The hidden order

Auroville is a very difficult place to understand. For example, it often seems messy, chaotic. What else would you expect when a conglomeration of individuals from different cultures and nations, different upbringings, education and motivations, are brought together in a place which lacks the checks and restraints of conventional society?

So some people fight, cheat, seek and abuse power, they downgrade, fear or distrust others, and try to maximise their own advantage irrespective of others’ needs. Yet we can also witness great generosity, solidarity and self- sacrifice in the service of something much greater than ourselves.

What to do with such an unwieldy mélange of defects and potentials? If Auroville was a business, an efficient manager would long ago have cut out the dead wood and imposed clear goals with strict deadlines for their achievement, while specifying procedures and behaviour which needed to be adhered to at all times.

But Auroville is not a business, nor a machine to be fine-tuned to perfection. Auroville is an experiment in the collective raising of consciousness and of an evolving group soul.

Ah, there’s the rub. For a group soul is very different from a business: and you don’t take a scalpel to a soul. Like life itself, it cannot be contained in mental formulations, for there is so much the mind cannot understand about this place. Why, for example, some people are here when they seem so ‘un-Aurovilian’ in the way they behave. Or why there needs to be such a mix of nationalities, motivations and personality types when, seemingly, we would progress much faster if only the ‘right’ people came.

Constantly we interpret, we make judgements about people and about whether or not Auroville is making progress, but we don’t really understand what is happening because we cannot comprehend the whole. How, for example, the different ‘life flows’ of different individuals intersect and act upon each other and upon the larger community; how the seemingly most unpromising or threatening situation may be necessary for personal or collective growth; how defeats or defects can presage more comprehensive progress; how extreme diversity may lead to more integral outcomes; how Auroville accentuates a millennia of habits in order to transform them; and how the constant pressure this place exerts on each of us works differently upon different individuals, according to our stage of evolution.

Moreover, the yoga of Auroville is embedded in matter, and this gives it a very different ‘feel’ from traditional yoga, for it is something that is lived, worked out, in the heat and dust rather than in the protective environment of an ashram. This, along with its collective aspect, makes Auroville a unique experiment for which no precedent exists: it is sui generis. Therefore, we can’t rely on old methods or old understandings, even those drawn from the spiritual traditions of India. We should even take care not to use our limited mental understandings to interpret Sri Aurobindo’s and The Mother’s words.

In fact, in order to understand, to live, Auroville we are asked to contact, to identify in some way, with the Force, the Spirit, which animates this place. And this doesn’t depend upon how much of Sri Aurobindo or The Mother we have read, or how often we concentrate in the Matrimandir. It simply requires an openness to that Force, something which Mother saw in those pioneer raggle-taggle Aurovilians who, with their unconventional behaviour and dress, so scandalised the more traditionally-minded Ashramites.

Today, more than ever, we need to trust that that Force is active here, and that we can contact it. For it means that what is happening now has a purpose, and those who are here now are meant to be here; that for the moment we are the perfect ingredients for something that needs to be worked out through the ‘pressure of consciousness’ which is exerted upon all of us.

In other words, Auroville may not be so ‘messy’ after all; there is a hidden order. But to begin to understand it we need to identify first with its inner core, not with its external manifestations.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work on the external Auroville. Undoubtedly, there is much here that needs to change, and we cannot evade the responsibility to improve our organisation and to manifest the city which Mother wanted. But it means that we cannot do this by purely external means, for without contact with the deeper source we cannot act in a way which is consonant with the larger movement.

This is why, although there have been many attempts over the years to bring ‘order’ to Auroville by external means, they have always failed. Although, no doubt, these have also played their part...