1968 and onwards

The goal of a revolution is to reject (by force if necessary) an existing malfunctioning order of things and replace it with a new paradigm. Has there ever been a revolution that has succeeded? Why do they almost never seem to succeed? Even if we change the modus operandi, what is to stop things reverting to their pre-existing state? What is to stop one overthrown despot being replaced further down the line by another?

I was in my early twenties in 1968. I was still fully concentrated on passing my examinations to become an architect. Meanwhile, things were stirring in the world. There was a palpable Force at work at a more global level than just in France, which was compelling change and rejection of the old order and vision. In Paris that May, students had occupied the University and taken to the streets, not merely in protest against the existing educational system, but in revolt against the whole existing state of things. The more the authorities tried to suppress the protests, the more virulent and widespread the protests became. The workers across France joined the students. In the end, did French politics and governance change? Was there a fundamental social change?

When The Mother was asked to comment upon what was happening in France, she said, It’s clearly the future which is awakening and trying to drive away the past….It’s the higher power COMPELLING (sic) people to do what they must do….It’s clearly (not in the detail of it, but in the direction of the movement), clearly a will to have done with the past and to open the door to the future. It’s like a sort of revulsion with stagnation.

But, she saw it only as the very first step, and warned, There must be no violence; as soon as one indulges in violence, it’s the return to the past and opens the door to all conflicts…

And, of course, there was violence in France. This is why we are justified in asking ourselves whether France had really changed. Certainly French youth seemed at the time to believe that they had inherited the spirit of the original French Revolution of May 1789, whose social and political changes were made concrete by Napoleon. And yet, despite the violence, despite the tendency at a societal level to progressively relapse into a consumer-centric mentality, there was a new vision and the sense of something different at work.

In the USA, the 1969 music festival at Woodstock became the focal point of a counter cultural movement of change, described as ‘the Summer of Love’. For what? Something else. But what?

“I’m going to try and get my soul free

We are stardust

We are golden

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden”

Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” attempts to capture the aspiration of the moment. I believe that ‘back to the garden’ had a wider sense than a return to living and working on the land.

“Well maybe it’s the time of year

Or maybe it’s the time of man

I don’t know who I am

But life is for learning”

Joni later commented that Woodstock was “a spark of beauty” where half a million kids “saw that they were part of a greater organism”. A paradigm shift.

Why did the change promised by Woodstock not then sustainably materialise itself in the society at large? Is it because, in part, in our hippy dreams, in being encouraged to ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’, to indulge in ‘sex, drugs and rock n’ roll’ we mistook the liberation aspired for as a licence to indulge in all of our desires, rather than for the true liberation from our egos that is a freedom from all desires and slaveries, and without which true love and peace cannot establish itself among us? Nevertheless, it was a seed for something else.

I felt the hopes and shared the dreams of love and peace with an unaccustomed intensity. By the time I had completed my studies and started working, the sense of dissatisfaction with the existing value-system and the structures it had created had begun to strike me. Half way through my post-graduation work experience, I stood one day outside my huge London architectural office (over 1000 architects, engineers and surveyors!) and realised that in all the office blocks surrounding me, the Shell Centre, etc. there were armies of workers, including myself, passing around bits of paper about realities, real life situations, they never actually experienced at first hand. In my case, we were designing housing for London’s poor without being exposed to or having any understanding of what it meant to live in the buildings we were designing (unless we unofficially made efforts to visit the area and engage with the people affected). Such was the mindset of the time that the homes we were designing were referred to as ‘housing units’, a description still widely in use even today! I resolved there and then to quickly save enough money so that I could travel and seek for something to become involved with that was more real, more true. It had to be something beyond this unreal world for which I had been educated and groomed. I had also by then commenced an inner search, unknowingly seeking Reality with a capital R. I sensed that I might find the ‘something else’ that I yearned for in India.

On 28th February 1968, on a barren plain in South India, the Auroville project was inaugurated. Auroville’s objectives somehow embodied the core and essence of the revolutionary spirit and hopes for a global change not just to a new vision, a new world order of things, a new kind of society, but to a new consciousness and even physically, to a new kind of being, which might make such a fundamental change possible. For to change the order without essentially changing the consciousness has always been the reason for the downfall and failure of all revolutions. And to change the consciousness requires that the individuals constituting any collective change within themselves then work together with others at a community level, eventually (hopefully), leading to a societal change. Not easy, unless the individuals can see, not just with their eyes and in their minds the necessity of change, but feel its need in their hearts with a need as great as the need to breathe. And that they are prepared to undertake the necessary discipline which will firmly root the change in the whole of their being. As I discovered in my own inner journey, such a colossal change cannot be achieved instantly, and certainly not quickly at a collective level. It is too often a case of three steps forward followed by two or three steps back.

Auroville’s pioneer phase saw its first potential citizens as having come endowed with the spirit of Paris 1968 and the Woodstock generation. Without these rebels and pioneers, Auroville would arguably not have been settled. Certainly the Indian spiritual aspirants, even the younger ones, seemed to me to feel more comfortable with a life of clean white dhotis and the comfort of the Ashram with its rituals, order and stability. Some of the Western pioneers saw out the pioneering stage of Auroville’s development, planted the 2 million trees that changed the face and microclimate of the proposed ‘city’ area and its surrounding region, and then started leaving as Auroville moved through its struggle for self-governance and independence from the rule of the old order into a more settled but eventually more bureaucratised and staid society. Perhaps it became a society resembling in many respects the old order it had hoped to eradicate. The early pioneers were also having to make a choice between a life with its libertarian sense of freedom, with either a Club Med or a hippy laisser-faire atmosphere and the more demanding atmosphere of yogic discipline. Did some of them, in the process, also lose the fire of their original hopes and dreams?

Revolutions, then, are seeds planted in a society whose general mass is not likely to have the will to change if it means losing its comforts and patterns of habit. Transformation among the mass of a society can only happen gradually and has to be preceded by an inner change of vision. It is only when enough people deeply feel the necessity for change that anything begins to change, and that often requires that a state of profound discomfort with the existing order of things becomes widespread, even unbearable. But the seed has been planted. Its growth is inevitably resisted by all that feel the existing order is under threat. In Auroville, after 50 years, when characteristically such utopian and idealistic movements would have imploded, it is still growing.