Luminous reaches and comfort zones

The recent community gathering on the topics What are you here for? and What are we here for? was inspiring. There was a strong collective aspiration for changes in our governance, our economy and ourselves so as to ally them more with our ideals. And ideas, inspirations, poured out about how to do this.

I was reminded of the energy and creativity of the Retreat a few years ago. But in recalling that event, I was also reminded of how few of the excellent ideas expressed there regarding governance, education, town planning etc. have actually been put into practice.

So what is blocking the flow, the implementation, of so many good ideas?

One obvious answer is it’s the lack of the resources needed – financial, infrastructural, human – as well as insufficient time or energy. But I wonder if there may be other, perhaps even more important, factors.

One is that mind and matter are very different ‘modes’, and to translate something from the former to the latter requires skill and creativity. I think this is hugely underestimated. We sometimes seem to believe that merely articulating our ideas and dreams is sufficient for them to get manifested. And so we fail to do proper assessments of the longer-term outcome of events like the Retreat which would allow us to understand what did or didn’t work, and why, so that we can do better next time. And we fail to see that, while some people are excellent in coming up with good suggestions, others are needed to ‘pull them down to earth’. Ideologists are not necessarily good implementers.

Another factor is our present organization. Most organizations, by their very nature, tend to support the status quo and resist change and I don’t think our organization is any exception to this, in spite of the best efforts of the people who work within it.

Yet another consideration may be that the ‘stars are not aligned’, that certain initiatives, however promising they may appear, are simply not in sync at that moment with the deeper unfolding of Auroville.

But one factor that is often ignored is the gravitational pull of our comfort zones.

In many of us, and certainly in myself, there seem to be two factors in opposition. One is the thirst to expand, to know more, to experience new places, people, ideas. The other is the tendency to contract, to hold to the familiar, the trusted, the unthreatening. Depending upon circumstances, as well as the make-up of the individual, one or other of these tend to dominate.

In our collective brainstorming or visioning sessions, we feed our expansion mode and get high on each other’s inspiration. Suddenly, we no longer feel crushed by the deadweight of our present town planning, economy and governance systems: a new world is within reach.

But next day, when we are back in our familiar milieu and faced with familiar demands and challenges, we often give the highest priority to stability, to the known ways of doing things, so that we can continue to function undisturbed. The high-fives of yesterday are packed away into a drawer labelled ‘enjoyable community events’.

Comfort zones are the places that insulate us from the challenges of our daily lives here, where we can switch off and go on automatic pilot because we feel we are in a safe space. They can be personal daily rituals – like the mid morning coffee or evening sundowner – they can be the way we replicate familiar living spaces from other climates and cultures, but they can also be accustomed thought forms or attitudes, like a tendency to favour voting when it comes to decision-making or using money as a means to assess value.

The paradox is that by continually reverting to our comfort zones we are not only giving up on the changes that motivate another part of us to attend workshops. We are also making it much more difficult to experience something far more wonderful than our present ‘comfortable’ lives – the “luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge” and “wide calms of our being” spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. For our comfort zones insulate us not only from some of the difficulties of existence but also from the wonders of an expanded consciousness. And it is only by discarding them that we make ourselves available for fresh experiences, profounder knowledge.

“Safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality,” wrote Sri Aurobindo. “To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits.”

Christ put it even more radically: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”

So what stops us doing this? Sri Aurobindo names “fear, distrust and skepticism”.

All these are characteristics of the ego, of the smaller self that views everything through its limited lens. For it is the ego which creates our comfort zones as defenses against what it perceives as threats: the new, the wider, the deeper. And its ingenuity in doing this is almost unmatched. It convinces us that just by being in Auroville we are pioneers of a brave new world, while all the time encouraging us to create or recreate our small comfort zones which are far removed from Mother’s Dream for Auroville.

What can we do about this? One way is to continually feed the aspirational self through reading Sri Aurobindo and Mother, for example, or through attending inspiring collective initiatives and gatherings (the poor practical outcomes are not necessarily a reason for cynicism if they serve to keep the flame alive). We can also support each other in our attempts to break through our comfort zones – for some of us are braver or more aware of our self-imposed limits than others.

It is unreasonable to expect that we can drop all our comfort zones at once as they have a protective function, and if we are to step into the unknown, initially we may need to keep some familiar footholds. But at least we can take short ‘space walks’ outside our comfort capsules by engaging with or reading about cultures or individuals very different from ourselves, or by cultivating a ‘witness’ space which allows us to see our hermetic silos for what they really are.

Finally, however, we are called to step out of them completely and here there is no substitute for faith and for surrender to something much larger. It’s a process that calls us to embrace flow rather than stasis, risk rather than safety, the new rather than the known.

This, after all, is the aspect of ourselves that brought many of us here in the first place. Do we really want to put that self to sleep in favour of the comfortable, the known? Are we really willing to trade a very limited and transient sense of personal wellbeing for the possibility of experiencing those “luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge”?