Different worlds

One narrative is that the people opposing the present developments are the ‘foresters’, but this is a totally inaccurate generalisation. In fact, I need to stress from the outset that there never was, and isn’t today, an ‘anti-city’ movement among those who work on the land and plant trees. In fact, a number of the early pioneers were drawn to Auroville by the prospect of helping create the ‘city of the future’, for they had seen images of the Galaxy and brief descriptions of the future city in various magazines as well as in UNESCO’s newsletter.

But that city took a long time to take shape. On the other hand, the priority for those early Aurovilians was digging wells, planting trees and healing the land so that, gradually, the city for them became more of an abstraction – something which lay in the distant future. Meanwhile, as they worked the land, they absorbed its rhythms, its seasons, smells and textures, along with its innate ‘wisdom’.

This did not mean that planning the city was put on the back-burner. Already, in the early days, an Auroville planning office had been set up by Roger in Pondicherry, and both here and in Paris people continued to work on planning the future city. But a planning office was a very different environment from that experienced by those working on and learning from the land and, over time, this made mutual understanding increasingly difficult because, in a sense, those landworkers and planners inhabited different worlds.

But how different those worlds were, and still might be, didn’t strike me until I read a book by the psychiatrist and neuroscientist researcher, Iain McGilchrist. For in The Master and his Emissary he identifies how the two hemispheres of the brain, while interconnected, have different ways of apprehending and dealing with reality. In fact, as he puts it, “The two hemispheres represent different worlds.”

”If one had to encapsulate the principal differences in the experience mediated by the two hemispheres, their two modes of being, one could put it like this. The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known – and to this world it exists in a relationship of care.”

McGilchrist emphasises that almost everything that we do involves both hemispheres. But the way they ‘attend’ to the world is very different. The right hemisphere has an intuitive sense of the whole, but it requires the left hemisphere to determine what comes into being, what can be used. The left hemisphere does this by applying linear, sequential analysis. This forces what is implicit into explicitness, and this brings clarity. However, in doing so, the sense of the whole is lost. Therefore the rational workings of the left hemisphere need to be returned to the intuitive wisdom of the right hemisphere for a healthy balance to be re-established and for wise action to result.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case and, at times, one hemisphere may come to dominate the other. This is generally the left, because while the right hemisphere retains an awareness of the whole, the left has no understanding of this and believes it can manage everything on its own. And thus the ‘emissary’, the left brain, supplants the ‘master’, the right. In individuals this can lead to various forms of psychosis. In societies, McGilchrist observes, it can lead, among other things, to “an increasing bureaucracy, totalitarianism and an emphasis on the mechanistic”.

For the left hemisphere seeks control, and its preference is “for what is clear and certain over what is ambiguous or undecided… for what is single, fixed, static and systematised, over what is multiple, fluid, moving and contingent” and its tendency is “towards abstraction, coupled with a downgrading of the realm of the physical”. “Its guiding principle is division, for manipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division…It is the hemisphere of ‘either/or’.”

The right hemisphere sees nothing in the abstract, but always appreciates things in their context, it is interested in the personal. By contrast, the left hemisphere has more affinity for the abstract or impersonal. In fact, as McGilchrist observes, people whose right hemisphere has been severely damaged, are “unconcerned about others and their feelings”.

McGilchrist’s description of the hemispheres and their relationship is based upon his and others’ extensive neurological research. But it is inevitably limited and doesn’t map easily on to the spiritual experiences and evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. For example, he has no understanding of the planes of being, of the psychic, or of how higher levels of consciousness change one’s perception of the self and the world.

But two things strike me as possibly having some validity, particularly in reference to what is happening in Auroville today. Firstly, there is the issue of the difficulty of communication between certain sections of the community. McGilchrist believes that the left hemisphere can be seen to represent ‘mechanism’ and the right hemisphere ‘nature’. In this context, I would hazard the generalisation that planners, because their work inevitably involves a high degree of abstraction, are more left-hemisphere oriented while those who work on and with the land are more right-hemisphere influenced. This already makes mutual understanding and, therefore, communication, difficult.

As Wordsworth put it:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect.

What makes communication even more difficult is that, according to McGilchrist, each hemisphere uses and understands language differently. The language of the left hemisphere is factual, analytical, while that of the right is more allusive, allegorical, less precise. And this, when the right hemisphere tries to communicate, puts it at a disadvantage in contrast to the left’s ability to convey its point of view.

The other possible insight which the book possibly provides also concerns planning. For if McGilchrist is correct in seeing the need for the analytical left hemisphere to return its findings to the right in order that they be grounded, embodied, in the real world, then, if this doesn’t happen, there is a real danger that in planning, abstract concepts will be imposed upon the living landscape as well as upon the people inhabiting it.

Great planners – and I would instance B.V. Doshi here – never allow their plans to lose touch with the people and the environment which they are dealing with. I also believe that Roger’s Galaxy plan has a great deal of ‘right brain’ creativity, evidenced in its emphasis upon flow, permeability and the blending of natural elements with built structures. The problem, it seems to me, comes when the plan, the gestalt, is translated into a simplified form to aid construction, because then there is a very real danger that the spirit of the whole will be lost and the project become one that simply engages engineers and contractors: in McGilchrist’s terms, it becomes a ‘left hemisphere’ project. 

I think there is a danger that this is happening to the Galaxy at present. What makes it even more critical is that the right hemisphere lacks the language to fully express, communicate, its experience and wisdom so that this can be incorporated into the planning process. Either it is forced into adopting the language of the left hemisphere (like explaining the ‘logic’ of planting trees), which is entirely unsuited to dealing with embodied experience, or it remains silent and gifts the stage to the planners.

(Of course, I am over-simplifying the situation here. Nobody in Auroville inhabits just one category. Some of those involved in planning have been very environmentally-sensitive, while land workers have been active in planning the future city. Nevertheless, I think the larger point about planning and working on the land representing very different ‘worlds’ has some validity.)

What can we do? Firstly, I don’t think simply adding ‘hard core’ environmentalists to our town planning team is a way to achieving greater wholeness, even if there would be a willingness for this to happen. In fact, believing that simply putting two parts together will automatically create a whole is actually a left hemisphere way of thinking. If anything, this might exacerbate the differences unless each orientation makes a genuine attempt to understand – and even tries to embody – where the others are coming from.

But, as a beginning, perhaps we could try to drop those left brain either/or oppositions, simplistic narratives and labels (‘anti-city’ versus ‘dogmatists’ etc.) which obscure our ability to better understand each other’s point of view, for they cause us to see our fellow Aurovilians as no more than one-dimensional representatives of narrow perspectives and encase us in our own sense of ‘rightness’.

We might also bear in mind what Mother expressed so succinctly in 1966: As long as you are for some and against others, you are necessarily outside the Truth. You should constantly keep goodwill and love in your heart and let them pour out on all with tranquility and equality.

Finally, I don’t believe that the breakdown in understanding and communication between different sections of the community – which, incidentally, encompasses far more than just planning issues – is the only challenge facing Auroville at present. Far from it. But I believe it is one of the most fundamental, because when one part of the collective cannot deeply comprehend another, it destroys the fabric of community.