Auroville offers alternatives to the mainstream world view

AVToday: To what extent does the yoga of Sri Aurobindo represent an alternative aim of life or teleology to that of the mainstream?

Debashish: The mainstream teleology at present is still Modernism, which is an ideology that emerged out of the Enlightenment movement in Europe. It was about a new way of seeing in which we, as humans, reject all unverifiable authority (such as that of the Church), explore everything systematically with our minds, and apply the truths of our exploration to create a better or perfect world. The world changed due to the universalization of this kind of ideology and we are all part of such a way of thinking today. 

Colonialism gained much of its confidence from the self-justification of this ideology. One may see a noble trajectory among its possibilities, as in “the white man’s burden”, which stressed the importance of universal education to arrive at human unity. Of course, behind this “noble goal” was the image of the human as a rational being, a premise which may be questioned and which has led to its own evils.

Apart from this noble goal, the Enlightenment movement had a shadow side to its will to power and this led to the evils of colonisation and eventually what we experience now, which is a world of hyper-technology run by corporations, a world where the quality of life is defined in alienated and consumer terms. This leads, among other things, to the exploitation of nature and the exacerbation of social divisions because this kind of lifestyle needs an under-class to support it. 

The mainstream teleology is also premised on the division between church and state and the subjugation of religions; religion is pushed out of the public space. But when it gets pushed to the wall, it often returns as right wing violence and this is what we are seeing around the world now. Benjamin Barber in his book Jihad versus McWorld has given us an image of a dystopian future in which huge cities are completely franchised and ruled by a few multinationals while nomadic fundamentalist jihadists operate on their peripheries in infrarational warring societies that combat the corporate Empire with suicide bombers.

That is an extreme dystopic projection of the present mainstream teleology. A less extreme but no less dangerous image is that of the careerist who lives only for the corporation. Underlying such a life is a huge boredom caused by alienation and the death of the soul. This is the tragedy referred to by Nietzsche in his description of the ‘last man’, the man who takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security. 

Sri Aurobindo presents an alternative teleology. It’s an aim of life that is not about having but about becoming.  He is saying that we have to lead a life of self-exploration and self-exceeding; we recognize ourselves as transitional beings in a process of becoming the fulfillment of our developing image of perfection. And it’s a full-bodied life. We don’t leave society and go to the mountains; we reclaim the foundations of life.

The idea of becoming is very different from the corporate idea in which our lives are defined for us and all that is left is to fill in the lot we have been given by having, by accumulating more and more possessions. In fact, Sri Aurobindo revises the Enlightenment definition of what it means to be human. He says it is not the mind but the soul that defines the human. 

In what way does Auroville represent an alternative to the mainstream?

I think there are different alternative teleologies in Auroville. Two of the principal ones, which refer to the texts of the Mother, is that Auroville is a place for human unity and that Auroville is the cradle of the Superman.  The latter connects with the idea of man as a transitional being, which is the full-fledged teleology of Sri Aurobindo. The former is not the full-fledged teleology but it still requires us to think of the life of the human as different from what it is right now. It is about wanting to create a better world, not through the competitive application of our rational discoveries, but a world of fraternity: a communitarian world which is also sensitive to the whole biosphere. If I relate this to the yoga of Sri Aurobindo, I’d say it’s a state of being in which the vital or life-being is under the influence of the soul or psychic being. 

It’s not as ambitious or as grand as transforming the cells, or arriving at a consciousness beyond the mind; it’s not the full-fledged notion of becoming divine but it could lead to the possibility of the emergence of the psychic being and so become a transition from the first teleology, Auroville as a place of human unity, to the second teleology, Auroville as the cradle of the Superman.

There is a danger, however. If the ideal of human unity is understood simply as some kind of better life, or some kind of higher humanity, one may get stuck at that level and the other ideal may get covered over or wiped out over time. In such a case, Auroville would become, perhaps, a place of beauty and greater goodwill, but it would no longer be supporting the transition to the Superman.

In The Human Cycle Sri Aurobindo writes about the coming of the “Subjective Age” which is characterised by intuitional knowledge and the aspiration towards self-consciousness and self-realisation.  Could we do more in Auroville to support this aspiration? 

I think there could be more self-reflection using the texts of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Recently, I gave a workshop here on The Mother. That was a reflection on a text of Sri Aurobindo. I know that in Auroville many people are allergic to a kind of religiosity that includes too much repetition of the words of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. However, reflecting on the texts of Sri Aurobindo can be of two different kinds. One is a kind of reflection where only a closed version of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga is presented and people are uncomfortable in opening up to other interpretations. The other is where his works are studied in a more open way. 

For example, we should be able to look at the work of modern philosophers side-by-side with the texts of Sri Aurobindo and be able to see how they mesh or don’t mesh. And we can also bring our own experience to the texts and try to express this in our own words. This is an exercise that may develop subjective intuition.

What about the danger of expressing a profound personal experience too early or too soon? Won’t it risk being dissipated?

It is true that individuals have to guard their experience because as soon as you put it into words you limit, to a certain extent, the experience. Nevertheless there is a time when the experience can be spoken about and it’s important to do this to create communities of belonging that have a shared experience. Of course, one can have one’s own language for that experience, and that language can be words or paintings or some form of embodiment.

When you are presenting texts of Sri Aurobindo at CIIS do you talk about your own inner experiences? 

Sometimes, but I talk about them in a more universal way. I will not talk about them as private experiences because then it becomes completely subjective. I will talk about an experience and compare it to other experiences which are not necessarily of the Sri Aurobindo tradition, and try to see where things overlap and where they differ. 

Isn’t traditional academia suspicious of any kind of experiential exploration?

It is true that the foundation of the modern knowledge academy is the Cartesian subject-object split which distrusts such exploration. But places like CIIS are challenging that model.  Now there are ‘scholar-practitioners’ who practice the discipline that they are studying, who talk about their experiences and try to put them in a larger context. This is a science of experience. There are also new methodologies, new disciplines, like contemplative studies or transpersonal psychology, which are not restricted to this subject-object split. They acknowledge there are many ways of knowing, that there are embodied as well as intellectual ways of knowing. 

Some people feel that certain experiences cannot be put into words. However, I feel that every way of knowing has a translation to language, even though it may not be a full translation. When The Mother referred to the messages of flowers she said she received these messages at a certain level where they are not words but she is translating them for us into the world of words. 

So when we talk about what Sri Aurobindo termed the ‘Subjective Age’ in terms of language, that’s what we are talking about to some extent. However, to tap into the body’s knowledge or the knowledge of the emotions, requires a more poetic kind of language than a language of denotation; it requires a suggestive language. Yet there can be an objectivity and precision to such a language. In the Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo speaks, for example of “experience-concepts.”

Even modern philosophers are introducing terminology which is extremely suggestive of realities that can be experienced below the threshold of mind. Gilles Deleuze, for example, talked about the “body without organs” or “the rhizome” in reference to intuitive realities that can be perceived or experienced at a deeper “vital” or “psychic” level than the objective surface. These thinkers are trying to give us a more complete description of the human that may be termed post-human. I think exploring them is one way by which we can avoid becoming closed to new ways of seeing ourselves and the world.