A third way of development?

For example, in a brochure for the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre in 1953 she wrote:

Generally speaking there are no cut and dried plans for the future. As has been the case in all the growth of the Ashram, things will be allowed to develop naturally and freely without subjecting them to any preconceived plan. The guidance is always there and at each stage for the growth of the movement what is best for its fullest development will be known and acted upon accordingly.

The nature of that ‘guidance’ in regard to the Ashram was explained by Sri Aurobindo:

There has never been, at any time, a mental plan, a fixed programme or an organisation decided beforehand. The whole thing has taken birth, grown and developed as a living being by a movement of consciousness (Chit-tapas) constantly maintained, increased and fortified.

And in Mother’s Agenda in 1969 Mother confirmed that this approach continued even after his passing:

The consciousness consciously recreates, so to speak, continues its creation… It’s the consciousness constantly at work, not as a sequel of what was there before, but as a result of what it perceives every instant. In the mental movement, there is the consequence of what you’ve done before – it’s not that, it’s the consciousness which CONSTANTLY sees what has to be done. It’s extremely important to understand that, because that’s how it’s still working – for everything. It’s not at all a “formation” whose development you must look after: it’s the consciousness which, every second, follows – follows its own movement. That allows everything!

It’s precisely what allows miracles, reversals, and so on – it allows everything. It’s the very opposite of human creations.

This is why, as she explained to Satprem in 1966, she had always resisted a mentalised approach to doing things. 

My whole effort is to live from minute to minute. I mean, to do every minute exactly what should be done, without making plans, without thinking, without ... because it all becomes mental; as soon as you start thinking something out, that’s no longer it.

And she further explained:

What I mean is that usually (always so far, and more and more so), men establish mental rules according to their conceptions and their ideal, then they apply them (Mother lowers her fist, as if to show the world under the mental grip). And that’s absolutely false, arbitrary, unreal, so the result is that things revolt, or else waste away and disappear.... It’s the experience of LIFE ITSELF that must slowly work out rules AS SUPPLE AND VAST as possible, in order that they ever remain progressive. Nothing must be fixed.

All this explains a great deal about how she dealt with Auroville. For example, for many years she did not want any rules to be laid down for the residents because:

Things will get formulated as the underlying Truth of the township emerges and takes shape progressively. We do not anticipate. It is why she was so concerned that her words should not be fossilised: You will say one day, ‘Mother has said this, Mother has said that’...and that is how dogmas, alas, are made.

This is also why she was extremely flexible, willing to change, for example, the orientation of the zones and even the site of the future Matrimandir when land was not immediately available. And it was why she allowed people like Yvonne Artaud and Roger Anger to continue with their experiments, unrestrained by any interventions from her. (However, she was not completely ‘hands off’ when it came to Auroville. “I am trying to give the general orientation and trying to prevent things from taking the wrong turn”, she told one of her secretaries.)

In other words, it is as if she was providing the Aurovilians with a basic framework – the land, the Charter and some general guidance – and then allowing them the freedom to find their own way under the constant pressure of a higher force for change.

All this raises a fascinating question. Did Mother know what the final form of Auroville would be? One of her statements could suggest this. In June, 1968, Rijuta, one of her secretaries, noted that Mother had told her:

Auroville is still suspended above and they are trying to pull it down. It will take time. They try to do things by a mental construction. It doesn’t work.

But even if she knew it was ‘suspended above’, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she knew all the details of how it would be (Mother often said, particularly in her final years, that certain kinds of foreknowledge were prohibited to her). It could also mean that while the ‘idea’ of Auroville already existed above, rather like one of Plato’s ideal ‘Forms’, it still had to be translated into worldly terms.

In any event, in spite of her comments about the ‘falsity’ of mental conceptions, it was not long before mentalised conceptions of how Auroville should develop surfaced. As early as 1970 in a letter to Suresh and Harish Hindocha, Dr. Sidney I. Firstman (Department Manager in the Aerospace Corporation, California, U.S.A., whom Roger and others hoped would do a sequential planning of construction for Auroville) wrote “I feel that at least some in Auroville have been too much concerned with determining the complete nature and physical form of Auroville.”

In this context, a very interesting meeting took place of the newly formed Planning Group in October, 1971. According to Ruud Lohman’s notes, Roger presented what he thought were the only two ways in which the township could develop. One way was:

...no designs, no plans, no committees. Just let it happen, give it a chance and all the time it needs, and we’ll see what comes out of it. For, after all, it is a spiritual and evolutionary experiment in which unknown forces play a role and it will happen anyhow, with us or without us. The second possibility is to decide how Auroville is to be built, in which case we can do nothing but project a model and keep on evaluating and correcting it. We have to remain supple, yet work from a preconceived base. He said he did not see a third solution, but he invited the group to come up with one, for he would be happy to consider it.

In fact, for many years Roger favoured a people-centred approach. For example, in 1972 he said in a video interview with Michel Klosterman:

This city will not be constructed first and then occupied but it will be the inhabitants who will define by their living experience the needs of the city.

And twenty years later, in an interview in Auroville Today, he reiterated:

The city is still to be invented, everything still has to be done through the daily experience and rhythm of the Aurovilians. Apart from these Lines of Force, everything is flexible, nothing is fixed.

However, just four years later, seemingly frustrated by the slow development of the city, his tone and attitude had changed. He told Aryamani and Luigi that:

The main thing is that you have forgotten that we all came here to build a city. We didn’t come here to do any regional development. That’s all. You have forgotten. That’s all. Or maybe you were never aware of it. And paradoxically I had somehow forgotten some of it because I was drowned in discussions, in confrontations, in political adjustments, in fears, in dreads. We don’t even have courage anymore to impose our vision. 

And in 2006, in a letter to Dr. Karan Singh, chairman of the Governing Board of the Auroville Foundation, Roger wrote:

For the township to be built within a time frame in accordance with the concept approved by the Mother and the already approved master plan, a team of people needs to be formed who have the mandate to make the Auroville Township a reality.

For an effective realisation of the township, I suggest therefore that the Governing Board appoints a special body which may be called the Auroville Township Development Council and that this body is fully empowered to plan, develop and build the township under my overall supervision and guidance.

In other words, the crux of the present crisis regarding Auroville’s city development seems to be embodied in the clash between what Roger was expressing in 1973, What is important is not building a city but building new men, and what he expressed many years later: She didn’t ask us to do the integral yoga; it is not true. She told us ‘Come and build a city’.

In that 1971 meeting at which Roger described what he saw as two possible approaches to city development, he invited the new Planning Group to come up with a third alternative, something which would bridge these two approaches, which he said he would welcome. But what would that third alternative look like, and could it offer a way forward?

Dr. Firstman had already articulated one possibility in his 1970 letter to the Hindochas. Firstman was a practical man, which is why he wrote that:

Though it is to evolve, I think that the planning of Auroville should not be left to chances or to loose discussions. It must be made a matter of purposeful thought and purposeful expression….

However, at the same time, he was very aware of the danger of a finished concept being imposed upon the community, which is why he also wrote:

Auroville should not be planned all at once. It should be allowed to evolve, expressing the people…Auroville should not be planned nor should it be scheduled, at least not beyond the next step objectives as seen at that time….

Therefore, his proposal was that, instead of preparing and following a town plan or master plan for development:

...we establish an adaptive development strategy. The basic elements of this adaptive development strategy are that annually, at least, and semi-annually if possible, a committee of Aurovilians carry out a planning and re-planning activity. This would involve evaluating or re-evaluating goals, assessing the current status of where Auroville was with respect to its goals, and then planning the next objectives for the next five years.

Today, the Auroville Universal Township Master Plan (Perspective 2025) seems to echo this approach to development in emphasising the need for the regular assessment of goals through five year reviews, as well as the need for flexibility and participatory planning. As the document puts it: 

Although the Master Plan perspective 2025 provides a time horizon of 25 years, it will neither be traditional nor static and rigid. [...] The present momentum in Development and Environmental activities will be strengthened through a participatory Environmental Management process which will be integrated within all development, planning and urban design elements.

However, little or none of this has actually happened: there have been no five year Detailed Development Plans, no Annual Plans, no reviews, and no participatory Environmental Processes. There may be many reasons for this (and Raag Yadava’s excellent recent analysis of governance in Auroville identifies many of them). But one of them seems to be that some of the planners have been concerned that inviting genuine participatory planning would slow down the city building process and/or ‘dilute’ the original concept which some people hold (in spite of Roger’s insistence in 1992 that almost everything in it is flexible) as in some way being sacred. They seem to think the Auroville which Mother said already exists ‘above’ must conform to the original Galaxy model in most or all its details as Mother had ‘blessed’ it. But this ignores a number of things. Firstly, that Mother’s blessings are not a guarantee of success or an indication that she ‘approves’ of something. As she put it:

My blessings are very dangerous. They cannot be for this one or for that one or against this person or against that thing. It is for... or, well, I will put it in a mystic way: It is for the Will of the Lord to be done, with full force and power. So it is not necessary that there should always be a success. There might be a failure also, if such is the Will of the Lord. And the Will is for the progress, I mean the inner progress. So whatever will happen will be for the best.

Secondly, that Roger changed a number of things in the original Galaxy plan while Mother was in her body, presumably with her approval and, thirdly, her statements about the need not to fossilise prematurely the development of the future town, for the ‘truth’ of it would take time to emerge. (Regarding details, the only detailed descriptions that Mother ever gave of constructions in the city were of her original conception of the Matrimandir – which later changed completely – and, later, of the inner chamber.)

Could, then, Firstman’s ‘adaptive development’ be the ‘third’ way of approaching development which Roger was inviting the 1971 planning group to discover, or at least one aspect of it, for this third way would also need to include how Sri Aurobindo and Mother experienced and practiced development, as a response to a ‘movement of consciousness’.

But how to contact, to make oneself available, to that consciousness? Sri Aurobindo wrote:

It goes without saying that the more the instrument is open, receptive and plastic, the better are the results. The two obstacles that stand in the way of a smooth and harmonious working in and through the sadhaks (of the conscious force) are: (1) the preconceived ideas and mental constructions which block the way to the influence and the working of the conscious force; (2) the preferences and impulses of the vital which distort and falsify the expression.

Mother described a similar process to Satprem in 1962:

Don’t decide anything mentally. You must learn to be immobile, silent, and let the Lord speak through you; it’s much better than deciding in advance, much better… The less one explains, the less one plans, the better, always, always.

Do we have the courage to step into this new adventure? For, while it would not preclude other approaches, at some stage in the planning process it would mean abandoning all our preconceptions of how Auroville should develop to allow us to become available to something else. To the revelation of the ‘Now’, of the constantly evolving Truth, “the consciousness which, every second, follows – follows its own movement.”