The absence of doubt

For at the moment there are a number of different narratives, each of which claim to tell the truth about what has gone wrong in Auroville. Perhaps the most prominent ones are that the foresters don’t want the city, or that Auroville is being run by a small clique for whom money and economic efficiency, or a ‘purist’ manifestation of the Galaxy plan, are the most important considerations, and not the people who live here. 

Over time, each of these narratives seems to have acquired a harder and harder shell as its chief propagators become more fervent and fixed in their belief that their’s is the only true explanation of the problem, and what needs to be done about it. And every time they have to defend it against someone who thinks differently, or they have to cope with information which challenges it, instead of stepping back to consider if there is anything new they can learn, they tend to dig in deeper. In this way, they add another layer to the hard shell of their particular narrative while becoming more deeply and inextricably identified with it.

Typically, these narratives are reductionist. They tend to reduce the complexity of the present situation to stark black and white choices, to a flat, two-dimensional landscape – “you are for the city or against the city”, “you are for Mother’s Auroville or against it” – or to the absence of alternatives: “we had no choice, we had to cut their maintenances”, or “we had no choice, we had to go to court”.

I do not doubt the sincerity of some who hold these positions; they believe that the integrity and future of Auroville is at stake and that they must fight to uphold it. What concerns me is the seeming absence of doubt. For the one thing that never seems to be expressed by the most fervent propagators of these different narratives is, “We don’t know. We don’t understand what is really happening in Auroville at present or what we should do about it.”

This is somewhat surprising. Both Sri Aurobindo and Mother made it abundantly clear that humanity’s knowledge of reality is, to put it mildly, defective; that what we term reality has far more dimensions than we are aware of, and, therefore, that our interpretation of what is happening to us and around us is necessarily extremely partial, flawed.

Yet, some of us act as if we are immune to this disability. Perhaps at one time this overweening confidence in our own ability had its advantages. After all, you can’t create a city and a forest from scratch unless you have a certain measure of belief in oneself as well, of course, as belief in Mother’s vision.

And, of course, we also claim that Mother’s words are there for our guidance, so how can we go wrong? However, we don’t always pay that much attention to them, and even when we do, we tend to interpret her words in ways which suit our predisposition, or cherry-pick them to suit the narrative we have adopted, while ignoring her warning that her statements should not become dogma. For she was always on the crest of the evolutionary wave which, as she once observed, is recreating the universe moment by moment.

Wouldn’t it be wiser, therefore, for us to admit that none of us hold an absolute monopoly on the truth, and that while we may grasp fragments, none of us can grasp the whole or follow the movement of that surging wave?

Actually, I think we do understand this, which is why some people are making genuine attempts at collaboration, reaching across the battle lines, because they realise that everybody may have something important to contribute to our overall knowledge and to the way forward. And yet, it is rare to hear anybody who is on the barricades admit to doubt or to a lack of knowledge concerning what is really going on.

Why? Is it because in the heat of action we become so desperate to win, or not to lose, that we get caught up in a zero-sum game? Have some of us have invested so much energy in creating and supporting a particular narrative that we don’t want to admit that we may have got it wrong? Or have some of us welded ourselves so tightly to a particular narrative that it has become part of our identity, and therefore must be defended at all costs?

But the admission of ignorance, might be the first crack in the hard shell of our narratives which would allow the infinite Grace and the moment by moment guidance which is always available to us to pour in.

Moreover, the collective willingness to admit to our essential ignorance may be the one thing that could unify us at present, and allow us to encounter each other again as limited but aspiring individuals rather than merely one-dimensional representatives of a particular narrative.