Auroville: the antithesis of yoga?

Aurovilians are not fooled by those chirpy visitor blogs that enthuse over the greenery, eateries and laid-back lifestyle of Auroville. Most of us know this is not an easy place to live. Every day we are pushed up hard against the sheer physicality of existence. The heat, the dust, the noise, the garbage, are very much in our faces, between our toes.

There is the daily struggle with flat tyres, broken pipes and erratic power supply, as well as more existential threats like, for some of us foreigners, the ever-present Damocles Sword of visa withdrawal or, on the community level, serious challenges to Auroville integrity, of which the proposed six-lane highway is just the latest example.

Everything here, and not just the iron laterite soil, seems to resist. It takes aeons to get planning permission for a parking shed; our famous community process, which involves endless meetings and three-day selection processes, rarely gives a satisfying outcome; the best-laid plans to improve our economy or decision-making often drain away into the sand or have very different outcomes from those intended.

It can be argued that life in the big cities is far more challenging, what with the pollution, crowding, violence and poverty. We are insulated from this. But here there is an additional dimension, and that is the daily battles Aurovilians are waging within themselves as they try to change something within and do work in a different spirit, that of karma yoga. This is difficult enough in itself, but what makes it even more challenging is that this is a collective yoga. This means, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out, that this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. (The individual) has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Therefore, he concludes, his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others.

Of course, we should beware of dignifying all our ordinary challenges as Kurukshetra-like battles in which the future of cosmic evolution is at stake. And not all Aurovilians are doing an intensive sadhana: it is possible to live a relatively comfortable life here if one has the means to insulate oneself from the irritations of daily existence and is content to merely skim the surface (as one Aurovilian gnomically put it, “the intensity is equal to the receptivity”). Nevertheless, the combination of both physical and inner challenges in Auroville exerts such a pressure that it’s not surprising that many, perhaps most, Aurovilians live on the edge, and that the constant pressure sometimes explodes into rudeness, dogmatism and conflict.

It’s a paradox. Mother stressed the importance of Aurovilians doing the yoga, so one would have expected her to have ensured the most propitious conditions. These, one would assume, would include a modicum of comfort, security and quiet. But here we have none of these. In fact, as one Aurovilian put it, “the special thing about the collective life of those who are there to change themselves is the crazy multiplication of struggles.” In other words, to fit the title of a book by Jocelyn Shupack, in Auroville everything seems to be ‘the antithesis of yoga’.

So why is it like this? No doubt, our personal failings play a significant part. After all, we have been assured there is a ‘sunlit path’ for those who adopt the right attitude. However, what if these seemingly adverse circumstances are exactly what many of us need to hasten a radical change of consciousness?

Certainly, the outer turmoil of life here forces us to go deeper, to discover the real source of guidance and peace within. But, more than this, this yoga deals pre-eminently with the transformation of matter. So it’s entirely appropriate that in Auroville we are drowned, immersed, in matter in its rawest form.

But matter, as Mother discovered through her work on her body, is very hard to transform. It’s dense, stubborn, intractable. It’s that element in us which is the most tamasic, the most resistant to movement, change, and so it requires harder blows to wake it up.

Hence the utility of what Ram Dass referred to, during his visit to Auroville, of a yoga of the market-place, where our feet are kept constantly close to the fire.

This is more than a metaphor. A distinguishing feature of this yoga is that we work with it directly in our bodies, both individual and collective. When a new highway wants to plough through Auroville, it’s felt as a physical wound; unresolved issues in other parts of our being frequently erupt in the physical dimension, while, as one of our experienced body workers observed, a spate of similar injuries or illnesses in the residents often reflects an imbalance in the wider body of the community.

But what about that other collective process which we gripe about so much, the one that consists of endless meetings and disappointing outcomes? Here, too, we may discern a yogic utility. For in a non-hierarchical, consensus-based society where we are constantly forced to deal with each other, we are given the opportunity to knead one another, to knock off the rough edges, even to break each other down, so that we can begin to open to something else.

As to the failures of our collective process and best-laid plans, they are there to remind us not only not to settle for less but also that to change anything without first changing our consciousness is, as Mother pointed out, a ‘vain chimera’.

Frequent failure is also an inevitable concomitant of the extraordinary freedom we have to make experiments and pursue individual paths. The deeper reason for this freedom and apparent wastefulness may be that Mother is waiting for us to exhaust all other possibilities so that we will finally recognise and turn to the true path (an approach she said she was allowing in the Ashram concerning those who wanted to forcibly ‘uplift’ humanity).

And then there is that other, pervasive pressure to which we are subject here. “As for me you know, I don’t believe in external decisions,” said Mother in 1970. “Simply, I believe in only one thing: the force of Consciousness exerting a pressure like this (crushing gesture). And the Pressure keeps increasing…”

It’s a pressure that confronts us constantly with our own shortcomings – as one Aurovilian put it, “the more sincerely we aspire to reach that goal, the more we are put with our noses on to our own imperfections” – and with the exact circumstances necessary for each of us to make both individual and collective progress.

Mother explained, “There will be all the frictions, contacts, reactions, all that comes from outside, as tests, exactly on your weak point, the most sensitive spot. Here you will hear just the word, the phrase, that you would not like to hear, and people will make just the gesture that would offend you. You will find yourself repeatedly in the presence of a circumstance, a fact, an object, it matters not what, just that thing among all that you would not like to happen. And it is precisely that which happens, and happens more and more, because you do not do your yoga for yourself alone, you do the yoga for everybody, without knowing it, automatically.”

But the key clue as to why the circumstances of Auroville are arranged as they are may be the one provided by Mother on December 13th 1969, when she told Satprem,

“There’s only ONE way, it’s for the ego to go away, that’s all. That’s the thing. It’s when, instead of an “I”, nothing remains there – completely flat, you know like this (immense, even gesture without a ripple) with a sort of…not even expressed in words, but a very STABLE expression of, “What you will, what you will”…Really with a concrete sensation that this (the body) doesn’t exist it’s only “made use of”, as it were, and there’s NOTHING but That. You eventually see it, you know …a vision of this IMMENSE Force, this IMMENSE vibration pressing and pressing and pressing …and then the world wriggling about underneath (!) and the thing opening – and when it opens, that enters and spreads…. It’s the only solution, there’s no other. … The image is very clear of all this humanity clinging and climbing striving to catch like that, but actually not giving itself – it wants to take! And that won’t do. It has to nullify itself. Then something else can come, can take its place._ The whole secret is there…. Ultimately, that’s the most difficult: to learn to disappear.”_

And ‘disappearing’ is particularly difficult for those of us with a Western background for we have been brought up to worship at the shrine of individualism. Isn’t this precisely why the yoga of Auroville is so often akin to a ‘test to destruction’ rather than a sunlit path? Because, given that we are such stubborn material, it is only when the sense of the ego is crushed out of us that we are able to surrender to the new force that is “pressing and pressing”. And my whole action is like this: a PRESSURE on them to make them abdicate the little person. Until it abdicates, the work cannot be done.

And so we come to one of the central paradoxes of the Auroville experience. On the one hand, it can be extremely uncomfortable, even distressing, to submit to this elemental, even brutal sadhana. On the other hand, many of us would not want to be anywhere else and even, in our more conscious moments, feel intense gratitude for the opportunity of being put through this wringer.

Why? Because here we are confronted with something we feel is irreducibly ‘real’, something which continually challenges us to strip away our superficial selves, all our personal and cultural baggage, and become more ‘real’ ourselves, more true to our deepest Selves.

And while there are many difficulties, these also serve to accentuate, throw into high relief, the sheer beauty of this place, the profound peace of the Matrimandir, and the courage, commitment, generosity and love of fellow Aurovilians.