Auroville's monthly news magazine since 1988

The challenges of organising Auroville

 

Societies are very complex organisms. Authorities in totalitarian societies attempt to diminish the complexity – which they see as a threat to asserting their will – by rigidly controlling the population through indoctrination and various instruments of coercion. But even governments in more liberal societies need to organise the activities and behaviour of their inhabitants, which they do through laws and other means.

However, when a society is an experiment in collective yoga and spiritual transformation like Auroville, none of these will suffice. While some form of organisation remains essential, it must provide the maximum possibility for the development of individual and social consciousness. And this requires a certain freedom from the external constraints of conventional societies which, of course, do not have spiritual evolution as their aim.

This is one reason why Mother initially did not want to formulate any rules for Auroville. For, as she put it,

“Auroville wants to be a new creation expressing a new consciousness in a new way and according to new methods.”

The sheer audacity of such an experiment in consciousness development, where the usual props controlling social behaviour have been removed to allow the free development of the spirit, not only arouses opposition from those who are used to exerting their will or achieving objectives through external control. It also arouses the opposition of powerful occult forces whose control of world affairs and societies is threatened by an evolution of consciousness. 

All this creates an unprecedented challenge for whoever is in authority in Auroville. It is why Mother took great care to define the qualities necessary for an ‘organiser’ (her preferred term):

No more desires, no more preferences, no more attractions, no more repulsions – a perfect equality for all things.”

“Wherever there is a personal consciousness, it means someone is incapable of governing … those given the responsibility should be people with a... universal consciousness.”

“It is necessary that this discipline (required for community living) should be determined by someone or by those who have the greatest broadness of mind and, if possible, by him or by those who are conscious of the Divine Presence and are surrendered to that.”

In the absence of a representative of the Supreme, Mother suggested that Auroville could be organised by a small number of people who possessed what she called ‘intuitive intelligence’. But how to recognise this?

Sri Aurobindo defined intuition as

“the power of knowing any truth or fact directly without reasoning or sense-proof, by a spontaneous right perception”,

and Kireet Joshi once replied that you can recognise a person who has intuitive intelligence by a few signs, amongst which, “They are sympathetic with everybody; there is a readiness to understand different individuals; they have a wide knowledge … you feel happy in their presence, they give confidence.”

I don’t know how many of us are capable of fulfilling these conditions and, even if some of us did, whether everybody in the present Auroville would be willing to submit to their guidance: for Mother said that only those with the highest consciousness should be in authority, and that everybody else should be guided by them.

This needs to be better known and adhered to by all organisers, whether Aurovilians or government appointees. Unfortunately, when it comes to organising Auroville, experience seems to show that those in power – whether Aurovilians or government appointees – have had a tendency to rely upon old models of organisation, like the belief that order stems from the imposition of a plethora of rules and regulations, something which Mother clearly wanted to avoid. And there is a tendency to assume that a spiritual experiment like Auroville requires them to be very selective in whom they admit or remove from the community; that Auroville should be populated by only the most evolved examples of present humanity.

But this is a complete misunderstanding of how Sri Aurobindo and Mother perceived their work. Sri Aurobindo explained that in his Ashram, which he termed a laboratory for a spiritual and supramental Yoga,

“...humanity should be variously represented. For the problem of transformation has to deal with all sorts of elements favourable and unfavourable … If only sattwic and cultured men came for the Yoga, men without very much of the vital difficulty in them, then because the difficulty of the vital element in terrestrial nature has not been faced and overcome, it might well be that the endeavour would fail.”

The Ashram, he continued,

is a field of growth, not a manifestation of perfection.” “People here [the Ashramites] are an epitome of the world. Each one represents a type of humanity. If he is changed, it means a victory for all who belong to his type and thus a great achievement for our work.”

In other words, just as in the Ashram, “all difficulties” are concentrated in Auroville in order for them to be worked upon under the pressure of consciousness which is constantly exerted here. And selecting only the cream of humanity would not enable this to happen.

And then there is the question of how Mother’s guidance is to be implemented. For if we attempt to apply Mother’s guidance without the requisite wisdom – which depends, ultimately, upon the degree to which we can identify with her consciousness – there is a danger that the outcome will be destructive rather than constructive. 

Some people accuse the present Auroville authorities of being guilty of this; that they have created conditions not so much inimical to spiritual growth – for spiritual growth can happen in the most adverse of circumstances – as severely limiting the outer expressions of that growth by prohibiting all expressions that do not conform to the official narrative and threatening to remove those who challenge it.

In fact, the present Chairman of the Governing Board has clarified that the Government of India is only here to build the physical infrastructure of the township according to what he believes to be Mother’s design: it cannot do the ‘spiritual part’, he said, for that is the work of the Aurovilians. However, in spite of real achievements in other fields, it is difficult to assert that the community has made great strides towards making Auroville a spiritual society, even though individual Aurovilians may have made considerable spiritual progress.

It’s worth remembering, however, that collective spiritual achievements of this magnitude do not happen overnight. In fact, as far as we know, this has never happened anywhere before.

The implication seems clear. All those involved in Auroville’s organisation will continue to blunder about in their efforts to solve our organisational problems until, firstly, they realise the first condition of being a ‘True Aurovilian’:

“The first necessity is the inner discovery in order to know what one truly is behind social, moral, cultural, racial and hereditary appearances. At the centre there is a being free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the active centre of our being and our life in Auroville.”

… and, secondly, all organisers and residents make it their first priority to create an environment conducive to spiritual growth; one where trust replaces fear, aspiration replaces conformity, and love finally triumphs over anger and hatred.

Without this, Auroville, for all its other achievements, is but an empty shell.