Auroville and accelerated evolution

But external circumstances can also be a spur. 

As Sri Aurobindo put it in relationship to India and the modern invasion of Western ideas:

“Throughout the East, the subjective Asiatic mind is being driven to adapt itself to the need for changed values of life and thought. It has been forced to turn upon itself both by the pressure of Western knowledge and by the compulsion of a quite changed life-need and life-environment. What it did not do from within, has come on it as a necessity from without and this externality has carried with it an immense advantage as well as great dangers.”

In this sense, while there have been real achievements in Auroville over the past 55 or so years, I wonder if it isn’t our failures which can provide the impetus for accelerating the evolution of our consciousness, for, unlike our successes, they have the potential to bring us face to face with the shortcomings of the present way in which we perceive and organise our world. 

Take, for example, our repeated failure to reconcile seemingly contradictory approaches to the development of the city. On the one hand, there is the view that Auroville must grow organically, according to the developing consciousness of the residents. On the other hand, there is the belief that the plans for the city have already been provided, and that all we need is to follow these, and that the process of materialising them will of itself serve to develop our consciousness.  

These alternative paths were first delineated by Roger Anger at the first meeting of the Auroville Planning Group in October 1971. Interestingly, at that time Roger favoured the ‘organic’ approach, explaining (according to Ruud Lohman’s notes) that we need to “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 dichotomy surfaced again as one of the ‘elephants in the room’ during the 2015 Auroville Retreat, where the following resolution was suggested:

“Auroville will be built with plans that allow for flexibility and organic growth within a planned framework”.

However, this very rational synthesis has not put the discussion to bed, perhaps because its resolution required something more than merely the intelligent exercise of reason; namely, the capacity to experience the different ways of perceiving which underlie these different ways of looking at development.  

The potential for doing this is already here. The ‘ecological perspective’ which favours organic development is most strongly developed in those Aurovilians who worked the land in the early years. For many of those pioneers, the slow, quiet work on the land led to a deep identification with the earth and caused them to develop an outlook upon life which was more aligned with nature; with the seasonal shifts and the slow growth of vegetation. 

But others were drawn to Auroville by something else: by the call of a vision which promised a new beginning, a new world, which, for many of them, was represented by the Galaxy plan. This was as profound an experience for them as the healing touch of the earth was for those pioneer ecologists.

The problem is that neither has been able to fully experience the other way of seeing. On the contrary, each has tended at times to downgrade or dismiss those who think differently. And so they are locked in a continual battle to demonstrate that their perspective is the ‘true’ one.

But perhaps it is precisely this impasse which offers the spur to the next stage in the evolution of our individual and collective consciousness in Auroville. For it requires us to develop our intuitive faculties; to develop the capacity to experience rather than merely verbalise modes of understanding different from our own, and to actually experience where they are no longer opposites but indispensable aspects of a larger whole. For, as Sri Aurobindo put it, “As you go higher up, a wider movement develops which reconciles all contraries”.

Perhaps it is the growth of this capacity, this enlargement of consciousness, which holds the key to the solution of many of our current problems, including the intractable challenge of how to organise this complex community. For as Raag Yadava put it in his monumental study, Governance in Auroville, “it is not an abandonment of the rational faculty, but its progressive illumination that is the defining movement for Auroville to develop its regulatory and governance architecture”.