Dancing between structure and openness

In The Agenda, Mother talks about a thought experiment she made with some Ashramites. She asked them if they would like their lives to continue indefinitely, but warned that this would not mean they could extend their present circumstances – their friends, relationships, activities etc – into an indefinite future. “For everything is constantly changing! And to be immortal, you have to follow this perpetual change; otherwise, what will naturally happen is what now happens – one day you will die because you can no longer follow the change.”

The Ashramites, it seems, were not happy with the prospect of changing their present circumstances, for Mother reported that not one in ten of them elected to extend their lives under these conditions.

It made me reflect upon how attached I am to habit, to the stability of the known, from my mid morning cup of coffee, to my evening walk, to beliefs and attitudes that I know are my default settings. At the same time, paradoxically, I recognize that something in me aches for change. I don’t want to be trapped all the time in the same old mould. In fact, one of the things I love about Auroville is the extraordinary possibility it gives us to reinvent ourselves.

The problem is that often we do not take it because we, like those Ashramites, are too attached, stuck, to the stability and comfort of the known.

Dogma is one symptom of this stuckness. If we look closely, we see that many of the unresolved issues that have exercised the community for many years are actually dogmatic attitudes confronting each other. For example, the belief the township should develop ‘organically’ is as much a dogma as the belief that it should conform to the ‘Galaxy’ plan. We have dogmatic beliefs about what we should eat, how we should treat illness, how we should develop the township and, most obviously, about how we should interpret certain words of the Mother.

Of course, dogma provides a framework and at our present stage of development we need some kind of framework within which to work. The problem is when the framework becomes a straitjacket, a dogma, that prevents us from discerning a new or evolving truth. The history of paradigm change in the sciences, from Copernicus to Darwin to Einstein, shows how difficult it is to displace established ways of thought, for the old ways fight hard to retain their supremacy.

So how can we negotiate the daily dance between structure and openness?

The first step, perhaps, is to recognise how many of our beliefs and attitudes are dogma (“a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds”: Merriam-Webster dictionary) and based upon a very partial understand of reality. If we can do this, we may begin to recognise that, in many cases, we simply don’t know what the truth is about something.

This is scary since, to a large extent, we have constructed our sense of who we are around certain beliefs, so we fear that loss of belief would mean loss of identity. But the ‘no-knowing’ opens up the possibility of a new way of knowing, or unknowing, which allows us new perspectives and a new, enlarged sense of identity.

The good news is this seems to be happening. Young Aurovilians today seems far less dogma-ridden than their elders. And many of those older Aurovilians who experienced the struggles of the late 1970s and early 1980s have since rejected or modified the over-simplified, polarised viewpoints of those times. Auroville today is a less ‘extreme’ place than it was in those years. Even our present bureaucracy which, like bureaucracies everywhere, seems relatively impervious to change, is balanced by a counter-movement in the community that is more inclusive, flexible and expressive of trust in an emerging reality. Witness, for example, the popularity of the Monica Sharma workshops, which give guidance about how to embrace and negotiate change, and the various Auroville groups that are experimenting with different ways of meeting and knowing each other.

In the end, the only interesting thing is to get into contact with what Mother refers to as ‘THAT’, the ineluctable essence. “THAT is what you must truly hold on to – but then you must be THAT, not this whole agglomeration. What you now call ‘you’ is not THAT, it’s a whole collection of things…”

But how many of us are truly ready for this?

Time for another cup of coffee.