AUROVILLE: “THE FUTURE FUTURELESS!”
(Remembering the dark decade of its growth)
V. Ananda Reddy
Our early approaches to the Infinite
Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge
While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun.
What now we see is a shadow of what must come.
Sri Aurobindo, Savitri (CWSA 33, p. 46)
Auroville is in itself a solution and a problem. The world’s problems are its problems and in its success lies the solution to the world’s major problems. That is because, all problems of existence — on the individual, social and national levels — are essentially problems of harmony. Auroville was begun as a place where: “one will be able to live in peace, without conflicts and without rivalries of nations, religions and ambitions.” (CWM 13. pp. 201–2) Especially, as Auroville aims at becoming the cradle of ‘superman’, of the ‘new consciousness’, of the Truth of Tomorrow, it will have to find ways of liberating a large section of humanity from the bonds of ignorance, which is the root of all human suffering, sorrow and pain.
Auroville knows the goal: “the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something that has never been in this present universe and will never be again in the same way.” (CWM 9, p. 151) It is an exciting and alluring adventure but the pre-requisite for it is that the aspirant must abolish his separative ego to a large extent, if not completely, and surrender himself to the Divine Will. This is the only way of launching on this great adventure.
The mind of man, though the highest term yet in the present evolution, would be an insufficient light to guide him in such an adventure. Till the present stage of evolution it has been the right guide; in fact all our past evolutionary history has been but an attempt at perfecting the mind’s aspirations. The great civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China, the great cultures of Rome, Greece and the Middle East culminating in the modern world tell us of a brilliant but at the same time a sad tale of the mind’s giant yet vain efforts at self-expression and self-perfection.
Unfortunately, all these efforts have landed our present civilisation in a great crisis, a crisis of consciousness which is reflected in the many wars, revolutions, exploitations, political corruptions, utter chaos and erosions of all values. The world of today seems to be no longer a place worth living in. But fortunately for us, there have been in recent times, sincere attempts by seers and scientists to overcome this crisis. Man’s landing on the moon in a way symbolises his eagerness to rise to a new dimension of consciousness beyond the mind’s horizons.
This leap into outer space certainly signifies the conquest of human frontiers; it is in the very scheme of Nature’s evolutionary process. Starting with atomic life Nature moved gradually, painfully, towards the expression of a greater consciousness embodied in a more and more complex body. After aeons of experimentation and struggle she brought forth man. In the human kingdom it has been her constant effort to bring about unity between large and yet larger groups of people. From the small nucleus of a family, she moved to a tribe, clan, village, city, state, nation and lastly to international organisations. This expansion of unity is only a physical symbol of Nature’s attempts to express more and more a global consciousness. But now a further expansion of unity means internationalism on the political level and human fraternity on the psychological level.
These could be stabilised and their purpose fulfilled only by a change of consciousness in the individual which demands an abolition of the separative ego and a strong conviction in each individual that all human beings are children of the one supreme Lord, and therefore really united. On the collective level it is required to make a beginning at a collective living: that is to organise a community or a city which can offer opportunities to all its members to experiment with this ideal and to grow into it without any cultural, national, social or religious inhibitions or dogmas. In other words, man must manifest his inner being, and re-orientate his outer life in the light of his inner guidance.
It is in this context that we should look at Auroville, because its raison d’être is precisely to give man the opportunity of reorganising his individual, social and collective life under the direct guidance of his psychic consciousness. Thus, the birth of Auroville was pre-destined in the annals of evolution, and the moment of its birth perhaps was decided at the occult level to be at 10 a.m. on 28th February, 1968. On that day, the Divine Mother planted the seed of humanity’s future in the Mother Earth and it is now left to her constant care and nourishment.
After this solemn inauguration on 28th February, pioneers in body and spirit poured into Auroville from all over the globe. Each one who came in saw the fulfilment of his dream in Auroville. Some found in it a romantic world of inner freedom, some hoped to find their social liberations, a few realised in it a perfect place for practising karma-yoga in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s teachings, and yet others considered it as the promised new world. And strange enough, Auroville held out to each one the promise of fulfilment of his or her expectations and dreams. Being a ‘dream’ of the Lord, it could surely encompass the dreams of every pioneer!
From a gardener to an architect, from a teacher to a mechanic, everyone hoped to see in Auroville a full flowering of his future; indeed, the symbol of Auroville is based on a flower called ‘Godhead’ by the Mother. It is a flower of the hibiscus family; like the flower the symbol too has five petals around a circle. The dot at the centre represents unity, the Supreme; the inner circle represents the creation, the conception of the city; the petals represent the power of expression, realisation. “So”, declared The Mother, “this city wants to bring back, the authority of spirit over matter,” and at the same time develop matter towards its secret perfection. Because of its integrality of vision and purpose, because of its futurity, Auroville attracted people from all over the world who were willing to dissociate themselves with “an old world ready for death” (CWM 13, p. 221) and who were wanting to participate in “anew and better world preparing to be born.”
(CWM 13, p. 221)
The first rays of this City of Dawn, figuratively speaking, were wonderful — mild in temperature, brilliant in colour, very alluring, very soothing. As the golden sun of Auroville rose up, it promised a new dawn in the lives of the people of Auroville. As children bathing on the sun-spilt sea shore forget everything, even their nakedness, so the people in the beginning of Auroville forgot all about themselves, and all of them worked, and lived, and laughed, and learnt, and dedicated themselves to the pervading spirit of Auroville, The Mother and Sri Aurobindo. The common experience of those times could be epitomised in Wordsworth’s lines:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven …
[The Works of William Wordsworth, The Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Hertfordshire, 1994, p. 208 (ISBN: 1-85326-401-6)]
Life was really one stretch of song, one movement of dance, one note of prayer, one breath of dedication: the big and the small, the rich and the poor, the black and the brown, the new and the unknown, the East and the West, the inside and the outside, the ‘you’ and ‘me’ — it was as if all sense of discrimination and distinction got completely obliterated. The site of Auroville quite barren in the beginning began to slowly wear a smile in the coming up of trees and flowers and feathery grass. The skies at night looked upon the participants of Auroville with their million eyes and seemed to approve of their work, accept their prayers and send them their loving benedictions which in turn brought them only dreams of the New. The wonderful ideal of Auroville filled everyone with inspiration, and they built schools, dispensaries, industries, workshops and houses, grew kambu (Bajra), paddy, vegetables, fruits, different species of trees, controlled soil erosions by building bunds and dams, and began work on Matrimandir, the nucleus of Auroville, the consciousness and soul of Auroville’s body.
Along with this external work, the inner work too had to be done, because the true Auroville can grow only by the psychic energies of its participants. Auroville has to be built first inside each of its inhabitants and only then can it manifest in the outside world. All forms of work are only opportunities for the inner to express itself. In other words, Auroville demanded from each inhabitant a yoga-sadhana on the collective level.
The cocoon period of Auroville’s growth could not obviously last for ever. As soon as the ‘courtship’ period was over, the true colours of the people were beginning to show. Differences of opinion led to the acute awareness of differences of races and cultures and nationalities; conspiracies lay concealed undercover of plea for change; ambition masqueraded as responsibility. Somewhere a breach began and the great virtues of confidence, trust and faith came crumbling down. People tried desperately to stick together, in small groups, to hold on somehow until the crisis was over. But the distant thunder of disunity, disharmony, corruption and violence came nearer and shattered every heart and home. People went helter-skelter — some changed one community for another, some left Auroville itself, some others left for the remote corners of Auroville. Of those who held ground, a strong, militant, revolutionary and reactionary body was formed and their slogan was ‘Autonomy for Auroville!’. The opposing group consisting of a handful of people cried for ‘Authority over Auroville!’. The slogans were heard loud in the halls of courts and in the conference halls of Auroville centres all over the world. Each side tried to gain and gather sympathy, support for itself and for its selfish ends. The project of Auroville was almost sold to the Government of India, to big business magnates and to high foreign officials!Alas! None could find any solution to the venomous problems at Auroville. The solution is there but it is inside, inside each one interested to solve the riddle of Auroville. If only one could hear it — but how can one do it in the constant din of violence, threats, intimidation, victimisation, expulsions, abuses, animosity? The harrowing, nightmarish experiences of all these years have made some people wiser, some quieter and others frustrated and disillusioned. The children of Auroville have had to face the brunt of the whole onslaught. They have bitterly experienced the rape of all values, a rape of culture and civility. They have, as it were, tasted blood; known violence, animosity and animal hunger, and now they hunger for more and hunt for it whenever they can. It is all sad, very sad but true, very true. Nature herself seems to have shrunk back in disgust from this putrefied human consciousness. The whole spectacle of Auroville now seems to be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing:
There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God ...
T.S. Eliot — Four Quartets
(http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/salvages.html, accessed on 17 Jan. 08)
It is difficult to analyse and say where exactly the whole thing went wrong. The malady is deep within and not surfacial. It is not expelling each other; it is not just abusing each other, that is the malady of Auroville. Each group and each individual has to look into itself/oneself and there they might see that what they are trying to reject outside is actually the thing that needs to be rejected from one’s own inner being. Long before the actual trouble had begun, the Mother had set this rule: “To establish in Auroville the harmonious atmosphere which, by definition, ought to reign there, the first step is for each one to look within himself for the cause of friction and misunderstanding.” (CWM 13, p. 207) Had the groups or the individuals only remembered it, perhaps much of the destruction — material and psychological — could have been saved.
These causes of destruction are always on both the sides caught up in a conflict, and before demanding anything from others each one should first strive to eliminate them from himself. Corruption, hypocrisy, violence, malice, animosity, hatred, power-hunger, the play of the lower-vital, etc., are the labels which are tagged to persons in the opposing camp. But these are the very things that need to be cleansed in all the individuals. They are all there in one form or the other, hiding and residing in each person, diminishing and lowering each one’s consciousness. This erosion of consciousness which began with the allowance of an almost infrahuman and subhuman lifestyle in fact put Auroville’s progress on the reverse gear. The Mother had foreseen this trend and warned about it many times. “What we want is to hasten the advent of the supramental, not at all to fall into the ugly condition of humanity full of desires and low impulses.” (CWM 13, p. 222) Had they paid heed to these warnings Auroville would not have been what it is today. Alas!
Yet, is this the sad end of Auroville, the conception of which is purely divine? To answer this one might as well ask: Is there an end to man’s progress? Should man stop dreaming of a better world? Should he stop thinking of a greater future? Is God going to go without this creation? If the answers to all these are in the affirmative, then it is the same for Auroville. Otherwise, Auroville must have a great future, and its present crises must be considered as only a transitory phase. Perhaps, mankind in general is not yet ready for the experiment of Auroville which, in its spirit and consciousness, does not conform to anything present. Or else, there could beonly one explanation for the chaos in Auroville; it might be that the seed which was sown by the Mother is now cracking up the earth around it in order to come out to the surface and to see the sunlight of a true future and perhaps it is this struggle of the seed that is symbolised in the present problems of Auroville. The little seed bestowed with the Divine’s grace and secret intention is struggling through the debris of national rivalries, social conventions, self-contending moralities and religions, is breaking away from slavery to the past ideals, habits and culture, is liberating itself from the bondage of ignorance and ego at the individual and collective levels. If and when it succeeds to make a breakthrough this age-old encrustation, then alone it will be able to feel concretely the rays of the Supramental Sun.
This inner progress and success of Auroville will be symbolised in the progress and completion of Matrimandir. It is “the symbol of the Divine’s answer to man’s aspiration for perfection. Union with the Divine manifesting in a progressive human unity.” (CWM 13, p. 229) — declared the Mother. However, the construction and completion of Matrimandir cannot be delayed or postponed indefinitely, for, it will endanger not only Auroville but the world at large. The Matrimandir is the spiritual nucleus of the unifying forces of Nature; and if it does not come up early enough, then mankind might have to experience a Third World War which might blow up the world before one could even think and wonder at what had happened. Although the coming of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother upon earth is a guarantee against such a global disaster yet if humanity does not collaborate in the Divine’s plan of things to come, it will have to experience crushing calamities. The first signs of this crashing situation are already visible in the world of today and they are very obvious at Auroville. That is because Auroville is the very embodiment of the present world moving toward the ‘new future’, the new face of ‘Supermen’. So, the Aurovilians bear a great responsibility: if they want to participate in the creation of this world that is to be born, they can do successfully only when they learn to surrender themselves completely and consciously to the Divine Mother. Only then can Auroville march forward and solve its own problems and help humanity to solve its problems:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
(http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/gidding.html, accessed on 17 Jan. 08)