Finding Auroville

Auroville of course is a community/township with spirituality at its core. However, for many people, for example young people who come here for various volunteering and learning opportunities, this fact is only of peripheral importance. And even people who come to Auroville because of its spiritual focus usually carry a vague or broad understanding of what spirituality is, and what it means in the Auroville context. People who decide to stay here over a longer period of time should ideally engage in earnest with the teachings of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, and the philosophy of Yoga in general. Unfortunately, many times this is not the case.

In Auroville a broad approach to spirituality has been encouraged. No classes, practices or techniques are mandated. No one is asked to engage in any spiritual practice of any kind. The idea behind this is that each individual has their own spiritual path that they need to pursue, and these paths are varied and multifarious. No one should be told what to do and what not to do. This is part of the liberal and autonomous idea of existence that has developed in Auroville, where people have wide freedom to do whatever they want.

However, this freedom has led to a lot of insincere behavior in Auroville. A very superficial and rhetorical engagement with spirituality is all that is required to justify one’s existence here. And for people who find Auroville to be an inexpensive place to lead their lives, and for people who are here for a particular type of laid-back, easy-going lifestyle, it becomes very facile and appealing to engage with this spiritual insincerity (on the infrequent occasions that one needs to do it at all). In fact, ironically, it is taboo to even question someone’s sincerity here. Just the fact that someone has decided to move to Auroville is considered proof enough of their sincerity. On the one hand, all this is part of the potent narrative that Auroville is not, or not specifically, about Intergal Yoga, and that any form of spiritual thinking (or none) is valid to be pursued here. On the other hand, it is part of the attitude that as long as one conforms to the existing establishment and social structure here, one can do whatever one wants. On top of all this, people who stress on Integral Yoga as central to the purpose of Auroville are called too dogmatic and rigid. They are portrayed as people who will stifle the freedom and creativity that Auroville stands for.

So what exactly should be the approach towards spirituality in Auroville? Should things be this flexible? Or should there be a more structured understanding of spirituality, and even a structured process of teaching it?

As I see it, and as I had written in an earlier post, Integral Yoga is indeed at the core of the purpose of Auroville. It is central to the teachings of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, and is in fact the raison detre of Auroville. So let’s briefly go to the source and see what Sri Aurobindo has said about variety, freedom and purpose in the context of Integral Yoga.

In The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo writes pithily about what spiritual freedom means in a spiritualised society:

A spiritualised society would live like its spiritual individuals, not in the ego, but in the spirit, not as the collective ego, but as the collective soul. This freedom from the egoistic standpoint would be its first and most prominent characteristic. But the elimination of egoism would not be brought about, as it is now proposed to bring it about, by persuading or forcing the individual to immolate his personal will and aspirations and his precious and hard-won individuality to the collective will, aims and egoism of the society, driving him like a victim of ancient sacrifice to slay his soul on the altar of that huge and shapeless idol.

Sri Aurobindo, Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age, The Human Cycle

Here Sri Aurobindo is clearly talking about giving the individual freedom of action in the material world to grow as they will, but is also talking about freedom from the ego.

The ambition of a particular religious belief and form to universalise and impose itself is contrary to the variety of human nature and to at least one essential character of the Spirit. For the nature of the Spirit is a spacious inner freedom and a large unity into which each man must be allowed to grow according to his own nature.

Sri Aurobindo, The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age, The Human Cycle

Once again here Sri Aurobindo is clearly making the case for freedom for people to grow as individuals, and on the need to refrain from religious beliefs imposing themselves on individuals. Freedom of action in the material world and the vastness of spiritual freedom are essential in his teachings. However he then goes on to say:

Therefore while many new spiritual waves with their strong special motives and disciplines must necessarily be the forerunners of a spiritual age, yet their claims must be subordinated in the general mind of the race and of its spiritual leaders to the recognition that all motives and disciplines are valid and yet none entirely valid since they are means and not the one thing to be done. The one thing essential must take precedence, the conversion of the whole life of the human being to the lead of the spirit.

Sri Aurobindo, ibid.

Sri Aurobindo lays down decisively here that while “all motives and disciplines are valid”, they are ultimately just “means” to a goal, which is the one essential thing: “the conversion of the whole life of the human being to the lead of the spirit”. So here we have the one essential, central aspect of Integral Yoga, which is (to repeat once again) “the conversion of the whole life of the human being to the lead of the spirit”. Thus, whatever paths and methods one takes to get to it, this is the central factor of Integral Yoga.

The question then arises, what exactly does Sri Aurobindo mean by talking of the conversion of the whole life to the lead of the spirit? He explains (long quote):

The secret of the transformation lies in the transference of our centre of living to a higher consciousness and in a change of our main power of living. This will be a leap or an ascent even more momentous than that which Nature must at one time have made from the vital mind of the animal to the thinking mind still imperfect in our human intelligence. The central will implicit in life must be no longer the vital will in the life and the body, but the spiritual will of which we have now only rare and dim intimations and glimpses. For now it comes to us hardly disclosed, weakened, disguised in the mental Idea; but it is in its own nature supramental and it is its supramental power and truth that we have somehow to discover. The main power of our living must be no longer the inferior vital urge of Nature which is already accomplished in us and can only whirl upon its rounds about the ego-centre, but that spiritual force of which we sometimes hear and speak but have not yet its inmost secret. For that is still retired in our depths and waits for our transcendence of the ego and the discovery of the true individual in whose universality we shall be united with all others. To transfer from the vital being, the instrumental reality in us, to the spirit, the central reality, to elevate to that height our will to be and our power of living is the secret which our nature is seeking to discover. All that we have done hitherto is some half-successful effort to transfer this will and power to the mental plane; our highest endeavour and labour has been to become the mental being and to live in the strength of the idea. But the mental idea in us is always intermediary and instrumental; always it depends on something other than it for its ground of action and therefore although it can follow for a time after its own separate satisfaction, it cannot rest for ever satisfied with that alone. It must either gravitate downwards and outwards towards the vital and physical life or it must elevate itself inwards and upwards towards the spirit.

And that must be why in thought, in art, in conduct, in life we are always divided between two tendencies, one idealistic, the other realistic. The latter very easily seems to us more real, more solidly founded, more in touch with actualities because it relies upon a reality which is patent, sensible and already accomplished; the idealistic easily seems to us something unreal, fantastic, unsubstantial, nebulous, a thing more of thoughts and words than of live actualities, because it is trying to embody a reality not yet accomplished. To a certain extent we are perhaps right; for the ideal, a stranger among the actualities of our physical existence, is in fact a thing unreal until it has either in some way reconciled itself to the imperfections of our outer life or else has found the greater and purer reality for which it is seeking and imposed it on our outer activities; till then it hangs between two worlds and has conquered neither the upper light nor the nether darkness. Submission to the actual by a compromise is easy; discovery of the spiritual truth and the transformation of our actual way of living is difficult: but it is precisely this difficult thing that has to be done, if man is to find and fulfil his true nature. Our idealism is always the most rightly human thing in us, but as a mental idealism it is a thing ineffective. To be effective it has to convert itself into a spiritual realism which shall lay its hands on the higher reality of the spirit and take up for it this lower reality of our sensational, vital and physical nature.

This upward transference of our will to be and our power of life we have, then, to make the very principle of our perfection. That will, that power must choose between the domination of the vital part in us and the domination of the spirit. Nature can rest in the round of vital being, can produce there a sort of perfection, but that is the perfection of an arrested development satisfied with its own limits. This she can manage in the plant and the animal, because the life and the body are there at once the instrument and the aim; they do not look beyond themselves. She cannot do it in man because here she has shot up beyond her physical and vital basis; she has developed in him the mind which is an outflowering of the life towards the light of the Spirit, and the life and the body are now instrumental and no longer their own aim. Therefore the perfection of man cannot consist in pursuing the unillumined round of the physical life. Neither can it be found in the wider rounds of the mental being; for that also is instrumental and tends towards something else beyond it, something whose power indeed works in it, but whose larger truth is superconscient to its present intelligence, supramental. The perfection of man lies in the unfolding of the ever-perfect Spirit.

The lower perfection of Nature in the plant and the animal comes from an instinctive, an automatic, a subconscient obedience in each to the vital truth of its own being. The higher perfection of the spiritual life will come by a spontaneous obedience of spiritualised man to the truth of his own realised being, when he has become himself, when he has found his own real nature. For this spontaneity will not be instinctive and subconscient, it will be intuitive and fully, integrally conscious. It will be a glad obedience to a spontaneous principle of spiritual light, to the force of a unified and integralised highest truth, largest beauty, good, power, joy, love, oneness. The object of this force acting in life will and must be as in all life growth, possession, enjoyment, but a growth which is a divine manifestation, a possession and enjoyment spiritual and of the spirit in things, — an enjoyment that will use, but will not depend on the mental, vital and physical symbols of our living. Therefore this will not be a limited perfection of arrested development dependent on the repetition of the same forms and the same round of actions, any departure from which becomes a peril and a disturbance. It will be an illimitable perfection capable of endless variation in its forms, — for the ways of the Spirit are countless and endless, — but securely the same in all variations, one but multitudinously infinite.

Sri Aurobindo, The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, The Human Cycle

So here we have it, “the conversion of the whole life of the human being to the lead of the spirit” means a fundamental movement away from the material physical, vital and mental of the human species to the spiritual. This is the central task that Integral Yoga lays out for us, the one essential thing, the key to a transformation of consciousness. Everything else around it is details. Sri Aurobindo writes about freedom and diversity in both the material and spiritual realms, about each individual growing in their own way from the vital and mental to the spiritual. However the one essential thing is this movement itself, where the spiritual and not the vital and mental becomes the center of human life.

One last quote on this theme:

For it is into the Divine within them that men and mankind have to grow; it is not an external idea or rule that has to be imposed on them from without. Therefore the law of a growing inner freedom is that which will be most honoured in the spiritual age of mankind. True it is that so long as man has not come within measurable distance of self-knowledge and has not set his face towards it, he cannot escape from the law of external compulsion and all his efforts to do so must be vain. He is and always must be, so long as that lasts, the slave of others, the slave of his family, his caste, his clan, his Church, his society, his nation; and he cannot but be that and they too cannot help throwing their crude and mechanical compulsion on him, because he and they are the slaves of their own ego, of their own lower nature. We must feel and obey the compulsion of the Spirit if we would establish our inner right to escape other compulsion: we must make our lower nature the willing slave, the conscious and illumined instrument or the ennobled but still self-subjected portion, consort or partner of the divine Being within us, for it is that subjection which is the condition of our freedom, since spiritual freedom is not the egoistic assertion of our separate mind and life but obedience to the Divine Truth in ourself and our members and in all around us. But we have, even so, to remark that God respects the freedom of the natural members of our being and that he gives them room to grow in their own nature so that by natural growth and not by self-extinction they may find the Divine in themselves. The subjection which they finally accept, complete and absolute, must be a willing subjection of recognition and aspiration to their own source of light and power and their highest being. Therefore even in the unregenerated state we find that the healthiest, the truest, the most living growth and action is that which arises in the largest possible freedom and that all excess of compulsion is either the law of a gradual atrophy or a tyranny varied or cured by outbreaks of rabid disorder. And as soon as man comes to know his spiritual self, he does by that discovery, often even by the very seeking for it, as ancient thought and religion saw, escape from the outer law and enter into the law of freedom.

Sri Aurobindo, Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age, The Human Cycle

One way to look at it is to use the visual example of the Inner Chamber of the Matrimandir. During a concentration session in the Inner Chamber, each person in the Chamber, sitting around the central Crystal, is sitting in a different orientation, looking towards a different direction. However they are all facing the object in the center, the Crystal. Similarly, in Intergal Yoga, each person has a different, unique and individual journey to the Divine, but the destination is the same. This destination, where the spirit starts to lead the human being and becomes the center of human life, is the one essential thing in Integral Yoga.

This is not, as is often said in Auroville, “dogma”. This is the central action of Integral Yoga and central to the purpose of Auroville. And as we can see from the quotes above, it contains an infinite amount of variations and freedoms, both material and spiritual, within that one essential thing, that one essential aim. This aim should be the central aspiration of Aurovilians.

Finally, after having made the statement above, the question arises whether to live in Auroville over the long term, each and every individual should be completely committed to Integral Yoga, committed to making that transformation from the material to the spiritual. As I see it, the minimal requirement for long-term residents of Auroville should be a mental understanding of Integral Yoga, a recognition and acceptance that its central aim of moving from the material to the spiritual is also the central aim of Auroville, and a commitment to supporting this aim, even if one is not ready to pursue the journey in its entirety. In this way, Auroville will move from being a “spiritual township” with spirituality vaguely defined, to a township with Integral Yoga as its central focus, as The Mother wanted. It is time for Auroville to mature and take this next step in its evolution.