Finding Auroville

The term Sanatana Dharma is in the news these days in multiple contexts. Sanatana Dharma can be understood in different ways, mainly because of the complexity of the word Dharma. The word Sanatana is understood well enough to mean “eternal”, but Dharma is a word with complex connotations. It is often taken to mean “duty” or “law” at an individual or collective level. Thus dharma becomes the duty or law that a person or group of people should follow. In this context, Sanatana Dharma has become a term that refers to the laws and rituals of Hinduism, and the term has become synonymous with Hinduism. In this post I will present my understanding of what the term means, in the context of Integral Yoga and Sri Aurobindo’s teachings.

For me, the term Sanatana Dharma has almost nothing to do with Hinduism as a material, sociocultural, religious, ritualistic institution. Sri Aurobindo has used the term to refer to Hinduism, but he writes that this religion is eternal, universal. Dharma, apart from meanings such as “duty” and “law”, also refers to cosmic law, as well as the inherent nature of a thing, or the inherent truth of a thing. In this context, Sanatana Dharma can be said to mean “eternal truth”, or “universal truth”.

As I see it, the eternal and universal truth of Sanatana Dharma is not in the material plane, but rather at the level of the (unmanifest) Divine. This truth is an understanding that the material, temporal world, what we call the universe or cosmos, is a manifestation of a much greater, all encompassing entity, which has been called Purushottam, or the Divine. We humans, as part of the natural world/prakriti, are part of this material manifestation. We have present in us the Divine, and it is our work, our innate duty, our dharma, to move away from identifying with our material self and move towards the realization that comes with truly identifying with the Divine. Sri Aurobindo calls this movement the transformation of consciousness. And our dharma requires not just for us as individuals to make this transformation, but to work to facilitate this transformation in all humanity, and ultimately in nature itself.

This movement, this transformation requires the dissolution of the ego, which is the process of detachment from our material self and joining with our self that exists beyond the material, our atman. Sri Aurobindo describes this as the movement from the vital through the mental to the psychic. This transformation is a psychological and sociological transformation, and ultimately in evolutionary terms will be a physiological one. It will be both at the level of the individual and the collective. This movement of humans and nature back to the Divine is the universal, eternal truth. It is thus not related to any material religion or set of rituals. Whatever processes are associated with it are universal. The only link to Hinduism is that the elaboration of this eternal, universal truth happened in the lands we call India, in the sociocultural context we call Hinduism. And therefore the terminology we use to describe it has (for now) that Hindu sociocultural context, for example the Sanskrit term Sanantana Dharma to describe it. To become truly universal, it will have to move out of the bounds of Hinduism and be embraced by the multiplicity of sociocultural contexts that exist and will evolve in the world. This eternal truth and the processes to get to it will have to be defined in the terminologies of all those multiple and diverse contexts. What will remain is the central, fundamental, eternal truth of the Divine, which is termed in our sociocultural context as Sanatana Dharma.

Sri Aurobindo, Aldous Huxley and many many others have said that aspects and elements of this truth exist in many religions and spiritual philosophical contexts. It has just been most thoroughly elaborated and crystalized in the context of Hinduism. To start to embrace its universality, it will now have to spread to the different sociocultural contexts that exist. The Mother initiated Auroville as one of the sites for the flowering of this universality.