Finding Auroville

It is very clear from the previous posts of this blog that my focus has been on emphasizing the centrality of Integral Yoga in the Auroville project. Yet there are many people in and connected to Auroville who don’t just de-emphasize Integral Yoga in Auroville, but deny its relevance outright. Their narrative states that Auroville is supposed to be an open, flexible, diverse and free place, where people have the independence to find their own spiritual path, whatever it may be, and no one is allowed to question this freedom or place any limitations on it. They label people who emphasize the importance of Integral Yoga as dogmatic and restricted in their outlook. It seems the only thing not allowed in Auroville is calling for a focus on Integral Yoga. An accompanying narrative is that Integral Yoga is old and outdated, and we have to move beyond it to look towards the future instead of being fixated on the past.

In a coming post, I will address the narrative that Integral Yoga is dogmatic. For this post, I want to present what I think should be the three modes of existence in Auroville. These three modes encompass, just like Integral Yoga itself, an almost limitless array of attitudes and activities, with a central Truth holding it all together. First however, I want to deal with the two narratives of Integral Yoga not being the core focus of Auroville, and Integral Yoga being outdated.

Is Integral Yoga Outdated?

The Vedantic texts that Integral Yoga evolved from, such as the Upanishads and the Bhagwad Gita, are thousands of years old. After them over the centuries there have been an array of philosophers and spiritualists who have commented on these texts their philosophy of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo wrote his central texts on Integral Yoga at the beginning of the 20th century, about a 100 years ago. So are all these now outdated? Has the world changed and moved forward so much that the philosophy of Integral Yoga is no longer relevant?

If one believes in Integral Yoga, one understands that there is a central universal Truth at the core of its teaching, on which its entire evolutionary spiritual philosophy is built. This Truth is that the Divine pervades the cosmos, and exists infinitely beyond it. The Divine also exists within each of us, and is accessible to us if we decide and work to connect with it. The aim of human existence is to connect with the Divine within us and thus the Divine all around. In order to do this, we must as a first step unyoke ourselves from identifying with our material selves and the material world, and instead identify with the part of the Divine that is within us. We do this by the dissolution of the ego, by dissolving our material desires, attachments, fears and insecurities. Sri Aurobindo calls this a movement away from our vital and towards the spirit:

The one thing essential must take precedence, the conversion of the whole life of the human being to the lead of the spirit …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

(Quotes taken from the last three chapters of The Human Cycle by Sri Aurobindo)

Further, we must not stop at and be satisfied with an individual bonding with the Divine, but must work in the material world to collectively move the world itself towards the Divine.

This is the actionable part of the eternal Truth on which the philosophy of Integral Yoga rests. This eternal Truth is the Sanatana Dharam as propounded by Sri Aurobindo. It is a spiritual truth, and not one that resides in the rituals and beliefs of the material world, even though its aim is to transform the material world.

This central eternal Truth is, well, eternal. It is not something that gets outdated and irrelevant. And for all intents and purposes, neither have we as humanity nor we in Auroville even begun to orient ourselves in a direction that could begin to move us in its direction. Even when, some time in the future, humanity reaches a stage where this actionable central Truth is as commonplace, as known, and as achievable as a basic level of mental education is today, this Truth will still remain absolutely valid as the core, essential nucleus of the evolutionary path of humankind. All future human evolutionary development, if that development takes the path charted by Integral Yoga, will be founded on this central Truth.

Spiritual Flexibility

Coming back to the present situation in Auroville, and to the notion that Integral Yoga is not the core focus of Auroville. A few quotes of The Mother are presented to support their claim that Auroville is not really about Yoga, and that instead the township is supposed to be much more spiritually free and flexible. One of the primary quotes in this category is one where she has said:

… in Auroville, the simple goodwill to make a collective experiment for the progress of humanity is sufficient to gain admittance.

So, the narrative goes, one simply needs goodwill towards humanity to be in Auroville. What this means in actionable terms is hardly ever elaborated on. And there is definitely no need to focus on Yoga per se. However, to get the full context of what The Mother was saying, we need to see the full quote. She said this in response to a question about the difference between the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and Auroville:

There is no fundamental difference in the attitude towards the future and towards the service of the Divine. But the people of the Ashram are considered to have consecrated their lives to Yoga (except, of course, the students who are here only for their studies and whom one never asks to make a choice in life). Whereas in Auroville, the simple goodwill to make a collective experiment for the progress of humanity is sufficient to gain admittance.

The Mother, on 10 November, 1969

I find this quote very useful in defining the different “modes of existence” that I think should be followed in Auroville. Lets break the quote down further. In it, The Mother said three separate but interconnected things:

1) that there is no fundamental difference in the aims of the Ashram and Auroville,

2) that in the Ashram the ashramites are “considered to have consecrated their lives to Yoga”, and

3) that in Auroville, “the simple goodwill to make a collective experiment for the progress of humanity is sufficient to gain admittance”.

If we put all these three together, we can see that since the aims of the Ashram and Auroville are fundamentally the same, and in the Ashram the ashramites are supposed to have consecrated their lives to Yoga, so it is logical to infer that Aurovilians are supposed to be, at least to some extent, focused on Yoga.

But in the third statement she says that “simple goodwill” is “sufficient to gain admittence”. Simple goodwill towards what? Towards a “collective experiment for the progress of humanity”. This collective experiment for the progress of humanity is in itself an experiment in Integral Yoga, because that was the philosophy that she and Sri Aurobindo taught. So we can paraphrase The Mother as saying that: the simple goodwill towards the experiment in Integral Yoga is sufficient to gain admittance in Auroville. “Sufficient to gain admittance” connotes a minimum standard or requirement.

Modes of Existence in Auroville

From all this, my understanding is that there are three different modes of existence that we can choose from for living in Auroville. All three of these modes require at least a mental understanding of Integral Yoga and an acceptance that Integral Yoga is the fundamental purpose of the project of Auroville. This of course is my own personal framing of how one should approach living in Auroville, and what the orientation of our individual purpose in Auroville should be.

Here are the three modes:

1) The first mode comprises of people who are committed to Integral Yoga, committed to understanding what it is, to pursuing it and pursuing the transformation of consciousness that it entails at an individual level. These people have seen that Integral Yoga is ultimately the only way for humanity to move forward towards a fundamentally equal and compassionate society, and are committed to being sadhaks (practitioners) and yogis (practitioners of yoga) of Integral Yoga.

2) The second mode is people who are interested in spirituality in general, but might not be completely committed to Integral Yoga. The focus on spirituality would have attracted them to Auroville, and they would be interested in the idea of spirituality in general being the guide for humanity as it moves into the future. However, even among this group of people, there needs to be a good mental understanding of what Integral Yoga is, and that the central focus of Auroville is Integral Yoga. There needs to be understanding that whatever work they do in and for Auroville will ultimately be in aid of the pursuit of Integral Yoga in the Auroville experiment.

3) The third mode is of people who are not even interested in spirituality, but are in Auroville for some other reason, basically centered around the idea of a collective or community working for the betterment of humanity in one respect or another. Even for this group, it will be essential to have a good mental understanding of Integral Yoga, and its centrality in Auroville. Like the second mode, they will also need to understand that their work in Auroville, even though not having direct a spiritual focus or intent, will ultimately go towards supporting the pursuit of Integral Yoga in Auroville.

So for all three modes, and therefore for everyone coming to Auroville, it will be essential at the minimum to have a robust mental understanding of what Integral Yoga is, and an acknowledgement that its pursuit is the central purpose of Auroville, and that their work here will ultimately be supporting that purpose. To think that the aim of Auroville is to come here and be “free” to pursue one or another non-defined or ill-defined spiritual path, or not one at all, or to pursue “human unity” without setting any definition of it or any understanding of how to go about achieving it, is a level of vagueness that is untenable in a project as large as Auroville. This vagueness and lack of definition is one of the main reasons why Auroville has strayed so far from its purpose. To get the focus back on Integral Yoga will set it in the right direction again. One need not be apprehensive of this leading to a restricted life, because as Sri Aurobindo says, Integral Yoga is as diverse as life itself.

To end this post, here is a statement by The Mother from 19th January 1967, in response to a question about people interested in Auroville:

They may not practice themselves, but if they do not know about yoga, how can they understand the purpose of Auroville?