Finding Auroville

In the previous post we saw how progressive thought and Integral Yoga have similar aims of universalism and the moving of humanity in a more egalitarian, harmonious, peaceful and compassionate direction. We also touched upon the idea that progressive solutions are limited by the fact that progressive thinking cannot go beyond the contours of the material world. In this post and the next we are going to take this line of thinking further and situate it within the framework of Integral Yoga and Sri Aurobindo’s writings. All quotes in this post are from Sir Aurobindo’s writing and words.

One of the key realizations in Yoga and Integral Yoga is that attachment to one’s material self is the source of all the insecurities, fears, wants and desires that lead to negative thought and action. It is these vital emotions and passions that lead us to the selfishness, self-protection and self-centeredness that hamper and thwart progress towards harmony within ourselves and towards human harmony at a wider scale. If instead of this attachment we recognize the Divine in us as the true self and identify with that self, we move away from these insecurities, fears, wants and desires. Identifying with the Divine moves us away from self-centeredness, and allows us to move towards harmony within ourselves and to truly be able to work for humanity to progress towards harmony. To repeat the quote of Sri Aurobindo from the previous post:

… the ego is not the self; there is one self of all and the soul is a portion of that universal Divinity. The fulfillment of the individual is not the utmost development of his egoistic intellect, vital force, physical well-being and the utmost satisfaction of his mental, emotional, physical cravings, but the flowering of the divine in him to its utmost capacity of wisdom, power, love and universality and through this flowering his utmost realisation of all the possible beauty and delight of existence.

True and False Subjectivism, The Human Cycle

Progressive thought, while it wants to do good in the world, while it wants humanity to move towards universalism and harmony, is still stuck in the material world and under the control of the vital. All the mental solutions it comes up with, no matter how virtuous and altruistic, will ultimately fail because somewhere in the planning or execution of these solutions (usually in multiple places), vital forces will derail the effectiveness of the solution. The self-centeredness of individuals and groups will hamper the progress and useful manifestation of the solution. Here are a few quotes from Sri Aurobindo that consider in different ways how mental, material solutions are always bound to fail:

It is impossible to change humanity by political machinery – it can’t be done.

Transcript from memory by a disciple, of a talk by Sri Aurobindo

There is a spiritual solution which I propose; but it aims at changing the whole basis of human nature. It is not a question of carrying on a movement, nor is it a question of a few years; there can be no real solution unless you establish spirituality as the basis of life.

It is clear that Mind has not been able to change human nature radically. You can go on changing human institutions indefinitely and yet the imperfection will break through all your institutions.

Ibid.

… human reason is a very convenient and accommodating instrument and works only in the circle set for it by interest, partiality and prejudice. The politicians reason wrongly or insincerely and have power to enforce the results of their reasoning so as to make a mess of the world’s affairs: the intellectuals reason and show what their minds show them, which is far from being always the truth, for it is generally decided by intellectual preference and the mind’s inborn education-inculcated angle of vision; but even when they see it, they have no power to enforce it. So between blind power and seeing impotence the world moves, achieving destiny through a mental muddle.

Remarks on Public Figures in India, Letters on Himself and the Ashram

War and conquest are part of the economy of vital Nature, it is no use blaming this or that people for doing it—everybody does it who has the power and the chance. China who now complains was herself an imperialist and colonising country through all the centuries in which Japan kept religiously within her own borders. If it were not profitable, I suppose nobody would do it. England has grown rich on the plundered wealth of India. France depends for many things on her African colonies. Japan needs an outlet for her overabundant population and safe economic markets nearby. Each is pushed by forces that use the minds of rulers and peoples to fulfil themselves—unless human nature
changes no amount of moralising will prevent it.

Morality and Yoga, Letters on Yoga – I (written in the first half of the 20th century)

… there are many things in the ordinary man of which he is not conscious because the vital hides them from the mind and gratifies them without the mind realising what is the force that is moving the action—thus things that are done under the plea of altruism, philanthropy, service etc. are largely moved by ego which hides itself behind these justifications; in Yoga the secret motive has to be pulled out from behind the veil, exposed and got rid of.

The Spiritual Life and the Ordinary Life, Letters on Yoga – I

It is clearly laid out that the movement towards a harmonious future for humanity will only be possible with a collective movement towards the transformation of consciousness as presented by Integral Yoga. The purpose of Auroville is to hasten that movement.

Further, another key aspect of Integral Yoga is its consideration of Nature’s path of evolution on Earth, and the place and purpose of the human species on this evolutionary path. Sri Aurobindo has famously said that:

Man is a transitional being, he is not final. He is a middle term of the evolution, not its end, crown or consummating masterpiece.

Man and Superman, Essays Divine and Human

Humans as a species are a part of the evolutionary journey of life on earth, but are not the pinnacle of that evolutionary journey. They are transitional, a stepping stone between the animals that came before us and whatever lies ahead of us. Base motivations such as self-preservation and propagation through procreation have been inculcated into animals, including humans, by Nature through processes such as natural selection. These base motivations are the primary generators of all the vital insecurities, fears, attachments, passions and desires in us, amplified by the mental complexity of humans at both the individual and collective level. But humans as the transitional species also have another motivation that drives our actions, which in many ways is in opposition to the base motivations of preservation and propagation. This is the aspiration for something higher, something truer than the base material life we live.

[There exists] that which is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine—something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is the soul’s inherent aspiration,
not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when “I seek you for this, I seek you for that” changes to a sheer “I seek you for you.”

…

The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and He is He. That is all about it.

Motives for Seeking the Divine, Letters on Yoga – II

These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation,—this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.

The Human Aspiration, The Life Divine

The work of humans as the transitional being/species is to move from the animalistic vital and physical impulses and passions with their base motivations, to the higher aspirations for Truth and the Divine. This move from the vital to the psychic (these are the terms that Sri Aurobindo uses), is facilitated by the mental, the human intellect. The development of this faculty in humans by Nature is what sets us apart from the animals that came before us. The mental is the bridge that will take humanity from the vital to the psychic.

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 Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, The Human Cycle

However, at the current moment, the mental intellect in humans is still governed and controlled by our base vital instincts and passions.

What precisely is the defect from which all his imperfection springs? … We see that at first sight man seems to be a double nature, an animal nature of the vital and physical being which lives according to its instincts, impulses, desires, its automatic orientation and method, and
with that a half-divine nature of the self-conscious intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, intelligently emotional, intelligently dynamic being who is capable of finding and understanding the law of his own action and consciously using and bettering it, a reflecting mind that understands Nature, a will that uses, elevates, perfects Nature, a sense that intelligently enjoys Nature. The aim of the animal part of us is to increase vital possession and enjoyment; the aim of the semi-divine part of us is also to grow, possess and enjoy, but first to possess and enjoy intelligently, aesthetically, ethically, by the powers of the mind much more than by the powers of the life and body, and, secondly, to possess and enjoy, not so much the vital and physical except in so far as that is necessary as a foundation and starting-point, a preliminary necessity or
condition, a standing-ground and basis, but things intellectual, ethical and aesthetic, and to grow not so much in the outward life, except in so far as that is necessary to the security, ease and dignity of our human existence, but in the true, the good and the beautiful. This is the manhood of man, his unique distinction and abnormality in the norm of this inconscient material Nature.

This means that man has developed a new power of being, —let us call it a new soul-power, with the premiss that we regard the life and the body also as a soul-power,—and the being who has done that is under an inherent obligation not only to look at the world and revalue all in it from this new elevation, but to compel his whole nature to obey this power and in a way reshape itself in its mould, and even to reshape, so far as he can, his environmental life into some image of this greater truth and
law. In doing this lies his svadharma, his true rule and way of being, the way of his perfection and his real happiness. Failing in this, he fails in the aim of his nature and his being, and has to begin again until he finds the right path and arrives at a successful turning-point, a decisive crisis of transformation. Now this is precisely what man has failed to do. He has effected something, he has passed a certain stage of his journey. He has
laid some yoke of the intellectual, ethical, aesthetic rule on his vital and physical parts and made it impossible for himself to be content with or really to be the mere human animal. But more he has not been able to do successfully. The transformation of his life into the image of the true, the good and the beautiful seems as far off as ever; if ever he comes near to some imperfect form of it,—and even then it is only done by a class or by a number of individuals with some reflex action on the life of the mass,—he slides back from it in a general decay of his life, or else stumbles
on from it into some bewildering upheaval out of which he comes with new gains indeed but also with serious losses. He has never arrived at any great turning-point, any decisive crisis of transformation.

The main failure, the root of the whole failure indeed, is that he has not been able to shift upward what we have called the implicit will central to his life, the force and assured faith inherent in its main power of action. His central will of life is still situated in his vital and physical being, its drift is towards vital and physical enjoyment, enlightened indeed and checked to a certain extent in its impulses by the higher powers, but enlightened only and very partially, not transformed,—checked, not
dominated and uplifted to a higher plane. The higher life is still only a thing superimposed on the lower, a permanent intruder upon our normal existence. The intruder interferes constantly with the normal life, scolds, encourages, discourages, lectures, manipulates, readjusts, lifts up only to let fall, but has no power to transform, alchemise, re-create. Indeed it does not seem itself quite to know where all this effort and uneasy struggle is meant to lead us,—sometimes it thinks, to a quite tolerable human life on earth, the norm of which it can never successfully fix, and
sometimes it imagines our journey is to another world whither by a religious life or else an edifying death it will escape out of all this pother and trouble of mortal being. Therefore these two elements live together in a continual, a mutual perplexity, made perpetually uneasy, uncomfortable and ineffectual by each other, somewhat like an ill-assorted wife and husband, always at odds and yet half in love with or at least necessary to each other, unable to beat out a harmony, yet condemned to be joined in an unhappy leash until death separates them. All the uneasiness, dissatisfaction, disillusionment, weariness, melancholy, pessimism of the human mind comes from man’s practical failure to solve the riddle and the difficulty of his double nature.

Ibid.

The task that lies in front of humanity now is to shake off the grasp that the vital has on our mental faculty, and utilize the freed mental to move towards the psychic self, so that it is the selfless psychic self that is in command of our being, as opposed to the vital and physical. Once this occurs, the solutions that humanity is looking for will automatically, intuitively start manifesting, because the selfishness that obscures these true solutions will be replaced by a fundamental selflessness that will have no interest in coming to any solution other than the ones that benefits humanity as a whole to the fullest extent.

We have seen or felt over the past few decades and centuries, that the solutions that could move towards human harmony and unity seem to be just within the grasp of humanity. We have felt again and again that we are close to finding the answers we have been looking for, but for one reason or other these answers and solutions elude us, and we revert back to bickering, warfare, opposition, dispute and contestation.

We have reached the limits of progressive thought and action. The mental solutions that progressive thought seeks to employ to solve humanity’s problems will constantly and always come up against the unbreakable barricade of vital control that humanity is under. The only solution for humanity and for progressivism to move beyond this stalemate is to realize and understand that it is this vital control that constantly derails human aspirations towards harmony and unity, and that the path forward can lie only in the diminishing of this vital control by the dissolution of attachment with the material self and all its insecurities, fears, attachments, desires and passions that have been put in us by Nature as part of our animal selves. We have to move from our animal nature towards our Divine selves (or whatever terminology one wants to use to understand and define the Divine). It is only then that humanity and progressive though will be able to move beyond the vital control that constantly derails the solutions that are brought forth.

In the next post we will continue with this line of thinking.