Finding Auroville

In the last few posts we have contextualized progressive and conservative thinking in the framework of Integral Yoga. In this post we take this further, focusing this time on the scale at which Integral Yoga functions, and how that intersects with progressive and conservative thought. And then with this framing we will take a look at the scale at which Auroville has been functioning, and the scale at which it ought to function. All quotes in this post are from Sri Aurobindo, except where mentioned otherwise.

At the heart of Integral Yoga is the transformation of consciousness of the individual person, which is the dissolution of the ego and the shift from identification with the material self to identification with the Divine self within us. But this is also in many ways just the starting point of Integral Yoga. Beyond this individual transformation lies the work of spreading this transformation to an ever widening collectivity of humanity. This spiritual transformation is the only way for humanity to move towards a truly harmonious, egalitarian and unified future. Sri Aurobindo refers to this collective spiritual transformation as the “spiritual religion of humanity”:

A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. Mankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because there can be no universal religious system, one in mental creed and vital form. The inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development. A religion of humanity means the growing realisation
that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood,
a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must be the realisation by the individual that only in the life of his fellow-men is his own life complete. There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race.

Summary and Conclusion, The Ideal of Human Unity

The “spiritual religion of humanity” that Sri Aurobindo writes about here is the spiritualization of humankind, the realization that each one of us is a manifestation of the Divine, even thought there is an infinite variation amongst us. Alongside this, he also writes about an “intellectual religion of humanity” (below), which is a mental, intellectual understanding of and aspiration for the oneness of humanity. This is what we have been referring to in the past few posts as progressive thought.

As we have already discussed, progressive thinking shares with Integral Yoga the aspiration for human harmony and unity, but is restricted in its thought and action by being contained entirely within the material world, able only to come up with mental, mechanical, material solutions for the problems facing the world. This invariably leads to failure, as the vital ego’s fears, attachments and desires always thwart the best laid mental material plans.

A religion of humanity may be either an intellectual and sentimental ideal, a living dogma with intellectual, psychological and practical effects, or else a spiritual aspiration and rule of living, partly the sign, partly the cause of a change of soul in humanity. The intellectual religion of humanity already to a certain extent exists, partly as a conscious creed in the minds of a few, partly as a potent shadow in the consciousness of the race. It is the shadow of a spirit that is yet unborn, but is preparing for its birth. This material world of ours, besides its fully embodied things of the present, is peopled by such powerful shadows, ghosts of things dead and the spirit of things yet unborn. The ghosts of things dead are very troublesome actualities and they now abound, ghosts of dead religions, dead arts, dead moralities, dead political theories, which still
claim either to keep their rotting bodies or to animate partly the existing body of things. Repeating obstinately their sacred formulas of the past, they hypnotise backward-looking minds and daunt even the progressive portion of humanity. But there are too those unborn spirits which are still unable to take a definite body, but are already mind-born and exist as influences of which the human mind is aware and to which it now responds in a desultory and confused fashion. The religion of humanity was mind-born in the eighteenth century, the manasa putra of the rationalist thinkers who brought it forward as a substitute for the formal spiritualism of ecclesiastical Christianity. It tried to give itself a body in Positivism, which was an attempt to formulate the dogmas of this religion, but on too heavily and severely rationalistic a basis for acceptance even by an Age of Reason. Humanitarianism has been its most prominent emotional result. Philanthropy, social service and other kindred activities have been its outward expression of good works. Democracy, socialism, pacificism are to a great extent its by-products or at least owe much of their vigour to its inner presence.

The Religion of Humanity, The Ideal of Human Unity

There are linkages created here between the spiritual religion of humanity and the intellectual religion of humanity, between spirituality and progressive thought. As we saw in the preceding posts, the mental faculty that has been developed in humans is the one that is going to move us from the vital to the psychic. Here we can see how the human mental faculty itself is the one that has revealed to itself the Divine in the psychic and spirit (antaratman and jivatman), and is now struggling against the control of Nature’s physical and vital energies to move towards the psychic, and in doing so is aspiring towards the Divine. This aspiration for the Divine in humans, which we call spirituality, in turn influences our mental faculties, and makes the mental faculties strive for higher truths, harmony, unity and a better world. And this mental aspiration can reach lofty heights. Sri Aurobindo writes that even for the intellectual religion of humanity, “mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and served by man”:

The fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and served by man and that the respect, the service, the progress of the human being and human life are the chief duty and the chief aim of the human spirit. No other idol, neither the nation, the State, the family nor anything else ought to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as they are images of the human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation.

…

Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement. The body of man is to be respected, made immune from violence and outrage, fortified by science against disease and preventable death. The life of man is to be held sacred, preserved, strengthened, ennobled, uplifted. The heart of man is to be held sacred also, given scope, protected from
violation, from suppression, from mechanisation, freed from belittling influences. The mind of man is to be released from all bonds, allowed freedom and range and opportunity, given all its means of self-training and self-development and organised in the play of its powers for the service of humanity. And all this too is not to be held as an abstract or pious sentiment, but given full and practical recognition in the persons of men and nations and mankind. This, speaking largely, is the idea and spirit of the intellectual religion of humanity.

Ibid.

This mental searching for higher truths and a better world is a sign in the intellectual human of the influence of the spiritual. It is a sign that “man is a transitional being”, that humans are in a position on the evolutionary path to take the leap from the material to the spiritual, and that behind the material veil of the physical, vital and mental there is the spiritual influencing the activities of humanity.

However, despite all this ability to conceptualize and aspire towards universal harmony, egalitarianism and unity, Sri Aurobindo lays out clearly in the long quote that follows, why the intellectual religion of humanity will always be limited in its effectiveness, and will never be able to lead to the true harmony and unity that we seek. In this quote he uses the trope of “liberty, equality and fraternity” from the French Revolution in the 18th century, as part of the intellectual genius of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, to frame the jump needed from an intellectual to a spiritual religion of humanity. Keep in mind that he wrote all this during the first half of the 20th century.

But this is the question whether a purely intellectual and sentimental religion of humanity will be sufficient to bring about so great a change in our psychology. The weakness of the intellectual idea, even when it supports itself by an appeal to the sentiments and emotions, is that it does not get at the centre of man’s being. The intellect and the feelings are only instruments of the being and they may be the instruments of either its lower and external form or of the inner and higher man, servants of the ego or channels of the soul. The aim of the religion of
humanity was formulated in the eighteenth century by a sort of primal intuition; that aim was and it is still to re-create human society in the image of three kindred ideas, liberty, equality and fraternity. None of these has really been won in spite of all the progress that has been achieved. The liberty that has been so loudly proclaimed as an essential of modern progress is an outward, mechanical and unreal liberty. The equality that has been so much sought after and battled for is equally an outward and mechanical and will turn out to be an unreal equality. Fraternity is not even claimed to be a practicable principle of the ordering of life and what is put forward as its substitute is the outward
and mechanical principle of equal association or at the best a comradeship of labour. This is because the idea of humanity has been obliged in an intellectual age to mask its true character of a religion and a thing of the soul and the spirit and to appeal to the vital and physical mind of man rather than his inner being. It has limited his effort to the attempt to revolutionise political and social institutions and to bring about such a modification of the ideas and sentiments of the common mind of mankind as would make these institutions practicable; it has worked at the machinery of human life and on the outer mind much more
than upon the soul of the race. It has laboured to establish a political, social and legal liberty, equality and mutual help in an equal association.

But though these aims are of great importance in their own field, they are not the central thing; they can only be secure when founded upon a change of the inner human nature and inner way of living; they are themselves of importance only as means for giving a greater scope and a better field for man’s development towards that change and, when it is once achieved, as an outward expression of the larger inward life. Freedom, equality, brotherhood are three godheads of the soul; they cannot be really achieved through the external machinery of society or by man so long as he lives only in the individual and the communal
ego. When the ego claims liberty, it arrives at competitive individualism. When it asserts equality, it arrives first at strife, then at an attempt to ignore the variations of Nature, and, as the sole way of doing that successfully, it constructs an artificial and machine-made society. A society that pursues liberty as its ideal is unable to achieve equality; a society that aims at equality will be obliged to sacrifice liberty. For the ego to speak of fraternity is for it to speak of something contrary to its nature. All that it knows is association for the pursuit of common egoistic ends and the utmost that it can arrive at is a closer organisation for
the equal distribution of labour, production, consumption and enjoyment.

Yet is brotherhood the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of human brotherhood and it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else. For this brotherhood is not a matter either of physical kinship or of vital association or of intellectual agreement. When the soul claims freedom, it is the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the divine in man in all his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming is that freedom equally for all and the recognition of the same soul, the same godhead in all human beings. When it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon the recognition of this inner spiritual unity. These three things are in fact the nature of the soul; for freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of the Spirit. It is the practical recognition of this truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his
soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the race.

Ibid.

Sri Aurobindo here is using tropes that have been created in the intellectual history of humanity to emphasize how humanity needs to make the leap from an intellectual conceptualization and aspiration for harmony and unity to a spiritual aspiration for the Divine, which will automatically, spontaneously, intuitively include an aspiration for human harmony and unity, since all of humanity and the world are part of the Divine and encompassed by it.

In these quotes above, the linkages between the intellectual religion of humanity, and the spiritual religion of humanity are made quite robustly. This is the link between spirituality and progressive thought at its highest. These quotes also set up the scale at which spirituality and Integral Yoga operate, and at which progressivism operates at when it reaches its highest level of thought and action. It encompasses the entirety of humanity and the world, seeking the betterment of all of humanity together. This is because a real harmony and unity is achievable only when the entirety of humanity is considered together. The smaller aggregates of human collectivity are only stepping stones for humans to reach this level of conceptualization and aspiration.

… the gradual process of Nature introduces a complication which prevents the individual from standing in a pure and direct relation to the totality of mankind. Between himself and this too immense whole there erect themselves partly as aids, partly as barriers to the final unity the lesser aggregates which it has been necessary to form in the progressive stages of human culture. For the obstacles of space, the difficulties of organisation and the limitations of the human heart and brain have necessitated the formation first of small, then of larger and yet larger aggregates so that he may be gradually trained by a progressive approach till he is ready for the final universality. The family, the commune, the clan or tribe, the class, the city state or congeries of tribes ,the nation, the empire are so many stages in this progress and constant enlargement.

The Imperfection of Past Aggregates, The Ideal of Human Unity

Throughout human history there has been this movement from smaller to larger aggregates, progressing from the family, clan, village, tribe, region, empire, nation, religion and now to humanity as a whole. We have now reached a stage where we can identify with the entirety of humanity, but our vital ego as yet restricts us from working at that level, and always reduces our thinking and our solutions to a smaller aggregate such as the nation, region or religion. And it is conservative thought that does this, using the fear and emotions of the vital ego to restrict thinking and action to smaller aggregates, pitting one group against the other. It is only when conservative thinking on “both sides” will be able to rise above these divisions created by the collective vital ego that there will be a chance for humanity to move forward beyond division to unity. We have seen that progressive though has already conceptualized this movement and aspires to act in that direction. However, even in the case of progressivism the vital ego acts, both individually as well as collectively, to thwart progressive solutions to the problems of the world. So the movement from the smaller, more restricted conservative thinking to the wider progressive thinking is never going to be enough. We will have to go further, even wider, till we understand that it is our vital ego, our attachment to our material self, which is the final barrier that we have to overcome on our way to human harmony and unity. It is only this transformation of consciousness that will allow us to overcome the control and shackling of our instrumental mental faculties by our physical and vital energies and passions, and allow our mental faculties to be governed by our psychic, leading to truly selfless action and a movement to a better future.

Another way of understanding all this is that even though progressive thinking can conceptualize a unified and harmonious world, it does so while still being involved in the material world, living within it, surrounded by it and influenced by it. And so progressive thinking cannot completely escape the influence and control of the energies and pulls of the material world. The transformation of consciousness allows us to situate our self at a place outside the material world, outside Nature. From this vantage point, the self can observe and act in the material world while being completely free from its influences. This objectivity allows for fundamentally more effective action in the material world, leading to fundamentally more effective solutions.

The purpose of Auroville is to move towards and reach this stage of transformation. It is an ongoing and continuous experiment to see how humans can use the process of transformation to formulate those effective solutions that come from the vantage-point that is outside the material world, and to showcase those solutions. This is why it is such an audacious project. This is why in April of 1972 The Mother said: “we are not here to do easy things; the whole world is there for those who like an easy life. I would like people to feel that coming to Auroville does not mean coming to an easy life – it means coming to a gigantic effort for progress.”

Of course the reality of Auroville as it exists today is very different from this aspiration. In the next post we will use the framework of understanding developed in this post to assess where Auroville is at after more than five years of existence, and how it can move in a direction more in sync with its intended purpose.