Finding Auroville

In Auroville the term “community” is used often. It is used to describe the community of Aurovilians as a whole. It is used as part of the “community decision-making process” by which Auroville has supposedly been making administrative and governance decisions over the past few decades. Housing in Auroville over these decades has developed in clusters, and each cluster of houses is known as a “community”, and each has its own (often morbid) internal decision-making process. In the liberal facade that Aurovillage projects to the outside world and the liberal milieu that Aurovillage pretends to exist in, “community” as part of the progressive lexicon is a powerful trope that is used to show togetherness, harmony and unity within Auroville. And in similar ways to how the term “human unity” is used to allude vaguely to the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the directions that The Mother gave regarding the purpose of Auroville, without ever getting into the details of what that term actually implies in their teachings, the term “community” is also used with varying positive connotations to signal that Auroville exists in harmony and is indeed moving along the path laid out by The Mother. The term has compelling resonances with the history of progressive thought in the 19th and 20th centuries and into the current century, connecting with socialist and communist ideas of “communes” as well as “hippie communes”, the last of which Auroville has a lot of overlaps with in its own history since 1968.

In all these ways the term “community” is a powerful and significant trope in Auroville today. However in all these ways, community is used to signify a material collection of people set in material surroundings. And yet we know (from previous posts if from nowhere else) that one of the central tenets of Yoga and Integral Yoga is to go beyond identification with the material, towards identifying with the Divine consciousness. This is the process of the dissolution of the ego, of self-realization, that has been termed as the transformation of consciousness. So how should we understand “community”, which is by definition a collection of material beings in a material setting, in the context and framework of Integral Yoga? And what are the implications of this understanding for Auroville?

Sri Aurobindo has dealt with the idea of community directly in his work The Life Divine. In this tome, he speaks of the gnostic individual and of gnostic communities. By gnostic individual he means a person who has come to identify completely with the Divine consciousness, one who has gone completely beyond identification with their material self.

The gnostic individual would be the consummation of the spiritual man; his whole way of being, thinking, living, acting would be governed by the power of a vast universal spirituality.

The Gnostic Being, The Life Divine

Then, as part of the description of what a divine life would be like, he talks about three aspects, the first being the quest for individual spiritual perfection, and the second “the perfection of the spiritual and pragmatic relation of the individual with all [those] around him”, as part of the individual’s “complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth”. And then he talks about the third aspect of a divine life, a “gnostic divine way of collective living”:

But there still remains the third desideratum, a new world, a change in the total life of humanity or, at the least, a new perfected collective life in the earth-nature. This calls for the appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in the unevolved mass, but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new common life superior to the present individual and common existence. A collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle as the life of the gnostic individual. In our present human existence there is a physical collectivity held together by the common physical life-fact and all that arises from it, community of interests, a common civilisation and culture, a common social law, an aggregate mentality, an economic association, the ideals, emotions, endeavours of the collective ego with the strand of individual ties and connections running through the whole and helping to keep it together. Or, where there is a difference in these things, opposition, conflict, a practical accommodation or an organised compromise is enforced by the necessity of living together; there is erected a natural or a constructed order. This would not be the gnostic divine way of collective living; for there what would bind and hold all together would be, not the fact of life creating a sufficiently united social consciousness, but a common consciousness consolidating a common life. All will be united by the evolution of the Truth-consciousness in them; in the changed way of being which this consciousness would bring about in them, they will feel themselves to be embodiments of a single self, souls of a single Reality; illumined and motived by a fundamental unity of knowledge, actuated by a fundamental unified will and feeling, a life expressing the spiritual Truth would find through them its own natural forms of becoming. An order there would be, for truth of oneness creates its own order: a law or laws of living there might be, but these would be self-determined; they would be an expression of the truth of a spiritually united being and the truth of a spiritually united life. The whole formation of the common existence would be a self-building of the spiritual forces that must work themselves out spontaneously in such a life: these forces would be received inwardly by the inner being and expressed or self-expressed in a native harmony of idea and action and purpose.

The Divine Life, The Life Divine

And again in The Ideal of Human Unity Sri Aurobindo reiterates that it is not in the material realm that the collective will find the answer to human harmony, but rather in the spiritual realm. This passage was already used in a recent post, but I am adding it again since it is relevant here:

But though these aims [to establish a political, social and legal liberty, human equality and mutual help] 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.

The Religion of Humanity, The Ideal of Human Unity

In these preceding passages Sri Aurobindo describes how a spiritualized collective or community would differ from the regular idea of a grouping of humans. In any grouping or community in humanity today, from the smallest to the largest example, it is humans as material beings that interact with each other. This means that it is human egos, our physical and emotional impulses and energies, and our mental faculties under the control and influence of these impulses and energies, that are interacting with each other. In this way, human interactions invariably become negotiations for attaining as much as we can for our individual selves or the parochial grouping that we identify with. This is true even among people who are friendly and affectionate with each other, as well as being true in intimate relationships. The individual ego always tries to get the maximum that it can, and only compromises when it becomes necessary. Human interactions as they exist today are a negotiation between egos. And when the individual identifies with a collective ego, they join the interaction to negotiate the maximum benefit for the group they identify with. A person who is in a stronger position in the negotiation will extract as much as possible from the person in a weaker position.

Even when we are deciding on supposed altruistic matters, or seeming to discuss things in good faith, the ego will still find its way into the discussion, and either try and get something for itself from the negotiation, or scuttle it completely. In normal human interactions, the sattwic attribute will always be tainted by rajasic and tamasic energies.

As an example, lets say that there are ten people in a group, and they are looking for a solution to an issue that is affecting all of them. Each person will find and support the solution that they think works best for them, even if it is to the detriment of others. Or two or more sub-groups will form, signifying temporary alliances, which will try to get as much for that sub-group as possible. Human interactions will always continue to function in this mode while we are under the control of our egos.

Sri Aurobindo explains it this way:

For the ego has inalienably the instinct of a double self-assertion, its self-assertion against other egos and its self-assertion by means of other egos; in all its expansion it is impelled to subordinate their need to its own, to use them for its own purpose and for that purpose to establish some kind of control or domination or property in what it uses, whether by force or by dexterity, openly or covertly, by absorption or by some skilful turn of exploitation. Human lives cannot run upon free parallels; for they are compelled by Nature continually to meet, impinge on each other, intermix, and in the ego life that means always a clash. The first idea of our reason suggests that our human relations may be subjected to a mechanical accommodation of interests which will get rid of the clash and the strife; but this can only be done up to a certain point: at best we diminish some of the violence and crude obviousness of the clashing and the friction and give them a more subtle and less grossly perceptible form. Within that subtler form the principle of strife and exploitation continues; for always the egoistic instinct must be to use the accommodations to which it is obliged or induced to assent, as far as possible for its own advantage, and it is only limited in this impulse by the limits of its strength and capacity, by the sense of expediency and consequence, by the perception of some necessity for respecting other egoisms in order that its own egoism too may be respected. But these considerations can only tone down or hedge in the desire of a gross or a subtle domination and exploitation of others; they do not abrogate it.

Self-Determination, War and Self-Determination

So while in current human interactions the ego is always the one partaking in the interaction, humans usually have to hide the fact that this is what is going on, but behind the civilized facades that we create there is usually a play of egos in competition with each other. For a time we might try to be truly altruistic and compassionate, but ultimately the ego always emerges as the true motive-force behind our actions, the sattwic aspiration always scuttled by the tamasic and rajasic impulses.

Now using the same example as earlier, let us consider that the ten people in question have made significant progress towards being “gnostic beings”, meaning that they have truly and sincerely moved away from identifying with their material selves and towards identifying with the Divine consciousness. These people will have no more remaining individual attachments, desires or wants. Their only aspiration from any human interaction will be for the betterment of as many people as possible. When this group interacts to find solutions, the solution that works best for as many people as possible in the best way possible will spontaneously, automatically be chosen, because that is the only course of action that will present itself to this group as being the one to take. And further, the course of action that has been taken will keep on getting tweaked and honed till it leads to continuously better and more effective results.

In this way, when there is a true and sincere progress towards the transformation of consciousness, the entire framework of human interaction will change. From a combination of tamasic, rajasic and sattwic tendencies working to find self-centered solutions behind a facade of civilized behaviour, the trigunateet state will take over, and any collective decision-making will spontaneously be truly selfless.

In the gnostic or divine being, in the gnostic life, there will be a close and complete consciousness of the self of others, a consciousness of their mind, life, physical being which are felt as if they were one’s own. The gnostic being will act, not out of a surface sentiment of love and sympathy or any similar feeling, but out of this close mutual consciousness, this intimate oneness. All his action in the world will be enlightened by a truth of vision of what has to be done, a sense of the will of the Divine Reality in him which is also the Divine Reality in others,
and it will be done for the Divine in others and the Divine in all, for the effectuation of the truth of purpose of the All as seen in the light of the highest Consciousness and in the way and by the steps through which it must be effectuated in the power of the Supernature. The gnostic being finds himself not only in his own fulfilment, which is the fulfilment of the Divine Being and Will in him, but in the fulfilment of others; his universal
individuality effectuates itself in the movement of the All in all beings towards its greater becoming. He sees a divine working everywhere; what goes out from him into the sum of that divine working, from the inner Light, Will, Force that works in him, is his action. There is no separative ego in him to initiate anything; it is the Transcendent and Universal that moves out through his universalised individuality into the action of the universe. As he does not live for a separate ego, so too he does not live for the purpose of any collective ego; he lives in and for the Divine in himself, in and for the Divine in the collectivity, in and for the Divine in all beings. This universality in action, organised by the all-seeing Will in the sense of the realised oneness of all, is the law of his divine living.

The Divine Life, The Life Divine

The self-realized person does not work for themself because there is no egoistic need for them to work for themself. Nor do they work for or identify with any parochial grouping, because there is no attachment in them to any collective ego formation either. They completely identify with humanity as a whole, and then they identify with the people immediately around them from that context, position and widest vantage-point of identifying with humanity. This identification of oneness does not happen at the level of individual or collective ego but rather at the level of the Divine consciousness that exists in each of us and is all around us. This identification will lead to a fundamental transformation of how humans interact with each other, which will become completely selfless and egoless. This transformation will lead humanity in a completely different trajectory than the spiraling that it currently exists in.

In this post we have laid out the differences between how community is perceived in a progressive material setting versus a setting where a group of self-realized individuals would interact with each other. Of course such a community of self-realized individuals does not really exist in our current times – it is an aspiration to move towards and work towards into the future. So how does such a conceptualization address what community should be like in the context of Auroville on a current day-to-day basis? We will discuss this in the next post.