Finding Auroville

There has been some interest from academics recently in studying Auroville through the analytic framework of “utopia”. I haven’t gone into the details of exactly how these scholars have been examining Auroville as a supposed or proposed utopian space, but I want to briefly address one fundamental aspect of this issue here, which in a few sentences is this: both the idea of utopia and the critique of utopia are mental, intellectual constructs, whereas the “ideal” community that we are aiming for in Auroville is a spiritual community based on the philosophy of Integral Yoga. This spiritualized community can only be achieved by going beyond the bounds of human intellect and our mental faculties. While the material aspects of Auroville are open for analysis by academia and the intellect, the spiritual aspects, which are the heart of the project, cannot be understood by our mental faculties are are thus beyond the bounds of intellectual analysis. I’ll elaborate further in this post.

Utopia is an ideal or perfect community, and the general critique of the concept of utopia is that whenever it has been attempted, whether in fiction or reality, it always fails in its objective or disintegrates into a dystopia, which is the opposite of a utopia. And this critique is quite understandable: it will be very difficult to create a “perfect” community or space, and even more difficult to maintain its perfection. Sri Aurobindo and The Mother talk about attaining perfection as a central facet of Integral Yoga, but theirs is a graded perfection, reached step by step by gaining deeper and deeper levels of detachment from the material world. Their perfection is a spiritual perfection, which entails self-realization.

Humans are part of material nature, and the parts of our material nature are our physical, vital and mental, with their corresponding tamasic, rajasic and sattwic attributes. The human species is distinguished by a highly developed mental faculty, with which we have created the complex world we have around us. However our mental faculty and intellect is still controlled by our vital energies, desires, attachments, fears and insecurities. We identify our self as being this material being with its physical, vital and mental aspects, and are as such completely attached to it. This identification with our material self is known as our ego. And it is the vital desires and insecurities of our ego that govern our actions in the material world, and cause us to act in self-centered and selfish ways. Spirituality is the process of first realizing the selfishness of our egoistical ways, the damage they do to us and to the world around us, and the damage that the human ego has done to the world over centuries and millennia. Then, the path of spirituality allows us to understand that our material being, which we identify as our self, is not our true self. Our true self is that part of the Divine consciousness that resides in every one of us, but which has not been created as part of the material world (nature/prakriti) at all, and instead is one with the universal, transcendent and all pervasive Divine consciousness that is beyond nature, but of which nature is a part. When we identify with the Divine consciousness as our true self, we go beyond material nature, and are no longer shackled to our vital ego, our physical form or our mental faculty. We are no longer attached and governed by our tamasic, rajasic and sattwic qualities. We are beyond these three modes of nature or gunas, to what is known as being trigunateet. In Integral Yoga, we continue to act in the material world from this space of trigunateet beyond nature. Our actions become truly and completely egoless and selfless, and we act solely for the betterment of the world. Sri Aurobindo has termed the knowledge and comprehension that lies beyond the intellect as being intuitive.

Academia is part of the complex intellectual world that humanity has created with its mental faculty. We have had immense success in studying, analyzing and moulding the material world, and academia in all its forms has been and is a part of this process. However, academic or intellectual analysis, being a part of the material human mental faculty, can only analyze the material world. At best, the intellect can grasp the limits of the intellect, but it cannot understand the space that lies beyond it. To be able to do that we have to go beyond our intellect, and we will have to develop new faculties, which will not be material faculties like the mental intellect, but rather intuitive faculties beyond material nature. We will develop these faculties as we progress along the spiritual path of identifying with the Divine as opposed to with our material selves.

So when academia studies Auroville through the lens of utopia (or any other analytical lens), it can only study Auroville as a place and space within material nature. It can only study the material, mechanical side of Auroville, with mechanical here implying the sociological, economic, ecological, cultural, physical aspects of Auroville. The entire spiritual side, which is the core of the project, is inaccessible to this analytical lens, because spirituality goes beyond the physical, vital and intellectual into the trigunateet space.

The “perfection” that is being aimed for in Auroville is a spiritual perfection, not a material one, and so it is beyond the scope of the intellect to comprehend or study it. At this point in time in the evolutionary process, our focus needs to be on self-realization, on the transformation of consciousness, and not on trying to speculate or understand what changes will occur in the material world when selfless actions start to dominate a collectivity. We do not, and intellectually cannot know what the material results will be of the spiritualization of a collective. Any attempt to speculate or understand it intellectually will only lead to limiting our actions to what the intellect and mental can comprehend. To assume that the intellect can comprehend what spiritual perfection means itself betrays a lack of comprehension of what kind of perfection we are aiming for.

To study Auroville from academic perspectives is of course an absolutely legitimate activity, but it needs to be understood that academic analysis can only study the material side of Auroville, and the spiritual side of it, which is the raison d’etre of the project, is out of the scope of academic study. To study Auroville through the analytical lens of utopia, or any other academic lens, can only imply the study of material Auroville, its physical, vital and mental aspects, its tamasic, rajasic and sattwic attributes. What will always be left out is the spiritual aspiration for perfection, and how that aspiration affects or will affect material Auroville. The spiritual, trigunateet space of Auroville can not be analyzed intellectually. For now it can only be aspired to and worked towards.

This analysis is actually also applicable to how Auroville is understood in more general ways. Many people (or perhaps most people), including people who have lived in Auroville for many decades, only have a mental understanding of what Auroville is and can be. For these people, their understanding of Auroville is perforce restricted to the material aspects that can be touched, felt and thought of – its physical, vital and mental aspects. Even when people talk about spiritual things, if there is not a sincere aspiration towards spirituality, the discussion invariably devolves to the material level. This difficulty in grasping (and accepting) true spirituality is why Auroville is a very difficult project for people to truly understand, whether they are visitors or long-term residents of Auroville. This is also the reason why it is so easy to deceive people, including very intelligent people like lawyers, judges, administrators and people in civil society, about the true purpose of Auroville. And it is the reason why it is so easy to deceive oneself about the true purpose of the project.

To give just one example from Auroville of how the spiritual gets reduced to the material: the spiritual aspiration to move towards “divine anarchy” as a mode of governance has devolved in the existing Auroville into a “collective decision-making process”. This collective decision-making process can be found in innumerable liberal/progressive (utopian!) experiments around the world, and its implementation in Auroville has been susceptible to all the manipulation and deception that exists in the egotistical material world. There is actually nothing spiritual about it, because the people who promote it have not been able to go beyond the mental, the material nor the ego. In this atmosphere, the talk of spirituality becomes just a rhetorical tool, unfortunately used often for duplicitous ends. This reduction of things to the material realm, where the ego always holds sway, has always been one of the most potent barriers that blocks Auroville’s movement towards true spiritual transformation. The spiritual is reduced through rhetoric to the material, since the material is much more fathomable and controllable, and this allows the ego to enter into all aspects of the project.

So while academic studies and intellectual analysis of Auroville are absolutely fine to pursue, we need to understand that the spiritual is not comprehensible by the intellect, and cannot be. This is part of the leap of faith that one needs to take when sincerely pursuing a spiritual path. This does not mean the ceasing of thought or cessation of the intellect. On the contrary, the intellectual faculties are still present in all their glory, but one comes to understand the limits of the intellect, one comes to understand the control that the vital ego has on the intellect, and aspires and works towards the transference of the control of the intellect from the vital to the spiritual beyond the material world. We attain a vantage-point where the material world, including our intellect and the intellects of others become objectively and selflessly observable, and the limits of the ego-controlled intellect become palpable. When we reach this vantage-point, we can begin to utilize the intellect to work for the Divine consciousness and the true betterment of humanity, and are free from the restrictions of the intellect working just for the material being’s selfish self-interests.