Finding Auroville

Many of the recent posts in this blog have compared certain aspects of conservative thinking, progressive thinking and spirituality. Conservative thinking has been defined as essentially parochial and insular, and the limits of the effectiveness and sincerity of progressivism have been highlighted. Progressive thought and action will always fail in its attempts to attain human unity and harmony as long as it stays within the realm of material nature, because the vital ego will always thwart progress towards these goals. In this way progressivism is very much like the sattwic attributes, which have altruistic aims that are nonetheless always stymied by the desires, attachments, fears and insecurities of the vital ego.

In the spiritual philosophy of Yoga and Integral Yoga, the dissolution of the ego is the key to the transformation of consciousness, to self-realization, and to moving humanity towards a harmonious and unified future. Humans identify with their material selves: their physical bodies, their mental intelligence and thought, and their vital emotions and energies – their desires, attachments, fears and insecurities, and assume that this material self is their one and only self. It is the only self that most humans know. And even though in humans the mental intellect has become a very complex and sophisticated tool, capable of all kinds of broad and deep thinking, this mental is still under the control of these vital emotions, and the mental’s actions are directed by the vital’s potent and powerful influence. In the process of the transformation of consciousness, we realize that the material being is not the true self, and that there is another self, the atman or jivatman, which is in fact our true self and which is part of the universal and transcendent Divine consciousness. As we begin to identify with this self, the material desires, attachments, fears and insecurities of the vital begin to lose their grasp over the being and the mental, and our actions start to become devoid of self-interest, self-centeredness and selfishness. We begin to work solely for the betterment of humanity, and for the movement of humanity towards the Divine.

From among these four terms that I keep repeating above and in previous posts: desires, attachments, fears and insecurities, I want to focus here on insecurity, and on its connection with the wideness of human thought. For me, insecurity is the most potent of these vital emotions. It is at the base of all the other emotions. For me, insecurity is the defining emotion of the human race, and is the fundamental driver of our all our self-centered actions. Insecurity has been put into animals by nature/prakriti as a controlling mechanism so that they are motivated to protect themselves and propagate. And this insecurity has been passed onto the animal human through the vital. In the process of evolution, as the human mind developed beyond anything that came before it, this insecurity became more complex along with the mental, and the desires, attachments and fears of humans became complex as well. Humans, as transitional beings that are part of animal, material nature but also have access to the Divine consciousness residing directly within them, have the potential to move away from identification with their material self and towards identification with the Divine. With this process of self-realization, the vital emotions that control the actions of the individual being become less and less potent, and have less sway over the being. And with this, the innate insecurity of the individual being also begins to dissipate, since the animalistic needs for that insecurity become less powerful. The being becomes fundamentally, emotionally and psychologically more secure with the exposure to the ananda of the Divine consciousness and the moving away from identification with material nature.

The other aspect I want to focus on is the narrowness or wideness of human thought, or the parochial nature of human thought under the influence of the vital ego. As mentioned above, conservative thinking is inherently parochial, dividing people into groups and identifying with one or more groups in opposition to others. Progressive thinking on the other hand tries to be expansive, embracing as many groups as possible into its ambit of solutions. Let’s set this aspect of parochial thinking in the context of the writings of Sri Aurobindo, and then link it to the aspect of insecurity. In The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo describes how humanity has passed from individuals identifying with smaller conglomerations of people to identifying with larger and larger conglomerations. (Many of the quotes I have used in this post have been used in an earlier post)

The whole process of Nature depends on a balancing and a constant tendency to harmony between two poles of life, the individual whom the whole or aggregate nourishes and the whole or aggregate which the individual helps to constitute. Human life forms no exception to the rule. Therefore the perfection of human life must involve the elaboration of an
as yet unaccomplished harmony between these two poles of our existence, the individual and the social aggregate. The perfect society will be that which most entirely favours the perfection of the individual; the perfection of the individual will be incomplete if it does not help towards the perfect state of the social aggregate to which he belongs and eventually to that of the largest possible human aggregate, the whole of a united humanity.

For 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. If the smaller aggregates were destroyed as soon as the larger are successfully formed, this graduation would result in no complexity; but Nature does not follow this course. She seldom destroys entirely the types she has once made or only destroys that for which there is no longer any utility; the rest she keeps in order to serve her need or her passion for variety, richness, multiformity and only effaces the dividing lines or modifies the characteristics and relations sufficiently to allow of the larger unity she is creating. Therefore at every step humanity is confronted with various problems which arise not only from the difficulty of accord between the interests of the individual and those of the immediate aggregate, the community, but between the need and interests of the smaller integralities and the growth of that larger whole which is to ensphere them all.

The Imperfection of Past Aggregates, The Ideal of Human Unity

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. But where the cult of these idols seeks to usurp the place of the spirit and makes demands inconsistent with its service, they should be put aside. No injunctions of old creeds, religious, political, social or cultural, are valid when they go against its claims.

…

Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement.

The Religion of Humanity, The Ideal of Human Unity

The ultimate aim of the individual is to identify with the entirety of humanity, and not with any intermediate aggregate. Intermediate aggregates add complexity, diversity and richness to the human whole, but they should not come in the way of identifying with the whole. And the only way to truly identify with humanity as a whole is by the dissolution of the ego, by the transformation of consciousness. With this, our outer identification with region, nation, religion and all other limiting affiliations is replaced with identification with the Divine consciousness, of which all of humanity is a part. Sri Aurobindo calls this identification with all of humanity as the religion of humanity. There is a mental, progressive and sattwic religion of humanity which he terms as the intellectual religion of humanity, but this cannot get humanity to harmony and unity as it is incapable of going beyond the control of the vital ego. It is only with the spiritual religion of humanity that we can achieve that aim.

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.

Summary and Conclusion, The Ideal of Human Unity

Humanity has been moving in the direction of the individual identifying with larger and larger aggregates of people, both intellectually as well as spiritually. The smaller social and cultural aggregates still exist, even as individuals move to identifying with larger aggregates and with the whole of humanity.

Conservative thinking still identifies with the smaller aggregates. It does so because the smaller aggregates are often in confrontation with each other, in multiple ways, and there is safety in identifying with an aggregate to which one culturally, “automatically” or “naturally” belongs. The innate sense of insecurity of the individual finds an amount of succor and comfort in identifying with this smaller aggregate. The individual’s insecurities are mapped onto cultural or group insecurities, thus temporarily and incompletely soothing the sense of individual insecurity. It takes a leap of courage to cease this identification, to go past these insecurities, and move towards identifying with humanity. Progressivism does this through the intellect, via the intellectual religion of humanity.

There is … at work a more powerful force, a sort of intellectual religion of humanity, clear in the minds of the few, vaguely felt in its effects and its disguises by the many, which has largely helped to bring about much of the trend of the modern mind and the drift of its developing institutions. This is a psychological force which tends to break beyond the formula of the nation and aspires to replace the religion of country and even, in its more extreme forms, to destroy altogether the national sentiment and to abolish its divisions so as to create the single nation of mankind.

Summary and Conclusion, The Ideal of Human Unity

However, progressivism, the intellect and sattwic qualities can only go so far in trying to achieve harmony and unity in humanity. In a way, progressivism and the sattwic qualities are an intermediate, mental step on the path towards spirituality and the spiritual religion of humanity.

… 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.

The Religion of Humanity, The Ideal of Human Unity

Progressivism, the sattwic qualities and the intellectual religion of humanity are an intellectual “seeking of light” by humanity, an attempt “to know the higher law of [our] own nature”. The mental is the bridge between the vital and the spiritual. But it is only when we are able to go beyond the ego, beyond the mental, beyond material nature of which the mental and vital are a part that we can achieve the true selflessness that is necessary to move towards human unity and harmony.

… in man sattva is awake and acts not only as intelligence and intelligent will, but as a seeking for light, for right knowledge and right action according to that knowledge, as a sympathetic perception of the existence and claims of others, as an attempt to know the higher law of his own nature, which the sattwic principle in him creates, and to obey it, and as a conception of the greater peace and happiness which virtue, knowledge and sympathy bring in their train. He knows more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his rajasic and tamasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends the perfection of his normal humanity.

…

… as the Gita points out, the sattwa binds, as much as the other gunas, and binds just in the same way, by desire, by ego; a nobler desire, a purer ego,—but so long as in any form these two hold the being, there is no freedom. The man of virtue, of knowledge, has his ego of the virtuous man, his ego of knowledge, and it is that sattwic ego which he seeks to satisfy; for his own sake he seeks virtue and knowledge. Only when we cease to satisfy the ego, to think and to will from the ego, the limited “I” in us, then is there a real freedom. In other words, freedom, highest self-mastery begin when above the natural self we see and hold the supreme Self of which the ego is an obstructing veil and a blinding shadow. And that can only be when we see the one Self in us seated above Nature and make our individual being one with it in being and consciousness and in its individual nature of action only an instrument of a supreme Will, the one Will that is really free. For that we must rise high above the three gunas, become trigunatıta; for that Self is beyond even the sattwic principle. We have to climb to it through the sattwa, but we attain to it only when we get beyond sattwa; we reach out to it from the ego, but only reach it by leaving the ego. We are drawn towards it by the highest, most passionate, most stupendous and ecstatic of all desires; but we can securely live in it only when all desire drops away from us. We have at a certain stage to liberate ourselves even from the desire of our liberation.

The Determinism of Nature, Essays on the Gita

There is therefore a gradation, from functioning under the control of the ego with a parochial mindset and identifying with smaller aggregates, to an intellectual seeking of the “higher law” of our nature and an intellectual pursuit of human unity and harmony, to embarking on the process of self-realization, which is the path to the dissolution of the ego, with which true human unity and harmony can be achieved. For me, this gradation involves the removal of innate human insecurities as a central process. At the level of the intellectual religion of humanity, there is an intellectual and sattwic understanding that these insecurities need to be overcome, but the control of the vital ego is still present, as is the attachment to material nature, and so the insecurities cannot be completely conquered, and many of these insecurities might not even be identified and understood. When the turn is made towards self-realization, as the attachment to material nature diminishes, the insecurities associated with these attachments are recognized, understood and diminished. This is the gradation of the overcoming of insecurities from conservative thought, to progressive thought, to the dissolution of the ego, the last of which involves going beyond the mind to a higher intuitive level.

What are these insecurities? They include things like our feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, the need for external validation, the need to fit in and other similar emotions. These insecurities are the root emotions that dictate our actions when we are under the control of our vital ego. The mind and intellect can to an extent play a role in diminishing such emotions, but it is ultimately only through the process of self-realization that they can be identified and comprehended at their root and definitively overcome and nullified.

For parochialism to give way to more expansive thinking, there needs to be a depth and breadth of social and sociological conceptualization and understanding, of critical and creative thinking in terms of sociological possibilities and potentialities. And ultimately, this sociological conceptualization needs to become completely selfless and de-centered, without the distortions that are brought in by the vital ego. This allows the conceptualization to move from an individuated point of view with its individuated biases and preferences to one that is devoid of such biases and can see things in a much more holistic manner. In a previous post I have used the trope of a high vantage point that comes with the dissolution of the ego. Selflessness brings along with it this broader and deeper perspective, the opposite of the “narrow-mindedness” of the ego. This high vantage point with its expansive views can oversee a larger picture and thus reach better solutions to issues. The dissipation of our innate human insecurities via the process of self-realization is key to this movement. As mentioned above, many of these insecurities are a carry-over from the animal past of humans, and have become complex and multiplied in our transitory present as mental beings. For humanity to direct its evolutionary process along a fundamentally more compassionate, loving, harmonious and united path, these insecurities will have to be acknowledged, understood and nullified as a central process of the dissolution of the ego.

I want to stress here once again that in all these comparisons of conservative and progressive thinking, my interest is not in critiquing conservative political parties or people who identify as conservative, nor am I interested in defending actions and activities that are conventionally lumped with progressivism but that in reality might not be so. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, individuals and groups that profess to be progressive can be quite conservative under the surface. Rather, my interest lies in identifying certain fundamental traits of conservative thinking and progressive thinking, and showing how at the level of these fundamental traits, progressive thought is closer to and moves towards the spiritual philosophy of Integral Yoga.