Towards a new sense of Collectivity
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 egowith 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 practicalaccommodation 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 ofcollective 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 consolidatinga 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 feelthemselves to beembodiments 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 thespiritual 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, butthese 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 existencewould 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 orself-expressed in a native harmony of idea and action and purpose.
Sri Aurobindo
The Life Divine (SABCL 18-19 :1031-32)
An external unity with others must always be an outward joining andassociation of external lives with a minor inner result; the mind and heart attach their movements to this common life and the beings whom we meet there; but the common external liferemains the foundation,—the inward constructed unity, or so much of it as can persist in spite of mutual ignorance and discordant egoisms, conflict of minds, conflict of hearts, conflict ofvital temperaments, conflict of interests, is a partial andinsecure superstructure. The spiritual consciousness, the spiritual life reverses this principle of building; it bases its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion ofothers in our own being, an inner sense and reality of oneness. The spiritual individual acts out of that sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the demand ofself on other self, the need of the life, the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly be done. A realisation of spiritual unity, a dynamisation of the intimate consciousness ofone-being, of one self in all beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action of the divine life.
Sri Aurobindo
The Life Divine (SABCL18-19 : 1029-30)
It was in answer to a question about this topic that the Mother recounted, in her talk of July 3, 1957, her vision of something like a huge hotel, representing the present state of the world, strongly influenced by the forces of material Nature and, to a certain very unsatisfactory extent administered by the mentalised human consciousness. In her vision she was identified with the creative force of the New Creation, which would have the power to change the present chaotic situation of the world into a harmonious progression - but in the vision, this creative force was not yet manifested.
After recounting the vision, she added these comments :
It is quite clear in its symbolism, in the sense that all possibilitiesare there, all activities are there, but in disorder and confusion.They are neither coordinated nor centralised nor unified aroundthe single central truth and consciousness and will. And we comeback, then, to.precisely this question of a collective yoga andthe collectivity which will be able to realise it. And what shouldthis collectivity be?
It is certainly not an arbitrary structure like those made bymen, in which they put everything pell-mell, without order orreality, and the whole thing is held together only by illusorylinks, which were symbolised here by the walls of the hotel. …
This is one of the most usual types of human collectivity: tobe grouped, linked, united around a common ideal, a commonaction, a common realisation, but in a completely artificial way.
As opposed to this, Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true community—what he calls a gnostic or supramental community—canexist only on the basis of the inner realisation of each of itsmembers, each one realising his real, concrete unity and identitywith all the other members of the community, that is, each oneshould feel not like just one member united in some way with athe others, but all as one, within himself. For each one the othersmust be himself as much as his own body, and not mentally andartificially, but by a fact of consciousness, by an inner realisation.
(Silence)
That means that before hoping to realise this gnostic collectivity,each one should first become—or at least begin to become—a gnostic being. This is obvious; the individual work shouldgo on ahead and the collective work should follow.
But it sohappens that spontaneously, without any arbitrary interventionof the will, the individual progress is controlled, so to speak,or held back by the collective state. Between the individual andthe collectivity there is an interdependence from which one can’ttotally free oneself, granting that one tries. And even a personwho tried in his yoga to liberate himself totally from the terrestrialand human state of consciousness, would be tied down, inhis subconscious at least, to the state of the mass, which acts asa brake and actually pulls backwards. One can try to go muchfaster, try to drop all the weight of attachments and responsibilities,but despite everything, the realisation, even of one whois at the very summit and is the very first in the evolutionarymarch, is dependent on the realisation of the whole, dependenton the state of the terrestrial collectivity. And that indeed pullsone back, to such an extent that at times one must wait forcenturies for the Earth to be ready, in order to be able to realise what is to be realised.
And that is why Sri Aurobindo also says, somewhere else,that a double movement is necessary, and that the effort forindividual progress and realisation should be combined with aneffort to try to uplift the whole mass and enable it to makethe progress that’s indispensable for the greater progress of theindividual: a mass-progress, it could be called, which wouldallow the individual to take one more step forward.
The mother
MCW 9 : 141-42
Auroville has surely been created for this work. The creative force of the New Creation is presiding over Auroville. Individually many of us feel it and connect with it, sometimes see it at work in the whole. But in the most external expressions of our collective life, how like that chaotic hotel we still are – still dominated by the mentalised human consciousness.
That is why a collective aspiration is so necessary, to help us to open to the New Consciousness and Force, even in the smallest details of our public life, so that Auroville can become what it is meant to be.
I like this message of the Mother, where she gives the clue of how to find and maintain that united collective aspiration, through all the diversity of individual action and expression :
Beyond all preferences and limitations, there is a ground of mutual understanding where all can meet and find their harmony: it is the aspiration for a divine consciousness.
(The Mother’s Darshan Message
24 November 1972)
A call for that collective aspiration for the higher Truth was expressed thousands of years ago by Rishi Samvanana Angirasa in an invocationto the Flame of aspiring Will that can unite all our energies and give them their right direction.
1.O Fire, O strong one, as master thou unitest us with all things and art kindled high in the seat of revelation; do thou bring to us the Riches.
2.Join together, speak one word, let your minds arrive at one knowledge even as the ancient gods arriving at one knowledge partake each of his own portion.
3.Common Mantra have all these, a common gathering to union, one mind common to all, they are together in one knowledge; I pronounce for you a common Mantra, I do sacrifice for you with a common offering.
4.One and common be your aspiration, united your hearts, common to you be your mind, - so that close companionship may be yours.
Rig-veda, Mandala 10, Sukta 191, translated by Sri Aurobindo
Hymns to the Mystic Fire SABCL 11:435-36
In The Human Cycle Sri Aurobindo gives us a wonderful glimpse of what such a collectivity would be like :
A spiritualised society would live like its spiritual individuals, not in the ego, but in the spirit, not as the collective ego, but as the collective soul. This freedom from the egoistic standpointwould be its first and most prominent characteristic. But the elimination of egoism would not be brought about, as it is now proposed to bring it about, by persuading or forcing the individualto immolate his personal will and aspirations and his precious and hard-won individuality to the collective will, aims and egoism of the society, driving him like a victim of ancient sacrifice toslay his soul on the altar of that huge and shapeless idol. For that would be only the sacrifice of the smaller to the larger egoism, larger only in bulk, not necessarily greater in quality orwider or nobler, since a collective egoism, result of the united egoisms of all, is as little a god to be worshipped, as flawed and often an uglier and more barbarous fetish than the egoism ofthe individual. What the spiritual man seeks is to find by the loss of the ego the self which is one in all and perfect and complete in each and by living in that to grow into theimage of its perfection,—individually, be it noted, though with an all-embracing universality of his nature and its conscious circumference. ... It is this kingdom of God within, the result of the finding of God not in a distant heaven butwithin ourselves, of which the state of society in an age of the Truth, a spiritual age, would be the result and the external figure.
Therefore a society which was even initially spiritualised would make the revealing and finding of the divine Self in man the supreme, even the guiding aim of all its activities, itseducation, its knowledge, its science, its ethics, its art, its economical and political structure. As it was to some imperfect extent in the ancient Vedic times with the cultural education of thehigher classes, so it would be then with all education. It would embrace all knowledge in its scope, but would make the whole trend and aim and the permeating spirit not mere worldlyefficiency, though that efficiency would not be neglected, but this self-developing and self-finding and all else as its powers. It would pursue the physical and psychic sciences not in ordermerely to know the world and Nature in her processes and to use them for material human ends, but still more to know through and in and under and over all things the Divine in the worldand the ways of the Spirit in its masks and behind them. It would make it the aim of ethics not to establish a rule of action whether supplementary to the social law or partially corrective ofit, the social law that is after all only the rule, often clumsy and ignorant, of the biped pack, the human herd, but to develop the divine nature in the human being. It would make it the aim ofArt not merely to present images of the subjective and objective world, but to see them with the significant and creative vision that goes behind their appearances and to reveal the Truthand Beauty of which things visible to us and invisible are the forms, the masks or the symbols and significant figures.
A spiritualised society would treat in its sociology the individual, from the saint to the criminal, not as units of a social problem to be passed through some skilfully devised machineryand either flattened into the social mould or crushed out of it, but as souls suffering and entangled in a net and to be rescued, souls growing and to be encouraged to grow, souls grown andfrom whom help and power can be drawn by the lesser spirits who are not yet adult. The aim of its economics would be not to create a huge engine of production, whether of thecompetitive or the cooperative kind, but to give to men—not only to some but to all men each in his highest possible measure—the joy of work according to their own nature and free leisureto grow inwardly, as well as a simply rich and beautiful life for all. In its politics it would not regard the nations within the scope of their own internal life as enormous State machinesregulated and armoured with man living for the sake of the machine and worshipping it as his God and his larger self, content at the first call to kill others upon its altar and to bleed therehimself so that the machine may remain intact and powerful and be made ever larger, more complex, more cumbrous, more mechanically efficient and entire. Neither would it be content tomaintain these nations or States in their mutual relations as noxious engines meant to discharge poisonous gas upon each other in peace and to rush in times of clash upon each other'sarmed hosts and unarmed millions, full of belching shot and men missioned to murder like war-planes or hostile tanks in a modern battle-field. It would regard the peoples as group-souls,the Divinity concealed and to be self-discovered in its human collectivities, group-souls meant like the individual to grow according to their own nature and by that growth to help each other,to help the whole race in the one common work of humanity. And that work would be to find the divine Self in the individual and the collectivity and to realise spiritually, mentally, vitally,materially its greatest, largest, richest and deepest possibilities in the inner life of all and their outer action and nature.
For it is into the Divine within them that men and mankind have to grow; it is not an external idea or rule that has to beimposed on them from without. Therefore the law of a growing inner freedom is that which will be most honoured in the spiritual age of mankind.
The Human Cycle (CWSA 25 : 255-56)
Submitted by Shraddhavan
07.01.07