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A TOWNSHIP

  04-04-1972

Aim: To practice the ideal of Sri Aurobindo in work and life so that a community of devoted idealists will naturally gather around the effort, ultimately forming a Township.

This is different from Auroville in one respect only. There a township is organised and aspirants received for settling so as to allow them to grow into the ideal. The physical framework is set, spiritual inspiration made available, a community is helped to shape itself. Here the spiritual nucleus applies itself to work in life, acquires the embryo of future community and as its natural social expression acquires the township.

Yoga: Sri Aurobindo has said, "All life is Yoga". When this ideal is practiced in utmost scrupulous execution, the ideal expresses itself in a township. Yoga is the abridgement of evolution. Science hastens the process of Nature. Organised civilized endeavour speeds up the growth of humanity. Systematised education quickens observation and inference in life. Methods, systems help humanity bypass centuries of effort. Science and its abstract methods are the some of this process. And YOGA is the essence of a condensed force practiced through a system perfected to the utmost possibility with a view to exploring the avenues of the abridgement of evolution. Nature has evolved man out of the striving spirit that is at its core. The theories of evolution have traced the laws of Nature (and have found her ways more economic?) For further advance Sri Aurobindo says Nature's ways are leisurely and it has to be hastened. He has delineated his methods, practiced them himself, answered hundreds and thousands of questions on their validity and now has succeeded in the endeavour.

The problem for humanity is how best to translate them into life. The present civilisation has come to stay, the society is a well-organised entity, distinguishable from the mass that is humanity. This society, its ideals, practice, mode of existence, aspiration help the individual to become a finished product of its own conception. The core of its conception still remains in all its insistent essentials, progress through the individual ego occasionally serving the cause of the collective ego, be it the nation or the community. The instrument nature has forged as its effective tool for this progress, is the individual ego and in the present society this ego does serve the purpose. If today one gives up the urges of his ego he is sure to disintegrate as a social entity. This individual ego not merely survives but has asserted its utility throughout.

Should the onward march of nature take further leaps and strides, it is obvious that the ego fashioned to serve a certain stage in evolution should disappear and a fresh tool of nature replace it. Our aim is to establish a new society where this fresh tool will be the prime mover. Sri Aurobindo says that this must be the Divine Will.

To shed the individual ego, to refuse to answer to the dicta of the collective ego are not enough. They must give place in daily life to the Divine Will. This is not something we can occasionally resort to; but this has to rule the million activities of our day extending its domain to breathing and heart beats. Work must be done in such a way that the Divine Will will assume its place and preside over the shaping community.

RAMAPURAM: The population here is primitive in every sense of the word. Their social consciousness is an organised falsehood. They have made falsehood effectively serve their social ends. It is not mere lies, it is original falsehood. The villager resorts to truth only when it serves him. He has a way of speaking truth (when it serves his ends) by first converting it into the texture of his false consciousness. When I discovered that I was thrown head-long into this place, I felt that the forging of a new community in natural conditions would perhaps require going to the very depths of this society and that is why we are here.

The supports of this consciousness of falsehood are the physical environment of poverty and the mental environment of ignorance. To found a community in the Truth Consciousness we must first remove the physical supports of poverty and ignorance. I consider that we have made a big dent in the poverty and that it is on the way out. The large number of wells that have been dug here have almost banished poverty in feeling as well as in fact. The incoming prosperity is not a further version of false living. It is the very first endeavour of the village to live by Truth. (He voluntarily returned the bank advance). Before us is the problem of how to proceed further, how to fashion life here so as to make possible the community that lives by Truth, motivated by the Divine Will.

If the supports of falsehood are poverty, disease and ignorance, the supports of the old social consciousness are all its institutions, especially those that have spring up around the individual ego. For example, the institution of private ownership is such a one. Our work here must be such that the individual in the present consciousness living within the shell of present institutions, must see why he should move out and away from these institutions. He must aspire for collective existence whose functioning is based in truth. The first move he has made and a few others are in sight. We believe we are on the right path. Further, if we organize our personal lives on the basis of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, dissolving the central ego, we believe that the population we work among will easily respond to the ways of dissolving their individual and collective egos. In the near future, the village will have to resort to collective management for obtaining water. That is a hard compromise for him. That will be his second step.

If Sri Aurobindo's Yoga transforms the ego-motivated individual into a divinely inspired human unit of the future, the translation of his ideal within a cross-section of people must transform the institutions of private ownership into collective existence.

As Yoga abridges evolution, this endeavour should first abridge the march of civilisation (i.e. all that the modern society, modern mind has acquired over the centuries are to be repeated here - on the collective scale now - in short periods of years) so that he may start a fresh on the quest of the spirit, basing himself not on the achievements of the individual ego, but on the accomplishments of the collective endeavour (the first glimpses of the Divine Will).



story | by Dr. Radut