Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources

5. the lotus and the mud

Through those meetings and the months to come, we were beginning to see, to trace the actual process of a collective consolidation of a community “without leader” as it felt its way along through its first hesitant translation defining its own contents. A collectivity that had to become one to survive, because there was no other.

And the pressure on the individual to change – to abdicate his sovereignty, to lend himself and his energies in order to forge this collective being – was irresistible. A pressure which was not a coercion from without, but rather a great river of power that broke from within us inexorably sweeping aside our damned egos, no matter how well-fortified, how entrenched, whether singular or plural. And yet, it was not a levelling of the individual, a sacrifice of the individual to the State, not a subtilized version of Marxism. The individual, the unique, Auroville’s soul ingredient, was simply placed in this hour squarely before its commitment to the whole. To the context whose destiny it shared. It was a question of finding the point where the two merged.

Why had we come to Auroville anyway, if it was just to live out our more or less exclusive, more or less personal trips? Surely we didn’t come together all this way from god knows where just to carry on our little solos. It was this question which Aurovilians now faced fiercely in the mirror of those Pour Tous meetings through the end of ‘76 and into ‘77 – gatherings that forged the basis for a true common action, a common seeing, the anvil where we hammered out the crude matter that we were, clashing in showers of sparks that would wear away the crusts thinner and thinner that hid our manifold unity. Two years later the process would begin to refine itself, the emphasis would begin to reverse, to seek a new equilibrium.

For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement of unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind, and usually even his practical parts escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem, or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and un-illumined compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as in mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilized, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour.⁸³

This menagerie of human diversity would become one, because it has never been. And the community process went on defining itself, clarifying, consolidating.

And the months to come through that early 1977 would reveal this tentative, evolving process of self-definition and self-purification – a process that simultaneously dealt with the forces within ourselves as well as without.

In February the Community would formulate an initial procedure for receiving newcomers who wished to stay on as resident Aurovilians – a procedure whereby those individuals interested in joining the Community were invited to present themselves in the general meetings (later, this function would be assumed by the Auroville Cooperative), expressing their feelings and perhaps their plans and directions. This offered a first contact with the larger communal body, which then, if there were no striking objections, accepted the individual(s) on an informal “probationary” basis. We would find out in the actual living arrangements in the particular settlements whether the experiment was mutually successful.

The Notes went on to ask “with particular regard to financial matters... with Pour Tous, how is this transition from private to collective life to be effected?” What arose then from the discussion was that a fixed sum of Rs. 360 (about $ 45) would be asked from the individual to cover his monthly food, maintenance and lodging expenses for approximately (though not limited to) one year. And when he no longer could rely on his own reserves, or if he didn’t have any to begin with, the Community, once the individual was clearly accepted as a member-, would assume the financial responsibility. Money was neither a bar nor a buy-off for Auroville.

This procedure – which was much more obvious in practice than in the abstract, and which would be considered and applied according to the individual merits and circumstances of each case rather than by one dogmatic norm – would become more precise with the formation of the Auroville Co-operative in late December of ‘78, as it also involved the community’s responsibility for undertaking the guarantee of the visas with the Government of India.

Another sequence of definitions – more or less imprinted by now in the life itself – reached a consensus in that same February regarding houses and ownership:

“-There should be no private ownership of houses, buildings and lands in Auroville, no real estate to be bought and sold. Expenses incurred (where private) in the construction of houses or buildings are to be considered as a donation to Auroville and are not refundable.

“-When a person goes away from Auroville definitively or for a long period, he should make clear arrangements with the community for the use of the house before leaving.

“-When a person returns to Auroville, the Community should make every effort to resettle him.”

The stress continued to be on a community approach, a sense of relatedness.

In June the question of drugs arose – Auroville’s attitude toward drugs. We were a wide open community that cherished its liberty and experimentality; and yet, we knew the Mother herself, despite her abhorrence for rules, had said: No drugs in Auroville. And though She never imposed, we arrived ourselves by the end of July at a collective statement clearly indicating that the community of Auroville neither condones nor tolerates the use of drugs in Auroville. It was not a matter of moral judgements, we were not interested in converting or saving anyone-those who wished to have their experience with drugs were free to do so … but not in Auroville.

Even the Pour Tous meetings themselves in this definitive moment did not escape the furnace. They too were only a larger circumference still within the expanding limits of Auroville’s context, and they were reminded of this. Auroville was simultaneously struggling against this tendency towards exclusiveness within and without, the gravity of the ego that pulled from all directions at once. And Pour Tous itself was no exception. It had to constantly reaffirm its For All-ness to avoid the inertia of becoming a Thursday Club, a Tyranny of the Group, of the Majority.

And yet, at the same time, it had to maintain its direction, its role of consolidating and unifying a nebulous and amorphous population “without leader” into a coherent and practically efficient Community, to counter the opposite current which tended towards disintegration. It was a delicate balancing act, rarely satisfying in this awkward stage.

But in response to this reminder, the Pour Tous meetings began to revolve Chairmen and locations. No one could be accused of overplaying his personal direction, of loading the dice, and no settlement could subtly annex or influence in its particular atmosphere. Of course we would go on accusing, and of course we would go on being guilty. That was the sorcerer’s caprice, the ego in its echo chamber, in its hall of mirrors, chastising its phantoms by proxy. But the true gesture had been made.

While this internal process of self-defining continued to accelerate, a similar decisiveness began to express itself with regard to the influences that imposed from without. Aurovilians began to throw the first road blocks to the SAS tourist bus and its Pondicherry “information” office. The SAS had been operating a lucrative tourist business under the name of “Auroville Information” located across from the main Ashram building in Pondy. It would take visitors, who assumed that this was the Community’s acknowledged representative, on a tour of Auroville conducted by guides who didn’t live in the Community, for a profitable fee which visitors assumed was going towards the Community’s support.

In addition to this cleverly misrepresented exploitation of Auroville, the SAS had confiscated Auroville’s school bus that had been donated for the Community. Everything – motor vehicles included had been initially registered in the name of SAS. Donated to Auroville, but the titles were in the name of SAS. And technically, legally in its most insipid sense, they could do as they liked. Even a large yellow Mercedes bus, driven overland from Europe and donated to the Community by the caravan that later came to reside in Auroville; was appropriated and to this day remains at the disposal of the SAS, parked in Pondicherry. Auroville, which numbered at that time nearly 500 residents, had only two small vans which operated alternately for the entire Community.

It was from this background that Aurovilians had begun to feel that they had had enough of this intrusive little lie. And one day, without any particular planning – spontaneously, as we liked to call these things – Aspiration refused to let the tour pass through its residential settlement. They simply refused and didn’t budge – something which Aspiration, to the exasperation of much of the rest of Auroville, would develop to an art. The French revolutionary art of “Non!”

They politely explained to the visitors in the bus that the tour was a hoax, unrelated in any way to the Community. Voilà.

That first successful attempt to block the SAS intrusion drove them to appeal before the Lt. Governor of Pondicherry who was the then Chairman of the new Government Committee. Technically, we were told, we couldn’t stop them. They had the papers and the Government had to acknowledge them. The L.G. was a bit miffed with our breast-beating over what he considered “details”. We were counselled that the Government was concerned with resolving the “larger questions”. And so we backed off. For the time being.

It’s funny how matters of consequence seem to always be preoccupied with the “larger questions”, never condescending into the “details”. But life lives in the details.

That spring of ‘77, a similar frustration would occur, accentuating the Community’s need to express itself toward matters imposed on it. In this case, a youth association from Kuilapalayam Village, the village neighbouring Aspiration, had begun to develop a close link with Aurovilians, and the possibilities of mutual projects and exchange grew through the friendships. Aurovilians offered the youth association a hut in which the contacts could further develop. But when the SAS heard of this, they immediately filed a complaint with the police asserting their authority and questioning our right to “give away” Auroville property.

This led into the deeper question which that week’s meeting faced of “whether we have the right to make our own decisions in such matters. Are we a policy-making group? If so, do we stick with our decisions or withdraw because of .the result? It is generally felt that we must take a very firm stand expressing our right to decide. SAS is already leasing peanut fields for next year. It is again emphasized that whatever has been done regarding the leasing and harvesting of crops this year … is not (even) the central issue, but that it is important that we consider whether we want to take whatever steps are possible to avoid revolving year after year around the same situation. It is felt rather strongly that Auroville must make a collective, overt statement-something to the effect that we do not recognize claims of ownership or rights to manipulate the land. If we do this, we must implement it and it should be endorsed by the whole Community…”

The frustrations were building, one could only wait so long; and whether sanctioned or not, authorized or not, Auroville one day would have to do something which no other seemed able or willing to do for it.

It could not deny itself.

This continuous confrontation between internal and external events during that period found a dilemma where both joined: the question of the Fidelity group. We had already begun to define our Community process with regard to receiving newcomers, but we had not yet faced the more unpleasant challenge which we, as a Community, would sooner or later have to face: the right to dissociate from itself – in other words, ask to leave – members who for obvious reasons had threatened or jeopardized the integrity and survival of the Community itself.

Left in the abstract, it has an ominous overtone, but such decisions – which we had never taken before and which we were not only forced to consider because of the exaggerated case – are inherent in the maturing of a responsible body.

The half dozen who constituted this Fidelity cult which orbited around a figure called Jagadish, aside from their autistic and ingrown behaviour under the possession of their enchanter, aside from the fact that they were in no way participating in any work contributing to the Community in over a year yet continued to accept their meals from it – aside from all that which, it is doubtful, would have been tolerated for more than the time it would take to show them the door in any other progressive human settlement these few had not even bothered to camouflage their active allegiance to the SAS in its efforts to re-appropriate Auroville.

It was, of course, the first time we were consciously facing such a decision which one always deferred to others, preferably behind closed doors. But we were facing it openly, collectively, with all of its implications – we who respected and were sensitive to the experiment which Auroville represented and which we did not want to diminish or tamper with by our own elimination process. But when the Mother herself said that “No rules or laws are being framed,” she also stated in the next sentence that “things will get formulated as the underlying Truth of the township emerges and takes shape progressively.” The Community was not enforcing arbitrary laws but evolving them out of its own living experience.

A series of meetings began to occur among the residents of the Centre area to see how to respond to the presence of the handful dug in at Fidelity, the name of their isolated compound located near Unity office. But Centre, unlike Aspiration’s zealous counter-balance, was unable to express its convictions decisively, unable to make up its mind. It somehow represented the looser – flexible might be a more dignified term – side of the Auroville coin whose true face was individual liberty and whose distortion was an indecisive and immature character whose features were quite faint, indistinguishable, un-individualized.

The last of this series of meetings was held in the Matrimandir construction office on May 20^th of that 19'77. And despite the clear and simple issue, the residents of the Centre area still lacked the resolution, found themselves caught in the same virtuous hesitations of Arjuna, could not pierce the sentimental web that obscured the issue, could not choose their dharma. The matter would remain for another moment to resolve.

It was a painful period for us. The mud was churned, dislodged, exposed and expelled. A messy business, the work of a plumber flushing out the tangle of clogged pipes that lay buried in the caverns of our humanity.

It is impossible to imagine how all this appeared from outside; even our most sympathetic friends who tried their best not to judge had difficulty making ends meet between the ideal of human unity, for which we strove and the mire in which we dove. But we held our noses and went on, descending deeper and deeper, long ago leaving behind those brittle surface harmonies which cloaked a oneness much more profound, infinitely more powerful-a oneness unbearable to the ego.

Ours was not a tepid and ether.eal love for Auroville and one another. Ours was a love of fire, a fire of love in the earth.

What you say about the ‘Evil Persona’ interests me greatly as it answers to my consistent experience that a person greatly endowed for the work has, always or almost always … a being attached to him, sometimes appearing like a part of him, which is just the contradiction of the thing he centrally represents in the work to be done. Or, if it is not there at first, not bound to his personality, a force of this kind enters into his environment as soon as he begins his movement to realize. Its business seems to be to oppose, to create stumbling blocks and wrong conditions; in a word, to set before him the whole problem of the work he has started to do. It would seem as if the problem could not, in the occult economy of things, be solved otherwise than by the predestined instrument making the difficulty his own, that would explain many things that seemed disconcerting on the surface.⁸⁴

And if the person was collective and his work to realize human unity.

6. the interregnum of consciousness and the economics of oneness

Nine years a Child-King in quest of his crown,

Ere the sixth the Queen Mother lay veiled in the frown

Of the Grey Regents who had conspired to drown

The golden-eyed Child and plunder his Town.

It was February 28, 1977. Auroville had completed its ninth year. Despite the Chairman, despite us. It would be because it had never been.

From the meeting on that birthday: “It is largely a question of formulating relationships within Auroville: who is who? who belongs where? who joins what? who stands where? … Auroville is trying to find its new identity … It boils, ripens, searches …”

On that same day, an article entitled Establishing Priorities for Auroville indicated that, “Auroville has been asked to submit a list of priorities to the Chairman of the Government Committee for Auroville, based on its genuine needs and its ability to implement them…” It seemed to represent the climax of a thread that had been running for many months through a combination of housing, development, land use and environmental ‘planning’ meetings attempting to define some perspective in terms of Auroville’s growth as a township-in-the-making. The image of “City” was still the index and definition through which most external bodies, particularly the Government, could relate to us and consider their own involvement.

These assorted working meetings seemed to be reaching a crescendo in February and early March as they raced to formulate the contents for the coming stages in order to fill in the apparent vacuum for committees whose bureaucratic milieus accustomed them to Five-Year-Plans. Pushed from this recognition that if we didn’t look respectable and convincing – at least on paper – some well-intentioned other might officially begin to advise us and eventually implement the contents according to its own definition; and pressed by our own dwindling incomes in a no-way-out situation and the attractions of substantial assistance, we doggedly ground away in our “development” exercises to provide a response.

A short notice appeared in the communities: “Without compromising our collective approach to administration of Auroville, a certain structure reflecting our modus operandi budget needs to be presented which would enable us to undertake a relationship with government agencies, organizations such as Tata, etc. It was proposed that rather than titles and personalities, the structure to be presented should emphasize areas of work and functions…”

The meetings that followed, though concentrated, were not held behind closed doors. Not because we needed to pry on one another, but because, somehow each one of us needed to at least have the opportunity to expose himself to participate if he wished, in these processes. The openness of our internal systems was an essential quality for the educational element inseparable from our lives. Auroville was a kindergarten where we learned to become responsible; and there was no place for professional exclusiveness, no matter how benign. Though this was not meant to contradict the individual’s need for creative space – which it sometimes did.

While this “Development Plan” for 77-78 was crystallizing, we found ourselves entering the moment of our first collective deficits; and those directly involved with the Community finances which passed through Pour Tous Fund found themselves abruptly thrown out of their first year’s honeymoon. We began to castigate ourselves, appeal to ourselves to become more conscious of our spending and consumption, discuss ways for the communities to reduce and cut back where possible. It was true that our budget already seemed to be on the marginal line; and it was true that outside sources had become unreliable or were blocked because of SAS’s embargo effectively closing off any tax-exempt donations from India; and it was also true that we had no cache of capital buried away to subsidize our means of self-sufficiency.

And though all of these constrictions might be miraculously erased by the Government and others who had appeared on the horizon to save us just in the nick of time, nevertheless some subtle connecting threads were beginning to unravel between the Pour Tous arrangement and the Community. There was now a between Pour Tous and the Community. The relationship had somehow slipped from identity into association. Pour Tous – For All, had, despite our protests and excuses and self-justifications, begun to lose its definition, began to blur into a cliché.

And there was no one to blame but all of us, each one of us. Pour Tous’ meaning derived from All of us, without exception. And when we stepped back, began to take it for granted, saw it as something other than us, let it fall into the responsibility of a few to whom we went to satisfy our needs, the key to Pour Tous was lost, Pour Tous was not a dispensation – a welfare system for needy Aurovilians.

The management of Pour Tous – of Auroville’s economy depended on the consciousness of the Community as a whole, the active awareness and participation of us all, who responded to changes not because we were told to by some one of us who had now become an other, but because we were personally responsible for the comprehensive details of our lives in Auroville.

“Either the Aurovilians are one or Auroville has no meaning” It was not a passionate proverb. It was a practical necessity, an essential definition.

It was not ultimately Pour Tous which had become exclusive though we could point the finger at many faux pas of the group that came to be labelled Pour Tous – it was we who had begun to exclude ourselves, for the best of reasons of course. And this trend, this slippage of ours would continue until the divorce between the individual and his collective economics was no longer supportable. The reversal, the renewal of Pour Tous in its own more living definition, would begin in the autumn of ‘78.

In the meantime, for reasons that were not difficult to imagine under the compressed circumstances, the deficits began. We were spending more than we had, blaming it on this reason or that, this system or that impossible restriction with our belts already tightened to the last notch. But it was all an unconsciousness. We had simply lost touch with ourselves and our economy reflected our disconnection. We were making others of ourselves, allowing some of us to “manage” the collective finances which, with all their good intentions, resulted in deficit spending of our “own” money - drawing from the pool of funds which Aurovilians had deposited in the Pour Tous Fund to compensate for the Community’s consumption which no longer corresponded to its means.

Itwas a miniature of the precariously existing economies all over the world – the monstrous systems of our teetering dinosaur cultures whose populations have almost no conscious relationship with their economies which somehow manage to stagger on through the juggleries of an elite, well-armed with statistical double-talk, but who – believe it or not – are no more magicians than you or I. There is no such thing as vicarious responsibility.

Auroville, on a scale where errors were still manageable, had registered an immediate imbalance in its budgets as soon as the individual sense of responsibility was obscured. And this was in a Community whose residents had consciously committed themselves to change. Auroville’s economics would only begin to find its true ground when the Community accepted to limit its expenditures to the actual resources available, bridging the interregnum of consciousness between the individual and the collective – the mental blind spot – placing a shared decentralized sense of responsibility upon all of its members. Because here, in Auroville, there was no one else to blame. But one wonders how much longer in the world’s present transition, where systems have complexified and outgrown all sense of proportion and relationship, the jugglers can continue to make ends meet. The ends which by now were no longer even identifiable.

Europe prides herself of her practical and scientific organization and efficiency.

I am waiting till her organization is perfect; then a child shall destroy her.

And so it would be in that fall of 1978, that the Community would accept that responsibility, take that decision to live within its means, to find out what those means actually were undistorted by loans and deficit spending. And thus would begin what came to be known as the “Envelope System” – an attempt to bring a collective transparence to Auroville’s finances.

The principle was simple. You use what you have and only what you have; what incomes you have, what food you grow. And then you see where you really are and what’s still needed, what you really need. For many weeks, many of us, especially in the large collective dining rooms, ate little more than some grains we grew and a few coarse vegetables. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. And we suddenly all understood directly, with the body, where we were. And this experience pressed us into the phase of rapidly developing our farms and intensive gardens, steadily moving towards a true self-sufficiency as the percentage of food and milk products grown and produced in Auroville rose from insignificance to become the mainstay of the Community’s diet within a year. Similarly, the involvement of our crafts and industries became less abstract, more dynamic – and none of this because a few pushed the many, but because the many spontaneously understood and responded accordingly, naturally toward a progressive practical unity.

We were continuing to redefine and refine our understanding of “need” and we were discovering the means – which the easy and prosperous way out never pushes you to find - of improvising what we needed out of what we had ... which wasn’t much, which was a nothing that contained a potential everything if we could see clearly enough. And it was in the weekly exercise of these “Envelope Meetings” that we began to learn this process of seeing collectively, as representatives from each of the communities would gather, assess the week’s needs and expenses, calculate the week’s income internal as well as contributions from friends and centres – and disburse the funds according to the acknowledged priorities. And these weekly accounts were then posted in each of the communities so that everyone could follow the progress, identify with the process, consciously participate in a synergy that would one day overtake the existing artificial hierarchies, establish the efficacy of oneness in the least detail and in the most external activity.

But that was eighteen months later, another moment. Now Aurovilians were still awaiting in that mid-March of 1977, a first grant to be released through the Government Committee. It seemed that the reinforcements we desperately needed had finally arrived. And then suddenly, a week later, in that same March of 1977, with the Emergency in India lifted, Mrs. Gandhi and her administration fell unexpectedly in the elections that she herself had called. And with that sudden and unforeseen event, the Government Committee for Auroville gradually became defunct, lost in the transition of administrative bureaucracies that followed as the newly-forged coalition of the Janata Party sorted itself out and became progressively more preoccupied with its own internal dissensions.

India, that unpredictable Woman, had pulled out another rug. Her timing was incredible. Just when the rescue seemed at hand, just when the development plans had crystallized. Yet somehow, and maybe we even knew it then, it was cheating. Our independence, our freedom could not be given by another. Not like that. It would come, but we were not yet ready. We would only have fallen into another glue, sweeter perhaps, but stickier.

But on that Monday morning following the elections, the fervour of the development meetings froze. Half a dozen grim-faced Aurovilians who had finished their paperwork and who could now use it for kindling to break the chill that hung over the room. As a Community we were left speechless, we simply became quiet, pulled in all the scattered strings we had thrown out, withdrew to calm our shattered collective nerves and recover the inner thread. One could hear a pin drop in that Auroville instant which had jolted us from our idyll back into the moment to moment – no more projections, no expectations. Silence. A silence that warmed and vibrated as we gave ourselves to it, a silence which perhaps was our true international language. A silence that reminded us where our true support lay, our true leverage.

The Government Committee for Auroville, which had barely functioned for three months, gradually dissolved, recalled back into that great bulk of bureaucratic protoplasm. It had accomplished three things in those three months, three simple tasks, none of which could be called hand-outs: it had enabled an initial bank account to be opened through which collective funds could be channelled to the Community; it had played a part in the Government’s temporary suspension of the SAS’s privilege which allowed it the exclusive power to guarantee visas for Auroville; and it had filed a report documenting the extensive mismanagement of large sums of funds by the SAS, particularly government grants in the early years, which now lies somewhere shelved in Delhi.

But the gift could not be given, the gift forever there, waiting to be discovered.