Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources

11. swadharma

On the Western periphery of the Auroville Township site stands a hollow complex of raw and bone-grey buildings, phantoms in concrete brooding over the palmyra-stroked landscape like some mammoth and impenetrable monolith out of time. These dark and dormant structures were meant to be the Cultural Pavilions of Bharat Nivas – the House of India. But instead, abandoned since 1974, they had in recent months become the last outpost of the SAS in Auroville.

The halls that had been offered to a great and once-powerful queen among nations had become the stronghold of a dark lord. A future usurped by the past.

For years, we would pass these massive, wind-swept ruins, wondering when they would warm and come alive, flowing with the Shakti of India. Two distinct forms lay amidst the unfinished foundations and pillars strewn here and there behind the barbed wire fence: One, a round cavernous structure which played like a flute in the wind; the other, a towering, angular auditorium whose roof arched heavenward like a spear. It was here in the basement of this oblique immensity that the SAS had cached itself.

None of our previous appeals to the Government had served to dislodge them. And somehow, on a deeper level where the symbols are transparent, the presence and possession of this Bharat Nivas – this House of India – by that force of Exclusion represented the resistance that sought to prevent the inner bond between India and Auroville, that sought to block the true relationship between the two who shared a common Ground.

It was not by coincidence that Auroville was in India. What other country on this criss-crossed earth could have offered her Motherland to support such a vast and incomprehensible experiment – an experiment which sought to synthesize a living unity from the most contradictory ingredients which inhabit this planet, a true and un diluted sampling of all of humanity and his teeming cultural diversity. An unabridged world in miniature. Bharat, the ancient Sanskrit name of India, which means Wideness.

It was this story, this secret key between Auroville and India, that lay locked, buried in the vault of Bharat Nivas.

Frederick among us had always been one of the most sensitive to the unfulfilled role that Auroville and India had to play together. He had been one of the earliest involved with getting grants for programs related directly to the neighbouring Tamil villages in the area. And when he returned from Delhi, he had crossed a certain line. The hypocrisy that had possessed Bharat Nivas – the door of India in Auroville – was no longer bearable.

And he was not alone.

In early April, a number of informal meetings and discussions took place at Auroson’s Home to see how to make a first true gesture in Bharat Nivas, to see how to bring some life into it, to awaken some spark, some forgotten memory of the India it was to house and express. To rouse it from the spell that had subverted it.

Fred, along with some of the Tamil Aurovilians, began organizing for a ten-day cultural program to begin on the 14^th of April – Tamil New Year – with a Nadashwaram music recital and continue with a painting workshop/competition open to all the local villages. It was a first attempt for Aurovilians and villagers to share a cultural experience together in Bharat Nivas.

And despite the tense atmosphere which vibrated from the presence of the SAS right under whose nose we were pulling this off, despite their grimace which reverberated through the wide, empty halls, putting everything slightly off balance, slightly ill-at ease, we came with our tractor trailer and began setting up the round chamber with panels to display the paintings, cleaning up the long abandoned, vacant interior, trying to kindle a first calorie of life.

The SAS, of course, responded warmly by disconnecting the water and electricity supply. But those we could brush off. It was their unforeseen and totally out-of-the proportion escalation that we could not.

Early on the 17^th morning, three days into the program which had begun to thaw Bharat Nivas, drawing hundreds of village children and adults together with their distant kin in Auroville, the SAS sent in their storm-troopers. They could no longer tolerate our brazen disregard for their last stronghold.

Without warning, they sent their busload full of agents and employees to block the entrance to Bharat Nivas, cutting off Frederick who was inside with Auroson and Janine, a young French girl who had come to help set up the arrangements for the day. The act had been well-planned. More than fifty heavies from the villages, who we later found out had been paid their Rs. 25 over the weekend to do their dirty work, met the bus at the gate to Bharat Nivas. They were well-armed with casuarina poles and clubs. Most of them were stationed at the gate while a group of them were instructed to accompany the few SAS members-among them, Prahbat Poddar, the Chairman’s nephew – to the round building where Frederick and his son were alone.

When Frederick heard them coming, he sent Auroson off with Janine for help. But the help would be too late.

And when we finally arrived an hour later, only able to pass through their mob at the gate after the police sub-inspector arrived, we found Frederick lying unconscious in a pool of blood, brutally beaten about the head and face. And in that vivid, un-retouched image, within that surreal theatre-in the-round strewn with broken panels and torn children’s paintings, Prabhat Poddar, as if nothing had happened, was casually tape-measuring the floor on which Fred lay, as if he had been there to engineer something else.

When we carried Fred out on a stretcher, while we waited for the ambulance, I sat beside him and took notes. It took a whole day – long after he had been stitched in the General Hospital where-he was kept for observation – for me to piece together all the disjointed elements in the story, to find out all the grim details of two other Aurovilians who had come from the Nursery in response to Janine’s call for help; who had entered the Bharat Nivas compound from the north attempting to rescue Frederick; and who too had fallen to the casuarina clubs of the SAS.

This was what Bharat Nivas, the House of India, was sheltering.

And despite this detailed reports that were sent to all levels of the Government, and despite the eyewitness accounts of high-ranking police and local district officials who had arrived on the scene before Frederick was taken to the hospital, and despite a ten-day hunger strike by some Aurovilians who felt they had to their utter frustration that something be done, and despite a speech given in the Parliament in New Delhi on the 26^th of April denouncing the atrocities that occurred in Bharat Nivas, nothing was done. Nothing changed. And the SAS bus still carries on its back-door business in Bharat Nivas. “Their” property, and we are the trespassers.

We are such impotent human beings, surrounded by our impotent institutions to protect us with our impotent laws. We are governed by our fears which freeze us, render us unable to act, unable to express the least initiative, the least creative movement which seeks to change a grain in our fossilized order. We are governed by that in us which does not let go, which has no trust in a future it cannot predict and control, which is only concerned to maintain its bankrupt stability of the past. Law and order, we call it. We are a race which does not know how to live, a race governed by our own death.

It was this which Auroville challenged, again and again. It sought to act according to another law, a truer law, a simpler and self-evident law which had no “legal” precedent. But because it wasn’t on the books, baptized in writing – even if the Truth was transparent, staring us all in the face – the Men of Law had to turn and look the other way. It was not authorized.

It is the built-in protection mechanism of the past – to prevent change, to prevent something else, something new which is by definition unauthorized.

Our logic, so sophisticated, even computerized, was so illogical, so absurd, based on a false premise that we never questioned. It was the Great Unmentionable. To ask that Question was the Sacrilege, the cardinal sin which peeked behind the curtains of our formidable Oz to see our pitiful impotence.

Our laws had ceased to live, to progress with life, to correspond with the changes that our civilization was now faced with. Instead of the instruments to protect our freedoms and our progress, they had become our prisons, applied blindly in all cases to preserve the mythic status quo. We were embalmed in our laws.

In India, the True India, beneath the crusted mass of superimposed rules and laws, beneath the plethora of bureaucratic dictum and decrees burying her true nature, beneath the servitudes of caste and priesthood which ritualize life and pauperize the spirit – there lies another understanding of law, an Eternal Law, Sanatana Dharma, a law spontaneous and free, a law unimposed but which is the very self-expression, self-nature of the conscious being, his swadharma.

It was this law, this conscious, self-responsible and self-determined principle of becoming, this living process where we begin to participate consciously in our own evolution, that Auroville sought and that India knew so well in its Vedic heart. It was the law of a New World, unprecedented, where men would have begun to manifestly take responsibility for their own lives, fully, inseparably, no longer codified in the constricting web of mental constructions and formulas that governed a world and its societies who still acknowledged their own division, who still accepted the anachronistic precedent that we are not one, that there is other.

It was a New Code – uncodified and uncodifiable – that Auroville sought, a living code secret in the cells of each of us, entombed under the millennia of our own unconsciousness, our conditioned impotence, our inability to master ourselves because we are not whole, because we are not one.

“O Flame”, declares the Rig Veda, “your force has become conscious; you have discovered the One Light for the many.”

This limitless Law, unbound even by itself, a law whose very substance is freedom, stands as the principle for another stage of evolution, a stage towards which humanity is being impelled, despite itself, a stage where this world dying in its divisibility will be forced to awaken to its oneness in order to survive, a stage towards which Auroville and its Aurovilians, despite themselves, have consciously given themselves, climbing out of the inertias of their own past kindled by the aspirations of that future which calls them. O Flame. your force has become conscious.

The inevitable Dharma of the future which burns silently in the heart of all. One Flame in the heart of all.

Sri Aurobindo, in a chapter entitled “The Gnostic Being” from The Life Divine, wrote:

… the law, the standard has to be imposed on us now because there is in our natural being an opposite force of separateness, a possibility of antagonism, a force of discord, ill-will, strife… But where all is self-determined by truth of consciousness and truth of being, there can be no standard, no struggle to observe it, nor virtue or merit, no sin or demerit of the nature. The power of love, of truth, of right will be there, not as a law mentally constructed but as the very substance and constitution of the nature and, by the integration of the being, necessarily also the very stuff and constituting nature of the action. To grow into this nature of our true being, a nature of spiritual truth and oneness, is a liberation attained by an evolution of the spiritual being… Once that is done, the need of standards of virtue, dharmas, disappears; then is the law and self-order of the liberty of the spirit, there can be no imposed or constructed law of conduct, dharma. All becomes a self-flow of spiritual self-nature, Swadharma of swabhava.

Here we touch the kernel of the dynamic difference between life in the mental ignorance and life in the gnostic being and nature. It is the difference between an integral fully conscious being in full possession of its own truth of existence and working out that truth in its own freedom, free from all constructed laws, while yet its life is a fulfilment of all true laws of becoming in their seeks for its own truth and tries to construct its findings into laws and construct its life according to a pattern so made. All true law is the right motion and process of a reality, an energy of power of being in action fulfilling its own inherent movement self-implied in its own truth of existence.

… A world full of conflict in ourselves, a conflict of the individual with the world around him are normal and inevitable features of the separative consciousness of the Ignorance and our ill-harmonized existence. But this cannot happen in the Gnostic consciousness because there each finds his complete self and all find their own truth and the harmony of their different motions in that which exceeds them and of which they are the expression. In the gnostic life, therefore, there is an entire obedience to the inherent law of the supreme and universal Truth in things. These are to him interconnected sides of the one Truth; it is his own supreme truth of being which works itself out in the whole united truth of himself and things in one supernature…

… there will therefore be no need of the mental rigid way and hard style of order, a limiting standardization, an imposition of a fixed set of principles, the compulsion of life into one system or pattern which is alone valid because it is envisaged by mind as the one right truth of being and conduct. For such a standard cannot include and such a structure cannot take up into itself the whole of life, nor can it adapt itself truly to the pressure of the All-life or to the needs of the evolutionary Force; it has to escape from itself or to escape from its self-constructed limits by its own death, by disintegration or by an intense conflict and revolutionary disturbance…⁸⁵

It was this transition that Auroville experienced as it moved from the world of division in which it dwelled-a world fragmented by fear, governed by the sheer force of habit, a world possessed by a consciousness unwilling to take responsibility for its actions, a consciousness divorced from its workings – to an unprecedented world where harmony was the inherent law of action, where nothing need be imposed because humanity had grown into a consciousness which possessed itself, self-mastered and inseparably one with the whole, a consciousness which at once clearly saw the need and spontaneously responded with a self-effective force – a power no longer governed by the impotence of the ego but by the freedom of a being, concentrated, fully individualized yet for whom there was no longer other, no longer torn by the competing divisive claims and ulterior motives of selfishness and greed that drain us, dilute us, disperse our energies and leave us in our futile state.

It was this towards which Auroville moved, disengaged from the false stabilities of the past, yet not fully possessed of that future which called it, which urged it on through layer after layer of impossibility. Auroville was in between. In between two ages, one whose laws have inscribed its epitaph, the other barely born yet forever there.

It was this no-man’s land in which Auroville struggled, seeking to define itself from within according to an unauthorized formula of oneness. Could the world support such an unprecedented experiment – an experiment which it needed so much to make yet which it feared so much to face – we who long so much to be free, yet who turn in dread from its responsibility? Could India, Bharat Mata, support such an experiment, rediscover her own Vedic secret in this Auroville which challenged and called to the fire of her soul? Or was she so encumbered in her mundane maze, so thrown out upon the surface of herself that she would not see the mutual destiny that India and Auroville, India and the world, shared and meant to one another?

Surely the soul of India would remember, would see and know. Despite the masks and foreign dominations which clouded her clarity, the Rishis still flowed in her veins.

And though the reasonable men – for whom this talk of Unity is only child’s stuff or the naive philosophies of fools and useless dreamers who waste the world’s precious time with their far-too-simple myths – will perhaps point their fingers at this open blasphemy which Auroville represents, this unembellished Anarchy – there is no word for it – which for them is scandalous, an advocacy of chaos, they might say, still Auroville will hold true to that Law which burns in its heart for a new world, despite what they say, despite their fears, because we know that at the heart there is no other.

And in its heart, India knows this too. It is a very ancient knowledge, a timeless knowledge. “Whence shall he have grief how shall he be deluded who sees everywhere the Oneness?” asks the Isha Upanishad.

How apparent is the Ultimate Contradiction in the reasoning of these reasonable men. They; who would condemn us as arrogant as madmen who dared to take their own lives into their hands, and by that simple gesture daring to challenge the infallibility of that Catechism which gives a semblance of order to the just-below-the-surface madness which possesses this ravaged and scatter-brained globe; they, who would claim that we have arrogated ourselves beyond reason, outraged all the respectable repositories of law and white-maned jurisprudence, taken the law into our own hands; to them I would ask, on what ultimate Authority do any of these social and economic laws derive to be held so sacrosanct and unquestionable, if not from men? men like you and I – fallible and answerable to each of us. And who has placed these laws of men – authored by men, authored by men like you and I – beyond accountability, beyond change? Who has ultimately authorised them, for they were simply men like you and I, men who had taken an initiative which corresponded to a certain moment in time and formulated a certain need for a governing principle? And when they took that initiative, based on their experience of that epoch’s need, they had no “legal” precedent, they too were unauthorized.

But in the passage of those laws that were handed down through time, their simple human origins were forgotten and they became untouchable, above question, axioms and indisputable dogma. Through the mesmerism of Reason, covering up its embarrassing unreasonableness and abysmal irrationality, these human doctrines became Authorized and answerable to no one. A Self-perpetuating mechanism that no one could question. A closed system. But one which ultimately had no ground to stand on.

And sooner or later the rug would be pulled out from underneath.

Auroville was simply guilty of authorizing itself, taking that same initiative that men before who did not fear to take one more step in accepting the responsibility of their lives – and in this case of the fragile planet with which they had been entrusted – have always taken in this evolutionary adventure of the earth.

Its unpardonable impiety was that it believed the world was one, and that all laws, all dharmas were ultimately answerable to only that, ultimately authorized by only that. And nothing else. There was no other.

And it was this story, this fundamental story, that Auroville and India had to work out. This ancient story in the roots of the earth.

2. a story for the future

As I begin this last chapter of a book which began sixty days ago on December 19^th, 1978 – the day Indira Gandhi was arrested – and yet which began at no point in particular; as I begin this last chapter with Iran still convulsing from its cataclysm and Viet Nam invaded by China; as I begin this last chapter which could never be conclusive in all that remains to be seen, I pray that it might be the last chapter of a very old, old story and the first of a new one untold and untellable. A story for the Future.

This last Auroville year witnessed the continuous intermingling, intermixture of that old story which seeks to endure and these intermittent flashings of the new one – which juxtaposed Shyam Sunder’s craft in the summer of ‘78 to carve out the Matrimandir as his own authorized empire at the same moment when the Community of Auroville had finally begun to awaken to the meaning and responsibility of its soul, its Centre; this old story, so very old, where only the faces change – the masks – and even they do not, which saw the same figure try to buy Aurovilians with his offers of “prosperity”, try to lure them from their further attempt to consolidate themselves as one Community, playing on the basis of our barely visible securities, our marginal community funds, adding one more variation on a very old theme vying to break the spirit and resolve that holds the Aurovilians together; a year which in the midst of its fall, while the monsoons churned Auroville into a sea of red mud, saw the becoming of an Auroville Co-operative, a first true and acknowledged body within the Auroville system to begin to co-ordinate the innumerable functions and workings within the moving whole, a first body to speak in the name of the Community as a whole, a point to focus the trust among ourselves as one responsible and inseparable organism.

A point of trust besieged in a world of doubt, inundated by the myriad tentacles, subtle and gross, within and without, of a million-masked Ego, under this reasonable face or that barbaric one – the formidable fragments and facets of that one unquestioned, exclusively authorized Ego who reigns by the fear of which he himself is made, this pitiful, pale grip of a nothingness, trembling in his robes, afraid to let go, afraid to let be.

And as we move through the first months of 1979, approaching the completion of Auroville’s eleventh year and the beginning of its twelfth, it is this trust which we need so much – we of Auroville, we of this whole earth – to make the passage, to climb out of our old familiar skins which cling to us and won’t let go. To make the passage from this old, old story, this funeral dirge of a world on the verge of its own extinction, to the shores of a new story, a new world whose infinite diversity springs from a conscious oneness, an indivisible unity, a spontaneous joy of utter simplicity. A new world whose reference point of consciousness will be the Whole, whose practical discipline of action and the basis of all its decisions will be the Whole, a new world in which there is no other, where intimacy merges into identity, a new world in which the relics of conflict and competition and greed will remain in the palenotology of the past – a past whose fractured vision which saw the world and men as other and in that seeing created the very possibility of strife and discord, a consciousness splintered in a hall of mirrors struggling with itself, will have been left behind, sloughed off in the course of our evolutionary journey.

It is this trust which we ask, which we call for, for Auroville to be free to make its experiment for the Earth, with the Earth. It is this trust from the Earth that we ask to build this Trust for the Earth, this Trust which “belongs to nobody in particular”, which “belongs to humanity as a whole”.

It is this which we need, this Earth that labours and suffers so much to be one. It is the only inescapable conclusion to this planetary impasse, this global imbroglio whose chronic, pathologic symptoms are endless. The knot must be united at the root. No ethical or legislative or technological antidote has the power to defuse this terrestrial time-bomb, this global ball of social psychological, environmental and economic knots.

The sole and radical solution lies in a change of consciousness. The law and the lever of a new world.

Whence shall he have grief, how shall he be deluded who sees everywhere the Oneness?

May the flame in the heart burn and burn and rise like a golden sun from within this Earth no longer obscured, no longer hidden from itself.

21 February, 1979

Auroville