Basic Frailties of Any Group-life

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry is, as is well known, an elaborate and complex structure of group-life sufficiently large in its dimension. But on what fundamental principle of solidarity has it been based or should it

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be based? Before discussing this question let us first see how, in general, any group is formed.

Man has in him two distinct master impulses, the individualistic and the communal, a personal life and a social life, a personal motive of conduct and a group motive of conduct. The possibility of their opposition and the attempt to find their equation lie at the very roots of human civilisation and persist throughout man's history of cultural development, even up to the stage when he has grown into a highly individualised mental being or even entered the path of spiritual progress.

And how are collectivities formed? Men seek to be grouped, linked, united around a common ideal, a common action, a common realisation, but in a completely artificial way. The individual, to satisfy his communal urge, partially identifies his life with the life of a certain number of other individuals and this association is determined either by birth or by circumstance or even by deliberate choice. While describing the nature of collectivities formed by mental man solely basing himself on the resources of his unregenerate ego-bound mental-vital consciousness, Sri Aurobindo writes:

"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 ego with the strand of individualities and connections running through the whole and helping to keep it together. Or, where there is a difference in these things, opposition, conflict, a practical accommodation or an organised compromise is enforced by the necessity of living together." (The Life Divine, p. 1031)

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And what is created in this way is a natural or artificially managed constructed order. But all such man-made attempts at the building up of a perfect collective life are bound to fail in practice and cannot but be exposed to an inevitable process of decay and disruption. For, the constituent individuals of any human order remain rooted in their egoistic nature and it is an axiom of truth that man can construct nothing that goes beyond his nature. As Sri Aurobindo has trenchantly put it:

"Imperfect, we cannot construct perfection, however wonderful may seem to us the machinery our mental ingenuity invents, however externally effective. Ignorant, we cannot construct a system of entirely true and fruitful self-knowledge or world-knowledge: our science itself is a construction, a mass of formulas and devices; masterful in knowledge of processes and in the creation of apt machinery, but ignorant of the foundations of our being and of world-being, it cannot perfect our nature and therefore cannot perfect our life." (The Life Divine, p. 1034, italics added)

Without the perfection of our nature, no perfection of life is possible, and this is the root of the matter. All group-life including our Ashram life cannot be perfect so long as the constituent individuals remain fixed in what they are now. And what is the actuality of the state of our consciousness and nature, whatever may be our professions and pretensions? In Sri Aurobindo's words:

"Our nature, our consciousness is that of beings ignorant of each other, separated from each other, rooted in a divided ego, who must strive to establish some kind of relation between their embodied ignorances; ...but in the mass the relations formed are constantly marred by imperfeet

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sympathy, imperfect understanding, gross misunderstandings, strife, discord, unhappiness. ... All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction..." (The Life Divine, pp. 1034,1035,1054)

And is this not what we meet with at times in our Ashram? And it cannot but be so. For most of us, the inmates of the Ashram, are in our surface consciousness, bound to separation of consciousness from others and wear the fetters of the ego. Our very pose of selflessness hides behind it more often than not a subtle form of selfishness. To build up an ideal collective life harmonious and spiritually perfect is a task far transcending the capability of such ego-governed individuals. What Sri Aurobindo has described in a significant passage of The Life Divine is almost an exact picture of what has been happening in our Ashram community today or might be happening in the near future with the invasion of new entrants, unless we take precautions to arrest the downward trend. Sri Aurobindo writes:

"There is in the mass of constituting individuals an imperfect understanding and knowledge of the ideas, life-aims, life-motives which they have accepted, an imperfect power in their execution, an imperfect will to maintain them always unimpaired, to carry them out fully or to bring the life to a greater perfection." (The Life Divine, p. 1044)

How exactly does it correspond to the actual psychological state of many of those who have lately joined the Ashram! Sri Aurobindo continues his description:

"There is an element of struggle and discord, a mass of

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repressed or unfulfilled desires and frustrated wills, a simmering suppressed unsatisfaction or an awakened or eruptive discontent or unequally satisfied interests." (Ibid.)

Again, how true is the diagnosis! We do not fail to see ourselves clearly reflected in the mirror of these words. Sri Aurobindo continues:

"There are new ideas, life-motives that break in and cannot be correlated without upheaval and disturbance; there are life-forces at work in human beings and their environment that are at variance with the harmony that has been constructed, and there is not the full power to overcome the discords and dislocations created by a clashing diversity of mind and life and by the attack of disrupting forces in universal Nature." (Ibid.)

This has been the root-cause behind the ultimate decay and degeneration of most, nay all, of the collectivities men have erected in the past. And the same fate may overtake our Ashram if we do not wake up in time. And surely that cannot be the destiny the Mother and Sri Aurobindo envisaged for their Ashram when they founded it in 1926. They wanted to build the Sri Aurobindo Ashram on an altogether new foundation so that it might fulfil its mission of unending progression.

But what is the nature of that new foundation? In which way should our Ashram be distinct and distinguished from all other group-formations past or present?