The Ideal Group-life: Its Character

All the past attempts of man to build an ideal collective life have invariably foundered on the rocks of ego-consciousness

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of the constitutive individuals. Egos in different persons in a group are bound to differ in their separate ideas, urges, perceptions, interests and purposes. And sooner or later these differences will emerge into the open, be accentuated and then come into conflict bringing in its trail the attendant discords. There are only two ways of overcoming this disharmony. Either the egoistic individuals, continuing to retain their egos, seek to enlarge and universalise themselves; or the individuals make an effort to transcend their egos and attain a state of consciousness where the conscious experience of the essential unity of all becomes the basis of group-life.

Now, the first course cannot but lead to disastrous consequences. For, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "any external attempt at universality can only result either in an aggrandisement of the ego or an effacement of the personality by its extinction in the mass or subjugation to the mass." (The Life Divine, p. 1027)

What is then the solution? The solution is that the individuals constituting any collectivity should move away from their surface existence which is at present the field of unbridled play of ego and try to dwell more and more in their inner consciousness. In Sri Aurobindo's words:

"It is only by an inner growth, movement, action that the individual can freely and effectively universalise and trans-cendentalise his being. There must be for the divine living a transference of the centre and immediate source of dynamic effectuation of the being from out inward; for there the soul is seated, but it is veiled or half-veiled and our immediate being and source of action is for the present on the surface." (Ibid.)

A veritable community of spiritual seekers, as our

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Ashram yearns to grow into, must reverse the ordinary principle of group-building and base its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being. An inner sense of oneness should be the binding element in the group-existence. To quote Sri Aurobindo again:

"The spiritual individual acts out of [a] sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the demand of self 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 of one-being, of one self in all beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action of the divine life." (The Life Divine, p. 1030)

And it is such a divine life that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother want to establish upon earth, and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram should consciously and deliberately aspire to be the nucleus of such a noble type of collective life. In such a group-life what would bind and hold together different individuals forming the group would be, not the physical fact of life creating a sufficiently workable united social consciousness, but "a common consciousness consolidating a 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 feel themselves to be embodiments 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 the spiritual Truth would find through them its own natural forms of becoming." (The Life Divine, pp. 1031-32)

Thus, unity will be the basis of such a spiritual consciousness,

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mutuality the natural result of its direct awareness of oneness in diversity, and harmony the inevitable manifestation of the working of its force: "Unity, mutuality and harmony must therefore be the inescapable law of a common or collective gnostic life." (Ibid., p. 1033)

The Mother too has spoken about the essential character of a genuine community ("une communauté vraie"). She says:

"... a true community can exist only on the basis of the inner realisation of each of its members, each one realising his real, concrete unity and identity with all the other members of the community, that is, each one should feel not like just one member united in some way with all the others, but all as one, within himself. For each one the others must be himself as much as his own body, and not mentally and artificially, but by a fact of consciousness, by an inner realisation." (Questions and Answers 1957-58 , pp. 140-41)

In such a community, perfect co-existence of freedom and harmony, unity and universality and not, as at present, separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the group. Love would be there absolute, equality consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference, and order would be maintained not by the observation of artificial standards and rules and regulations but by the free automatic perception, by each, of the right relations and their inevitable application in the act.

Now, in the light of what has gone before as regards the traits of an ideal group-life envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, let us cast a look at the actual state of our Ashram life and dispassionately judge how far or near are we to this ideal.

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