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perception – a combination of feeling and sense and vision and need – till one
reaches a kind of confirmation of awareness, and leaves it at that. For, what is one
to ‘do’ with it? Write about it in the Auroville News? Go out of one’s way to talk
about it, and try to convince?
One tends to conclude that surely there must be others who have reached that
same understanding – for it must be sufficiently objective if it is sufficiently true! –
and that this awareness, circulating, will do its work. And I think to myself then, ‘let
me not add to the ambient noise!’… And so, I desisted again!
But I do still read the Auroville News, and I do hear this or that comment,
fragmented report or rumour. And I am struck by the absence of perspective!
Every issue is a valid issue: it bears a living question and a challenge; it points to
an evolutionary necessity.
Yet we generally tend to blur it, to confuse and confound it so thoroughly that it
looses almost entirely its power of progress.
This time around, I would like to try and put into words the significance of this
particular issue, as I understand it.
There are three related questions here: one, why does one ever turn to alcohol or
drugs; second, why here in Auroville; and third, why is it necessary, in the
adventure of Auroville, not to remain or become subject to any addiction to drugs.
1- No matter where one lives, or in which circumstances, there are times when one
is threatened by an excess of conditioning. There seems to be no living situation
anywhere in which, sooner or later, the amount of conditioning does not exceed the
capacity one has to extract from the experience of life enough meaning and
motivation.
Conditioning actually is most of manifest life. Whether biological, genetic,
hereditary, karmic, social, racial, cultural, contextual, or merely circumstantial,
conditioning surrounds, fills, animates and supports most of what we are at every
moment.
Any spiritual endeavour always stressed the crucial importance of will, personal will,
as the one agent that could break through the mass of this multi-headed and multi-
limbed beast, at least until some decisive and irreversible merging was
accomplished with the higher consciousness.
But even then the danger remained that, since human will is a manifestation of the
separate ego, this very separateness would seek to usurp and appropriate the
realisation to its own ends.
One way out was, for many and for long, to declare the whole thing as a snare and
an illusion, and thereafter to let the disappearance of any sense of existence
become the goal.
Now, alcohol and drugs are definitely closer at hand; and they do provide a break,
quite immediate and effective, from conditioning.
Alcohol as a means to relieve oneself from the chafing bounds of conditioning, has
been honoured by a number of social and cultural traditions, an acknowledged
prescription given by the collective ego to its members, insofar as certain limiting
rules, timings and manners would be observed.
Some drugs too have been universally prescribed, generally with a view to let or
help individuals discover more levels of experience, yet again within certain
boundaries, defined by rituals and rhythms.
Nowadays industrialisation, urbanisation, commercialisation, information and
consumerism have spread everywhere and more and more individuals have been