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uprooted from cultural and social beds only to be plunged in fiercer tides of
conditioning.
Humanity is torn and split and pulled apart and forcefully exposed to more than any
of its members can actually assimilate.
The mass of subconscious storage of conditioning is burst open to the conflict of
vast forces that seek to install themselves.
And drugs have now themselves become, particularly since World War II, a tool of
perverse conditioning, destabilising entire societies to bring them more surely under
the sway of some of these self-serving forces and interests.
In the process the very usage of drugs has grown into a conditioned response to
the sheer weight of the question each and every individual is increasingly faced
with.
2- But why is it also happening in Auroville?
I do not presume to explain that: there are too many angles to it.
But a good part of the reason is obvious to me: the very basis of experience,
adventure and progress set for Auroville by the Mother, is so high and integral that,
as she said, one needs to be a hero to sustain its demands. Not heroism in the
sense of a magnified ego, but in the more conscious sense aware of and one with
the truth of one’s being at every moment and in every circumstance.
Each of us has initially felt that call and our joining Auroville has been our response
to it.
But today there seems to be, under the guise of tolerance and wide-mindedness, a
comfortable trend of consideration that takes shelter in some quotes of the
Mother’s, such as ‘to be in Auroville, it is enough to have goodwill towards human
unity…’
But there is a catch!
There is simply no way, no way at all, to truly serve human unity without actually
doing the Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s yoga!
Auroville has been conceived in such a way, and on such a pure and divine
foundation, that we are bound to meet all the contradictions at their very roots.
The only means given to us are: the psychic being within oneself, and the Mother’s
Force above.
And there comes the daily grind, with its hundreds of opportunities for a truer
response, a fire, a call and a need to serve, and to gradually change the very fabric
of life.
That aspiration and that flame, the presence of that living need in us of the Help
from above, is the only security Auroville has; for Auroville is only protected from
collapse into ordinariness in proportion to the activity of that flame.
In the absence of it we fall back on the bare facts of a situation which is still unique
and challenging – the commingling on a small patch of un owned land, of a rather
variegated sampling of human diversity; but we are also thrown back to the
habitual mechanisms of conditioning: a jumble or competing conditionings!
We all wear cumbersome shells, battling within some monstrous assemblage of
master-shells, and we are only that when we disconnect ourselves from the
sweeping energy of the new birth.
Our many failures to sustain the inner exigency of Auroville are well spread in our
days: cynicism and corrosive boredom and callousness.
There is a vacuum of experience: we have only made a virtual jump, we have not
actually leapt.