journal d'une transition

1094

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