The

greatest future triumph of the thinker will come when he can persuade the

individual integer and the collective whole to rest their life-relation and

its union and stability upon a free and harmonious consent

and self-adaptation, and shape and govern the external

by the internal truth rather than to constrain the inner

spirit by the tyranny of the external form and

structure.

~ Aurobindo

Ghose, The

Synthesis of Yoga







Aurobindo Ghose (also known as Sri

Aurobindo) was a Bengali mystic and political activist who wrote

about political and social theory, philosophy, religion, and

spiritual poetry. Some of his major works are The Synthesis of Yoga,

The Life Divine, Secrets of the Vedas, Essays on the Gita, The Human

Cycle, and The Ideal of Human Unity. The latter of these works, in

which Aurobindo deals with social concerns and presents a

philosophical ideal of what a future idealized society should be,

will be the focus of this article. I will analyze Aurobindo's

projections of what would constitute an ideal society, and compare

this with the real-life scenario of Aurobindo's ashram, and the

existing commune of Auroville in Puducherry, south India. My goal is to

lay out a theoretical picture of what a future society might look

like if Aurobindo's views, methods, and practices, were applied on a

wide scale, and formed the basis of a spiritual ethics of social

action. Since this is unlikely to ever actually occur, this paper

will be speculative, in the vein of a thought experiment to use

a popular term. The major technique, or ability, which would form the

basis of this utopian society based on Aurobindo's thought is the

power of telepathythe sharing of thoughts at distance between

people without external verbal communication.

At the beginning

of The Ideal of Human Unity Aurobindo writes while it is possible

to construct a precarious and quite mechanical unity by political and

administrative means, the unity of the human race, even if achieved,

can only be secured and can only be made real if the religion of

humanity, which is at present the highest active ideal of mankind,

spiritualises itself and becomes the inner law of human life

(Heehs, 1998, 148). This passage strikes a chord with me, and I feel

that Aurobindo's conclusion is correctthe unification of the human

race in a peaceful and constructive manner will necessarily utilize a

means of government, forms of social communication, and of religion

and personal ethics, which seeks to find and establish a common

ground of humanity and equality. Within our current mode of society

and governance we have all kinds of codified hierarchies and

insider/outsider distinctions. Our current political system is based

on the ideological division of supposed binary opposites; there is

left wing/right wing, Democrat, Republican, and something else on the

periphery of that called Independent. There is a division

between the wealthy who more easily wield the tools of political

power, and the disenfranchised poor who cannot afford lobbyists and

do not generally have their views and needs well represented within

our current political system. In this way, political power is often

consolidated into the hands of the few, the affluent, and those

families who have traditionally held political positions for the past

centuries. This divisive and complicated system seems to do the

opposite of what Aurobindo sees as the ideal, which is to create a

psychic and spiritual unity of humans that subsequently informs and

substantiates government.

In the preceding passage Aurobindo

presents us with the intriguing position that the religion of

humanity must spiritualise itself and become the inner law of

human life. What does this mean? What is the distinction Aurobindo

is making here between religion and spirituality? I read this to mean

that the religion of humanity i.e. the outward forms of

religious expression we see as churches, mosques, synagogues,

temples, etc. needs to turn inward and become personalized,

spiritualised, within the experience of the individual

themselves. Aurobindo's term inner law means a divinely

inspired intuitive understanding of ethics. This would mean no more

external religious interpretations of truth, and no more political

interpretations of truth would be required. No authorities

beyond ones own self would be relied upon for definitions or

boundaries of reality. In Aurobindo's words from The Synthesis of

Yoga, internal truth would shape and govern the external,

rather than constrain the inner spirit by the tyranny of the

external form and structure. Is this possible? What would the

implications be? How could this kind of self-knowing governance come

about?

In Aurobindo's writings he saw the future state of

governance as probably having one or two possible organizations,

there is likely to be either a centralised World-State or a looser

world-union which may be either a close federation or a simple

confederacy of the peoples for the common ends of mankind. The last

form is the most desirable, because it gives sufficient scope for the

principle of variation which is necessary for the free play of life

and the healthy progress of the race (Heehs, 1998, 151). Aurobindo

believes that a World-State or one-world government would inevitably

become stagnant, monolithic, and unresponsive to the needs of the

people; the triumph of the World-State government would be the

triumph of the idea of mechanical unity or rather of uniformity

(Heehs, 1998, 152). In contrast, Aurobindo thinks that a

centralised socialistic State may be a necessity of the future, once

it is founded, but a reaction from it will be equally an eventual

necessity of the future (Heehs, 1998, 152). However, both of these

efforts will be ultimately futileor rather, impermanentattempts

to solve the problem of governance and social responsibility.

Aurobindo saw this happening in great cycles of social change which

were inevitable because of the systemic organization structures of

these forms of government. He writes, the greater its pressure [to

control peoples' lives], the more certainly will it be met by the

spread of the spiritual, the intellectual, the vital and practical

principle of Anarchism in revolt against that mechanical pressure.

So, too, a centralised mechanical World-State must rouse in the end a

similar force against it and might well terminate in a crumbling up

and disintegration, even in the necessity for a repetition of the

cycle of humanity ending in a better attempt to solve the problem

(Heehs, 1998, 152).

Why are these forms of government destined

to fail, or become inadequate, according to Aurobindo? That is

because they are based on formations of external truth, social

symbols, and arbitrary divisive distinctions rather than an organic

psychic unity of humanity which in itself gives rise to government.

Aurobindo saw the latter as an undreamt political possibility which

could possibly form the basis of a future government and social

system. In The Ideal of Human Unity Aurobindo writes,



The saving power needed is a new

psychological factor which will at once make a united life necessary

to humanity and force it to respect the principle of freedom. The

religion of humanity seems to be the one growing force which tends in

that direction; for it makes for the sense of human oneness, it has

the idea of the race, and yet at the same time it respects the human

individual and the natural human grouping. But its present

intellectual form seems hardly sufficient. The idea, powerful in

itself and in its effects, is yet not powerful enough to mould the

whole life of the race in its image. For it has to concede too much

to the egoistic side of human nature, once all and still nine-tenths

of our being, with which its larger idea is in conflict (Heehs,

1998, 152).



This is a remarkably insightful passage

about the status of modern religion. Aurobindo views the religion

of humanity (which I take to mean the religions of humanity) as a

positive force for human unity, but one that is ultimately still

mired in the dualistic world of egoistic concerns and externally

based distinctions. He comments that the egoistic side of human

nature is in conflict with the larger idea of human unity which

religion seeks to promote and facilitate. We can see how political

hierarchies and religious hierarchies both create insider/outsider

distinctions which necessitate different levels of political

empowerment.

If we would like to critically define the current

status of our Democracy in realistic terms, we would probably be

forced to conclude that American government is not, in fact, a

Democracy, but rather a Republic, or a representative Democracy,

which, unfortunately has become increasingly less and less

representative and increasingly oppressive of personal freedoms

rather than supportive of them. Recent legalization of previously

illegal and invasive wiretapping spy procedures upon unsuspecting

citizens is only one of many examples of the development of an

authoritarian surveillance and police state which has seems to have

become the trend in American government (1). To be even more specific

about definition in light of the facts, we might conclude that

American government is actually a corporate oligarchy, in which an

elite group of financially powerful corporate interests dictate

public policy and political decision from behind the scenes. The

industry of political lobbying by wealthy corporations is hardly a

secret, but the real implications of this for the power structure of

American politics is not well understood. With the recent removal of

corporate restrictions on campaign funding, the veil of influence

that corporations exert over American politics is now even more

transparent (2).

Acknowledging that this is in fact the case,

we might then accurately define American political system as a

Fascist oligarchy. Here I am adopting the incendiary term Fascist

with well-thought intent. I mean this designation of Fascist in

the sense that the Fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini meant

when he said, Fascism is the merger of corporate and state power

as was described in the Fascist manifesto published in Il Popolo

d'Italia on June 6, 1919 (3). With the recent corporate bailout

under the heading of the Troubled Assets Relief program (TARP) in

which billions of taxpayer dollars went directly into the pockets of

formerly wealthy banks, and many blatant and documented mis-uses of

this money, the corruption of the state in terms of the influence

military-industrial complex and Wall Street upon American politics,

the merger of corporate and state power to use Mussolini's

phrase, has never been more evident (4). The concerns of Aurobindo

are quite relevant to our current political landscape.

Our

political salvation, according to Aurobindo, lies in the

establishment of psychic unity which has its grounds in religious

truth, but would also be different from current religious

understanding. Towards the end of The Ideal of Human Unity

Aurobindo describes what this might look like.

A spiritual religion of humanity

is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what it ordinarily

called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and

intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. Mankind has tried

unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because

there can be no universal religious system, one in mental creed and

vital form. The inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other

the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its

self-expression and means of development. A religion of humanity

means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine

Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest

present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are

the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It

implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about

a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us

oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all

our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper

brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a

common life (Heehs, 1998, 154).

Aurobindo stresses the point that this

unity would not be based in a system, or a creed, or belief, or

ritual. These are the things which traditionally constitute religion.

As Aurobindo points out, by and large the project of religion has

failed, if its attempt has been to help humanity realize its divine

unity. Aurobindo's solution is for us to realize that there is a

divine Reality, in which we are all one. This understanding would

necessarily transcend the boundaries of nationality, race, religion,

economics, because its source is deeper than any of these more

superficial traits of humanity. Getting to the spiritual source of

humanity is where we would find the basic commonality and real

oneness which, if properly understood and communed with, could

possibly foster a prevalent psychic unity among all humans. For this

to truly happen, the realization would have to be based in a mystical-type

consciousness of non-duality. This psychic unity would be grounded in a level of

communication deeper and more primal than verbal language. To

accomplish this humanity would have to evolve a capacity for

consistent telepathic communication.

While this may seem like

a bizarre or radical conclusion, there is actually a strong basis for

this concept within Aurobindo's life and practice. Telepathy is

thought to be one of the siddhis, or magical powers, which may be

gained from following a spiritual path such as Tantra. Some of the

siddhis mentioned in Hindu literature may be relevant to the modern

scientific term telepathy. In The Lives of Sri Aurobindo,

historian Peter Heehs writes,

Following an ancient tradition,

Aurobindo spoke of eight siddhis: two of knowledge, prakamya and

vyapti; three of power, aishwarya, ishita, and vashita; and three of

the body, mahima, laghima, and anima. The siddhis of knowledge

constitute what is known in the West as telepathy. The siddhis of

power are applications of will by which one mind can influence

another. The siddhis of the body overlap with the next chatusthaya,

the quaternary of the body (Heehs, 2008, 240).

Traditionally it is thought that with

enough concentration and practice, one could develop and perfect the

use of these types of powers. Certainly Aurobindo took these ideas

seriously in his own practice. Aurobindo even documented the progress

of his meditative and vigilant spiritual practice in the Record of

Yoga, a journal which he kept. Heehs writes of Aurobindo's partial

mastery of these powers, By 1911 he was able to report that he

could 'put himself into men and change them,' that he 'had been given

the power to read men's characters and hearts, even their thoughts'

(here he added: 'but this power is not yet absolutely complete'),

that he could guide action 'by the mere exercise of will,' and that

he was 'in communication with the other world' (adding that this was

'yet of a troubled character') (Heehs, 2008, 242). There are

several stories of Aurobindo's attempts to directly influence reality

through the force of his psychic will, and even encouraging other

people to do this as well (5). Yet Aurobindo's attempts were not

entirely successful; for the most part he was only partially

successful in these types of experiments. However, in the context of

understanding these siddhi powers and how Aurobindo conceived them,

we may better understand Aurobindo's ideal of human unity and

how he might have pictured the future development of humanity in the

areas of politics, religion, society, and the spiritual

self.



Aurobindo believed, as was the tradition surrounding

siddhis, that any person regardless of class, race, nationality, or

status, could, with proper discipline and attention, develop these

kinds of siddhi powers as a natural result of spiritual practice. In

this understanding we could consider that perhaps these powers are

currently latent within the whole of humanity, accessible, but

usually only explored by certain gifted and focused people such as

Aurobindo. This means that at the present time only a small few of

humans are able to use these sorts of powers. However, with proper

training and practice, anyone could learn to master these forms of

extra-sensory perception and mental extension.

This makes

sense in terms of Aurobindo's cosmology: we could consider that these

siddhi powers are an aspect of the latent, yet omni-present

foundation of the supermind or supermental intellect

which Aurobindo describes as the trajectory of human consciousness

towards a teleological end of ultimate psychic unification (6).

Perhaps the ability of telepathy would be a consequential result of

the descent of the Overmind that Aurobindo described. If

Aurobindo's premise is true, and our individual minds are immersed in

some kind of larger, more integrated, more informed, supermind

of which we are individualized manifestations, and this supermind

is actively creating and influencing us towards an end of psychic

unity, we might conclude that eventually the siddhi powers could

become a natural and everyday part of human life. The most important

of these, within the context of Aurobindo's argument for psychic

unity and self-governance, are the siddhis associated with telepathy

and the sharing or extension of mental functions between minds:

prakamya and vyapti.

What is telepathy? In

Telepathy and Clairvoyance: Views of Some Little Investigated

Capabilities of Man Dutch professor W.H.C. Tenhaeff, former Director

of the Parapsychological Institute of the State University of Utrecht

writes that telepathy is the receipt in one's mind of thoughts

that emanate from the consciousness of another person (Tenhaeff,

1957, 23). According to Roger Luckhust's book, The Invention of

Telepathy, (Oxford University Press, 2002) the term telepathy

was coined in December 1882 in the first volume of the house journal

of psychical research: 'we venture to introduce the words

Telaesthesia and Telepathy to cover all cases of impression received

at a distance.' My first chapter tracked the preconditions for the

emergence of this object within the perturbations of scientized

modernity in the 1870's, working with the insight that 'the place of

knowledge lays down the conditions for the appearance of the objects

of science, for their validation as real, and for the terms on which

they are knowable'. (Luckhurst, 2002, 60).

To construct a more

modern definition for telepathy as it has come to be understood

we might say something like mental impression, cognition, and

information exchange at a distance, sometimes between two or more

individual minds. However, as Aurobindo noted, there had already

been a philosophical system for describing this type of psychic

action at a distance for centuries before the term was coined by

scientists in 1882: the siddhis had long since been noticed, and well

documented within the religious and mystical literature of Hinduism.

Westerners scientists like Frederic Myers who were interested in

telepathy and similar evidences of extra-sensory perception and

psychic ability, were studying phenomena which had already been

fairly well understood, and even mastered by advanced practitioners

of Tantra, for thousands of years. Aurobindo himself can be counted

as an example of this tradition, although technically he was not a

Tantric.

One comparison that could be made of Aurobindo's

model would be with the Western philosophical idea of the noosphere,

as developed by authors such as Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky

and the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (7). The

noosphere is conceived of as a layer of thought-energy which envelops

the planet in a similar manner as our atmosphere does, but in an

immaterial sense. Scientists have identified many energetic layers

which surround and envelop the earth (even though we may not be able

to directly perceive them), including the bio-magnetic layer produced

by the earth's core, layers of radio waves, sound, light, gravity,

the Van Allen belt of charged plasma, and many other forms of

radiation (8). Some people have taken seriously the idea that the

mental substance of human thought might form a layer of energy

which could theoretically be tapped into and accessed. The Akashic

record is one such concept found in the literature of the occult

(9). Research from the Global Consciousness Project carried on by the

Institute of Noetic Sciences has tried to suggest a method for study

of the collective information patterns within the whole of human

consciousness. A statement on their website reads:





The Global

Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an

international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists,

engineers, artists and others. We collect data continuously from a

global network of physical random number generators located in 65

host sites around the world. The archive contains more than 10 years

of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials

every second. Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may

reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We

predict structure in what should be random data, associated with

major global events. When millions of us share intentions and

emotions the GCP/EGG network data show meaningful departures from

expectation. This is a powerful finding based in solid science.





Their idea is that

important global events which imprint the collective psyche could be

correlated with statistical shifts in random number generators.

Eventually they hope to be able to read this data and even develop it

as a predictive tool.

One could argue that the Internet,

particularly in the form of recent social networking websites, is

already functioning as a crude pseudo-telepathic superstructure of

human thought and information exchange. José Argüelles

discusses this possibility in his book Time and the Technosphere.

Argüelles argues that the technosphere, meaning the Internet and

the externalized technological communications network, may be a

pre-cursor to the development of an organically and biologically

integrated telepathic network which would link all of the minds on

the planet together into a single planetary consciousness or perhaps

a diverse, multi-faceted group consciousness (10). Observing how the

technological evolution of computing has made incredible, almost

unthinkable, leaps and bounds in the past fifty years, we could

imagine that in the next two hundred years there will be some amazing

developments in information technology. The trend in information

technology seems to be the development of an increasing personal

intimacy and information exchange between geographically distanced

groups of people, using the machines as the interface, and an

increasing trend to embed our personalities and habits within the

external technological infrastructure of the Internet through social

networks, etc. The end result, which may already be partially

visible, seems to be the establishment of a collective personality

based on the information, perceptions, and input of individualsall

mediated by technologies which are becoming increasingly integrated

to be compatible with the biological system of the human body.

In

modern science there is still an ongoing and heated debate amongst

scientists as to the validity of such psychic powers, or psi, as the

psychic energy is sometimes called. The institutions of science have

unfortunately been extremely squeamish about approaching these kinds

of phenomena. The reason is probably because the necessary

conclusions of the truth of psychic phenomena, particularly things

like telepathy and clairvoyance, would directly undermine the

established materialist view which is the fundamental and

indispensable foothold and basis of modern science. For scientists to

include psychic phenomena into the conventional view of what human

is, they would need to rewrite much of the known science relating to

human mental functioning to include the reality that the human spirit

is somehow able to transcend the boundaries of the material world in

a way which is still, on the whole, not comprehensible by current

science.

However there are examples of intrepid scientists who

have dared to breach this experimental ground. Some scientists such

as Dr. Dean Radin and Dr. Charles Tart, have dedicated their careers

to ask some of these questions, and studying the effects of psi in a

laboratory setting (11). There has also been considerable interest in

psychic abilities within the studies of the governmental intelligence

agencies such as the CIA, which has conducted numerous projects to

study psychic ability, and use trained psychics to carry out various

tasks related to intelligence gathering (12). The paranormal as

it is called is an area of science which seems to frighten and

disconcert many mainstream scientists, but in the future it could

become a promising area of scientific study. As Sir Cyril Burt writes

in the preface to The Mind Readers: Some Recent Experiments in

Telepathy,





During the last few decades, current beliefs in

almost every branch of science have undergone a revolutionary change.

The little we think we understand turns out to be but a fraction as

compared with what still defies our comprehension. No longer

therefore need we feel unduly perturbed by new facts or new phenomena

undreamt of in Horatio's philosophy or in Tait and Thomson's physics.

The plain duty of the scientist is neither to reject nor to neglect

these seeming oddities. Only by concentrating on the rare and elusive

clues that indicate cracks and inadequacies in the orthodox doctrines

of today can genuine progress be achieved (Soal, 1960, 14).





I

suspect that once this field of study is finally reviewed by

mainstream science in a reasonable and sensible way, much new data

about the experience of psychic phenomena and the immaterial

components of human consciousness might be learned. Until then,

phenomena like telepathy are relegated to fringe science and the

pages of religious and mystical literature such as the tradition of

Sri Aurobindo. Yet if we consider this assertion that some

individuals can develop means of communication that is more

internalized, more deeply originated and deeply felt, than verbal

communicationas Frederick Myers, Dean Radin, Charles Tart,

Teilhard de Chardin, and Aurobindo Ghose have suggestedwhat would

be the conclusions of this? If this ability could be trained and

developed into a global communications network, what implications

might there be for future forms of political and social

organization?

I can imagine a world in which children are taught from

birth and encouraged to develop their psychic and

spiritual powers, in terms of dreaming, telepathy, etc. If these

educational programs were successful perhaps a basic commonality of

thought and mental substance could be achieved, maybe similar to

Aurobindo's concept of the supermind directly manifest and

utilized as the primary means of communication. Writing and texts

would become secondary to the direct experience of telepathic

transmission. Within this mental superstructure, true Democracy, i.e.

self-governance, could be more easily achieved. The general

organization might function like this: autonomous communes,

telepathically linked, which define for themselves their own rules

and behaviors, without any nation states, or religions, to dictate

the norms of behavior and social communication. This would be similar

to Aurobindo's concept of a future loose world-union or

confederacy of states. This might be along the lines of

Marshall McLuhan's concept of the global village which he saw

as a possible future of social organization (13). Howard Bloom's book

The Global Brain might also describe what this kind of social

organization could resemble (14). This form of organization might

also resemble Gandhi's idea for India's ideal form of government,

resembling the tribal village councils of olden times (15).

I

can imagine a kind of telepathic council of all citizens of a global

village or autonomous communes, where they would gather to make

decisions, based not only on materialistic rationalization and logic, but

also emotional empathy and deep, experiential understanding of others

and their needs. This would be an implicitly ethical system, based on

intuitive ethics which would be debated and formulated by each

global village or autonomous commune separately. If someone

broke the ethical rules there would not be a system of punitive and

psychologically damaging prison or physical punishment, but rather an

expulsion and social ostracization similar to the village councils

described by Gandhi. In effect, the social punishment would be that

if you can't get along with your peers, you have to find another

place to live and another group of people who you can get along with.

This form of social punishment might prove to be more effective than

the currently disappointing failure of punishment rehabilitation

which is the methodology employed by the current U.S. prison system.

Basing a society on cooperation and inclusiveness rather than

competition and social hierarchies could be helpful in solving some

of our modern problems.

For real-life examples of how this

form of society could actually play out, we can look at existing

communes such as Auroville, and how they are organized and function.

To get a sense of the ideals of the township of Auroville we can examine their

charter, presented by Auroville founder Mirra Alfassa, also known as The Mother,

with whom Aurobindo lived in his ashram. This charter, given at the

inauguration of Auroville in 1968, consists of four main points:

1. Auroville belongs to nobody

in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live

in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine

Consciousness. 2.

Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant

progress, and a youth that never ages. 3.

Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future.

Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within,

Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations. 4.

Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a

living embodiment of an actual Human Unity



(Auroville.org).



Auroville, also called the City of

Dawn is designed in a manner that is fitting of Aurobindo's

personality: its rules are permissive, open, tolerant, but the

dedication to spiritual work and community building is strong,

following the example of Karma yoga. There is a strict application

process and several levels of residence or membership within the

community, entailing different privileges and responsibilities.

Leadership roles are shared amongst different people at different

times. The population is remarkably diverse, with more than 2,000

permanent residents coming from over 40 countries (16).

A

section of the Auroville website titled Toward a Human Unity

applies Aurobindo's philosophical views to the modern circumstances

of Auroville. They describe a new truth-consciousness which

will evolve human society toward a spiritual age of

humanity.





This 'spiritual age of humanity' then will

represent a transformation in the nature of man as momentous as the

appearance of the thinking mind on earth. In the same way as for

millennia the mind was the centre of our life, so, in the new age

opening for humanity, or 'supra-mental' age, the soul will become the

centre of all life and activities. A new stage in the evolution of

man has already begun; a new consciousness, higher than the mind, a

truth-consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo said, in which the dualities,

hesitations and limitations of the mind and the greed and blindness

of the ego will no longer exist, has already started to appear, and

all the upheavals and convulsions that are at present so painfully

tearing our earth are the outward signs of this evolutionary crisis.

This new consciousness is already at work in the atmosphere of the

earth: we can connect with it, we can call it in ourselves, we can

use it to transform our entire nature and consequently the world in

which we live. It is in this wide and far-reaching sense that

Auroville is dedicated to human unity. All are

invited.

While

Auroville and Aurobindo's vision are worthwhile ideals, the commune may have

not always lived up to the concept of a living embodiment of an

actual Human Unity. Auroville is a functional and vibrant commune,

but it is still far from the vision of a telepathic

utopia.





Aurobindo himself realized that this process of

descent of the supramental force was actually a gradual and

slow process which was not likely to manifest in terms of an

overnight revolution. Rather, over a period of time, the higher

consciousness would form and crystallize itself within matter, and

transform it. This became increasingly clear as Aurobindo became

older. Peter Heehs writes in his biography,

Sri Aurobindo's

task, as he visualized it, was to prepare a 'step forward which the

evolution of the earth-consciousness has still to make.' For a while

he thought that he could accomplish the task in a relatively short

time. Asked towards the end of 1932 whether the supermind would

descend 'within a decade,' he replied, 'I don't know about the

datedates are things that one ought not to fix too rigidly; but I

certainly hope we won't have to wait for a decade! Let us be more

sanguine and put the beginning of the decade and not the end as the

era of the Descent. It is more likely then to make haste.' He

remained generally sanguine for a year or two more. In November 1933,

after noting that 'the supramental has not descended into the body or

into Matter,' he added: 'it is only at the point where such a descent

has become not only possible but inevitable.' And ten months later:

'The supramental Force is descending, but it has not yet taken

possession of the body or of matterthere is much resistance to

that. It is the supramentalised Overmind Force that has already

touched, and this may at any time change into or give place to the

supramental in its own native power.' But by the end of 1934 it was

becoming clear that the process would take much longer than

anticipated. 'The descent of the Supermind is a long process,' he

wrote that October, 'or at least a process with a long preparation,

and one can only say that the work is going on sometimes with a

strong pressure for completion, sometimes retarded by the things that

rise from below and have to be dealt with before further progress can

be made' (Heehs, 364).

And this task has yet to be completed.

Aurobindo's teleological model is describing a deeply recurring

pattern in reality which could be described as spiritual

evolution. Not only the evolution of the individual, but the

evolution of the whole planet and the structure of human

consciousness. Will this evolution involve a further

individualization of consciousness, or the shift towards a more

cooperative, shared consciousness that could be mediated through

telepathy? Time will tell, but certainly efforts such as Auroville

and other communes are fledgling attempts at the kind of shared

consciousness or spiritual religion of humanity described in

the writings of the modern mystic Sri Aurobindo.

Notes

1. Wall Street Journal

online. The Obama Justice Department Adopts the George W. Bush

Administration's Legal Stance on Presidential Powers. March 7th,

2009. Web.

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638765474658467.html>

2.

New York Times online. Supreme Court Blocks Ban on Corporate

Political Spending. January 21st, 2010. Web.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html>

3.

Passmore, Kevin. Fascism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford

Press, 2002.

4. Federal Reserve Bank online. TARP Program

Information. Web. April 20th, 2010.

<http://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/tarpinfo.htm>

5.

Heehs, Peter. The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. New York: Columbia

University Press (2008) 242.

6. McDermott, Robert A., ed. The

Essential Aurobindo. New York: Schocken Books Inc. (1973) 203.

7.

For information about Vernadsky see Samson, Paul R.; Pitt, David C.

The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global Environment, Society, and

Change. London: Routledge (1999). For Pierre Teilhard de Chardin see

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man (1955) New York:

Harper Perennial 2008.

8. National Geophysical Data Center

online. More Information about Geomagnetic Fields.

<http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/geomaginfo.shtml>

9. De

Purucker, G. Occult Glossary: A Compendium of Oriental and

Theosophical Terms. London: Theosophical University Press (1933)

4.

10. Argüelles, José. Time and the Technosphere:

The Law of Time in Human Affairs. Rochester, Vermont: Bear &

Company (2002).

11. Radin, Dean. The Conscious Universe: The

Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. New York: HarperOne (1997).

Tart, Charles T. Physiological Correlates of Psi Cognition.

International Journal of Parapsychology (1963) Vol. 5, 375-386.

12.

Puthoff, H.E. CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing Program at Stanford

Research Institute. Journal of Scientific Exploration (1996) Vol.

10, 63-76.

13. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The

Making of Typographic Man. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto

Press (1962).

14. Bloom, Howard. Global Brain: The Evolution

of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. New York: Wiley

(2001).

15. Chakrabarty, Bidyut. Social and Political Thought

of Mahatma Gandhi. London: Routledge (2005).

16. Wikipedia

online. Auroville. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville>

Web. May 3rd, 2010.

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Photo: Auroville, an "experimental" township in Viluppuram

district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India near Puducherry in South

India, used under Creative Commons license courtesy of mckaysavage.