This talk is dedicated to the city-state of Auroville and its founder Mirra Alfassa, the spiritual partner and collaborator of the 20th c. Indian philosopher-yogi Sri Aurobindo, who designated her as The Mother. The talk is divided into three sections, each of which is inspired by a quote from the Mother that I will read at the end of the section.
I The Anthropocene
Atmospheric scientist Paul J. Crutzen has proposed from the start of the 21st c., that the human footprint is so ubiquitous across the earth that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the geologic counterpart of the non-local time and space of 21st c. (post-)modernity, a kind of technological apotheosis, or techgnosis in which humanity experiences a layer of omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience due to the ubiquity of cyberspace. One may think of this as the apotheosis of modernity, a kind of Hegelian “end of History,” when Science and Technology has achieved for humanity what it set out to do in the 17th c. with the Enlightenment. But this beginning, which conceptualized itself as a rupture in history leading to the perpetual rupture of modernity, a fleeing from the past into an ever-renewed future, was itself just a rational displacement of a religious logocentrism that privileged the human as made in the image of God and the rightful heir to the kingdom of Earth. “Man as the measure of all things,” reborn in the Renaissance, strode across the planet, vernier caliper and calculating machine in hand, completing the unfinished perfection of the earth as his god-given duty, to be accomplished by God’s own creative faculty, Reason, that God had bestowed on Man. Inextricably entangled with this drive for knowledge, and in fact, at its origin, was the will to power as systemic technology, producing and colonizing the Other of Western Rational Man, be it woman, child, animal, earth or the non-western human. The chapter of colonialism has led to a postcolonial world of mimic western men, the virus of post-Enlightenment modernity replicated in all its others. Or so was the intent; but the rational logos was not deep enough it seems, for like the tower of Babel, close to the finish-line of Heaven, all Hell, it seems, has broken out. The revolt of the earth, of life and of culture, geological, biological, sociological, erupts in massive cracks across the ordered façade of global modernity, threatening a slow or unpredictably rapid extinction, or through brief exultations of vaccinated recovery, a chronic dystopia. The grinding halts in the Machine that affect the world today and are likely to repeat in various forms, are cautionary messages that a new paradigm of civilization is necessary, one that cannot return to a premodern separation and isolation of Earth and World, East and West, Man and Woman, Civilized and Savage, Sane and Mad. Nor can it continue to maintain these binaries, privileging one over the other or attempt to collapse them by implanting a version of the privileged category into its other. What is called for is a radical plurality and an intense intimacy. The infinite Other confronts us in every form, yet by intense relationality, we can merge into a consciousness alien to thought, a knowledge by identity which retains the bliss of duality while knowing unity. Here is the Mother’s meditation on April 7, 1917 in Japan:
“A deep concentration seized on me, and I perceived that I was identifying myself with a single cherry-blossom, then through it with all cherry-blossoms, and, as I descended deeper in the consciousness, following a stream of bluish force, I became suddenly the cherry-tree itself, stretching towards the sky like so many arms, its innumerable branches laden with their sacrifice of flowers. Then I heard distinctly this sentence: “Thus hast thou made thyself one with the soul of the cherry-trees and so thou canst take note that it is the Divine who makes the offering of this flower-prayer to heaven.” When I had written it, all was effaced; but now the blood of the cherry-tree flows in my veins and with it flows an incomparable peace and force. What difference is there between the human body and the body of a tree? In truth, there is none: the consciousness which animates them is identically the same.
II. The “we”
In The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger accurately read the will to technology at the heart of modernity, enframing, classifying and commodifying the world into standing reserve. All things are calculable, the human anonymized to fodder for capital, human resource. Modernity in offering individual freedom and choice, tears the individual from its traditional belongings and isolates him but simultaneously renders him as its conditioned subject, one of the “they.” If an individual awakes to this facticity, s/he experiences the dread of oblivion and must wrest his or her individual subjectivity from the “they” in a heroic act of authenticity. Death is the point of singularity which alone cannot be anonymized, a being-towards-death the condition for authenticity and freedom from the “they,” the condition of being a subject capable of true relationality, his/her relation to the earth that of the shepherd of Being. This is Heidegger’s response to modernity, but as the recent posthumanist thinker Bernard Stiegler has pointed out, this response is no solution to the transformation of the “they.” The inner freedom of the “I” is no safeguard from the world conditions of the “they.” Heidegger diagnosed this as the temporal horizon of modernity, he called it “the Europeanization of the world” and “the age of the world picture.” Today, in the Anthropocene, the signs of the fulfillment of this temporality are more evident than ever, there being no refuge from the regime of capital. The lack of a theory of the collective, of a “we” to stand as an alternative of creative choice to the leveling condition of the “they” made Heidegger fall prey to the false hope of “the chosen people.” This is the problem we all face, to be swallowed by the “they,” the reign of global capital, to become the “I” and be isolated and obliterated by the “they” or to seek solace in some premodern “we,” a chosen people from a golden past. There is no winning throw to this dice. This is what makes Stiegler theorize the need for the conscious collective, the “we” that can build its own polis with its internal will to become greater than human, which, adapting Nietzsche, he calls a “will to overmoratlity,” selectively engaging the global drivers of technology and capital in the interests of its telos.
The critique of modernity was rehearsed in its own way during the anticolonial struggles of colonized peoples in the 20th c. Stiegler’s need for the alternative polis of collective becoming was intuited in India by a number of its nationalist thinkers, adapting the idea of the ashram to engage in a new way with the determining forces of modern world-making. Tagore’s Shantiniketan, Gandhi’s Sabarmati and Sri Aurobindo’s Pondicherry saw attempts at such modern adaptations of the ashram. Sri Aurobindo passed in 1950, so he did not see the enhanced phase of technology that has led to our times. However, the Mother lived on till 1973 and in 1968, founded an international community, Auroville, proximal to Pondicherry, with the aim of integrating the social, political and spiritual ideals of Sri Aurobindo, addressing thereby the effects of global capital, and forming a model habitus for the future. It is beyond the scope of this paper to describe this city-state in the making, but I can point to some of its characteristics as a collective space for the “we” in Stiegler’s sense. The “we” must be a porous society, open to the world and engaged with plurality. The “we” must be a symbolic world, representing diverse cultural histories, and including the biosphere and geosphere. The “we” must have an alternative telos of becoming, a will to universality and oneness through deep relationality and intense intimacy. Auroville has been set up with this kind of telos. Voicing this spiritual telos, in the Mother’s words:
“…[A] gnostic or supramental 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 realization.” (2004: pgs. 141-42).
These conditions open also the possibility of a new politics, a politics of deep relationality and plural unity, in which government is an unnecessary evil, replaced by a participatory spiritual or divine anarchy.
III. Yoga
“A fact of consciousness” making the individual one with the earth, the world and all its “others” is not arrived at through the logocentrism of the mind. It is arrived at through a science and art of consciousness, what in India is known as yoga. This is not yoga seen as a franchised commodity of global capital, nor a traditional school or lineage of the golden past and the chosen people. It is yoga seen as an archive and toolbox of praxis put at the service of posthuman becoming in the Anthropocene. Here becoming-universal is not a transcendental abstraction separated from the earth and the world. The Mother’s New Year message of 1973, her last, is the orientation in which it has to be sought: “When you are conscious of the whole world at the same time, then you can become conscious of the Divine.”
