Tower of Babel

What a great noise we are making!

An overwhelming tsunami of sound and fury. A great flood has inundated the world and Noah in nowhere to be found. From the empty bellowing of the radio waves, to the puzzled phrases of the written word, to the blurred visual imagination of television, to the inane drone of the ubiquitous cell phone, to the anger and bombast of internet postings, to a twittering in the distance. This cloud computing leviathan has put a dank fog upon human discourse. We can access the world but cannot discern a single voice. We have a million thoughts at our fingertips but we can't wade throught the clotted digital arteries full of bile and mediocrity that blinds us to a commonality of purpose. From duelling mystics to craven mammon: a virtual Tower of Babel.

And here I am in the middle of it waving my flag. Maybe I'm making the same mistake we all are and should just keep my mouth shut.

I think we have gone through the looking glass and we have no idea whose running the asylum.

It's all White Noise. Is this the best we can do?

Maybe it will eventually cancel itself out and we will be left with ineffable silence.

GADFLY

Aristotle's defence at his trail:

"If you kill me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me."

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of the truth"

The gadfly needs to be the postmodern man. The pinprick, the balloon deflator, the applier of cold water, the translator of signs, the voice that cries in the wilderness and the hand that stays the onslaught.

...I talk to the wind.

And the gadfly needs to start, by healing thyself. It is no good pontificating to an uncaring world with vacuous words. There is enough of that already. You begin by cleansing the dross of a lifetime that is your identity and place in this world. The unexamined life is not worth living as Aristotle also wisely added. Almost all that we are and believe has never been questioned or examined. We are a collection of disparate influences: family, community, peers, school and media. We have swallowed the menu whole in unquestioning obedience as good members of our society and culture. Now it is about time we look at ourselves and what we represent with an unjaundiced eye and a reasoned temperament. Undauntingly we must challenge our deepest core beliefs and values to find out if they pass the true test in the clear light of day. Then and only then can we proceed to view the wide expanse or our community, culture, nation and planet with open eyes and begin to effect a change which could transform our lives.

We must rub our eyes and throw off the sleepiness so as to begin to walk in the daylight of a mature human life. The childish things need to go. We are not playing with toys anymore.

CERTITUDE

You need an absolute, unshakeable certainty and conviction in your own self-worth and in the wonder and beauty of life. It is only with that at the core of your being that you can then clearly and vigorously look at your life, the community around you and human life upon this planet in such a way that you can come to the crux of the problem; which is the solution of it all. Not a wilful stubborness or a blind faith in unjustifiable ideas but a grounded and honest understanding that at one's centre lies a clear vision and an emotional honesty and passion that allows us the strength to take on the messy vicissitudes of the world and the obvious contradictions that exist in our own being. You will need an inner strength to be able to strip bare all the conditioning and the dross that so fills our lives and propels us to actions we can't possibly excuse. Joseph Campbell said: " the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are." And how many of us allow ourselves the time and space to find out who we really are. It is quite simple and a wonder. It is not navel-gazing. It is about the fact that we can't take responsibility for our place in the world till we take responsibility for who we are.

The pathless land

I sat on the edge

of an ocean, setting sun

no roads to follow.

I am at the end of the road, of a life-long journey. I came all this way to look at what I thought was the last best hope and instead find that I have to set aside all my illusions that there is really somewhere that actually practices what it preaches, lives up to it's expectations and could become a home of like-minded individuals on the same quest with the same passion and integrity. Since it appears a lost cause I have to confront that fact and then get on with it. I might feel some pain but it is also strangely liberating. All paths have been trod and found wanting. I feel like I am being stripped clean like bark off a tree. It is a cleansing process and tossing away the accumulated garbage of a long life can lighten the step. It's like throwing your life into the Large Hadron Collider until you hit the wall, splitting yourself up, breaking apart and then picking up the pieces to map the scattering shards, read the runes and move on. I made a mistake early in life by taking an epiphany that came unbidden and then to try to fit it into the mould of present spiritual and philosophical experience rather than just get into the depths of what it represents for me personally without being put into a straight jacket of thought and living that could never express it. I now have to get face to face with myself without any filters and go into the pathless land.

TIME: A Double-Edged Sword

The one thing missing in this time-obsessed world is time itself. We are so busy, our days so filled with activity that another day is gone before we even realise it had started. Time is money: what a curious thought. In our commoditized world it might make sense but it is a very dangerous phrase. Time is your life! It better be worth more than money. Otherwise we are dead people. I believe that time is the one precious experience we need the most and have the least of in this modern world. And by time I mean that totally free time, competely seperate from our daily whirl. We do not take time to get away from it all and remove ourselves from our personal daily circumstances enmeshed in the drama of our culture in which we are so deeply identified. We need time to decompress first. We cannot realise what is going on or what we could possibly be missing till we radically seperate ourselves for awhile to let that chaotic momentum wash away from us. Only when that occurs can the real process begin. A certain seperation, isolation and distance is needed to give the perspective that will accomplish the goal. A complete change of scenery and geography is probably best and that is why travel can be such a tonic when it allows us to confront the world and ourselves in a totally different way and forces us to climb out of that morass of daily life. A wise man wrote extolling the efficacy of idleness. Allowing such a taboo idea into our focussed world could give us permission to step back and take stock outside the prism of the daily grind. The problem confronted here like with all issues contains a joy and a challenge. The joy is the opportunity to step away from your normal routine and glimpse another possibility. The challenge being that we all bring along our own excess personal baggage making it difficult to appreciate the experience and to throw up all kinds of reistance to it. Our personal baggage needs a weight limit. Otherwise all the possibility recedes into irrelevance. We invariably we feel impelled to do something when confronted by these moments of opportunity. The being has to precede the doing. We are so used to our cluttered routines that when confronted with quiet solitude and self-reflection we to tend to run away as from a disastrous encounter. Are we up to this? Do we want it? If not how do we break the cycle we are stuck in and for which we feel an obvious disatisfaction.
Again we reach another puzzle and the answer is in the unravelling.

ESSAY ON AUROVILLE

The aspiration of the community of Auroville is represented in it's charter formulated by the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1968 as a noble endeavour. The charter as written is:

1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville one must be the willing servitor of the Divnine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an undending 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 wil be a site of material and spriritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.

This wonderful aspiration attracted me to the noble experiment of this community over the last fourty years. No one who has the best intentions for a better world can criticize the conception envisaged in this charter and effort to implement it on the ground in the real world. Let me begin by giving praise to the clear and positive impact that this project has had on the environment of the area. I first came to Auroville in it's early days to be astounded by the harshness and utter desolation of the land upon which the project had planted it's flag. To my utter amazement in subsequent visits there has been a triumphant improvement in the landscape. Instead of a denuded desert of red soil it has become a forested region reclaimed by wildlife that had fled the area years ago. The change is astonishing and hard to comprehend if you had not seen the early days. For the success of that alone, Auroville should be proud, congratulated and supported in those efforts. It the rest of the country had accomplished similar efforts with the scant resources but obvious dedication and will this whole country could have been a rejuvenated ecological showpiece for the world. I call on everyone to look at their methods and support those same efforts everywhere we can as they have provent their efficacy with few financial resources.
Ok, so that is the great visible achievement of this community and maybe the easier one to accomplish. Going back to the charter which formulates a psychological and social change in human life you have to admit that this experiment appears to be failing at it's core. I am not sure the participants can objectively understand this and without a clear confrontation with the facts they sow the seeds of it's eventual collapse. One wise man responded to it's difficulties by saying that at least the community had lasted fourty years and endured to fight another day. This is true and commendable but not good enough. Survival is not an answer and explanation. The community can only have a rationale to exist if it has kept it's core beliefs alive and well. thriving in an adverse environment. That really is certainly up for debate both inside and out the project. Too many people who come to Auroville and even the members themselves have serious concerns about it's status and progress. There is a sense of stalled momentum, a stilted inward thinking and defensiveness that mitigates against all the values upon which Auroville staked it's reputation. I do not expect perfection or pure enlightenment out of the community. But I think a fair person would expect to see a greater appearance that the members of Auroville are working diligently and honestly in everyway to develop and bring to fruition the concepts that underpin it's creation. I will not go into the details of the numerous flaws of the community as that is not the issue that concerns me in this commentary. I might be more concerned if there were not any issues that needed identification and resolution. In an imperfect world with imperfect people this experiment needs to move forward and be ongoing. My concern is that there is not enough serious reflection and effort on a personal level to ever properly tackle these issues so that Auroville can be seen as a true participant in solutions and be a beacon of progress and vision in a broader world. Auroville maybe the community the "world needs" but then it needs to live up to the responsibility this implies and take the necessary steps on a personal and communal level to begin to resolve it's problems in a new way that shows the way for all of us. The world is in serious trouble. God knows it needs some help and guidance but the role of Auroville has to play is being lost in the petty personal bickering and politics that we can find anywhere in the world. Until you give yourselves a collective slap in the face you will miss the opportunity you have been given to show a way out of the morass of our times. And believe me, others will leave you by the wayside if you do not meet the challenge. It is a sad tragedy that this wonderful possibility is allowing itself to be sidelined when it is needed more than ever. I am beginning to think that the process at the heart of the experiment is flawed. I'm begging you all to get your act together. You have no stronger cheerleader but I will not refuse to see the reality of what is happening because I believe that this is the crux of the problem: looking clearly and honestly and then acting upon it. Maybe Auroville can only really exist in our hearts and maybe that is where it belongs. Not in any collective experiment that cannot get past it's internal problems. Others will find a way to keep the spirit of this idea alive but maybe in a totally different way. The personal issues have to be dealt with first and the colletive will follow.
This is too important to be allowed to utterly fail.