A solid hammering

When you are reading a book like “Born in Tibet”, what you are getting is not so much a description of the country and its history, but what they meant to Chögyam Trungpa and how growing up in Tibet felt like to the author. I should warn you that it is the same with what I am writing here; it cannot prepare you in any way for what you would see and feel and experience on coming to Auroville. My writings do not provide you with facts, either. They rather tell you a lot about what is on the writer’s mind, and what this place means to him (and maybe why he uses to talk in the third person about himself).
My fellow Aurovilians may back me up on the fact that, regarding descriptions of the joys and difficulties of living in Auroville, there is a very close connection between the observer’s world view and their experience of events in this township. It seems as though Auroville is magnifying psychological challenges, philosophical puzzles, or, if you prefer to express it in these terms, karmic conditions which dominate a person’s life. One might say that, in Auroville, you are getting a solid hammering of the exact issues that call for getting resolved.
The intensity of it all seems unbearable, even torturous, sometimes. Auroville, some folks observed, is not exactly the place of smiling people; betrayed of their dreams and bewildered, many choose to leave. But if one is willing to face the heat this pressure from an unknown source can become a powerful drive for working out the issues oneself, finding out what they mean, overcoming the self-inflicted internal suffering, and translating all of that into a way of life in a close-knit community. Irrespective of “Divine Consciousness”, ” eternal youth”, “human unity” and all the rest of it, this is, to me, what AV’s four-point-charter is all about, and why the Mother could boil it down to one single, all-inclusive sentence, “All people of goodwill are welcome”…
…to learn how to embrace the other 95%

Going round in circles

While it is true that two paper manufacturers invented the first piloted ascent of a balloon, and that two bicycle retailers invented and flew the first successful airplane, and that a patent officer revolutionized physics, it is also true that these people did not put other people’s wellbeing at risk in doing so. Picking up a task that you have little or no previous knowledge about can be regarded as a noble thing. It may indicate that you are courageous and eager to learn something new, and your fresh mind may help improving established practices, but it comes with a responsibility for those affected by your actions.

A society which is protecting people from having to take the consequences of their actions is not only undermining the idea of responsibility, it keeps people from learning their skill, improving their level of consciousness, and/or to function as part of something larger. The history of educating children has many according examples for both responsible and irresponsible training.

There must be personal consequences for those failing to act in the best interest of everyone concerned, be it intentionally, carelessly, or just ignorantly so. Not as a punishment, not draconically imposed, but in order to deepen the experience of having found out about something that has not worked. Bygones must only become bygones once the lesson is learned; otherwise the wasted opportunity for understanding the causes of a problem tends to solidify the malpractice.

But in certain circles we just run away from responsibility. We fail, and then we cannot even apologize. Usually we deny the failure altogether, blame it on the affected person who must have attracted the mishap through „bad energy“ or „wrong behaviour“ somehow. Soon enough, we even must not talk about the incident at all, for it belongs to ancient history.

Because we deny ourselves to take a closer look at what exactly did not work out, we rarely find a constructive solution; because we shy away from having people get confronted personally with the results of their decisions or actions, we go through the same situation again and again and again, until one of the silly ideas we randomly use to replace other dysfunctional ideas with happens to work out.

Yes, we rant a lot, incessantly. There are grievances that want to make themselves get heard, and we’ll be incapable of growing out of this mood until the need for getting heard is being met.

The trouble with the global structure of society is not so much that outdated, dysfunctional patterns have been adopted and perpetuated; the trouble is, that the system is dysfunctional and there is nothing you can do about it – unless learning is encouraged to happen in a manner in which failure-induced grief is a part of the normal stages of fully comprehending the nature of an event rather than getting labelled as „egoistic“, „complaining“, „negative-minded“, or „backwards-oriented“.

This understanding happens inwardly, individually, before it can express itself collectively, and no system imposed from above, or from without, can make a difference. Systems cannot comprehend. Only humans can.

Zhampa travels the German way

Yesterday I finished the raw translation of “The trouble with wisdom“, a novel by Thomas Henry Pope. Its German title has not yet been determined; that will be discussed later. The thing is definitely worth reading, otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up the task.

I also received a couple of proofing copies of my previous two works (Greer, Star’s Reach & Quinn, The Story Of B) the publication of which has not yet happened due to legal issues. I warmly recommend reading them as well 

Today I was in another meeting with BOSS (not the company) which went unexpectedly well, though they couldn’t resist trying to intimidate my companion, which basically means that they didn’t believe us. That’s fine; take the next step and get your fingers burnt. At least I didn’t have to read them from my original 1948 Edition of the “Universal declaration of human rights” that was sitting in my bag –just in case.

Truth doesn’t hide behind acronyms

I thought I had seen them all; all those groups which run by pompous names that they choose to disguise with funny acronyms like STOP and DENY and CASH. I have been lucky enough to not having been stopped by STOP, and not having been denied what I needed by DENY (though I couldn’t avoid getting mugged by CASH), but I have become aware of enough other cases to understand that this has actually been a matter of chance. This has become pretty clear while I was attending meetings of KING and BOSS, two institutions at the mentioning of which almost everyone is rolling their eyes. All of us have made our experiences with them, and all of us have been shaking heads over how these people operate affairs.

To begin with, it already makes you wonder how a seemingly decent person becomes a snooty ignorant bitch the very moment he or she joins one of these groups. It almost looks like, on entry, some part of their brains get lobotomized, making them completely incapable of rational thought, reasonable action, and feeling compassion for others.

E.g. the first person to file a complaint with them is regarded as “the victim”, per definition, the other, of course, must become ” the villain” who can expect to receive strong scolding including elements of intimidation. The basis of the groups’ decisions is hearsay, throughout, upon which opinions get built which have everything to do with personal preferences and nothing to do with facts.
In case a “villain” is unwillig to surrender another institution called COWDUNG comes into play which uses progressive methods of manipulation like ‘Neuro-Linguistic Progrmming’, Mediation, and ‘Non-Violent Communication’ to determine that “the villain” is actually the villain.
And so it goes on.
As I said, I thought I had seen them all. At least enough of them to have an educated guess at how all the others are operating.

I was wrong.

By the end of last week I have been attending a meeting of what could be regarded as the secret crown of all the other pseudo-governmental groups, and their acronym might as well have been HELL. If you have ever been walking in the hallways of power, if you have ever lingered among members of government or high finance, this is how you may imagine it felt to be there with HELL. Their field of activity is within the realm of financial assets and immovables, and immovable, indeed, were their. stonelike faces and the notions that guided their decisions. One of them impatiently twitching a finger was as much as they allowed themselves to give insight into their actual thoughts about some petty farmer explaining his being passionate about his work and being concerned over what happens to the land that is supposed to get sold to some mining company. HELL must have come to the conclusion that these peasants were suffering from an incurable delusion about the value of money — the stuff you can use to buy food from elsewhere — but as it was unlikely that these poor souls could be talked out of their misinformed condition the obvious answer was, Thanks so much for sharing with us; we assure you that your worries are baseless, and that we will Inform you in case the situation changes.
With that we have been dismissed.

The very instant the door closed in our backs, the feeling of suffocation immediately stopped and fresh air filled my lungs again.
Dude, was I just thinking, Occupy Townhall?
If only that were the solution…

Terror Show

You call your lifestyle “spiritual” and “holistic” and “permaculture” and “energy-conscious”, and then you go to a foreign country and spread false allegations about a native person you don’t even know and who is just doing their work; and then you convince another foreigner who has nothing to do with anyone around here to carry the lie to the officials, and you abuse your membership and your friends in major administrative bodies to push your case, and you do this over and over and over again – how much more can you taint your spirituality?
I used to get mad at you. But that was when I still thought there was some sort of intelligence in you that could respond to my rage. From what I understand today, you are a sad case of someone being helplessly possessed by hate, and you don’t even care whose livelihood you destroy in the name of “love and light”.
You leave me confused. I don’t know how to deal with all this falsehood. I don’t know how NOT to deal with it.

And yet, I love it so

After hours of nightly contemplating the immense depth and amount of corruption, incompetence and insincerity I have the doubtful honour of being allowed to witness and which affects my life on a daily basis I felt like I needed a shot of Heavy Metal to keep my mind from further spiralling into negativity again. Metal has always been my drug of choice which helped me kill the pain of living in this age, and I am aware of it for quite some time. As a consequence, I stopped listening to music almost completely for a few years.
There is yet another quality to Metal that I was not aware of, which I was constantly seeking to apply, though: to have someone scream at the evil in man and to have them shout with rage, and spit in the faces of the gods that failed. 

Seeing things a bit different today, my return to screeching guitars, galloping basses, thundering drums and voices like air-raid sirens became sort of an amusing bed-in which presented me with the question who these people were shouting at. The greed, the ignorance, the imposture, the make-believe, the displays of incompetence in compensating for incompetence*, they are all rather laughable than enraging. We are players in a charade called Auroville, and if we didn’t have it all backwards it could be such an enjoyable experience, like a child’s birthday. And you out there who would smirk or snort at my utterings, you are completely right, though probably for the wrong reasons. For you are like us, because we are like you.

(* German = Inkompetenzkompensationsinkompetenz. I accidently found this in a dictionary and just couldn’t resist. Yays for compound words!)

Koan

Places like Auroville are needed for people to realize that places like Auroville are not needed. The Mother WAS a practical joker.

Alien encounters

“We cannot solve your problems; we cannot come to you or take you to some other world; we cannot teach you anything you are not ready to learn. All we can offer is the chance to communicate with other intelligent beings, to try to grasp something of the way we and other species experience our worlds, to share your own experiences with others who are eager to learn about them, and to know that you are not alone in the universe. If that is enough, we welcome you to the conversation between worlds.” 
–John Michael Greer: Star’s Reach

Belongs into any communication about what Auroville can and cannot do. Or anybody else, really.

Arbitrary rule

Recently, the Auroville Council has presented a draft paper, for feedback, containing the envisioned future conflict management procedure of the township. A significant part of it deals with the final steps of conflict resolution, namely arbitration as a means to finish the dispute.
Let me explain why I think arbitration is detrimental to what we are seeking to achieve in Auroville, and what we could try instead.

From the collection of Mother’s explanations of Auroville’s aims and ideals we know that its society is supposed to be what she calls a “Divine Anarchy”, a community in which each individual, and the township as a whole, is guided by a higher consciousness. In effect, we would not need to be governed by any worldly authority because we would take responsibility for our deeds ourselves, acting in the interest of the common good. We would still have different opinions, but we would not deem them more valuable than anybody else’s needs. Embracing our diverse world as it is we would make decisions in consensus with others. That requires a great deal of understanding of people’s needs and motivations.

In the old paradigm, the civilization we have been born into, it is understood that, in a world of scarcity, the needs of individuals compete with each other for fulfillment. Therefore my gain is your loss, and vice versa.
In order to overcome this kind of thinking we must learn to resolve conflicts by achieving a win-win situation, i.e. the needs of everyone involved getting met. Just like NVC [non-violent communication] it doesn’t come easy to us; it has to be trained, dispute by dispute, until it becomes our natural habit to look for common ground. From this new point of view, each conflict situation is a challenge rather than a problem, and it becomes an opportunity to learn and grow. Conflict must not be suppressed in favour of superficial harmony, but rather lived through consciously.

To a large part, the Council’s draft reflects this understanding, describing a procedure that ranges from rather informal talks to facilitated, strictly reglemented methods, including restorative circles, reconciliation, mediation, NVC-meetings, and negotiation. If no agreement is reached the Council imposes arbitration on the conflicting parties and everyone else involved.

Arbitration

Arbitration, basically, is a settlement of affairs by judgement of appointed, ideally non-partial, persons. Their sentence is binding, leaving no choice to anyone affected by it.

As far as the Council is concerned, the conflict, and hence the suffering, ends there.
This is a misapprehension.

Arbitration may shorten the timespan until the issue is off the Council’s table, true enough. But it also stops the process of conflict resolution within the minds of the quarrelling people. It takes their responsibility for coming to a conclusion off their shoulders, and hands it over to an authority which they have no power over. To say that arbitration puts an end to suffering is objectionable for two reasons.
First of all, every time we suffer life tells us that something in our thinking, something in our strategies, something in our actions is not working out. We run into walls, physically or mentally, get hurt, analyze what has happened, and adjust to our new understanding of the world. That’s how we usually learn the important lessons in life. Some call it “trial and error”, some call it “learning by doing”. In short, we need suffering in order to be able to let go of non-functioning thought and behaviour.
Secondly, with arbitration being used to end a dispute, a person’s suffering from the pressures of conflict is getting replaced by suffering under the felt injustice of the verdict. Usually one, often both sides feel that their needs have not been met, their position not been understood. Rightly so, because we all know that even the most respectable arbiter is not free of bias. The pain of being degraded to an object in a decision-making process, to powerlessly having to bear the judgement by another, can be some of the most agonizing among all perceptions. Arbitration thus undermines the belief of the individual in the just, equitable functioning of its society. Authoritarian approaches such as arbitral verdicts are IN THE WAY of achieving a true dissolution of conflicts because the arbiters’ view suppresses contradicting opinions, thus creates rejection instead of acceptance, and the grudge against our opponents, and society as a whole, remains as a splinter under our fingernails.

We should not get forced to accept arbitral verdicts. Not to be willing, though, to do the inner work necessary to achieve the kind of human unity mentioned in Auroville’s charter makes our presence in the township pointless, or even disruptive. Personally developing solutions to our conflicts is therefore a must, a top-priority task given to us, an order to learn. If our consciousness is not evolved enough to come to an agreement with our fellow human beings, we should be forced to work on exactly that issue.
How do we do that?

Intensification

Time seems, to me, of cruical importance in matters of conflict. The longer the quarrelling lasts the more we get used to the rhythm of strike and counterstrike. We adjust to the constant presence of pain. In time we also lose the confidence that struggling will eventually end. If, however, the opponents are kept in close proximity, their suffering will be more intense; so will be their efforts to solve the problem, as well. We may expect a speeding up of the process, resulting in a quicker finalization.

Let’s call the last step of conflict resolution “intensification”, and let’s say we make the opponents meet each other daily for two hours, under the guidance of an NVC-trained facilitator. NVC as such may have failed before when some of the persons involved have learned the phrasing technique, but refuse to consequently actualize its meaning. The objective in intensification is to bring about a deeper understanding of the other’s needs, deep enough anyway to be able to propose how those needs may be met. The method consists of the following steps:
a) collectively attempting to phrase each person’s needs until they feel exhaustively understood
b) reciprocally proposing actions that are likely to meet our opponent’s need, until that person feels satisfied
c) harmonization of the proposed actions
d) written agreement that is binding to everyone involved. Its contents should be quantifiable in time and amount.

It is the duty of each party to find acceptable solutions for its (former) opponents, and the process must not get interrupted until we have come to a written agreement. As there is no deadline to the process, and as the meetings are happening daily, unavoidingly confronting us with the suffering of our neighbour (and our own), eating up a sensible amount of our precious time, with impacts on both work and private life, we cannot help but break our inner resistence. There is only one way out: achieving a consensus. Having truly understood this, suddenly there is motion.

Persistent resistence

What do we do, then, with those resisting to collaborate? – Well, the same as with those resisting to abide by the arbitral rule, now. Only would I propose to expand the range of tools into the realm of social control, before we go into exclusion from the Master list. Step by step we would be approaching friends to make them have a talk with the person in question; respected Aurovilians may later take the role of a coach to carefully steer the person into understanding the need for opening up. A denial of service and a temporary stopping of work engagement may further help with achieving the insight that society and individual are in a mutual relationship of dependency, which means that a society can only support the individual if the individual contributes sufficiently to its functioning. Only after it is made sure that someone will persist, regardless, is it justified to exclude people from citizenship in Auroville due to their involvement in a conflict. While it is not asked too much to deliver on the promise that we made when we came here by our own free will (to collaborate and constantly evolve), it is  important to note that imposing “solutions” produces the exact opposite: resistence and rigidity. We must avoid, by all means, what literally becomes an arbitrary rule.

Refoaming the system

“This issue [to reform Auroville’s entry process] – which should have been a normal phase of changing and renewal of a policy – has become a winning and losing situation […]
Yes, we could have insisted and we have no doubt this proposal would have gone through easily and if the present Entry Service did not accept it, the community could have asked them to step down and a new one formed to implement it  […] 
Or the community could have imposed the present Entry Service to implement it. These are both nightmare scenarios and we did not wish to create neither of them.” 
(Report of the Entry Task Force, a residents’ initiative)

Now imagine a similar situation in any of the Western democracies.
Would a citizens’ movement have the power to overthrow an administrative body just like this?
And if they had the power — or any political party had it – would they step back from their demands on encountering strong objections?
Would anybody in a position of strength try to make an attempt to come to a consensus with the opposing forces, with the help of a facilitator?

Auroville surely needs reforms, revolutionary changes even, on all levels of public life. But if you asked me what’s so special about this township, it is events like the above I would point at – people daring to live by a higher consciousness. Knowing that overpowering another will not create solutions, only conflict. Or, in more brash words, War doesn’t decide who is right, just who is left.

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