Weight of hang-ups and cultural conditionings

The first thing needed - Alan Auroville Today > June - July 2006 Current issue Archive copies

When it came to advising Aurovilians, Mother didn’t beat about the bush

“The first thing needed is the inner discovery, to find out what one truly is behind social, moral, cultural, racial and hereditary appearances. At the centre there is a being, free and vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who should become the active centre of our being and our life in Auroville.” (The Mother)

The problem, I suspect, is that while every Aurovilian sees other Aurovilians staggering under the weight of hang-ups and cultural conditionings, poor things, none of us seem to believe we're carrying any baggage ourselves. I used to believe this, until...

I'll tell you a story. I was educated at a school whose purpose, back in the 1850s when it was founded, was to train its pupils to rule and administer the British Empire. By the time I reached its ivied walls that Empire had vanished. However while we boys were no longer exhorted by winey-faced Colonels at the annual Speech Day to take up the ‘white man's burden', in other, infinitely subtle, ways my school inculcated me with an image of the world and my place in it which reached back to that previous age. There was still the unquestionable assumption, for example, that Britain (well England, actually) was best, and that Queen's English was the only language one needed to master (apart, that is, from Latin and classical Greek) in order to master the world.

Now, fast forward to around 1980. I'm riding my cycle along a path near Utility canyon. A villager on a cycle approaches from the other direction. We meet. We stop. I ask him to move out of the way as the only navigable part of the sand at that point is on the left side of the path: I know my Highway Code. He refuses. I ask him, rather more strongly, to move out of the way. He refuses. We start pushing each other. Finally we have to be separated by a passing Aurovilian....

O.K. there were plenty of mitigating circumstances, there always are. But I ask myself – if the man I had met on that narrow path had been an Englishman who addressed me in Queen's English, would I have reacted in the same way, however unreasonable his behaviour? I think not. At some level, my public school conditioning had clicked in.

This sounds like something horribly akin to racism and I hope, I really hope, that I wouldn't behave in the same way today. In fact, I think there is very little conscious racism in today's Auroville. On the other hand, I think there's quite a lot of what I would term ‘unconscious culturalism' – thought patterns and behaviour influenced by unconscious attitudes and assumptions inherited from our cultural upbringing.

These assumptions may differ dramatically from culture to culture. So when a group of Aurovilians of different nationalities meet together, they may think they are speaking the same language, but the meaning they give to certain terms and the behaviour they find appropriate may be quite different. This, needless to say, can cause problems....