The choice is ours for the practice of a collective yoga

Reflections on THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY By Debashish Banerji by Debashish on Mon 09 Oct 2006 11:33 PM PDT Permanent Link THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY - Chapters XXXII - XXXV: Internationalism, Internationalism and Human Unity, The Religion of Humanity, Summary and Conclusion.

Indeed, today, the international idea is swiftly becoming a world-reality. Technological developments and economic interdependence have shrunk the globe, throwing cultures together in a huge planetary churning. "The International Style" in architecture defines our living and working spaces in uniform and utilitarian urban cityscapes. Uniform life-styles, dress-habits, consumptions and acquisitions, mark off the middle-class and the affluent everywhere, while the poor struggle to be admitted into the International club. Multinational conglomerates control our doing and having, dictating expectation, taste and goal worldwide. Globalization has not meant the socialization of the world but its capitalization. Though it is true that, relatively speaking, in more urbanized sectors, a wider mix of nationalities coexist amicably, it should not be forgotten that fraternity is easy when all men do the same. I do not believe that the "international sentiment" has grown any greater than at the time of Sri Aurobindo's writing, and if there is any emotional identification with larger groupings left today, it is as intenser and narrower temporary forms of localized ethnic or religious fanaticism while the majority of the "globalized world" falls into the anodyne of domesticated sleep.

And yet, the globalization process proceeds inexorably, moving towards the external and mechanical fulfillment of Sri Aurobindo's prophecy. The scaffolding of world-union completes itself, with or without our adherence. Cyberspace spreads like an invisible Indra's Net throughout the world, bringing the All into Each point; while the circulation of the Euro promises significant political changes in the not too distant future, initiating the process of regional unifications. But the vital or intellectual ideal of Internationalism "is 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. On the other side, because it leans principally on the reason, it turns too readily to the mechanical solution. For the rational idea ends always as a captive of its machinery, becomes a slave of its own too binding process". [SABCL, 554]

What then could bring about the conditions of consciousness that can humanly match the unifying mechanics of civilization? Sri Aurobindo finds a closer correlate to the ideal of Fraternity in the Religion of Humanity. As it is commonly understood however, this too has a rational foundation, as the liberal humanism of post-Enlightenment Europe. A faith that all humans beings are the same everywhere and an urge to serve humanity in its betterment, irrespective of nationality, caste, creed, gender or culture is the wide formulation of this ideal, less cold than Internationalism since it puts the heart's passion behind its charitable rationality. But this ideal too is doomed to insufficiency and failure if it retains its rational basis and cannot embrace the possibility of the spiritual realization of the Oneness of all beings as its individual and collective goal. Such a spiritualized religion of Humanity would alone be able to transcend personal and ethnic egoisms in the living realization of the One embodied in myriad forms.

Though such a possibility looks distant, Sri Aurobindo says, "But if it is at all a truth of our being, then it must be the truth to which all is moving and in it must be found the means of a fundamental, an inner, a complete, a real human unity which would be the one secure base of a unification of human life. A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependant upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence".

The inexorable unification of the world will proceed, with or without our permission; but the choice is ours to match in consciousness and in individual and social expression this unification, through the practice of a collective yoga. Print Article --> Keywords: Holism, Internationalism, WorldUnion, SriAurobindo, History, Communities