We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar


10. Communes and Seed-Groups


The recent mushrooming of small communes throughout America, and even on a somewhat different basis their appearance in other Western countries, should be considered a most significant and today inherently valid social development. In the 19th century communes were formed in the United States and fairly soon died, and European history records the appearance and disappearance of communities whose members were bound by a common religious and/or social faith. The beliefs and social ideals of these communities were considered heretic, or at least very suspicious and dangerous to the official social order and its ruling classes or groups. Thus, they were sooner or later either ruthlessly destroyed or, in America, subjected to various pressures — internal and external — which forced their more or less rapid disintegration.

The present-day situation faced by the new communes, mostly of young people, reveals much the same kind of trends in operation, but with notable differences. In order to understand the meaning of these differences and better to orient ourselves in our evaluation of this communalistic trend — but in no sense "Communist" in a political Marxist sense — it seems important to differentiate two basic types of communal groups — though no doubt some can be said to operate halfway between the two types. The motivations, techniques and goals of each group are fundamentally different, even if the difference is often not obvious and what I call "seed group" — a definite type of small commune group — exists today more as a potentiality yet to be consciously and decisively realized than as an actual fact. Nevertheless the ideal is there at least in a prenatal and embryonic state; and it is in relation to this ideal that even the most chaotic and unstructured communes now in existence acquire their deeper social-historical significance.

In order to understand accurately this significance one has to realize that our entire Western society and its civilization are gradually disintegrating, even where it appears to be most successful in producing technological wonders. However, a process of disintegration may also be interpreted as a process of metamorphosis. The main issue, stated at the very beginning of this book, is whether there will be gradual transformation, with ups and down but following the basic line of progress of the last five hundred years in Europe and America — a line now being exported to nearly the whole of mankind — or our present society and its root-beliefs have to experience a total catharsis. This catharsis would be deeper than the one which Russia experienced at the close of World War I, because it would upset not only the political-economic patterns of a nation and its people, but the basic premises of civilization itself and the very foundation of all interpersonal relationships and of man's relationship to the Earth and the universe.

The founders of the seemingly utopian communities of last century in the U.S. were far-seeing, or rather intuitively prophetic, men, who foresaw what, to them, already appeared the inevitable results of trends operating in even the earliest phases of the Industrial Revolution. They were projecting and trying to present in concrete social reality their concepts or feelings of an alternative society based in some cases on a feeling that we should return to the simple communal way of life of some early Christian groups, in which the sharing of most everything was stressed as a prerequisite for making the religious ideal concrete and workable. Such attempts were purposive. They sought to attract dissatisfied or highly idealistic persons who were eager to live with other persons with similar aspirations; but essentially in most cases the group was started to actualize the "vision" of one or a very few leading spirits. In this sense we can call them "seed groups."

Seed groups are formed toward the end of a culture-cycle in order either to give a public (or semi-public) example of an alternative way of living on which a new society could be based, which would succeed the present one, or to act as a focalizing field for energies and structural potentialities whose time for public manifestation has not quite come; a too public and concrete manifestation would be premature and self-defeating.

The problem confronting the formation of a seed-group "ritualizing" the interpersonal relationship of a few persons able to operate publicly in a concrete practical manner can be complex and perhaps excruciating. There are internal problems — problems affecting the feelings, the egos, the minds and the behavior of the members of the group — and there are also external problems relating to the way in which the Establishment, and the people who the would-be seed-individuals have to meet in order to carry on their vital activities, respond to the attempt to form such a seed-group.

In other words, two basic factors are involved; the first refers to the ego-transcending individual maturity, the intensity of dedication, the love and intelligence and the capacity for effective work and cooperation, the reliability and flexibility and openness of the individual persons constituting the actual and operative seed-group; the second refers to the reaction of the society and the State (and perhaps of other somewhat similar groups) to the purpose, the ideals and the mode of behavior of the seed-group.

I will not discuss at greater length the first-mentioned class of factors; but it is essential to realize that in all but the rarest cases, the modern youth communes do not constitute seed-groups, even if they share most of the latter's problems. It is probable that the great majority of the young people who join a commune, either in a rented house in a city or in the mountains, desert or forest, do so in terms of what one has to call a "negative" purpose; they are rebelling against, and often impulsively and desperately running away from living conditions within a family or class environment which had become unbearable or so empty and dull as to be nauseating.

Probably most of these young people had experiences with drugs like LSD, or at least certainly with marijuana. These experiences had the effect of making them feel that, through childhood and adolescence, they had been "programmed" by family, TV, school and society in general. They have experienced through these chemical means — and some through more natural processes of mind-development and contact with various types of Oriental philosophy — a state of de-structuring. A drug, or some emotional shock and catharsis, temporarily broke down their protective ego-structure — a structure which is as necessary for the early development of the mental functions as a womb is indispensable (so far, at least!) for the development of the biological functions of a human embryo. They emerged from the experience over-sensitized, most vulnerable and too open to react normally to biological and social pressures or even spiritual discoveries.

When a drop of atropine on the eyeball makes it impossible for the pupil of the eye to narrow its circumference and a strong light is faced, the nerves of the retina may be so injured by the light-rays as to cause blindness. This is perhaps a good illustration of what can happen at the psychological or psycho-mental level. When the ego's protective patterns are either paralyzed or forcibly torn open by a drug like LSD the consciousness may be so flooded with some kind of light that it becomes, first, over-excited and productive of a myriad of fantasy-pictures which magnify normal sensations, then blinded by an irruption of the contents of the unconsciousness — as Carl Jung might say.

Whether the results are frightening or exalting is not what matters here. The outcome of a very strong experience, or of several repeated ones, seems to be in most instances — as so many reports show — an at least temporary de-structuring of the consciousness and the sense of what we normally call reality. The person, as it were, is "re-virginized" — or unprogrammed. He or she has become open to the desirability of radical changes — and "available" as a potential agent for forces of social transformation. This openness and availability can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on past body-conditioning, acquired habits and reactions to people stimulating various childhood complexes and fears or adolescent devotional urges. The outcome depends as well as on the family and class environment, the interest in reading, the persons whom the youth meets and befriends, and a variety of apparently fortuitous circumstances.

When a commune is composed of young persons in such a condition, it is likely to have no structured pattern of interpersonal relationship and no positive social purpose. It is essentially a place of refuge. The group operates mostly in terms of feelings, and the very general and vague group purpose is simply to live together in a way as little as possible contaminated by, and free from, the routine of regular job and from commitment to the social systems of the vast majority of the people in America or elsewhere. According to the personal "hangups" of the initiators of the commune, this or that type of practice, group-behavior, and perhaps involvement in a cult or a social-political movement at the time arousing pent-up and potentially explosive emotions, become characteristic features of the group's activity. In some instances the members of the commune still find individually their outside interests or occupations and their mates; in others, there is a quite set way of life — for instance the sharing of certain types of experiences or sexual partners — or a definite routine of work required for the construction of building, the cultivating of the land, etc. But all these more or less routine types of activity do not constitute really a clearly formulatable purpose. If such a purpose exists it tends to be either a group devotion to some Asiatic guru (for instance, the communal groups of the bhakti movement for Krishna-consciousness) — an often naive devotion which may readily change its focus once the first wave of enthusiasm turns into disappointment and a feeling of emptiness or boredom — or simply a general but unfocused interest in all the types of thinking and practice which the official Western tradition and the social and parental Establishment have condemned as undesirable or unethical.

There are nevertheless groups of young people who are forming what has been called "intentional communities" in which the practical as well as the psychological problems which have to be met in everyday living by our modern individuals are faced quite clearly. These communities seek to stress the need for self-improvement and commitment to common ideals, and even the need for Training Centers to prepare the young drop-outs for successful communal living. In this sense, such intentional communities can be said to represent a training ground for an even more purposive type of group consciously operating in terms of historical evolutionary and planetary issues of larger scope. A very valuable discussion relating to all these problems can be found in Alternatives! No. 1 (Fall 1969), edited by Dick Fairfield in Berkeley, California. This issue contains also a long list of communes in the United States, plus the names and addresses of a few more in other countries. Most communes have a short life-span — in part because the young people joining them are really not ready for such a type of communal life in usually hard circumstances (some are indeed rather sick, psychologically) — also because the way in which the commune is started is too haphazard, too unrealistic or at times too dependent upon the personal fascination of a "messianic" kind of originator and leader.

All that I have said so far concerning the most frequent type of communes should not be considered as a criticism of such a type and of its ideals, naive as their members may often be in their belief in instant Utopias, or in rapid ways to attain cosmic consciousness and the mystic state. They represent, in terms of the expected total human transformation, a "pre-conception" stage of development. It is the state of unformed desire, of pure feeling. Of course it is a chaotic state, but chaos is the yearning of the formless and the disintegrated for a future order, as totally new as possible.

Once Communist theoreticians spoke of the virgin masses of the proletariat; but at least in the U.S., "proletariat" is now but an empty name. The potentially fruitful mass is that of the dis-programmed and dis-enchanted youth who, for whatever reason it may be, refuses to accept the traditional American way of life (and in general, most of the premises of Western civilization). But this collective youth does not constitute a "virgin mass"; it is a re-virginized collectivity of available persons — available for anything that can fascinate them. Such an availability constitutes today's great hope — and also, obviously, a serious danger. It would remain a vacant and deceiving hope unless fecundators come and are accepted — the seed-men and the seed-groups. And I am speaking here of a fecundation at the level of the illumined mind, the level where new archetypes — source of basic mutations — can be envisioned or intuitionally felt as dynamic realities.

I spoke already of the evolutionary-cyclic fact that, as a new phase of the process of planetary and all-human development approaches, the pressure of the need resulting from the end-failures (and perhaps the deviant pseudo-successes of the closing cycle) makes new archetypal structures — i.e., new formulas of relationship — available. To this availability "above," an availability "below" should correspond. The human person and the group should be available to incarnate (i.e., embody in the substance of human relationships) these archetypes.

However, it is easy to think of oneself as fully available for the manifestation and promotion of some great purpose, especially if one has been conditioned to think of it as "God's Plan," or as being inherent in a "wave of the future" which inevitably will triumph over the inertial resistance of past institutions and long-accepted dogmas. It is usually much more difficult to transform oneself so thoroughly that, within one's mind-feelings and biological nature, there are no longer obstacles to the exemplification and dissemination of new Images, new forms of relationship, and new ways of life which, for most people today, are only utopian ideals or naive dreams generated by past frustrations.

Many of the youth communes, willing and hoping to become examples of the workability of ideas about developing "alternatives" of social organization, speak of love, of freedom, of sharing many or all of the few things they have, of the availability of each participant to every other; they may use rituals, perhaps the ceremonial partaking of psychedelic substances along lines reminiscent of Native American practices. But very often the most basic issue is the one that deals with the problems relating to sexual relationships; for it is in this area of communal living that the openness, the availability and the actual overcoming of ego-complexes and personal insecurity can be most clearly, tested — and found wanting.

There have been various attempts in European and American communities to practice what is usually called quite senselessly free love; and arguments for, and mainly against, such a practice have been advanced with emotional intensity. As I see it, however, these arguments tend to miss the most significant issues, because they fail to sufficiently take in consideration both the historical-social and the psychological reasons for "free love" in a closely related group of modern individuals. The very term, free love, reveals how nonsensical most of the arguments are, or rather how they simply constitute the emotional rejection of a definite type of relationship which has traditionally accepted and religiously eulogized a purposeful kind of bondage. Free love is presented as an anarchistic revolt against bound love — love bound by social, ethical and religious concepts of what love means and how it should be given expression within, safe and exclusivistic patterns of interpersonal relationship. But how can a true and ideal love-relationship be either bound or binding?

I have already shown how the modern "nuclear" family with its unprecedented narrow focusing of interpersonal relationships — husband, wife, a couple of children living in usually a very small living space in a city-dwelling, or even in a suburban house like hundreds of identical houses — is the product of our industrialized and fragmented Western society. It is a very recent social phenomenon totally different from the old European family. As a theoretically monogamous and monoandrous pattern of living it is unstable and neurosis-producing, and it constantly breaks apart; the man and the woman indulge in often clandestine and hectic extra-conjugal "affairs" which most of the time have little meaning, except that they may relieve some unbearable pressure or emptiness of feelings.

What is at stake in any significant and consciously accepted communal sharing of partners is the extension of the concept of interpersonal relationship; and this involves not only the man-woman relationship, but the parents-children relationship as well, a most important point often left out. What is at stake is not "freedom" in love and sex-relationship, but a new kind of allegiance; and, in the parents-children relationship, it is a new kind of education (in the broadest sense of the word education) which I shall discuss in the following chapter; that is to say, a change from the personal, possessive and ego-directed parents-centered education (badly compensated by an impersonal school education) to a group-centered type.

In other words, the real issue is not freedom vs. bondage, but rather whether, and to what extent, the exclusivism, possessiveness and ego-centering of the present-day narrow family can be transformed, so as to allow for a wider, healthier, more stimulating, more inclusive and more open approach to interpersonal relationship — and therefore to love. Nevertheless, Western men and women have been so intensely conditioned by our patriarchal and theoretically Christian morality that the matter of sexual relations poses deep-rooted problems. Can interpersonal group-love between modern men and women really exist as a stable force if the essential group-feature of the availability of every member of the group to every other is not allowed to operate at one of the most basic levels of human desire, need and activity — the sexual level?

Just because the sexual urge is one of the most fundamental drives in human nature — nearly as fundamental as the hunger for food and for human companionship — it seems important, and perhaps essential, that the process of human transformation be experienced also at this deepest bio-psychical level, the level of sexual activity. Is it not at this level that the greatest victories against the inertial power of life's automatisms and social compulsions could be won?

However, there are two possible answers to these questions; and I shall try to examine them objectively and in relation to the functional differences characterizing two basic types of cultural situations and ideologies, and also of human temperaments or potentialities.

Transformation Through Group-Interpenetration

We have to deal with human beings as they are now, and the basic problem is how to induce a radical transformation of both individuals and society. Where can one begin? Can even an above-average individual person — exceptions notwithstanding — experience a radical transformation alone, and without the change being sparked by some definite relationship, at whatever level this relationship may operate? Is not at least some catalyst necessary for the transformation?

In the past the process of radical change, or "con-version" (literally, being turned together) was often causally linked with a relationship between two persons. It could be the relationship between a guru and his would-be disciple, thus between the "fascinating" exponent and exemplar of a different way of life (whether constructive or destructive) and an individual allowing himself to be thrown off his traditional or egocentric track. It could be also a powerful emotional-sexual relationship between a man and a woman. This love-relationship could, as it were, break down egocentric walls and dispel the gnawing sense of fear and isolation so strong in our modern society. It could do so in an ego-transcending and exalted state of happiness; but it could also operate tragically in terms of a thorough kind of catharsis, perhaps even a psychotic episode — for even psychiatrists today have come to accept the fact that such episodes, if not interfered with, may be as valuable to the total personality, as fever is to the body in its struggle to re-establish its organic balance while fighting against invading viruses.

Such bi-polar types of transformation may still occur today, but the social and psychological situation of mankind no longer favors their occurrence, especially in terms of constructive and spiritually or emotionally exalting experiences. The reason for this should be evident. In the past the individual person was deeply rooted in the compact subsoil of collective traditions and taken-for-granted beliefs implemented by equally collective sanctions. He had to struggle as an individual to emerge from binding matrices; and in this struggle he had most often, if not always, need of some kind of spiritual mid-wife or surgeon. Only after such an emergence (or rebirth) could he discover a few persons who had had similar experiences. He might join an occult "Brotherhood"; but because this Brotherhood had mainly to operate in at least relative secrecy, the situation did not favor unceasing and sustained experiences (and problems) of interpersonal relationship.

Today, especially in America, circumstances are very different. Modern individuals — especially if still quite young — are almost automatically, and often nearly since birth, living "on their own," as isolated egos even if they are parts of the typical present-day family. They are alienated individuals — rootless, without any secure identification with their social collectivity, and anxiously seeking to discover their much advertised, yet elusive personal identity. When they become fascinated by some guru or religious preacher a la Billy Graham, they do so usually within the contagious atmosphere of a mass gathering. It may be a small gathering, yet it is truly a "mass" grouping because the persons in it are only superficially related, or not related at all but merely gathering in terms of mere curiosity or fortuitous happenings such as a public notice or publicity ballyhoo.

The real problem facing most young persons is not how to emerge as individuals from binding attachments to parents, religion and culture, but how to overcome their insulated egos and to transcend the insecurity and the complexes which cause them to feel alienated and "lost." Running away from a family environment to a commune operating merely as a kind of temporary and unstable refuge for lost souls is not the solution. What is needed is a definite and, in a sense at least, definitive whole-hearted participation in a group with a conscious functional purpose to which the young people could dedicate at least a cycle of years in their lives. What is needed is a deep commitment — a commitment which, though it be not formalized or legally contracted, is nevertheless as significant in the quality of its allegiance as a legalized or religiously sanctioned ordinary marriage is.

It is such a quality of commitment, as well as the purposive character and structure of the group, which today might transform a commune into a seed-group. What the commitment involves and indeed logically implies is that the members of the group should experience vividly their interpersonal relationship at whatever level such a relationship would be more integrating and more expressive of interpersonal love and harmony. Quite obviously the characteristic purpose of the group would have much to do with the spontaneous determination of this level; but in all cases there should be not only total availability but also interpenetration. And there are basically three possible levels of interpenetration: biological-emotional, mental, and psychic (or psycho-spiritual).

At the biological-emotional level interpersonal sexual relationship is basic, whether or not the begetting and education of children is implied; but more than actual sexual interpenetration should be, and indeed inevitably is, involved. There is a transcendent occult aspect of sex; or, let us say, the fundamental rhythmic vibration which is the root-reality of the sexual act has many overtones. Just as the most beautiful and moving instrumental tones are composed almost exclusively of overtones, while the fundamental in them is only an implied presence (implied but none the less effective as an inaudible vibration), so the love-relationship between two human beings can emphasize the synchronizing of overtones, the strictly sexual fundamental nevertheless being a deeply felt presence within the united auric fields of the lovers.

At the mental level there can also be interpenetration, but in this case mind would need to be polarized by feeling, or else completely illumined by a super-mental spiritual Reality, otherwise conflicts would tend to arise which would translate themselves eventually and almost inevitably in group discord. Mind is a formative power, and each individual thinker tends to feel rigid concerning his mental formulations; which leads to discussions often proving centrifugal and disintegrative in their effect upon the group harmony. For this reason, it is at one of the two levels above-mentioned that the key to group-integration is to be found — possibly at both.

The psychic, or psycho-spiritual level of interpenetration is clearly in evidence in what is called in India an ashram; but unfortunately, perhaps, the popular concept of what the essential reality of an ashram is fails to take in consideration the basic character of such special groups — among which we may also include Eastern and Western monastic communities. What characterizes all these groups is the shifting of the basic issue of group integration from the biological-sexual to the psychic-spiritual level. The group, in principle at least, is based on an interpenetration of psyches (or souls) and not of bodies (or electro-magnetic fields).

Such a type of interpenetration absolutely requires a common devotion to an integrating symbolic Image or an Exemplar, either living within the group, or discarnate, yet powerful as a hidden Presence. In the traditional Hindu ashram the guru is active, in his own mysterious and often a-logical way, and the disciples gathered around him worship him as a direct or indirect incarnation of the Deity or of some special aspect of the Divine Power, Wisdom and Love.

This situation existed in the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry, but in a modernized and broader sense, mostly through the overpowering and "fascinating" presence of Mother Mira, a French-born woman who has guided the development of the ashram for more than forty years. A few years ago she inspired and, even now in her mid-nineties, is overseeing the actualization of the ideal city of Auroville, near Pondicherry.

I said "guided," but it is far more than guidance; for the entire ashram, and at least in its initial stages Auroville itself, have been unfolding within the joint "auras" of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Thus one should speak of psychic containment rather than of guidance in an external or paternalistic sense. The ashram exists within the Mother's extended psyche. The disciples are integrated in it as embryonic cells within a womb. They interpenetrate at the psycho-spiritual level; and this is what constitutes a real ashram. When the Theosophists speak of the ashram of a "Master of wisdom" they likewise mean, or should mean, a group of spiritually and occultly evolved individuals unfolding their highest human potentialities within a magnetic-spiritual field which could be considered an extension of the Master's aura. Whatever each member of the ashram feels, thinks and does registers automatically in some manner in the Master's consciousness, and is to some extent at least directly influenced by it.

In Buddhist or Christian monasteries and nunneries similar, but probably more diffuse, conditions exist. The integrative Images are those of the Divine Founder and Exemplar — Buddha or Christ — and of the Buddhist Sangha or Catholic Church. The bio-sexual drives of the members of these monastic communities are repressed and theoretically sublimated. There have been outstanding instances of intense love between a monk and a nun — particularly the great love between St. Francis and Sta. Clara in the Medieval period — but this love had become totally transcendent and psycho-spiritual. So must have been the love between Sri Aurobindo and "the Mother." Indeed the Auroville project has been presented as the social-spiritual progeny of their occult and mystical union.(1)

Availability and Discrimination

The ashram type of group can be quite large, though in ancient India it probably gathered only a few disciples. In the Christian tradition we find the Apostolic group — a real ashram — including only twelve persons. The original group surrounding the Persian Prophet, the Bab, had eighteen members, the Bab himself being the 19th. When we consider what I have called a seed-group, in which there is no dominant central and "divine" Personage, but where the participants should operate (at least theoretically and relatively) as equals, a smaller number of individuals should in most cases be preferable. A minimum would seem to be between three and eight. These small groups, of course, might gather in larger associations or "communities" united by a common purpose; these in turn could participate in still broader social or spiritual Movements. What is essential is that the participants should come to the group strictly as individuals — and at least in principle, as "free" individuals without prior attachments.

The seed-group operating at the bio-emotional and magnetic level of interpenetration is to be conceived also as an "alchemical" group. What it is meant first to accomplish is a transformation of the quality of the relationship between the participants, a transformation which does not require a repudiation of personal intimacy and magnetic interchange — thus asceticism — but instead a reorientation and repolarization of the attitude toward such interchanges. Whereas sexual interaction in the traditional marriage operates ideally as a closed relationship, it should be considered, according to the group-ideal, an open relationship — which in no way implies what is usually called a promiscuous, superficial, or over-permissive and undiscriminating attitude toward body-contacts.

In considering these most of the time misunderstood matters, one should always refer them to the larger all-human issue, that is, to the eventual establishment of a global society founded upon the principle of functional differentiation, spiritual equality, and harmonic operation consciously in tune with the great rhythms of the Earth and the cosmos. Only a radical and basic transformation of all human relationships will make such a society possible. This transformation must begin somewhere. It must first take place "in seed," as a mutation. The seed-group, as I envision it, is the "holy place" (maqom in Hebrew) where this mutation can occur. Mutation at this stage of human evolution implies a conscious transmutation of the feeling-response to close interpersonal relationships, as well as of the concept of relationship. At the present stage of human evolution such a conscious transformation may find its deepest challenge in the bio-psychic focusing of love, which today normally takes the form of "sex".

In the ashram or monastic type of group, the repudiation of sex is logical and perhaps necessary because the basic relationship of the members of the guru-centered or Church-centered community is to a transcendent Personage or mystically experienced Presence. Every cloistered nun is symbolically married to Christ, the God-man; every devotee of Krishna becomes one of the many gopis united in intensely emotional love with the divine Avatar. The fundamental goal is not the transformation of the person-to-person relationship, but the establishment of a total absorption of the person's feelings and consciousness into an exclusive relationship to a divine Personage, and ultimately to God Himself, but God as a person.(2)

One might call such a relationship between a human person and a divine Personage a "vertical" relationship; and there is obviously no place for a physical type of sexual activity in these relationships. If the type of energy normally expressed in such an activity is present in the vertical relationship it is under a completely transmuted or transubstantialized aspect leading to what is usually called mystical experiences of "union." But when one deals with the process of building a new type of society through group-activity, one operates in terms of "horizontal" relationship — relationships between "equals." It is such a type of horizontal relationship, between individuals who are both inherently equal and operating in a functional manner in order to exemplify the great principle of universal harmony, which today has become so important.

Important though they be, these horizonal relationships are still haunted by the ghosts of traditions which refer to a different phase of human and social evolution. These ghostly presences act at both the mental and the feeling levels. They act in terms of intellectual dogmatism and emotional exclusivism. They set rigid boundaries around interpersonal relationships. Boundaries are valuable as focusing factors; the question is whether mankind today can progress under the continued use of a narrow and rigid focusing of interpersonal relationships, or it is necessary to broaden significantly this traditional type of focusing in order to establish a harmonic and all-inclusive world-society.

To broaden the focus does not mean to become unfocused; but it is probably inevitable that the first phase of such a broadening operation should start with a youthful and impulsive (if not compulsive) revolt against all that focalizes and structures interpersonal relationships. The usual youth-commune tends to be pervaded with such a revolt. The participants in a seed-group should have overcome such an initial tendency, and they should be willing to accept a "ritualization" of not only their joint activities, but also their feeling-responses to interpersonal relationships. The group should discover its own intrinsic structure (i.e., the structure which enables it collectively to actualize in optimal conditions its potential of creativity and social effectiveness.) Such a group-potential is the fruition of the interaction of personalities having become at least relatively free from egocentric and ancestral conditioning.

What this practically means would depend on the particular group situation. Ideals have often strange ways of becoming concrete actualities. No one in his senses would want to lay down rules and regulations on matters dealing with the most sensitive, most intimate, yet most potent area of interpersonal relationship. The simple and evident fact is that, today, and especially in the Western world, sex is there to be dealt with. It has to be understood, for today it is in most individual lives not only a biological drive, but often far more a psychological urge to overcome isolation, loneliness, and the "cramps in the conscious" of which Carl Jung vividly spoke.(3) This psychological aspect of sex is most potent in many cases today, even if people are not aware of it and keep up the pretense of having to placate a mere biological urge, while in fact such an urge very often is mostly a habit, or, today, with many young people, a fashionable form of protest against the rules and regulations which their parents loudly invoke, only to break them at the first opportunity.

The essential issue is not what is done at the sexual, or near-sexual and emotional, level, but how and why it is done. It is the quality of the attitude of the participants; and the basic problem, in most personal instances, is bound to be the overcoming of possessiveness and — in one of its many and often subtle forms — jealousy. It is for this reason that a clear grasp of what availability means and how availability should be complemented by and integrated with discrimination is so important.

In the old time large family — and of course in the archaic tribe — every kinsman was available to every other, including even in terms of vendettas spanning several generations. One could dislike greatly a brother, uncle or cousin; yet one would antomatically be available for support in case of need and attack. Within the old-time family, however, morality excluded not only sexual rapports but even too close body-contacts or shows of affection.

The situation is different in the communal groups in which there no blood ties, thus no incest taboo. The externalized emotional aspects of love tends to be given free-play in very close embraces, even if not in actual, or rather in "focused," sexual activity. I speak of focused" activity because every close body contact can be considered unfocused or potentially stimulating sexual activity, once the body-consciousness is freed from specialization and taboos.

Where there is deep and vibrant interpersonal love at a more or intense and emotional feeling level the readiness to share should in evidence. Yet should it be total sharing (or sharing within limits?) if it is within limits, what or who sets the limits?

In order to answer these questions I shall return for a moment to the role which the ego plays in the development of a person.

The ego limits the field of consciousness so that during childhood and adolescence the mind and conscious processes may develop within this limited field; which means, without being subjected to a vast amount and variety of unrelated information, confusing pressures, contradictions and emotional problems too great for the slowly developing young brain and nervous system to assimilate. The ego-structure screens out the undesirable information or experience. It seeks to keep relationships, feelings and thinking patterns simple enough not to endanger the sense of value, thus the making of the many decisions which must be taken in everyday life.

The main problem with the young generation is that TV, radios, magazines and frequent travels have forced upon children and adolescents an undigestible mass of information and scenes of interpersonal relationship (including love-making) which tends to overwhelm their ego-function. The reaction is to develop a very defensive ego; and aggression, we are told, is the best form of defense. This defensive ego is the greatest obstacle to sharing; and the concentration on the defense of one's ego-patterns—glorified under the name of fighting for one's integrity or self-identity — blocks the universal feeling of love and the full blending of polarities in bi-polar human love. It is indeed "safer" for the ego-dominated individual to limit to one person his or her eagerness for total sharing and his or her surrenders — just as it is much simpler for the mind to think in terms of Aristotelian either-or logic than to try to harmonize opposites and integrate many aspects and levels of reality in a multi-faceted whole.

Nevertheless, especially for the men and women of our society, the necessity for sharing in group-relationship might be the most effective means to broaden the capacity for love — if it is impossible to universalize it entirely — a very difficult goal possibly reserved to a few Buddha-like and Christ-like personages. A commune should be an expanded field of interpersonal relationships pervaded by love and real tenderness; and this essentially means a warm and spontaneous availability to need. The main problem, however, is whether what is made available can be received and assimilated by other persons — i.e., whether ego-blocks are unconsciously set on the path of the flow of love toward the person needing its healing or whole-making power. The recipient may be unable to respond to the quality or the level of the love, perhaps because of fear of being too absorbed in another person. The greatest obstacle to group-sharing is the inability of the ego — and secondarily of the body — to let go of its insecurity and its tight concentration upon keeping its boundaries intact and inviolate. Fear and insecurity constitute the foundation of possessiveness, jealousy, ill-will, defensiveness, prudery and, in general, of the will to be separate. However, this will to be separate in a psychological ego-sense should not be confused with the desire for privacy in order to concentrate on a work or on such inner activity as meditation.

Still a practical question must be answered in each specific interpersonal or group situation: how to combine discrimination and sharing — not only in feelings of love but also in terms of the communication of thoughts and spiritual experiences. Is "the Other" ready to receive? Will the giving assist the person's self-actualization process, or confuse it? Unintelligent and undiscriminating love often causes tragedies or over-dependence. Can, or should, the sharing-in-love within a small group of individuals deeply aware of their interrelationship be identical to that between a single pair of lover and beloved, of husband and wife? Should the group-sharing be totally uninhibited and unconstrained, or must sexual restrictions remain — and if so, up to which point?

This of course depends largely on the individuals' feeling and conceptual image of what sex actually means. What is today the purpose of sex for men and women who have freed their consciousness from the hypocritical dogmas of our Western civilization — and, first of all, is their consciousness really and totally free, or only intellectually free, leaving their bodies and nervous system bound to ancestral memories and personal ghosts?

To What Use Sex?

Most people take sex for granted. If you ask someone: what is sex for? — you are likely to be confronted with a puzzled look — as if you had asked: what is food for — or going to the toilet for. Most people see sex as an organic function to be taken care of according to certain traditional rules and regulations which have a moral as well as bio-social justification. The rules are now ignored far more extensively than ever before, by young and old; but this so-called sexual freedom does not imply that the majority of men and women are giving an individually conscious and deliberately developed meaningto their sexual activities. There are collective fashions in sexual behavior and fashionably intellectual ways of studying what is implied physiologically, psychologically and socially in sexual relationships.

Sexual activity has, of course, been identified with pleasure-seeking and with the stimulating or exalting release of pent-up glandular nervous and emotional energy. Is it, however, what gives to sex its essential character, or merely a superficial way of approaching such a basic functional drive in man? Man's ability to experience sex in all seasons separates him from the animal and vegetable kingdoms. But is this unique freedom from seasonal — and thus from purely biological and procreative — rhythms given its essential meaning if sex is merely a means for nervous excitement and pleasurable experiences? What the sexual possibilities open to men and women suggest is that a truly "human" sexual relationship is far more than a biological release of glandular products (ovum and sperm) for reproductive purposes.

When sexual reproduction developed in the evolutionary process of life on this Earth and it superseded the process of cell-division (mitosis) in an unsexed organism, its purpose was evidently to make possible a wide range of genetic combinations, that is, to increase immensely the scope and variety of biological features and of generic responses to ever more complex existential situations.

At the human level of evolution, biological traits can be, and now usually are, overshadowed by cultural-social characteristics. Human relationships operate, then, at two basic levels, biological (with psychic and emotional overtones) and cultural; and today our culture stresses intellectual activity and mental ambition. The biological level is at this time quite stabilized in its functional activities; but the cultural-mental level experiences periodically profound upheavals, and we are today in the midst of such a world-wide, all human upheaval.

Sexuation divided the primitive asexual organisms so as to produce diversity in biological organization; and biological diversity in turn led to a great variety of human cultures, each with its own symbols, its own language and its own characteristic types of relationships. These cultures became matrices for the development of individualized persons, each with its own basic individual rhythm, or self. The sex factor, in correlation with the mind, has had much to do with this process of individualization, for sexuation retained at the cultural human level its original evolutionary purpose; i.e., making possible a great variety of combinations producing different life-responses.

Today we are confronted with the crucial need of bringing harmony and some sort of all-inclusive structural order to the immensely increased number of differentiated individuals who not only feel different and unique, but are unable to break through the insulating mechanisms of their ego-controlled consciousness and, as a result, feel unrelated and alienated. These individuals yearn for experiences in which they would feel intensely their "common humanity" instead of their own ego-singularities. For this reason they have been led to seek in drugs pseudo-mystical "unitive" experiences, and to return to nature, body-consciousness and unstructured sexual relationships. Could sex, which once appeared in biological evolution as a factor of differentiation, be now used as a force for the harmonization and integration of anarchistic ego-centered individuals?

There seem to be two basic answers to this question. One is totally negative, insisting that sex can never be used for truly integrative spiritual purposes. It claims that only through the total repudiation of sexual activity and the utter dismissal of sexual imaginations can an elite of human beings lead the masses of men and women to a social state in which union and sex-transcending love can prevail. The other answer accepts as a fact the nearly universal fascination with sexual experiences even in men and women most open to the ideal of world-harmony and human unity, but accepts the possibility of allowing sex to serve a basic purpose in the process of all-human transformation.

The first answer is the ascetic answer, the ashram type of development of consciousness through a total refocusing of sexual-emotional feelings and energies upon a devotional-mystical relationship with God or an incarnate God-man (i.e., an Avatar). It is the second answer which I am trying to discuss here in terms of the needs of and the possibilities open to modern individuals — especially in the Western world.

How can sex be "used" consciously? Certainly not in ways that are over-individualistic, haphazard, hectic, sensation-seeking, purely hedonistic and ego-satisfying or ego-glorifying — or as a youthful protest and a resentful challenge to hypocritical parents. Sex could presumably be used as a structured, constructive and creatively integrative force if it would be considered not an end in itself, a pleasurable diversion, or merely the release of glandular and nervous energies, but instead a means to anchor more deeply the love pervading interpersonal relationships in organic, or etheric-magnetic experiences. These experiences may take various forms, depending on the character of the participants. Again, it is not what is done which is important, but how and why it is done — and this ultimately can only depend on the quality of the interpersonal relationships, which in turn means the quality of the feelings, the imagination, the thoughts and the dedication of men and women to a super-personal purpose.

One has to be realistic and to face objectively the world-situation and the average family set-up in America without any feeling of dependence upon traditions and religious imperatives. Once, they certainly were valid; but are they not now obsolete? This obsolescence evidently does not apply to all cases, and very likely not to the great majority of human beings. But the path leading to the basic transformation both of individuals and of society is never followed by the majority, silent or vocal as it may be. Seeds constitute a small portion of the material substance of a plant; but in fall time only the seeds matter. Theirs is the responsibility for the future vegetation; and to discharge this responsibility they must, first, be impervious to the action of chemicals resulting from the disintegration of the leaves dampened by rain and snow; then, accept the ritual sacrifice of germination.

It cannot be an easy path. To change the quality of the love-sex relationship between a man and a woman, and between this man and woman and other men and women, is certainly no easier than total sexual abstention while one is enfolded within the aura of a true ashram. In the ideal seed-group the individual person must not only be himself or herself, but also an organ of the whole group-organism. In the group the individual realizes his potentiality by being more-than-individual — and certainly no less than he ever was. He surrenders his fears, his insecurity, his isolation much more than in the usual type of exclusivistic marriage, because he has the possibility to act in different roles, in relationship with different persons of different rhythms and feeling-responses. His capacity for interpersonal relationship should become "polyvalent"; and as this capacity expands, so should also his interests and his appreciation of human values and of the intricate texture of society.

The child of today is subjected to a multitude of involved and usually dramatic or trival interpersonal relationships as he watches day after day his television set. But this is a "subjection," a passive approach to human realities; and this attitude of passivity may remain with him for a long time, perhaps through his whole life. The life of the ideal group is a life in which each participant not only shares and is available, but acts and gives spontaneously of his being; the very depths of this being are being challenged by the constant dynamic interplay of a multi-level type of relationships — relationships pervaded through and through with unpossessive and compassionate love. If there is not such a love, then the group must be a failure.

Needless to say, such an ideal of group-living would demand for its actualization men and women of rare character and lucid mind; and at present there do not seem to be too many. The experiences with psychedelic drugs may have helped a large number of persons to break away from some aspects of their social-cultural bondage. They may have had fascinating experiences of de-focusing, experiences which are too easily interpreted as "cosmic consciousness," yet which most likely are only the reflections of such a consciousness upon a wide open, unprotected mind acting as a lake reflecting full moon light and the immensity of the sky. Such intoxicating experiences, even in the best instances, leave results whose meaning is yet to be assessed and fully understood. There is deconditioning and disorganizing. One can only have faith that a stage of reorganizing and restructuring will take place, giving to the young people upon whom so much depends the emotional stability and the mental clarity required to establish new and wider, yet steady and constructive, modes of interpersonal relationship.

They need to rise above a constant preoccupation with their personal and psychological problems. They need to look at their society and at mankind as a whole with a wider angle of vision — to identify with the large picture of human evolution. All that I have said concerning group relationship and the man-woman relationship makes little sense unless it is seen and given meaning in terms of such a large picture.

How many will be able to do so? One often wonders. It is easy to dream of love and peace, but very hard indeed to satisfy the conditions required for the actualization of the dream. Yet "great dreams" have made history. The inconspicuous seeds invisible in the decaying humus of autumnal woods make the future vegetation.

Still, many seeds decay, whose protective envelopes were not strong enough. Strength is needed; it will be needed perhaps increasingly. One must learn where, when and how to be hard. Above all, one must be centered. True love flows from center to center. It demands courage, patience, inner peace, and creative imagination — essential virtues for whoever would want to be truly a participant in a seed-group. It demands faith in the future, creative faith in the victory of man over the inertia of institutions and the down-pull of reactionary forces — faith in the overcoming of fear and insecurity, of lust and anger, of selfishness and greed.


1. cf. the issue of the magazine =1, devoted to the inauguration of Aurovile, February 1968. (The preceding paragraphs were written before the Mother's death in November 1973).    Return

2. The ideal marriage in the patriarchal Hindu society was one in which the woman totally lost her identity in her love for her husband, who became indeed specifically her guru. It therefore had to be an exclusive relationship and the sexual aspect of it was theoretically impersonal — a manifestation at the human level of the cosmic polarization of energies. A boy and a girl did not get married for personal reasons and in order to live personal lives.    Return

3. cf. Jung's memorial address at Richard Wilhelm's funeral included in The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Wilhelm from Chinese.    Return

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