Developing the Principles of a Gnostic Society

When we look at the organisation of human society today, based on the physical, vital and mental formations that bring people together based on commonality of physical need, vital relationship and mental ideas, we see either that there is a close common bond that ties people together; or else, in a pluralistic society, we see the attempt to develop a working social order based on mutuality and compromise (when the society is succeeding to some degree in its efforts to accomodate different views–some societies become failed communities due to their inability to find a working accomodation).

It is insufficient, in Sri Aurobindo’s viewpoint, to simply effectuate the perfection of the spiritual individual, both within himself and in relation to the world around him. The third desired result is the transformation of society to a new basis…”a new world, a change in the total life of humanity or, at the least, a new perfected collective life in the earth-nature.”

Such a perfected society would take on the characteristics of a unified, organic oneness with an automatic harmony based on an intimate unity of all its constituent parts, as Sri Aurobindo describes it “a common consciousness consolidating a common life.”

“All will be united by the evolution of the Truth-Consciousness in them; in the changed way of being which this consciousness would bring about in them, they will feel themselves to be embodiments of a single self, souls of a single Reality; illumined and motived by a fundamental unity of knowledge, actuated by a fundamental united will and feeling, a life expressing the spiritual Truth would find through them its own natural forms of becoming. An order there would be, for truth of oneness creates its own order: a law or laws of living there might be, but these would be self-determined; they would be an expression of the turth of a spiritually united being and the truth of a spiritually united life. The whole formation of the common existence would be a self-building of the spiritual forces that must work themselves out spontaneously in such a life: these forces would be received inwardly by the inner being and expressed or self-expressed in a native harmony of idea and action and purpose.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 28, “The Divine Life”