Prosperity Based on Minimum Needs

The Mother's Dream

The bodily needs of each one would be equally provided for, and intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but by increased duties and responsibilities.

Beauty in all its artistic forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, would be equally accessible to all; the ability to share in the joy it brings would be limited only by the capacities of each one and not by social or financial position.

For in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social standing. There, work would not be a way to earn one’s living but a way to express oneself and to develop one’s capacities and possibilities while being of service to the community as a whole, which, for its own part, would provide for each individual’s subsistence and sphere of action.

- The Mother, A Dream, CWM XII, Aug 1954

It is a sort of adaptation of the communist system, but not in a spirit of levelling; according to the capacity, the position―not the psychological or intellectual, but the inner position of each one.

What is true is that materially every human being has the right―but it is not a “right”… The organisation should be such, should be so arranged, that the material needs of everyone are assured, not according to ideas of rights and equality, but on the basis of the minimum needs. And once that is established, each one should be free to organise his life according to―not according to his financial means, but his inner capacities.

--The Mother, CWM XIII, 30 December 1967

There’s something very interesting on a psychological level: it’s that material needs decrease in proportion to the spiritual growth. Not (as Sri Aurobindo said), not through asceticism, but because the focus of attention and concentration of the being moves to a different domain…. The purely material being, quite conceivably, finds only material things pleasing; with all those who live in the emotive being and the outer mind, the interest of the being is turned to… for instance, things of beauty, as with those who want to live surrounded by beautiful things, who want to use nice things. Now that appears to be the human summit, but it’s quite… what we might call a “central region” (gesture hardly above ground level), it’s not at all a higher region. But the way the world is organized, people without aesthetic needs go back to a very primitive life—which is wrong. We need a place where life… where the very setting of life would be, not an individual thing, but a beauty that would be like the surroundings natural to a certain degree of development.

Now, as things are organized, to be surrounded by beautiful things you need to be rich, and that’s a source of imbalance, because wealth usually goes with quite an average degree of consciousness, even mediocre at times. So there’s everywhere an imbalance and a disorder. We would need… a place of beauty—a place of beauty in which people can live only if they have reached a certain degree of consciousness. And let it not be decided by other people, but quite spontaneously and naturally. So how to do that?…

Problems of that sort are beginning to come up at Auroville, and that makes the thing very interesting. Of course, the means are very limited, but that also is part of the problem to be solved.

--The Mother, Agenda V11, 25 March, 1970