The Teachers: Vinoba Bhave and Ideal Community

Vinoba Bhave was an Indian figure of the mid-20th Century who was elevated to sainthood through the popularity he gained through his staunch adherence to principles of decentralizing government to that of more self-regulating local or regional collectives--usually of agrarian orientation. I became aware of what many refer to as Vinoba Bhave's "peaceful anarchism" as a result of my 'accidental' attraction to writings about utopianism--which led to my initial awakening to and awareness of alternate ideals of government, including the various forms and practices of anarchism, communism and socialism. My consciousness was greatly enhanced through the writings and works of Plato, Thomas More, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin, Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Mohandas Gandhi.
     Vinoba Bhave was, in fact, a contemporary and friend of Gandhi. For a time the two were even on the same page in terms of political agendas for their native India. But, eventually, Vinoba veered away from Gandhi's nationalism in favor of a focus on restoring power and autonomy back to smaller localities.
     According to its official census from 2001, India has 122 major languages and 1599 other languages. Figures from other sources vary as to the accuracy of these numbers--primarily due to differences in definition of the terms "language" and "dialect." India's 2001 Census recorded 30 languages which were spoken by more than a million native speakers and 122 which were spoken by more than 10,000 people. Coming from Raigad District of Maharashtra, Vinoba Bhave was a native speaker of Marathi--a language in which he chose to write and speak for the majority of his lifetime. With these statistics in mind, it is easy to understand why Vinoba thought that centralized rule over so many ethnicities was wrong. It was ludicrous. And arrogant.
     Vinoba invested little faith or praise in the achievements of modern industry and technology. In terms of what is best for the individual soul, for all humans involved, he believed that the more natural state of small community promoted the personal and mutually supportive interdependence that allowed both healthy and successful relationships both physically but also psycho-spiritually. Thus, Vinoba was in favor of returning power to small states which allowed peaceful consensual autonomy within agricultural-based communal areas.

     My discovery of the belief in the health inherent in small community-based autonomous collectives living peacefully with trade and travel agreements with neighbors was the answer to my own internal quandaries. To see that anarchism--or the lack of over-arching authority--could be achieved and maintained peacefully through the small community made absolute sense to me. Peaceful, communal living guided by open, consensual decision-making, going back to agrarian orientation and values, is, in my opinion, the answer to the best living conditions for healthy human societies, for healthy human psyches. Global unity through global government and a global economy is, in my opinion, not the structure to best facilitate the realization of the highest potentialities for the majority of humans; globalization is not the means to successful mastery of human beings' basic needs. In fact, one might easily prove that globalization has the exact opposite effect on individuals--that it promotes fear, isolation, insufficiency, separation, and struggle. Vinoba Bhave and I want to see every human being have an equal chance for successful mastery of the human condition or, as Abraham Maslow put it, the chance to achieve Self-actualization, the highest rung of his Hierarchy of Needs pyramid. This is what my gut tells me--what it has been telling me for millennia.
     Vinoba's and my intuitive beliefs are being well-supported by modern social psychology. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has suggested that there is a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person in the group. One's "social network." Social scientists can now agree that the number of capacity for successfully active human social interaction (and interdependence) is between 100 and 250 people. The size of a village. Like the cooperative agrarian villages of Vinoba Bhave. Coincidentally, it was revealed to me in my most recent Life-Between-Life session that the Community of Monads with whom I work is numbered at 89.

     Such small "villages" are perfect for autonomous self-regulating consensual anarchism. In agriculturally focused life there is no need to seek resources from others, no need to use aggression to solve problems, no need to move or leave in order to meet individual needs as all food and simple needs are met from within the collective or through peaceful trade with neighboring collectives. This is the "anarchism" Vinoba Bhave taught--and practiced. Vinoba walked for years over India asking property owners to share, to give, to donate property to others, especially to the poor and destitute, to those that Nature had shorted. He was a believer and practitioner of social equality and inalienable basic human rights.  

     Though many writers have written fictitious accounts of perfect societies--utopias, eutopias, dystopias, and the like--the number of active experiments in living a kind of ideal-based social life has usually taken the form of small intentional communities--of which there have been many. The young United States was a haven for experimental communities, some religiously motivated, others politically and economically so. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, Roger Williams' Rhode Island, William Penn's Quaker state, James Oglethorpe's egalitarian Savannah and Georgia colonies, New Chautauqua, New Harmony, Oberlin, Brook Farm, Oneida, The Amana Colonies, Home Washington, Seneca, Auburn, Twin Oaks, The Farm, Esalen, Kripalu, etc., etc., the list goes on and on, from 1620 to the present.
     Communal village life was still a common organizational system in rural agrarian France even into the 1980s. I know. I had friends at University who came from such entities. And these village communes worked. They worked because everyone knew each other, because everyone was in active relationship with one another. These bonds of familiarity bred trust and interdependence. In these villages there was no need for property laws. Food and labor were shared, distributed amongst all of the villagers. Community decision-making was done collectively, with all individuals valued by being given equal voice and equal authority. People get along because they know each other personally, because they know and understand the relationships among all of their village members.   

     The modern-day Amish practice a similar kind of communal self-regulation. They choose to organize their communities into "districts" of usually not more than 30 families. With their practice of raising large families (it is common for an Amish woman to bear and raise ten or more children over her lifetime), this could mean gatherings of up to 300 people (or more) for their religious, family, and work celebrations. Having spent some quality time within our local Amish community, working with families and with their individual family members, it feels to me as if Vinoba would have been pleased to see much of the Amish choices in lifestyle. I admire and commend the Amish for being able to sustain their devout principles and practices despite the influences and pressures of the Industrialized "English" world surrounding them, even interlaced within their own.

     Vinoba Bhave was a figure of transmission, a person whose ideals and practices were unique, unusual, and admired well-enough to have been recognized and recorded by history. It just happens that my exposure to translations and interpretations of Vinoba Bhave's practices and ideals helped to (re-)awaken within me knowledge and values that had been hitherto hidden to my conscious mind but which resonated thoroughly with my own.
     I never met or knew Vinoba Bhave. Still, I consider him to be one of my teachers. His presence on the planet inspired others to record for posterity his works and words so that people like me could find inspiration--could awaken with in the Spirit of them Selves versions of their own Truth that may have been obscured, diverted or repressed. What was once hidden is now awake and alive. (Again.) That is the essence of the effects of teachers:  They awaken that which was inside you all along but was before hidden and waiting.