The Mother explained the true spirit of collective yoga as follows: “Yet it [religion] is one of the most common types of human collectivity—to group together, band together, unite around a common ideal, a common action, a common realization but in an absolutely artificial way. In contrast to this, Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true community—what he terms a gnostic or a supramental community —can be based only upon the INNER REALIZATION of each one of its members, each realizing his real, concrete oneness and identity with all the other members of the community; that is each one should not feel himself a member connected to all the others in an arbitrary way, but that all are one within himself. For each one, the others should be as much himself as his own body—not in a mental and artificial way , but through a fact of consciousness, by an inner realization.
(silence)
This means that before hoping to realize such a gnostic collectivity, each one must first of all become (or at least start to become) a gnostic being. It is obvious that the individual work must take the lead and the collective work will follow; but the fact remains that spontaneously, without any arbitrary intervention of will, the individual progress is restrained or CHECKED, as it were, by the collective state. Between the collectivity and the individual, there exists an interdependence from which one can not be totally free, even if one tries. And even he who might try, in this yoga, to free himself totally from the human and terrestrial state of consciousness, would be at least subconsciously bound by the state of the whole, which impedes and PULLS BACKWARDS. One can attempt to go much faster, one can attempt to let all the weight of attachments and responsibilities fall off, but in spite of everything, the realization of even the most advanced or the leader in the march of evolution is dependent upon the realization of the whole, dependent upon the state in which the terrestrial collectivity happens to be. And this PULLS backwards to such an extent that sometimes one has to wait centuries for the earth to be ready before being able to realize what is to be realized. This is why Sri Aurobindo has also written somewhere else that a double movement is necessary: the effort for individual progress and realization must be combined with the effort of trying to uplift the whole so as to enable it to make a progress indispensable for the greater progress of the individual: a mass progress, if you will, that allows the individual to take a further step forward. And now you understand why I had thought it would be useful to have a few meditations in common, to work at creating a common atmosphere a bit more organized…..
So the best way to use these meditations…. is to go deep within yourselves, as far as you can, and find the place where you can feel, perceive and perhaps even create an atmosphere of oneness wherein a force of order and organization can put each element in its true place, and out of the chaos of existing at this hour, make a new, harmonious world surge forth.”
—Agenda, July 3, 1957