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Insight

Swadharma, a learning journey towards wholeness

Manoj Pavitran

Abstract
Does finding one’s swadharma, one’s own law of being, have any bearing on the health and well-being
of an individual and society? Our current education system is a by-product of the Industrial Revolution
and thinks in terms of batch-production ignoring the individual. The idea of the human being as an
evolving soul with a unique evolutionary past and its gifts and mission in life is still not part of our
mainstream ideas of education and its pedagogy. This is a serious error resulting in individual and
collective disorder and demands innovative solutions. Since 2016, Auroville has been offering five-week
long educational programmes focusing on the idea of swadharma for youths aged between 18 to 28 from
around the world.

Swadharma and our psychological centre means confusion, disorder and finally decline
and loss of vitality (1).”
Often the Sanskrit word swadharma is translated
as ‘one’s duty’ and this brings to mind the Our approach to swadharma is from this
notions of external social responsibilities or perspective. Swadharma is not an external
moral and legal obligations. However, that’s duty one must perform in a society based
not how Sri Aurobindo renders its meaning: on any economically or culturally formed
social roles. Swadharma is one’s own law of
“... to live in one’s self, determining one’s self- being, an inside-out movement arising from
expression from one’s own centre of being one’s own inmost centre. Such a movement
in accordance with one’s own law of being, is fundamental to the integration, order and
swadharma, is the first necessity. Not to be able vitality of life and therefore the well-being
to do that means disintegration of the life; not of the individual and society. According to
to do it sufficiently means languor, weakness, the Mother:
inefficiency, the danger of being oppressed by
the environing forces and overborne; not to be “We give the name ‘psychic’ to the psychological
able to do it wisely, intuitively, with a strong centre of our being, the seat within us, of the
use of one’s inner material and inner powers, highest truth of our existence, that which can

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