Sadvipras

The board records, under yogic science, the most forceful of Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti's reversals: he overthrew the old idea that spiritual practice must be done apart from society, and held that sadhana without active social service amounts to spiritual exploitation. The sadvipra is the person in whom that reversal is complete.

The word joins sat, meaning true or good, to vipra, one whose mind is developed. A sadvipra is someone who has taken on the full discipline of the practices — meditation, ethics, service — and who turns the strength gained from them outward, to the collective. In PROUT's theory of history, society moves through a cycle in which each ruling mentality in turn becomes exploitative; sadvipras are the people who push the cycle forward before that happens, and who belong to no class in it because they have the qualities of all four: the labourer's capacity for work, the warrior's courage, the intellectual's clarity and the acquisitor's practical sense.

What makes the concept a contribution to yogic science rather than to politics is where the qualification lies. A sadvipra is not elected and cannot be appointed. The role is the outcome of practice — of a person who has nothing to protect and nothing to accumulate, and so has no reason to exploit — and the board's note on new leadership puts it in those terms: courage without wisdom destroys, so the leaders a society needs are those whose inner work has removed the motive.

The idea is demanding, and Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti meant it to be. It sets the standard against which the movement measures its own workers, and it is the link between the two halves of his teaching, the inward path and the outward one.