A Forecomer revisits

I came to South India and met Mother totally by chance. I left New York in the late 1960s because I made the decision to use urethane foam as a sculpting material. It worked very well, but the fumes from the process were toxic and I had to radically detoxify through fasting.

I decided to get out of the city for a while and travel. I finally arrived by boat in Madras.

I wanted to study yoga and at the Theosophical Society I was told that the best place to study it was Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram in Pondicherry. After a terrible bus journey, I arrived. 

It was not an easy entry. Whoever I spoke to started talking about someone called ‘The Mother’. As a New Yorker in the 1960s, everybody was seeing a psychiatrist and learning about the ‘mother complex’, so you can imagine how I felt.  At the same time, I really liked the feeling at the samadhi.

One day, I got a big scorpion bite and had a blood poisoning reaction. The hospital told me I needed a shot of penicillin but, because I was on a healthy diet, I refused. Somebody informed Mother about this. She told him to tell me to go to America House, lie down on a bed and concentrate upon her photograph.

I did that and towards late afternoon the swelling opened and drained out. That’s when I understood who The Mother was! 

I hadn’t actually met Her yet: all the communications were through a sadhak, Udar.  Mother then suggested that I go and live on Ananta’s Island, which was quite remote, because local people were coming to me daily with wounds to be dressed. Mother said there is nothing we can do now about the wounds of India. It would be much better if you concentrate on your own inner life and the wounds that are there. 

The first time I actually met Her, I saw shoots of light going out from Her. I couldn’t understand what was happening so I turned around and walked out. When Udar asked Her what she thought of me, she said she didn’t know because she had only seen the back of my head! 

But I saw Mother again. She told me to return to the United States because I had attachments and if I went back, they would dissolve. But if I stayed in the Ashram, She said, they would have to be severed and that would be painful. Then she gave me a flower that, She said, is especially for you.

Downstairs, I was told She had named this flower for the new city of Auroville. I guess that was an indication of what was ahead of me.

One of the people I met on my first visit to Pondicherry was André Vandenburgh. He had studied ancient Egyptian mathematics with R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz whose masterwork, The Temple of Man, was based upon a 12-year study of the great temple of Amun-Mut-Khonsu at Luxor. 

I became interested and began studying with André.

When I had to go back temporarily to New York because my mother was ill, I continued my studies with him. I also met Deborah, who became my partner. I told her I had to return to India. In spite of having a successful career, she decided to come and Mother agreed. 

Out to Auroville 

We returned to the Ashram. One day Deborah said we should go and look at land where there were plans to build a city. We cycled up the coast road, then walked up a sandy canyon. When we got to the top, we looked around and everywhere was just so beautiful, so empty and so pure. 

We told Mother we would like to try and live out there and she told us to go ahead. She wanted someone to be there because there were lots of great plans but nobody was actually living there at that time.

This is because it was beautiful but very challenging. There were snakes and huge scorpions; every step you took you had to be careful. There was no road, no water or electricity…and here we were, two people from New York City!

Roger Anger, Auroville’s architect, designed something for us but  it was not possible to construct it immediately. So I looked at the way the village people built things and realised that I had a lot to learn from them. I had to learn about the past before I could learn anything about the future of this place. 

So we ate like the villagers, we wore similar clothing, we learned how to farm the land and dig a bore well. It was hard work – our first bore well collapsed, as did a dam that we built to prevent land washing away – but we stuck it out. 

Although we were living at a very elementary level, we started doing experiments with the kind of house we wanted to live in and with growing our own food. I had already been involved with the ecology movement in the States and this was an opportunity to express all that.

I started experimenting with my own diet and eventually this led to us growing and eating algae, which is very high in vitamin A. 

When I returned to Auroville, people like Francis were handling Forecomers much better than I ever did so I decided to focus upon my Egyptian studies. We were living in India and studying ancient Egypt and this enormous cross-fertilization of traditions gave new shape and meaning to our lives. I realized I could not live by ideals alone, I had to involve myself in ideas. So in 1972 we decided to leave Auroville to pursue our studies in more depth. 

I left not because I was disappointed in Auroville but because I wanted to bring another level of consciousness to the experiment. I didn’t think that living physically in Auroville was the only way to live it: I thought you could live anywhere in a consciousness that would assist the creation of a new society. 

My only reservation about how Auroville was developing was I thought we were getting stuck: we were building little places and saying this is ‘my’ place, which I thought was opposite to what we were meant to be doing. We were using our success in establishing Auroville to build our egos. 

I was also concerned that larger India was extremely attracted by mechanistic and technological solutions that were already proving to be an environmental and psychophysical failure. 

The world of ancient Egypt and the yugas 

When we went back to the United States, we lived remotely with André at first, then we started going to France every year to check with Lubicz’s step-daughter our translation work on The Temple of Man.

This was our entry into the mind of ancient Egypt. It took me 8 ½ years to fully understand it. 

At the temple of Luxor, the various sections of the human body are incorporated into the proportions of the temple except for the top part of the head, the cerebral cortex, because up there are the neurological changes, the ones that are responsible for our present materialistic, manipulative approach to nature .

Sri Aurobindo talks about the ‘lid’ of mind. Below the lid, the mind functions in a certain limited way but above one can view time from a timeless perspective.

This was an important idea for the Egyptians, but the idea that time becomes timeless is also one of the important elements in the ancient Indian conception of time, which is based upon the ‘yugas’. The yugas succeed each other almost endlessly. The Golden Age, or Satya Yuga, is the first age when we live in absolute attunement with the natural world. A decline marks the succeeding yugas until the Iron Age, or Kali Yuga, which everyone agrees is the time we are living in now, where we have turned over the natural forces in the world to a mechanistic technological science. At the end of the cycle, Kalki is said to take birth and reestablish righteousness, thus beginning a new Satya Yuga. 

The notion of Yugas also underlies Greek cosmology – the idea expressed by Plato and Pythagoras as “the Ages of Man” – and similar concepts appeared when I studied Australian Aboriginal culture. 

It is important to understand this because, unless one knows the governing principles of the time period in which one lives, one cannot explain or understand anything about the forces that drive our collective and individual lives. 

The yuga in which we are living now brings a vast circle of time to completion. According to the scholar Alain Daniélou, who lived in India and whose book was translated by Deborah, the real essence of Indian philosophy is that we are on the threshold of a huge transformation in time – we are nearing the end of a final yuga in a cycle of yugas . It will mean a disintegration, followed by a period of rest in the cosmic creation for 60,000 years. Because of what we have done to the earth, it will probably take that long for this system to recover!

Mother mentions that Théon, her teacher of occultism in Algeria, said there would not be another pralaya or cosmic dissolution, but he was basing this upon his reading of the Kabbalah and the Chaldeans. The correct translation from the Indian Puranas, which had been written down some 6,000 years ago, had not been done at this time. 

We cannot avoid cosmic dissolution at the end of this yuga, but I do not see it as a bad thing . Destruction is also a form of purification. It gives us  a fresh start and a new way to do what Mother said to me, which is to dissolve one’s attachments. 

The one thing that is not destroyed is consciousness. And this is where Sri Aurobindo and Mother’s work on the supramental consciousness fits in. A new form of our species will come next. 

While we cannot avoid dissolution , we can prepare for the next Golden Age in our thoughts . We can imagine some of the modifications that could make this species into something that is more successful in maintaining the entire livingness of the earth. The aborigines were aware of this dreaming responsibility, and through their dreaming they were able to maintain a continuous culture for 60,000 years.

Auroville today

This is the first time I have returned to Auroville for an extended visit for many years. 

I made a brief visit soon after the Matrimandir was completed and I was very happy because I thought if this is happening, the rest will straighten itself out.

I think there are some terrific things here and others that are hanging on to the past. There is this problem about the influence of money, and I was disappointed by the extreme size and luxury of 

living of some people. But I got used to the way that Mother thinks about this kind of thing, which is that one can’t lift one part by repressing another. 

We’ve got to let them both be expressed, see how they interact and then go on from there.

Overall, I’m very positive about the Auroville of today. It has not yet realised the dream, but it is certainly something that is not erasable any more. Now the concept of a society based on these principles must happen in a more dispersed way or else the world is not going to change.

From an interview by Alan and Vikas, with additional material from the internet. 

After leaving Auroville, Bob wrote a number of books. In addition to ‘The Temple of Man’, they include works on sacred geometry, on the present environmental problems in relationship to a male dominated