Mutation Alchemy and Grace

In truth, Auroville Today was something of a straightjacket for a free spirit like Roger. For while Roger was perfectly capable of writing a good overview of Auroville’s afforestation programme, his real interests lay elsewhere.

One of the things that fascinates him is the presence of other realities that can, at times, break through and transfigure the world as we know it. Hence, his interest in Ireland’s legendary past, in the Greek myths and, more contemporaneously, in crop circles and Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. Above all, it seems to be what drew him to India – “an underlying rhythm of which one can only catch a fragment, a fragrance” – and, of course, to Sri Aurobindo and to Mother with their stupendous vision of a transformed humanity.

In fact, the necessity of an urge towards transformation is one of the leitmotifs of his writings, often couched in terms of alchemical transformation, the conversion of base metals into gold. “Can a key still be found to release man from both his devils and his gods?” he asks.

It is in this sense that he is drawn to the ‘dark angels’ – Villon, Genet, Satprem and, closer to home, Kenneth Fator – who, out of their darkness, sing of the light. It also explains his interest in the ‘marginals’, the outcastes and travelers upon dusty roads, for they may be vouchsafed visions unknown to those who choose to tread the regular pathways.

The best writers give voice to a new way of seeing, of feeling. Roger is in no doubt that Auroville is a ‘singularity’, an attempt at human transformation that never existed before, and he attempts to forge a language that could convey the cosmic context in both its struggle and its splendor.

Yet another note that sounds through some of his poetry is that of a melancholic lyricism. It is a reminder that Roger is not simply an observer. He has battled loss, darkness and alienation which, characteristically, he attempts to transmute into something of beauty: “I’m dancing with my pain,” he writes.

Some years ago, Roger suffered a serious accident that almost cost him his life. Since then, he has written little. But in one piece, written after his accident, he refers movingly to his own ‘mutation’.

Since 29 February 2012, the “Golden Day” anniversary marking the supramental manifestation on the physical plane on the planet Earth and many universes, my mutation has become miraculous, beautiful, and strange. Before, I used to suffer from depression, but now I wake up every morning just happy to be alive and I thank sweet Mother for that.

This compilation, put together by his friends, is a reminder of the unique voice of a “vagrant heart”, a latter day troubadour, wanderer of the roads of life, always seeking that final, fierce transmutation.

The compilation was released on 20th December in the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture. Here are some extracts.

Mutation Alchemy and Grace by Roger Harris. 

Published by Auroville Press Publishers, 2017. 

Available from the White Seagull Bookshop and auroville.com.

Rs 450

from “Auroville: A Township Takes Shape” | Late 1980s

Twenty years ago, on 28 February 1968, these bare, concise, and yet such far-reaching words, which constitute the Charter of Auroville, were read out by The Mother in Pondicherry and broadcast live to several thousand persons gathered in an amphitheater on a barren, almost treeless plateau in South India. They were gathered for the foundation ceremony of Auroville. Nearby a lone banyan tree stood in an expanse of dust and sunbaked earth, like some ancient Vedic symbol, its roots reaching from its branches down to earth. As the soil from 123 nations was placed, by students from those countries and states, in a raised two-meter marble urn, a dream – like an answer to the call of countless ages – was born on Indian soil.

Twenty-one years later, hundreds of people, many of them children and teenagers, born in intervening years, sat, gathered in silence, and watched the flames of a large bonfire leap, dance, and throw themselves like a challenge against the last vestiges of a night sky that slowly faded into the grey half-light of dawn. As the first orange glow of sun appeared through the low clouds on the horizon, it illuminated the dominating skyward-arcing curves of a massive grey structure, the Matrimandir, soul of the city to be, which seemed to break out of barren red earth like a pod to God in stone. After twenty years of struggle, of controversy and hope, a unique adventure, an experiment born of an extraordinary woman’s dream and her luminous vision of the future, calls our beleaguered species, our threatened ravaged earth, not merely to survive, but to come of age.

from “Common Dignity: Ireland after 9-11” | Auroville Today, February 2002

On 13 September, two days after the day [9-11 eds.], it felt that time, like those clocks that stopped forever, had come to an end, and I flew from Paris to Shannon. Charles de Gaulle airport had a surreal pre-apocalyptic feel to it. Plain-clothes security outnumbered stranded or flying passengers, and the computer screens and arrival departure panels listing all the flights to or from the U.S. as cancelled made the ramifications of the unimaginable act of horror that had just occurred even more immediate. That evening in a crowded pub in a small village in County Clare I observed a white-haired man trying to explain to a young girl the meaning of the terrible footage being rerun on every news channel. His task could not have been an easy one. The next day was a day of mourning throughout Ireland and all shops and businesses closed down. I spent three minutes of silence at 11 A.M. gazing from across the street at the Irish flag at half-mast in the middle of a small park that contained a memorial to the local Republican dead from 1916 on. The feelings of a shared sense of shock, grief, and sympathy for those affected by the attacks in New York and elsewhere cut across all boundaries and perhaps even united the island for a brief while in a common surge of humanity.

For what had occurred was quite simply an attack against humanity, and it is perhaps in the response that it generated in a majority of people of all colors, creeds, classes and persuasions, that those intent on spreading fear faced their most massive defeat. People lost their sense of complacency as freedoms and even just simple pleasures, long merely taken for granted in Western societies, had suddenly not only to be valued, but cherished and upheld. Back in Paris in the Marais district suddenly everyone, from the clochard to the young skate-boarder, from the post office worker to the bourgeois, had a role to play and played it by simply being themselves. There was tension in the air, but also an unaccustomed sense of fraternity that for a moment cut across all social swathes, and proved stronger than fear….

Sri Aurobindo foresaw what he called a religion of humanity – a term first used by the nineteenth-century political philosopher Auguste Comte – as being a common binding force that might unite the human peoples at the onset of a spiritual age. Perhaps the challenge that faces all of us now is to free ourselves from old mindsets, whether personal, political or religious, valid in their time, or at a moment of our lives, but now a hindrance through their very rigidity to the forces of acceleration and change at work throughout the world today, whether on a personal or a global scale.

from “Heading South like Ambrose Bierce: Remembering Kenneth” |Auroville Today, October 2002

Dropping in on Kenneth, which I did every six weeks or so down the twenty years I knew him, would most often lead to an invitation to step inside, and a two to three-hour session in his small, cluttered kitchen. Once we’d settled in and become relaxed with each other’s company – ‘How are you doing, don’t give me the macho bullshit, the last few weeks it’s just getting worse and worse’ – our conversation, fueled with brandy and cold coffee from his rusting fridge, would ricochet. Once he described a play he had started writing, called “Roll On, Shelley.” Its characters included Rooftop Julie (a woman leaving on the bus for Iowa), a man with balloons, a prisoner and a guard coming out of a manhole who end up exchanging roles, a couple of wino derelicts and two lovers carrying a park bench around. I’d say this was fairly typical of his surreal and often ribald sense of humor. Our conversation would then range from Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando’s performance in a “Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront”, to the Sumerians, Niburu (the rumored twelfth planet of our solar system) and extra-terrestrials. It would be punctuated with relevant asides such as how Al Capone was a great fan of Louis Armstrong and used to go to his gigs in speakeasies in Chicago. Frequently he would reminisce about growing up in New York, his travels through the South and a youth spent in and out of jail. “I was in solitary confinement when the supramental came down,” he liked to point out.

from “Symbols in the Fields or Holding the Earth in Place | Auroville Today, June 1996

“I can feel ancient presences greeting us,” my friend tells me as we join the path just outside the village of Ogbourne St. George in Wiltshire, England, which leads to Avebury. The wind ripples through the grass and the green stalks of wheat of the Marlborough Downs, as dappled cows and sheep graze by prehistoric burial mounds. The silence is pervasive, almost mystical. We pass the ancient Roman fort of Barbury Castle and join the Ridgeway, the oldest walking path and pilgrim route in Europe. Clumps of trees frequently situated above prehistoric burial mounds line the ridge at regular intervals. Sarsen stones dot a nearby field, and suddenly two deer leap out from a grove and bound off down the hillside. One feels part of an ancient ceremonial landscape that is both feminine and healing, and the descent into Avebury is always impressive, even initiatory.

Part of the village of Avebury is surrounded by a large embankment and ditch that used to enclose what was perhaps the largest ceremonial bronze-age temple site in Europe. Some two hundred standing sarsen stones, alternately diamond and oblong in shape, quarried from the nearby downs and weighing up to thirty tons, were arranged within the embankment in a large outer circle. This in turn enclosed two inner circles, one dedicated to the sun and the other to the moon. Two serpentine megalithic avenues, one of which still partially exists, once led to the stone circles of Avebury. A cow path leads from the stones of Avebury to nearby Silbury Hill, an earth and grass covered six-tiered pyramid that is estimated to have taken some eighteen million man-hours to make and whose original use remains a mystery.

Beacon fires on hills were used to once guide pilgrim traders and tribes along the paths that led from Glastonbury to Avebury, beacon points that were sacred to the Celtic variant of the Roman God Mercury, messenger of the Gods and guide to the souls of the dead. His symbol, the caduceus, a rod with two serpents entwined, can be seen as representing the kundalini energies as well as the spiraling helix pattern of earth energies whose grid of pathways the ancients marked out with barrows, mounds, megaliths and stone circles.

Scientists and researchers who have studied standing stone formations have found that ultrasonic pulsations, spiral energy patterns and electromagnetic sound waves become measurably activated around the sites of standing stones, particularly during equinoxes. Dowsers have also recorded spiral patterns of energy connected with the lunar cycles coming from standing stones and, according to modern geomancers, two different lines of earth energies – one masculine and the other feminine, known respectively as the St. Michael and St. Mary lines, which traverse England – cross each other at a point between the inner and outer ring of one of the stone circles of Avebury. It might be no coincidence that the area of Avebury, one of the most sacred sites in prehistoric Europe is, in an era of awakening earth energies, becoming activated again….

Could the phenomenon be an inter-dimensional one? Forces of a subtler realm using the grid of earth energies both to send us messages and to stabilize our wounded earth? Perhaps the formations can be considered messages of sorts, communiqués from a yet-unknown source, perhaps nature herself, in a language of symbols and archetypes that are preparing us for an era of impending changes. A transition or passage from one way of being in the world and seeing it, to a new one.

from “The Dalai Lama’s Shoes or ‘The Buddha can’t do much!’” | 1986

It was my turn next (to meet the Dalai Lama). I was ushered out to a patio in front of a large garden by Tenzin, who was to act as interpreter, and then into a large room where, before I knew it, I was approaching a short and sturdy man in red and yellow robes, who was standing waiting for me in the middle of the room and looking at me inquisitively. I presented him my scarf draped over my two hands and then greeted him with a namaste – the traditional Indian greeting. He responded immediately by shaking my hand heartily, and then showed me to where we were to conduct our interview. I sat down on the couch next to him in the armchair, briefly noticing the thangkas and the image of Avalokiteshvara above a cabinet on the far wall, and after a few introductory comments, began the interview.

“I met the Lady once,” he says as I take the tape recorder out of my bag and place it on the coffee table. My first question sounds awfully solemn, but within a few minutes the ice melts and a sense of warmth and even friendliness sets in. I ask him questions about the political situation in Tibet today, but we end up talking about the Buddha and how people will have to want to change – it won’t be done for them – and about the need, he feels, of a balance between people’s inner and outer lives, “fifty-fifty,” he says.

He speaks broken English, frequently punctuated (particularly when he wants to make a philosophical point) with bursts of intense Tibetan that Tenzin then translates. I imagine the years of debating one has to go through to be a monk, not to mention a Dalai Lama. A number of times he breaks into a hearty laugh. Once, seeing him look for words, I ask him if it’s perhaps hard to express himself in English, whereupon he retorts, “No, not in English as a whole, but in MY English!”

I am struck by the powerful simplicity of his similes, feeling in some way his presence behind them and realizing how unused we are to such a state of being – we, who are in love with outer complexities and contradictions, children of an age that is dancing out its last dreams in a ballroom of destruction. He does not have the mystic, piercing gaze I might have imagined the Dalai Lama to have. Rather he has a wide, benevolent one, and a strongly anchored physical presence, not an otherworldly, spiritual one. He is sitting in his armchair next to me, red and yellow robes draped over a pockmarked arm and, although I’m concentrating on his questions and following his answers – periodically checking that the tape has not run out –, the contact is there. We are talking from our different viewpoints, but behind that there is something else.

“A human being – if you show him something – you will feel sometimes that, at a superficial level, the other side will not accept it. But deep down something happened there.” And something did.

We are one whether we like it or not, I suggest, and he goes on to use the image of the human body to bring this fact out. “It’s like one’s body, between one’s head and one’s shoe, I mean one’s foot, there is quite a long distance and big differences, but still it’s part of your body and you must concern yourself with every part of your physical. In the same way, the world is one. You simply cannot neglect or ignore another part of the world. You cannot solve one problem, localize it, and solve that alone. And under these circumstances, the key point is human universal responsibility, a genuine sense of brotherhood, sisterhood, with warm heart and clear realization, clear deep realization as one human family….”

As I listen to him, my gaze travels down his body to his feet and, shining out – immaculately polished – beneath his robes, are a pair of walking shoes identical to my own, and I have the distinct feeling that my own pair of revamped shoes are having a spiritual experience.