Auroville gives me everything

In 1969, I was attending the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, studying engineering physics. It was through a librarian there that I was put in touch with Sri Aurobindo’s writings. His writings answered a long-felt need I had, so I started to read a lot. A couple of years later, I began to correspond with the Ashram and The Mother. She wrote back once, otherwise she would reply through a secretary. In the summer of 1974, I joined a trip to June Mayer’s house in California for the first meeting of returned Aurovilians. People who had first-hand experience of life in Auroville during its first six years were there, such as Savitra. The experience of staying with these people felt right. I thought, “That’s my family, I’m going to go to Auroville.” So I made the arrangements and came in October 1974. I came to stay. I was very sure of the feeling. India was very far away in those days, with the image of dust and poverty, but the need to come and be a part of this adventure was stronger than all of that.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which is full of totally beautiful nature. I spent many years canoeing on lakes and rivers, climbing mountains, hiking in the forest, and camping in the wild. I was trained in living in the rugged outdoors, and this was very useful when I came to Auroville! I realised afterwards – when had I heard other people’s stories about the situations they came out of to join Auroville – that I had had a very privileged upbringing, not in the sense that I came from a rich family, but that I had experienced a life situation where there was zero conflict around: everything was peaceful, the country wasn’t at war, it was all fine.

But even in those most beautiful spaces – sitting by a pristine lake or hiking in the deep forest – eventually I felt there was something essential missing, something hidden. And that “missing Something” was the thing that fuelled my search.

My close friends in Canada understood my sudden decision to go to India in 1974 because I was in a circle of people seeking for something, but my family didn’t. An amusing follow-up was that one of my sisters was sent by my father to “rescue” me in 1986, when I’d been here for 12 years. After an epic journey by sailboat and airplane, she arrived to find me well and happy, and she was so struck by Auroville that she got happily stuck here for 14 years! That is Susan, who is well known to many people here. Finally my mother came twice, and she understood.

It just felt like this was the right place, and it still feels like this. It’s that layer underneath: India has a deeper aspect that is not at all apparent in the West. But this place in particular has it, and Auroville was so glowing with that start-up energy in those days. The enthusiasm of everybody was quite palpable.

Right away, I came to Matrimandir and started working here. After a few months, I got hugely ill, so I was in hospital and then I recovered in the Ashram Nursing Home. I lived in the Ashram for two years to build up my strength, which was great – I had a whole other experience there. I worked with Dr. Chamanlal Gupta in the Knowledge section of the Ashram School on a solar energy project. During that time, I often came out to Auroville to help with the Matrimandir concreting.

In 1978, I came back to Auroville and began living at the Matrimandir workers’ camp, twenty rambling rooms joined together under a keet roof. At that time, there was a wave of people coming from the Ashram to Auroville. For example, the people who started Djaima, Jean L., Goupi, Joy and Lakshminarayan, who is still here at Matrimandir. At that time, Auroville was going through a very tough period. The most difficult memories for me are the conflicts that happened at Matrimandir. These had a big impact on me, probably because I had grown up with zero conflict, so when there was violence, especially physical violence, it was tough, and those bits are burned into my memory. Forty years later, when there’s conflict, it still stands out starkly as being not appropriate here.

It was quite amazing to be part of the team building Matrimandir. It was always challenging, with difficult and beautiful moments and lots of laughter. The completion of the Inner Chamber was a miracle. To have built this space, so beautiful and strong, even while the exterior of the Matrimandir was completely unfinished and open to the weather, was really like a miracle. Overall, I don’t have this feeling of satisfaction like, “Oh now we’ve done it, that’s great”. The satisfaction was, and still is, in the moments of doing it, of being with all those people lined up together during a concreting, passing chetties of concrete, or with a team building scaffolding high on the Matrimandir. It was very satisfying to be involved with things like that from day to day.

I have been working at Matrimandir all this time. It just feels like the right place. I have no impulse to try something else. Over the years, I have done so many different things here, from cooking breakfast to building high scaffoldings – it’s all been great fun. I’m one of the four executives, and my responsibility is the financial section. I coordinate with the rest of the team, purchase materials, maintain the machines, plan work for the ongoing and future projects.

We’re concentrating on finishing the gardens’ oval right now. The work has three parts: the first work is the nine gardens, which are moving ahead; the second is the finishing of the two large rooms under the amphitheatre, one for the garden tools for the 50-100 people who will maintain the future gardens, and the other a green room for the amphitheater performers; the third is the ring road that runs around all the gardens, which will be laid with granite cobblestone and will be integrated with a rainwater harvesting system, so we can collect all the monsoon run-off from the entire 22 acre gardens oval. These are the three things that will complete the Park of Unity. All the old maintenance and administrative buildings will have to go, so that the isolating Zone and the lake that the Mother wished to have around the Park of Unity can be created. This is a big project ahead of us. The other future task is to build the Reception Pavilion, which Roger Anger had envisioned to receive all Aurovilians and visitors coming to Matrimandir.

Every Sunday morning, I meet a group of 76 visitors and I give them an introductory talk and take them to the Chamber. They have all sorts of questions, and I try to do my best and answer those. I enjoy doing that. For some, it’s a life-changing experience.

I also write the Matrimandir newsletter, providing an update on the progress of the work and sometimes looking back on Matrimandir in the early years. If you look at the photos of Matrimandir in 1986, the majority of people working on it were Aurovilians, a mix of westerners and Indians. There were hardly any paid workers, and specialist paid workers were only called in when we needed them. That was how it was up until the beginning of the 90s. However, by 2006, we had 300 paid workers and 40 Aurovilians, as the push was on to complete the building in all its aspects. Now we’re down to 90 paid workers and 60 Aurovilians, so the balance is shifting again, and we hope that it shifts more as we get increased participation from Aurovilian volunteers.

For the last 20 years, I’ve lived in the Nursery. In my spare time, I go to the swimming pool, I go cycling, I spend some time with my friends and I play with kids. I grow vegetables for my neighbours. I come back to Matrimandir in the evening to check everything, and then I sit quietly in the gardens and simply enjoy the silence of the night.

I have an active “hobby” maintaining the solar bowl at the Solar Kitchen. I was trained in engineering and physics, so from 1974 onwards I helped with the search to find a way to focus a sunray on to the crystal in the Matrimandir. I was involved in creating the first solar bowl in Centre Field between 1979-1981, which led to the building of the large Solar Kitchen bowl in 1998.

The real challenges of being in Auroville are very much on the human side. It’s this whole challenge of getting people to listen to each other during conversations, and gaining some understanding of issues. Of course, we’ve made things overly complicated and bureaucratic. The pendulum has swung to the extreme in that direction. Hopefully it will swing back.

In terms of the conflicts at Matrimandir, I have generally not taken a public stance because most incidents of conflict concerned issues of design, where it was not my place, as a builder, to comment. The one time I spoke out (in the News & Notes) was about the poor quality of the material being created for the inner skin – an issue that polarised people. The panels of reddish polyester then installed were fading and warping, and perhaps not sufficiently fire-resistant, so in that case it was easy and important enough for me to speak out about them.

This perhaps is my key concern, or rather my fundamental perception: that we are One here, and on the surface take the appearance of so many contending views, positions. We do not have the ability to hold onto our Unity, so we get lost and caught in all this turmoil. There are positions which have more of a dose of truth than others, yes, but they do not hold the whole truth.... We get so easily caught in all of this.... so it is difficult, and often painful.

On the surface we seem to be way short on almost every level, but I think the aspiration to change is there, collectively. I have a positive outlook as I feel there is a slowly growing awareness of our togetherness on a very deep level. For me, that growing need to exist together in a different way needs to be more manifested. But the process of this collective inner growth is very complicated, as we have a big influx of people joining Auroville, bringing their own ideas. So it’s amusing, to try to understand how it will all work out. Finally, Mother did say one can laugh because it’s all being carried forward by forces quite beyond us: Auroville is being built in spite of us!

Auroville – the Forces sustaining it – gives me everything. I never felt the need for anything. All material and inner needs have been spontaneously met over the years. In one letter I wrote to The Mother in ‘72, I asked her to accept me as “a most humble and loving child”. She wrote back, “YES, with love and blessings”. And it has been like that. Everything has been given. And I can only be grateful.