Auroville in its 51st winter

Understanding Auroville with the mind is like grasping a handful of ash that wafts away in the breeze. You say something about it, then realize that the opposite also is true. Auroville is hard to grasp because, at its core, it exists somewhere that eludes the mind. It is the elephant which the blind men attempt to define by the part of the animal each touches. Skirmishes are common because our tools – our minds, our words – betray us and miss the target. They struggle to catch what Auroville means to those who have chosen this adventure. It is so hard to express outwardly what is in our thoughts, our inner vision.

I saw this challenge already in the 1970s when I lived in Auroville. Life is more polite, kinder and better dressed in today’s Auroville. One’s feet are less red, the body less tanned. But the issues remain the same though they change their colours, like chameleons. People defend positions that reflect their own work or their community, their friends, their past allegiances. We bring our egos to the table. We want our vision of Auroville, and we fight to defend it. Those impulses become personalized. Is there not a role for greater equanimity, a deeper surrender and less attachment to the outcome? At times, life feels impossible, but at other times we touch the heights of joy and love that will make Auroville the “City of Human Unity”, whatever its population, whatever its speed of growth.

A personal note: Why, readers may ask, does he weigh in on Auroville issues, this ex-Aurovilian who has not lived here for decades?, How can he understand how Auroville is evolving? I get it. Yet, an observer who has lived the highs and lows of Auroville – its crushing pressure, its magic synchronicities, the joy one feels at a quiet moment – can perhaps offer an insight that those who live it each day of the year might miss through their daily grind. When I come, I talk to many people and hear competing versions of Auroville. What I say is not negative, but a simple reflection back of what I hear. I keep returning because this bold, audacious experiment is my home too, if from afar, and the only real hope I see on this battered planet is for the birth of a new mankind that may well save it.

In the bubbly high of last year’s 50th anniversary, Auroville seemed to have finally emerged as an adult from its long years of puberty and preparation. There was a sense of miracle that, despite all the challenges along the path, Auroville IS! I had the feeling that renewed energy could go to the expansion of the town and ourselves in, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri, an “adventure of consciousness and joy”.

However, this winter I have seen it with colder eyes, perhaps a reflection of the concerns of friends who say it is stuck, unable to move forward, with major issues to be solved in a social environment too complex for people to agree on solutions. Land. Water. Infrastructure. Traffic. Dust. Housing. Manpower. Tourism. Village participation. Clashing visions. Financial haves and have nots. A missing management structure. In the outer Auroville, growth and dynamism are seriously stuck. Yet in the inner Auroville, people tell me, residents are moving forward just fine, plugging into the vibration of the future that Mother and Sri Aurobindo manifested in 1956.

For most of Auroville’s life, I have sided with those who felt we must first build ourselves before we can build Auroville. I feared we might be making mistakes that would be there, in concrete, to stay. Why not wait until we are more enlightened, more intuitive, before we set out to build the city Mother described? Yet fifty years into the experiment, Aurovilians do not seem to have honed any great transformation in intuitive knowledge or decision-making as a collective, a community, other than a keener ability to listen to others and to express one’s opinions with a kinder shine.

Mother joked that Auroville needs a government of divine anarchy. Auroville has got half way there; there is anarchy, but it is not divine. Sure, there is this working group and that working council and this selection committee. And there are any number of planning, moderating, arbitrating, and mediating panels, groups, councils. Auroville has been adjusting its systems for decades, tightening this screw, reevaluating that bolt, replacing this fixture for that one. Any idea more radical than these tinkerings – from whichever sector – gets attacked by a tsunami of resistance and refusal before it even has a chance to be read, digested and discussed.

Auroville is a collective, a community, dedicated to “an actual human unity,” as Mother said in the Charter. In such a community, the sharp-edged individual ideally submits to the collective good. But what is the collective good? Until some new birth yet unknown comes along, the best guide is the Mother, whose compass gives us the direction in which to move. As She often said, it is not this versus that. It is this and that. So, what is it we are building? In Auroville today, that often comes down to a simplistic Forest vs City, two poles with a lot of space in between, enough to find the way to solutions. So why not, Forest and City. Old timers and the young. Galaxy and Forests… and walkways through the forest and electric trams and open buildings and, frankly, who knows what will come along as the town evolves. It has to be that way. Aurovilians must give a little to have something greater. It takes compromise and collaboration, not bias and suspicion. Each one benefits, because the collective benefits. That’s what Collective Consciousness is, in the material realm.

One morning last month, in the inner chamber, some words dropped into my head. “We make ourselves by making Auroville. We make Auroville by ourselves.” I thought perhaps my old friend, Ruud Lohman, sitting up there somewhere, was intruding into my meditation, for it is something he might easily have said. Mother probably said something like it, too. After all, both activities are crucial to the success of Auroville.

What does it mean to be “a willing servitor of the Divine consciousness”, Mother’s foundational expectation for all Aurovilians. Key to the Charter’s first proposition, it is the common denominator expected of everyone living here. No one can judge where any Aurovilian stands as though on some spiritual barometer, but are all doing the work She expected, as spelled out in Gilles Guigan’s timely two volumes, “Auroville in Mother’s Words”? It is all there. There is no excuse for our challenges but ourselves.

In fact, everything she said is already woven into the writings of Sri Aurobindo. It is hard to say one is practicing Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, it seems to me, without having read Sri Aurobindo’s main works. When, in February 1972, I was asked to take up work for Sri Aurobindo’s centenary celebration, Mother wanted to meet me. After staring into my eyes for a while, then offering up a broad smile, she asked, point blank, “Have you read all of Sri Aurobindo?” All. That was her expectation for this new arrival in Pondicherry. I said that I had finished three of his books. Good, she intimated with a more serious regard. “You can do this work, but set aside two hours every day to read all of his writings.”

What She said is clear. The central duty of Aurovilians is to do the Yoga, and not some flippant “all life is yoga” toss off. If everyone absorbed Mother’s words on Auroville and lived by them, I doubt this budding town would be stuck in a stalemate. The apparent intractability of issues, the stubborn resistances, can evaporate, if there is a will to do it.

As for the city, I see only one solution. Each person needs to break down her or his inner and outer walls, move to the centre and find collaboration and compromises rather than refusal and stubborn persistence. In another era, I was among those who fought to conserve the exact dimensions of the Inner Chamber, another of Auroville’s long history of skirmishes. I thought there was an occult imperative to it. Besides those dimensions, Mother saw four zones to the city, a silent park in the middle, and the refuge that has become the Matrimandir. When Roger presented the Galaxy model, with its lines of force, She approved it, and it has been evolving ever since. (It had enough yantric power to convince me to move from London to Auroville nearly 50 years ago.) But I cannot believe that other aspects of the plan have such occult resonances. Sixteen stories, or eight stories… does it really matter? I believe Mother pulled the number of eventual residents as 50,000 out of the air, not out of some Akashic Record or an inner vision. Isn’t it possible to think of the “city” as something more intimate, given the realities on the ground today? Or Auroville could add in the population of the villages that enter our Green Belt. Let’s keep the roads and general scheme of Roger’s plan, but adjust where needed, with greater fluidity and flexibility. Mother was practical, and She was flexible where plasticity was needed. Can’t we work out the near future without it becoming another Hundred Years War, with all the damage the internal battles leave in their wake?

Aurovilians need to believe that their neighbours, their brothers and sisters, are willing to collaborate and to work out details as comrades, not enemies. We are all learning what it is to become something that we weren’t before. An old friend said, “I don’t believe I have met a ‘True Aurovilian’, by Mother’s definition. I have only to look at myself.” When one regards the world today – more and more convulsive, with darkness menacing everywhere – one thinks of Mother’s observation that the world’s problems are all present in India, and that Auroville will be the place to solve them. Would Mother still say that were She to reappear?

Auroville was meant to remake the world… and we, to remake ourselves? If Aurovilians can agree to follow Mother’s Dream, putting aside parochial positions, the project can move forward. But something has to change. That change, I’m convinced, has to be in ourselves. Without it, Auroville’s soul is in danger, and Auroville’s future.

From 1972 to 1979, Roger Toll worked at Matrimandir, in publications, on governance issues and with Satprem. His outside career has been in journalism. Returning often, he remains a keen observer of Auroville’s growth and development