Embark – come what may

My name is Alain Bernard. I heard about Auroville in the fall of 1971. I found “The Future of Evolution of Man”, a small compilation of texts extracted from various essays written by Sri Aurobindo. I still remember vividly the extraordinary impression these texts made on me. I was sitting in my office and kept repeating to myself, “Here is someone who speaks the Truth, here is someone who speaks of what he knows to be true from personal experience.” I was in total awe that such a being had existed. I had been from my childhood quite a devout Catholic, even to the point of nearly becoming a priest. Religions speak about the ‘the kingdom of God’ but it is for the after-life. Sri Aurobindo simply declared that the Life Divine is the future of Earth, that it is going to happen and human beings are called upon to cooperate towards this manifestation. The Mother was made to create Auroville as one important step towards this goal.

I visited Pondicherry in the summer of 1972, applied to become Aurovilian and was accepted by the Mother. Eleven months later in mid 1973, I joined Auroville, an adventure towards creating a different world. I am still there 50 years later…

After the passing of the Mother many problems arose and a majority of residents became involved in a battle with the Auroville legal sponsors who wanted to impose unwarranted controls as if they were the owners of the Auroville project, in deep contradiction with the spirit of the Auroville Charter given by the Mother. This battle with many ups and downs lasted for about 12 years.

What touched me immensely was the then Indian Government’s efforts to rescue the project to the point of practically siding with a majority group of residents, including many foreigners, against an Indian society. I am sure that in any other country the Government would have just closed down the project. Deep reverence for Sri Aurobindo and The Mother kept the project alive. I was present in the gallery of the Lok Sabha on September 5, 1988, when its members unanimously passed the Auroville Foundation Bill. This scene will remain vividly etched in my memory forever. It is why, even now, when another Government has so far taken actions which for me contradict the letter and spirit of the Auroville Foundation Act, I cannot despair as I am sure another typically Indian miracle will occur and rescue the true Auroville.

My given birth name is Eric Chacra. I left France more than 11 years ago to live in Auroville. That was Eric, the person. Now, there is the consciousness that Eric is a character played by the Divine. Now, there is the consciousness that Eric has no free will by himself. Now, there is the consciousness that my true Nature is Peace and that I share this true Nature with everybody and everything. How many lives it would have taken to open my eyes if the story of Eric had unfolded in another context other than India. Gratitude, Gratitude....

Divine Consciousness brought me to Auroville, leaving my comfortable life, my family (my mother, living alone), my friends and, there was no courage in this, it was simply ‘natural, an inevitable call’. It was never a choice of Eric, only an expression of the Leela through the ‘Ericness’.

Most of my money, my energy, my time go to Auroville. No courage in this.

When I stepped foot on the soil of India, there was a feeling of being at home. I feel the Life, the Energy and I enjoy so much the smiles from most people here.

Still, the specific character, the Ericness played by the Divine, is a baby facing the most incredible challenge for humans in the collective – the Auroville ideals: Human Unity through True Collaboration and Peace upon Earth.

I pray for the Grace to never forget this.

I aspire to live in the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. To foster the emergence of the collective intelligence.

And I can appreciate what Nisargadatta Maharaj said and eat a nice mango: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.”

Dear friend of Frederick,

A letter from the heart – that is not easy – I try.

It all started with that word ‘Auroville’. Someone threw it into a conversation we had about life and what we would do with it. We were a mixed group of friends with kids. I registered that word ‘Auroville’. My life at that time was difficult. Miraculously, that word ‘Auroville’ came back to me. Now my ears got big; I wanted to know what was this ‘Auroville’. That friend knew a man who had lived there. We invited him to visit us. It was very different from a casual visit and quite intense. He played some music from Sunil, the musician of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and gave an introduction to this project. We were about 20 people. After a short walk in the forest nearby, it had gotten dark, and he showed us some slides and a short movie.

That was it. I can’t explain it. For me it was absolutely clear: we will go there. Whatever other people say, positive or negative. I will go there with my two daughters. The only problem was money.

Two friends of mine and a sister of one of them and I opened an account for Auroville. It took the four of us almost three years to save enough. We sold everything of any value, worked as much as possible and lived a simple life. The urge to go grew and grew. Finally we were ready to depart. Lot of drama with parents, etc – but we left. It felt so right. I knew that was it. And never regretted it.

We arrived in February 1976.

Cycling from Pondicherry along the beach road and then the sandy path up through the village, past it, up a light slope, sweat running, a lonely palm beside the road. As I passed that one palm standing in a desert, something changed. I was still sweating and the cycle was still hard to move, but I was home.

The heat, the dust didn’t matter anymore.

Everything was right, perfect. I was home forever.

That feeling never changed. Of course, there were plenty of difficulties. They were solved or disappeared. The hut we moved into was very romantic, not practical, near a noisy village and the thatched roof full of rats.

The joy of being in Auroville never left me. After we had settled in, we looked around to see what we could do for Aurovillle. In the fields around we found stones with AV on them and got the information that they marked the land that was bought for Auroville. We started to plant some easy vegetables and local grains and slowly over some years built up a farm. We were no farmers – learned a lot from the villagers – and studied books about organic farming.

When we came to Auroville, about 350 people lived here. It was very different from now. No services, you did it yourself or it would not be. Your neighbours would help, and you them. It was hard work, but we were happy, joyful, enthusiastic, full of energy and never any doubt that Auroville would be what it should be.

Life changed many times. Work was done as it came along. I did all kinds of work, just what came up and I was able to do it or learned.

All that joy is not totally gone. It is still good and needed more than ever to be here and help Auroville to grow. It is not easy to keep the joy, the drive to move forward. We have our breakdowns, loss of energy and sometimes I cannot hold back the tears. Again and again we – I – try not to lose hope and trust. I am sure almost all of us feel the disharmony around us.

The good that came out is that we stick more together – do not keep in our corner and suffer. That what keeps us upright is the love for Auroville – for each other – that helps us to focus on what we have come here for.

Thank you for reading what flows from my heart.  

PS: We were five persons to come here and we are all still here.

I prefer to contribute anonymously. For what is it to tell one's own life story when all lives, even if unique, will find hundreds of thousands of life stories that are similar to theirs? The details that make a life unique are intricate and minute, woven in the fabric of time and ‘coincidences’, yet the essential patterns on the fabric tend to repeat themselves in the course of eternity; they might change colour or size, but the magic thread that is used is the same: that of the Divine Will.

The Divine Will with its ‘push & pull’ in humanity's collective consciousness where it plays ‘hide & seek’. Individuals are awakened, individuals are bewildered, at loss, in despair for Justice, hungry for Beauty, seeking Peace, crying for Freedom, aspiring for brotherhood yet waging war on their own family, disoriented by the darkness they grasp for Light, drowning they call out for a saving hand that will deliver them from the Human Made Misery.

We contemplate Infinity yet we hold tightly onto futile ideas and things.

And so, when Life seems to have no meaning and the pain of the world seems to tear one's heart into pieces, and the Question becomes more urgent than anything else, a matter of life and death, then something arises from the backstage and gently reclaims its space in Life. "Will you make space for the Truth?" It asks, and if the individual answers "Yes, come what may!", well, then the journey of Discovery and Adventure begins.

I was graced in this lifetime to be called on the Great Adventure. At the age of 20, I left family and country behind, to embark, without questioning, on a journey.

Sri Aurobindo and Mother have given me a Certainty that is beyond comprehension. The happiness and joy that is there, knowing that I'm being held in their arms, is expressed with infinite gratitude each day I wake up.

Auroville expresses the finest Ideal of Sri Aurobindo and Mother, grant you, with the limitation of present-day humanity, because, let's not forget, we are humans after all, complex, stubborn, reticent, full of conditioning and traumas. I dare you to change that without the Grace of God. It is Impossible. It is indeed a Herculean task to work on human nature, but this is what I came here to do, with Their Help and my sustained and caring effort.

I have learnt that patience is essential, and so is kindness.

Society nowadays is goal oriented, worshipping ‘success’, disdaining failure. Yet the Real Work that humanity needs to do is that of kindling an unwavering aspiration, a burning flame where personal gain is forgotten entirely, and the only success is to be a better instrument in the hands of the Divine or, simply put, to become a kind, compassionate, creative and sincere human being, with loads of Goodwill.

To surrender and be grateful and happy because the Divine always Smiles at us even when times are dark.

If Auroville becomes an institution governed by people that have not chosen to Live here (and so can't understand Auroville in its entirety), people that are perhaps stuck in the past, in the old idea of Religion, imposing a mechanical, fabricated, artificial discipline on the collectivity, then the Auroville that was flourishing will wither.

We owe it to the Future to preserve and protect Auroville from Destructive forces, because this is what I have witnessed in the last year and a half. Wanton destruction, devoid of beauty and kindness, devoid even of common sense.

Nature, Divine Nature, the Shakti expresses itself in everything, yet we humans do hold some responsibility, we do make choices, we can make the journey hard and painful and arduous by aligning ourselves with strife, division, competition; or we can build on the foundation of real brotherhood, equality, freedom so that humanity can really flourish. This doesn't mean that the journey will not be long and arduous, but it will greatly reduce the hardship and the pain.

The destruction that I see, I hope it will awaken in us the wish to become better human beings; less greedy, less stubborn, less competitive. So that we can really build together the Auroville Sri Aurobindo and Mother intended.

I'm just a humble woman, writing to a stranger, a stranger who is my brother, my sister. A stranger who, like me, lives in the world of today and knows that Dream is essential.

Auroville is that Dream.

A Dream that runs in our veins and is a flame in our heart, no matter where on this big planet we are, no matter what our belief system is.

The Ideal of Auroville is the Ideal of Sri Aurobindo and Mother for the entire world.

I am Gillian, Aurovilian since 1977 . I came to India in 1974 from Australia. I was staying in Pondy where I lived for a year. Here I befriended a young Indian man. Every day he read a Canto of Savitri to me with a deep rich voice that penetrated into my soul, and opened me to the journey of my life.

We would walk out to Auroville quite often and slowly befriended some Aurovilians. Very soon I knew this was my true home as I felt more and more the immense embrace of the rarefied atmosphere of Auroville and felt a deep and lasting gratitude to Mother and Sri Aurobindo for creating Auroville.

In 1977 I decided to return to Australia and prepare to move to Auroville.

What do I do? I have done and do “What has to be Done.“

From the beginning I became highly motivated to DO. As there was so much to be done. It was in the very beginning of the manifestation. There was a powerful feeling of movement, of drawing Auroville, the invisible city, out of a dream state onto the land.

A group of us began the cycle paths as there was an urge to be off the roads that were very dusty. I ended up the last survivor of the original small team who wanted to see them built, and to this day am still working on them.

We created a waste management system which became Ecoservice. Houses, schools and kindergartens were built. Farms were started to grow food for Auroville.

Everyone was planting trees for their garden and forests to protect the land from the burning sun.

I was drawn to working in Kuilaypalayam village as there were big settlements of Auroville interspersed in that area. There were no toilets at all in the whole village and it was very unsanitary, so I built several public toilets and slowly introduced private toilet schemes funded by the local government. Then the garbage developed and added to the chaos. Nothing has really developed that has been sustainable in the village as time has shown it requires a large amount money to establish something that can last. I have developed a project waiting for funding.

Slowly over 50 years emerged a vibrant sustainable microcosm of a new society built with goodwill of the people who came with their skills and lives.

The Aurovilians have been woven together into a tapestry of care and love and faith and joy that can and will endure.

My name is Frederick. Born in 1939 in Germany as the youngest of five children, I have vivid memories of the third Reich and the war. I have not been able to understand how Germany could become such a barbaric nation. From an early age I knew I was not part of Germany and looked for a new home.

Finally, when I was 20, I landed in India and realised I had come home. My Darshan with The Mother when I was 21 changed my life and I dedicated my life to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. In 1966 when I finally settled in the Ashram and shortly after in Auroville, I surrendered a significant inheritance to The Mother. I became the father of the first child born in Auroville and also built the first proper house.

My work in Auroville was very varied, from creating a Tamil Fund, working with J.R.D Tata, Kireet Joshi and many other prominent figures on legal, educational, political and administrative levels.

The funding and building of Auroville became my life’s work, and its aims as expressed in the Charter and The Dream became the meaning of my life.

No other country than India has the insight and the breadth to give shelter and foster a project like Auroville, which aspires for human unity and transcends national borders.

My gratitude to India, to Sri Aurobindo, to The Mother, to Auroville.

My name is Lella, a resident of Auroville originally from Italy. In the early 80s I heard for the first time about Auroville, a place where there was no circulation of money. Unbelievable! Was it possible that on earth would exist a place where people would live together and work for reasons other than money?

I travelled to Auroville a year later: strange indeed, I felt immediately at home. During that stay someone put in my hands the book by Satprem ‘Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness’; a revelatory experience. I came to know about the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo gave me fully satisfactory answers to my existential questions, and thus I finally understood the meaning of my life.

Back to Italy, the ‘call’ was too strong to resist. I left my job, my finance, my studies at the university, to be back to Auroville in 1986, leaving a comfortable life in Italy for a precarious existence here. At times even some courage was needed. I lived for several months in a hut with a big cobra on its roof…

37 years have passed and I am still here, practising the yoga of work/action of Sri Aurobindo. I am immensely grateful to the Mother and the Master for having chosen me, and grateful to Mother India for hosting me on her sacred soil.

My name is Sandyra Ingrid Andrassy. I am 64 years old, a native of Germany, and have spent the past 15 years blessedly living in Auroville. When I initially visited in 2007, on the second day, after the concentration in the Inner Chamber, I sat under the Banyan Tree and sobbed tears of joy for over an hour.

My entire being was pulsating with the profound knowledge that I had arrived home. This intuition was reaffirmed when I discovered that the force that had been with me for years was Sri Aurobindo —whom I referred to as “my Indian Jesus”— during his formative years. I was both humbled and blessed.

There were no questions or obstacles in my path to Auroville, and I received a clear call from the higher forces. A calling that required me to leave behind my loved ones, close friends, my lucrative business, and my comfortable home in the lush countryside of Bavaria. A calling that also promised to satisfy my profound urge to infuse spirituality into daily life, a place where community members hold a great desire for human unity and where the soul can be set free by turning over control to the Divine.

I worked with the bioregion during my Newcomer period, eager to learn more about India, its culture, and its people. I felt a strong connection to India, the country with its deep spirituality that gave me a new home and gave Auroville the space to grow and become an example for the rest of the world.

Soon after my Newcomer period, a group of friends and I were given a farm to develop, in which I eagerly invested all my savings. It enabled us to triple the farmland for producing vegetables for the community, dig water catchment ponds, build volunteer houses, and so on. After a spiritual experience with Sri Aurobindo, I felt compelled to take on more collective responsibility, which led to my appointment to the Auroville Council.

Throughout this time, I never stopped volunteering in the community as an energy healer (working with cellular consciousness and energetic alignment to source), holistic counsellor, and life coach. My passion is also the evolution of consciousness, so I devote my energy to creating spaces for collective healing, fostering collective intelligence, and discovering new forms of natural justice and collaboration. In this field I contribute by being an executive and therapist in Holistic Healing and a therapist at Quiet Healing Center.

I've spent many years studying and contemplating Mother's symbol, the deeper meaning of the four Mother Powers, and the twelve Qualities. I am a member of several meditation groups and feel deeply connected to the Matrimandir.

I consider myself fortunate and honoured to be a part of The Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's experiment, and I am hopeful for the future of human unity. To contribute to unification and peace, I decided to participate in the current heart-weaving process, which aims to bring the community into a path of peace and harmony while honouring the entrusted task of building the city the world requires.

With a lot of gratitude in my heart.

I arrived in Pondicherry August 7, 1969. When sitting in a chair meditating on a painting in the house of a friend in Tucson, Arizona. April 11, 1968, the painting disappeared and a face appeared and said, 'come to India now.'

The voice did not leave a name and address so I travelled slowly east to India – and finally got to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Upon approaching the samadhi, I felt an inner resonance, which was even stronger in the meditation room. I met The Mother for the first time October 13, 1969 and she gave me permission to live in Auroville. I had already started working with Lisa on Aurocreation, and eventually Jocelyn Elder and others joined us and we opened the first Auroville boutique and got the first export licence. I moved to Auroville on February 28, 1970 and built my first house, Silence, on what is now the Bharat Nivas field. I put in the bore well which the Bharat Nivas compound uses till today for water. On February 28, 1971, I was sitting meditating with many others in the early morning and I heard mother tell me my work at Silence was finished. I then asked for and got permission to build a community for artists and artisans at what is now Sri Ma. When I returned from a short trip to visit my parents, I returned to the beach to find some French people living in my hut. I wrote to Mother asking her what to do – she replied, find your psychic being, try and I will help you. 

I moved into my friend Ravindra's house near Bharat Nivas when he went to Bombay. Mother saw two people from Aurocreation every two months in 1972-73 – and each time I was one of the two she called. In October 1973, I went to the USA because my father was ill. When I returned in 1976, I went to live in the forest now called Silence with Gillian Chvat. I built a workshop that produced crocheted shoes, leather, beaded shoes, bags and garments. I had a unit called Amadi. I also worked with Gilles Guigan on the Auroville Resource Center, and sat on the maintenance desk from 1987-1989 when a friend invited me to California and I went. When I returned in 1990, there were other people in all the buildings I had built at Silence, so I went to live in the house John Walker was building when he died, which was then a guesthouse. After the manager's hut burned down and he left the community, I was given the house so it became my house.  did years of research in sacred art and wrote a novel, ‘Antithesis of Yoga’, and maintained the house and built a garden.

In October 1971, I arrived in Bombay searching for a Guide who would help me to live a more conscious life. With two friends we began visiting different Ashrams and, in January 1972, we arrived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. We had the grace to be received by The Mother and that put an end to my travels and my search. I had found my Guru and decided to remain in the Ashram near The Mother. I lived there for 16 years practising, as best as I could, the yoga of Sri Aurobindo while working in the Ashram schools and doing translations from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

Then, in 1988, we left the Ashram and went to live in Catalonia for the next three years and in October 1991 were called back to Auroville by Mother's dream: There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of good will who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth: a place of peace.... Since then, my family and I are living here.

I chose to come to Auroville to participate in the adventure of the evolution of consciousness. I wanted to be part of the transition towards the New Being of which Auroville, Mother tells us, is the cradle. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have brought down on Earth a Higher Force which will bring the human species a step higher. I wanted (and want) to become a tool of their Force.

I work with the body. Exploring it and becoming aware of all the possibilities has always been my way to contact the deepest in me, the way to align all the different parts of my being around the Essence, the Presence inside myself.

Since I came to Auroville, I have continued to work with my body and, through my body, to gain awareness, to expand the consciousness. With a friend of mine, we created and developed Awareness through The Body (ATB), a programme to offer tools to the children who attend the schools of Auroville, to help them discover who they really are, and thus be able to manage themselves more effectively and consciously. Since 1992, ATB is part of the curriculum of the Auroville schools. Later on we started to offer this programme to adults too, here in Auroville and elsewhere in the world.

I am in Auroville to continue my path in The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Here the Force for this endeavour is much more accessible than anywhere else in the world, and even in moments of difficulty, like the one we are transitioning now, the Force is always there and helps us to grow.

I am extremely grateful to Life that has brought me to The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, I am extremely grateful for the existence of Auroville, and I thank India for having made space for Auroville to be.