The deeper cause

The community is not informed that a meeting of the Board will happen, and Aurovilians are not invited to present their issues and concerns, while minutes containing momentous decisions of the Board are not or very late communicated.

The International Advisory Council which, under the Auroville Foundation Act, has the function of advising the Governing Board, has likewise been ignored; its attempts to protest at questionable and destructive actions, like the excessive cutting of trees and the opaque land exchange and purchase policy of the present Foundation administration (resulting in a conservatively estimated loss of over INR 200 crores or approximately US $ 24 million to Auroville, in addition to the loss of important parts of Auroville’s physical body and legacy), having met with no response from the Governing Board. The present administration also hardly or insufficiently responds to the Right to Information requests made under the RTI Act.

A number of Aurovilians have stood up to the present authorities of the Foundation, contesting their arbitrary decisions directly and in the courts with some success — but it is a lengthy process full of uncertainties. The Madras High Court found that the present administration has been acting in contravention of the Auroville Foundation Act but, instead of accepting the verdict, the administration is appealing against it.

Meanwhile, the present administration has replaced Auroville’s working groups with their own working groups, and the Working Committee selected by the Residents’ Assembly has not been recognised. The majority of the community’s internal and external communication channels have also been taken over, some, like Auronet, by groups which remain anonymous.

There has been a huge increase in the administrative staff of the Auroville Foundation Office to more than double or triple its previous size, which is now staffed by people with little or no knowledge of Auroville. At the same time, many Aurovilians have been removed from their work and maintenance without explanation.

The outcome is a botched execution of the Auroville Universal Township Master Plan Perspective 2025, whose emphatic prescriptions of flexibility and adaptations and community participation are totally ignored, and a climate of fear and insecurity has been caused by the insistence upon adherence to the views of the governing bodies on pain of punishment, which includes the withholding of visa recommendations without giving the affected persons the opportunity to be heard, cutting the income security of many Aurovilians and their employees, and threatening to move some Aurovilians out of their homes without any relocation assistance.  

Now, more than ever, money has become the sovereign lord. Payment of the city service contribution has become mandatory and, for non-Indian nationals, is linked to visa recommendations. Units’ profit contributions are now calculated five years backwards and linked to the right to receive donations. Only since April 2024 has the Budget Coordination Committee of the Auroville Foundation begun to release a monthly statement of Auroville’s accounts.

Unsurprisingly, given the immense material and psychological upheaval the community is experiencing — by far the worst in its history — some Aurovilians, including long-time pioneers, are considering leaving, while there is no way of knowing how many potential applicants or donors have been put off applying or donating by the actions of the present regime. 

We can all see and experience the surface manifestations. But what is the deeper cause of this immense turmoil? For Sri Aurobindo wrote that “Possibly because we start from an external view of things, we tend to fixate on the external forms rather than the inner causes,” and “the play of the forces is very complex and one has to be conscious of them and, as it were, see and watch how they work before one can really understand why things happen as they do”.

The supreme example of this was Krishna’s explanation to Arjuna of the need for him to fight his own kinsmen on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, immortalised as the Bhagavad Gita.  

For the danger is that without understanding the deeper cause or causes, symptoms will be confused with the underlying issue, and superficial explanations of the ‘why’ of what is happening may drive people’s responses.

Therefore, Auroville Today decided to mark the month of Sri Aurobindo’s birthday by asking various Aurovilians to step back from the heat and dust of conflict and reflect upon the deeper causes of the present turmoil. The hope is that new understandings may emerge which will lead to different ways of dealing with the present crisis.

For many years, Barbara has been doing what she terms “consciousness and energy work" with Aurovilians.

Auroville Today: What do you think is the underlying cause of the present turmoil in Auroville?

Barbara: The chaos we are experiencing at the moment is not only happening in Auroville, but all over the planet. The new Light, Consciousness is active everywhere exerting pressure. Individual realisations are no longer enough, there is a need for a collective and global realisation.

What is happening is an enormous shift, which on the surface can appear destructive and catastrophic, but Sri Aurobindo tells us it is the “Hour of God”, and God knows what to do.

Thank god.

So while the outer atmosphere of Auroville appears chaotic, I know when existing systems like democracy break down, chaos comes, but if we choose to stay creative and connected, out of the chaos the real answer will come.

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have helped bring the Supramental into the earth field, and now the Earth is waking up. This is a huge integral process, and we can see that everything done so far, even the best, is no longer enough and doesn’t work. Before, we could use our mental possibilities to organise ourselves and the environment, but now we must learn to see and accept that the Divine is organising better and truly. That is now the difficulty: to make people realise that the Divine organisation is already happening in a new way and knows how to deal with everything better than any human organisation does.

So how can we participate in this new movement?

The law of evolution has changed: from the law of duality (oppositions) into the Law of the new light and truth and unending progress.

“A new world is born, born, born…,” Mother says. If we have trust and faith and surrender, Sri Aurobindo and She can do everything needed for us and “the work will be done automatically”.

But we have to free ourselves from the ego automatisms: the ego has to go by opening to eternal frequencies and the presence of the psychic. This is an ongoing process of purification and by that we become transitional beings. It happens in our daily life and work, and the psychic can grow into a psychic being by which we become true and loving beings for all life.

But we must be patient. We have to learn to connect to everything and all forms on Earth in a true way, and at present we receive the Light in small doses. This one can only do step-by-step: it is a huge work which cannot be rushed.

The experience of ignorance, falsehood and perversions etc. bring symptoms of painful inner and outer attacks, confusions and depressions… so what to do with all this?

Now a lot of things trouble us, but we must be careful that we don’t get pulled down by them. We must learn not to get into the wrong vibration, which happens when we are fearful and the body shrinks. We need to slow down, become silent in the mind, peaceful in the vital, and very still in the body so that nothing moves anymore, everything becomes quiet and the cells can rest in stillness. This is the way of purification and transformation: individually and collectively. This is the Yoga of the Earth and the Adventure of Consciousness… a big on-going work.

Is evolution speeding up?

Yes, the whole planet is progressing to a higher frequency. Now the world is becoming more and more light, and with this light everything is possible. And what has to leave is breaking away.

We are in the vast field of on-going free progress without beginning and end. The past is disappearing and the future comes nearer to the now. After all, the Universal Mother has taken up a human body which started an accelerated process of evolution on earth and brings back the original purity and joy.

“If Earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now for that immense and glorious transformation,” said Sri Aurobindo.

We have the opportunity to enter into a field where we can collaborate together and realise that we all come from the same source, the divine source. This is how I want to be with Aurovilians and everybody, to share the joy of living in the presence of That.

Alain Bernard first came to Pondicherry in August 1972 and was privileged to see The Mother. A few days later, his application to become Aurovilian was approved by Her and he joined Auroville in July 1973. Together with other Aurovilians and Kireet Joshi, the former Registrar of the Sri Aurobindo Centre of Education who, after The Mother’s passing, had joined the Government as Educational Advisor and later became Special Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Alain conceptualized the Auroville Foundation Act. At present he is an executive of the Auroville Village Action Group. Auroville Today asked him about his views on the present times in Auroville.

Auroville Today: What, do you think, are the reasons for this present situation?

Alain: There are of course outer and inner reasons. Starting with the outer ones: there were many defects in the way Auroville functioned, which we were unable to address, as the community was weary to give ‘authority’ to its working groups for fear of abuse. We created an organizational structure which prescribes much discussion, in attempts to come to consensus. But results have mostly evaded us. Take, for example, the Retreat. [see AVToday #309, April 2015, eds.] In the course of these rather intense three days with nearly 200 participants, we jointly identified many ‘elephants in the room’, but none of them was resolved by us afterwards. In a way, we were stuck.

And the inner reasons?

I have started re-reading Mother’s Agenda, and chanced on Her explanation of the brutal attack on the Ashram by hundreds of rioters on February 11, 1965. Mother said that the protection had been weakened by collective imperfections: “I had a microscopic (but absolutely precise and exact) perception of all the lying points in the atmosphere of the Ashram, which established the contact [with the negative forces],” She said to Satprem.

Surely, Auroville too has many of those ‘lying points.’ Our many imperfections are obvious, especially in relation to the ultimate goal of transformation which is something so incredibly high. Didn’t Mother herself say that Aurovilians were supposed to already be in permanent contact with their inner being? She made it a condition for becoming a true Aurovilian: “The first necessity is the inner discovery in order to know what one truly is behind social, moral, cultural, racial and hereditary appearances. At the centre there is a being free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the active centre of our being and our life in Auroville.” I suppose we can rightly assume that most present Aurovilians, if not all, do not fulfill this condition. But how otherwise can one be truly the ‘willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness’ mentioned in Auroville’s Charter? This is not to say that all are equal in this. I have always felt that the true ‘hierarchy’ in Auroville is beyond our perception and that some souls here do protect Auroville through their quiet but intense aspiration.

There are most probably other reasons as well. In the Agenda, Mother speaks about asuric beings; She recalls that one of them had told Her that he knew that She would one day destroy him, but that before that happened, he would destroy as much as he could in the world. Mother spoke about Auroville as a Dream of the Divine. I think we may assume that such a Divine Project is likely to be attacked by such forces. I feel it is happening right now, and we don’t know how long this attack will continue.

You said you don’t think that many people have made the inner discovery. Could you elaborate?

Mother said that the inner contact with the psychic is a concrete fact and those who once experienced it know this as an undeniable truth. But it is not mental. I believe that I have seen some otherwise nondescript people whose psychic appears to be a tangible influence in their day-to-day lives. But those people do not speak about that. I myself long ago went through a period of a few weeks where things were really different. Obviously I was not ready for anything permanent and it slowly dissipated. I remember a feeling of ‘being present’ which was special. When I mentioned this to Kireet, he told me it is a promise and it will come back. I am still waiting. But clearly, such a way of being, if established, would have made a huge difference in my participation to Auroville’s work.

I suppose the same may have happened to many Aurovilians. Radical transformations like ‘new births’ we have not seen so far. Let’s hope it may manifest more in the future as, surely, it would help tremendously our painfully slow collective progress. Still, whoever and whatever we may be, I feel that it is the deep faith of most Aurovilians about Mother’s force and presence despite the awful appearances which help them face and go through the present ordeal.

Besides the individuals, there is also a question of a collective intensity in aspiration.

We all go about our lives and our projects but do we keep at the same time a constant concern and prayer for Auroville’s true development? Like a living background present behind at all times? Maybe some do and if so, it is great. As Satprem, that intensely intense being said so simply and luminously – in Auroville people do many beautiful and good things, precious researches, they create beauty in many different ways, they organize life — but that’s the outside appearance. There is a secret. They do these activities, but at the same time they are in search of the ‘new world’. That Secret can sometimes be shared with those who can understand. It is not necessary to speak about it with everybody, but it is at the heart of all we do.

Or, rather, let’s say that it is how it should be. I do feel that building up the ‘collective’ meaningfully and intensively may be the next important effort after the acute crisis ends. I don’t really know how it can be done but is it not significant that in more than 50 years of Auroville’s development during which we built many large buildings, we have not been able to create a big, beautiful place in which we can all meet regularly and easily, in all weather patterns, with adequate infrastructure?

So the psychic discovery is essential for all Aurovilians. For example, when Mother was asked what political organization She wanted for Auroville, She replied, “An amusing definition occurs to me: a divine anarchy. But the world will not understand. Men must become conscious of their psychic being and organize themselves spontaneously, without fixed rules and laws - that is the ideal. For this, one must be in contact with one’s psychic being, one must be guided by it and the ego’s authority and influence must disappear.” And on its relevance for the future, She replied: “The Divine manifests in man under the psychic influence, and that is how the coming of superhumanity is prepared.” Last but certainly not least there is that conversation of March 22, 1969, where She spoke about the effect of the descent of the Overman Consciousness on January 1 that year:

“Two days ago (not yesterday, the day before), this Consciousness said something to me, and then I said, ‘Fine’... but it went on saying the same thing over and over again until I finally wrote it down! So here it is [Mother hands him a note]. And it explained to me why it had used ‘we’. ‘We shall endeavour to make Auroville the cradle of the superman.’ [the intermediate species between mankind and the supramental being, eds.] And then I said, ‘Why we?’ and it said, ‘Because we’re going to try to get the people who will be in Auroville to collaborate’.”

We know from experience – yes, despite our limitations – that the more we grow internally, the more needs of all kinds diminish. Being in permanent contact with one’s true being is the supreme lightness: this is why The Mother begins with that with her enumeration of the characteristics of this still unknown being that she reveals to us: the True Aurovilian. That new race which alone can really make Auroville the city that the earth needs.

Do you have any expectations for tomorrow?

No, I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Who knows? What is known, however, and shared by many, is the imperative need for another Auroville. Even if this Auroville that we have known and loved is a luminous memory compared to what we see today, it is not at the level of the true Auroville, we know that. It is why it had to be broken, dislocated, and crushed. And of one thing we must be convinced: As Sri Aurobindo and Mother have repeatedly said, all that happens is exactly what must happen in order to lead us and the world as quickly as possible to the goal―the union with the Divine and ultimately the manifestation of the Divine. This other Auroville must become a living body composed of hearts and souls united towards the goal of becoming “the cradle of the superman”.

An Aurovilian since 1995, Manoj is an educator, filmmaker, and the director of Purnam Centre for Integrality in Auroville. Here he presents his views on the current crisis in Auroville.

Auroville Today: What is the underlying cause of the present turmoil?

Manoj: In my view, Auroville’s present turmoil stems from a confluence of issues, not a single root cause. The powerful intervention by the GB and the Secretary is only an external instrumentation, not the cause. The intervention brought out very old hidden layers that are the deeper causes. The first layer is our decades old conflict between the forest and urban development, two differing world views. Over the decades this conflict was in a status quo with foresters having an upper hand but that has now been forcefully disrupted. 

The old status quo was held in place by the second layer beneath it — the ineffective system of governance. Due to excessive decentralisation and non hierarchical approach, we were stuck in decision making and execution paralysis and incapacity for collective action even on pressing issues. Now the officials have brought in centralisation and it is in conflict with the old way.

Beneath this is the third layer, the wounded relationship with power. Historically, across the world, the abuse of power has left deep pain in the collective memory. This was present as a collective shadow in Auroville making people hypersensitive and emotionally reactive when dealing with power and authority. Our excessive decentralisation was a defence against this angst. This collective shadow has now erupted as an open raw wound unleashing a great deal of psychological violence and fear.

The fourth and the deepest cause is the fundamental disconnect from the soul at an individual and collective level. On one hand the emotional being is mistaken for the soul and this misconception is held in place by lack of self-awareness. As a result the collective evolution is stuck at the level of the emotional being. The intelligent will — buddhi — is not able to mediate between the group soul and the vital and physical parts to translate the soul’s vision into reality. Despite the abundance of theoretical discussions about the “psychic being,” inner discovery remains elusive.

These are the causes at varying depths.

What are we being asked to understand, or the lesson we are being asked to learn?

The pressure on Auroville is not asking for ecological sustainability but something deeper. Even when spiritual ideals govern Auroville’s vision, we have been largely driven by global narratives based on materialists’ view of sustainability. There is a tendency to reduce inner growth into our carbon footprint and ecology.

Wars, weaponisation of all things and ecological destruction are symptoms not the root cause of human crisis. As E.O. Wilson said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” Ego’s sense of separation, territoriality and fighting instincts are lurking within us along with the shadow of our wounded relationship with power. Until we cleanse and transform this inner state and heal those inner wounds, true outer harmony and unity are impossible.

The pressure is on us to truly delve into inner transformation, a transformation that will ripple outwards and change how we behave. Just like we’ve regenerated the outer landscape, we need to regenerate the collective inner landscape — that’s the real call we’re facing. Auroville’s dharma, its purpose, is to be a living laboratory for this kind of transformation, a place for inner discovery. This has to be our top priority.

How may this change the way we behave in the present situation?

Expecting the government officials to lead the inner transformation is naive. The transformation won’t come by compliance with government laws and regulations just like it is not about the carbon footprint or ecology or the curvature of the roads. These are important but only secondary and outer factors.

On the other extreme, demonising the officials is a trap of our own shadow as we end up manifesting what we fear the most. The so-called authoritarian out there lives within us as our shadow but it is hard to comprehend and resolve. It is easier to fight with outer reality, file court cases, crank up RA machinery, weaponise the media, and play the victim card. Through all this we are only aggravating the wounded relationship with power, not healing it. We are going through a recurring karmic pattern and it is time to dissolve its grip.

As long as our actions are born out of fear, anger, anxiety, sorrow and pain, we remain the agents of these forces, propagating its toxic effect. We can generate as many narratives, counter narratives, facts and counterfacts as we want, but as long as the animating consciousness is not transformed, nothing has been fundamentally changed even if you win all the court cases.

The invitation to Micheal Bonke and his team to take up unfinished work of CPWD is an important signal of collaboration. Whether you like his ideas or not, his substantial contribution to Auroville is undeniable. The future belongs to those who have not only knowledge and love for the divine, but can also reasonably and diplomatically negotiate boundaries and collaborate for finding win-win solutions. This is possible only when you have healed your relationship with money and power and it is no more an uneasy shadow. I hope more such solutions emerge.

There are only two things fixed, the vision of Auroville and the land. Everything else, including the Auroville Foundation Act, are transient and evolving forms in between the spiritual and material end of things. But the material end is yet to be secured. We do have a realistic possibility of securing it with the help of the GB and the Secretary if we collaborate. Formally empowered officials can provide great support in land consolidation. However, we have to let go of many transient forms of the past, even if it is emotionally painful for those who invested their time and energy in shaping them. It is a sacrifice for the sake of the larger good. This is where the behavioural shift is critical.

On the side of government officials, the tendency to turn Auroville into a government department will be a fundamental disservice to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. I expect such tendencies to subside as it has no alignment with the soul of Auroville.

A reflection by Alan.

For more than two and a half years, Auroville has experienced deep turmoil. It has divided Aurovilians and even led some to doubt whether Auroville itself has a future. What is the cause? There is no shortage of explanations. Some explain it as resistance from certain Aurovilians to a change in the status quo, or in their resistance to the construction of the city in the face of a renewed push for its materialisation. Others blame it on the attempt to impose dogmatic and outdated ideas, or clumsy attempts to impose what some people believe Mother wanted, on an evolving experiment. Conspiracy theories include suggestions that this is a deeply laid plan to rid the community of foreigners, or an excuse for a complete government takeover, or for the Sri Aurobindo Society to take control of Auroville again.

Yet none of these explanations seem sufficient to account for the scale and depth of the disruption.

What, then, could be the deeper reason for what is happening? Mother understood that everyhing that happens is, ultimately, the Divine’s way of hastening spiritual evolution, even though it may not appear like that to us. But within that overarching trajectory she also made it clear that there are choices to be made at the individual and collective levels, choices which can affect the speed at which that evolution can take place. In that sense, the present disruption of our accustomed way of living could be taken, at the individual level, as an opportunity, as a spur, to dedicate ourselves more completely to the ideal and to practice what Mother advised:

All thinkings, pre-plannings, arrangements and all that, are very favourable to much disorder. To live almost minute by minute, to be like that (gesture upward), attentive only to the thing that is to be done at the moment, and then to let the All-Consciousness decide.

At the collective level, one of the present narratives is that Auroville has gone ‘off the rails’, that it has drifted far from the ideal Mother set before us, and that the present disruption is actually a necessary course correction. Few Aurovilians would dispute that in many areas we have failed so far to fully materialise what Mother had intended for Auroville. It is unclear, however, if the present attempt at course correction, however well intended, is making things better, as the means chosen is causing considerable collateral damage.

It is totally understandable that those who fear for the integrity of Auroville should do all that they can to promote or protect it. In fact, the present turmoil is seen by some as a struggle between ‘asuric’ forces which wish to destroy Auroville and those who are trying to protect Mother’s Dream. The problem is that each of the opposing orientations in the community seems to believe that they are the ‘true’ Auroville while they characterise the others as the destructive force. The result is that we are trapped in a circular dynamic where the action of one leads to reaction from the other, and so on in an ever escalating way.

Perhaps there is another possible explanation. And that is, indeed, that we (as well as the larger world) are engaged in a struggle, but it is the struggle of the old world as it resists the new. And even though we would all like to believe we represent the new, the hard fact may be that all our present understandings and actions, however fine, may actually be ‘old world’, even including the way we interpret and use Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s words.

For this new consciousness, according to Mother, is unlike anything we have been used to before, the expression of a ‘new world’ which has already been ‘born’. And one of the changes it has already brought about is that the old ways are no longer effective.

There’s really something new – things are NO LONGER what they were. All our common sense, our human logic, our practical sense – collapsed, finished! No longer effective. No longer realistic. They are no longer relevant. A new world, really. 

This threatens many of us who rely heavily upon our minds and on the Enlightenment proposition that everything can be solved rationally. But how are we to access this new consciousness? Mother gave hints:

There is one essential condition: the ego’s reign must come to an end. The ego is now the obstacle. The ego must be replaced by the divine consciousness – but, essentially, there is no workshop manual for how to do this.

The road to it is a completely new road which has never before been traced out – nobody has gone there, nobody has done that! It is a beginning, a universal beginning. So, it is an absolutely unexpected and unpredictable adventure … It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails, a real adventure, whose goal is certain victory but the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored… One must put aside all that has been foreseen, all that has been devised, all that has been constructed, and then…set off walking into the unknown.

When Auroville’s very integrity appears threatened, it seems illogical, even dangerous, to begin exploring other ways of solving our problems, to embark, in other words, upon this new adventure. No doubt, we will have to begin with small steps as we cannot easily abandon a lifetime of assuming that we know how the world works.

But begin, I think, we must as a collective (no doubt some individuals are already on the way). We cannot keep saying we are not ready yet, that we have to keep using the old methods, for this will continue to encase us in the old world. 

Mother expected something more from us:

Auroville wants to be a new creation expressing a new Consciousness in a new way and according to new methods.

Angad is a long-time Aurovilian who manages Mantra Pottery.

Auroville Today: What do you think is the deeper cause of the present turmoil, and what can we learn from it?

Angad: One of the things that has become very clear to me is that everything that is happening to me every day, every moment, is my tutorial. And since I’ve been looking at things like that, I’m more able to accept things, my inner life has improved and my outer life has improved. I believe that everybody is getting experiences in their life precisely according to their need for growth, and that some are recognising it, but most don’t.

So what can we learn from the present situation?

In Bangalore beautiful big trees are sweetly preserved by the planners when a road gets widened, but one day, when the road needs to get even wider, they take the trees out because the cost and inconvenience of not doing that is a no-brainer.

Cities mean change. Mother’s city has to come here, so why would we want to create problems for ourselves many years later by not preparing for those changes now? It can be done. In 2009, one of our planners came to me and said they were thinking of starting the Crown. I asked him to mark the route precisely and then make a fence on my side of it so that whenever I did work on the land or built something, I knew that it would not be destroyed later. He agreed, and the Development Group paid for the fence. So when the Crown happened in this area, I had virtually no disturbance.

You can’t block planning just because you’ve planted trees. That’s one lesson we need to learn. At one time I also thought this would be a city with meandering lanes and winding narrow roads, with no motorised traffic. I liked this concept because I’m also one of those who are escaping from cities. But in the last year I spent time in a town in the UK where all the essential services are provided in walking distance, and I really like that concept. Isn’t this how Auroville is meant to be? I was even telling the Youth Centre people how lucky they are because they will be on this main thoroughfare and this will be part of their contribution to the vibrant life of Auroville’s High Street.

People fear the Crown will attract traffic, but it doesn’t have to be like that. There could be one part that would be accessible for deliveries between fixed hours, and an inner part could be for cycles or an electric tram or something. We are building radials with a width of only 4 ½ metres, but lorries delivering building materials, buses, and children on bicycles etc. will be using them. This makes no sense. We seem to be stuck in a warp between what we think is a wide road and what is required. In fact, in India it is mandatory for such roads to be at least six metres wide to allow access for emergency vehicles.

But accepting that cities have to develop and Mother’s city has to come, do you support the way it is happening at present?

I don’t think anything was wrong with the way the present Secretary acted. When she came she tried to engage with everybody with walks around the Crown road, but then some people started saying, how dare she do this? I was so happy that night when an email came from the Youth Centre saying that they accepted the Crown and inviting everyone to come the next day to dismantle their structures. But then a few people who wield a disproportionate influence told the youth not to move. That’s what created the situation that day. They expected that the Secretary would buckle, but she didn’t. Almost all the present differences of perception/difficulties etc are a consequence of that day’s actions.

I don’t like diktats, or the Foundation muscling in and replacing our groups. This is not the society we are here to build: we are here to build a society where we inspire people to do things.

But I think the diktats are a result of our resistance. The Secretary and Foundation wanted to get the Crown started, and when they encountered resistance, they had no more creative way to do this than by imposition. Meanwhile, by then they had already attracted those people in Auroville who wanted to do it at any cost, with force if necessary. So what do you expect?

I myself wonder if the radials have to be so rigidly curved, but we have shut ourselves off from the possibility of modifying these things by being so rabidly against them. With the conflict becoming so fixed with court cases, we have shut ourselves off from these options and perhaps the Crown has been deliberately built in a way that it cannot easily be changed.

This is a collective tutorial! I think the first thing we need to recognise that it is our own shit that has to be worked upon, and not keep blaming somebody else for what is happening.

But there are certain things I am pushing back against. For example, the Funds and Assets Management Committee has become a tax collecting group, rigidly collecting money from units without considering, for example, their need to offset losses incurred during COVID.

I also feel strongly that we should be developing the infrastructure of the villages inside the Master Plan, which are an intrinsic part of Auroville and whose population is expanding rapidly. I’d hazard a guess that there are already over 15000 people living in the Master Plan Area of our City (mostly in the Green Belt to be precise) and there’s no talk of any relocation, whether outward or inward. Isn’t it better, then, to think of building sewage and waste management systems there, where the population density is already present, and then, look at the learnings that will emerge before doing big projects inside the Residential Zone or even along Lines of Force?

Kristen came to Auroville from California in 2012 and is grateful to be here.

The core issue is that our soul-forces are not as strong as the other forces. Imagine if they were:

“It’s time to move houses.”

“Oh good, new neighbours, and I can get rid of all this junk!”

“You have no budget.”

“Free from money, at last!”

“Someone not in your tribe has benefitted from this.”

“Wonderful, their happiness is part of my happiness.”

“You no longer work here.”

“All right, time to learn something else.”

An important action needs to be taken – you know exactly what it is and do it perfectly. Someone needs help – you feel it and respond without being asked. You are told a falsehood – you recognize it, smile and know the truth behind.

A subtle network forms of conscious beings who know when one among them is not okay, and can channel to him what he needs to be okay. Each feels the wellbeing of the whole integral with the wellbeing of himself.

A challenge posed by a bigger entity is met with clear eyes and welcome. Where it is compatible with the truth of the collective being, it is integrated. Where it is incompatible, an alternative is expressed so coherently and powerfully that the bigger entity feels, “Oh, this is actually much better.”

No one is rejected, but each one takes their right role.

I suppose what we are all being asked to do is to decide what is really important to us. Is getting along important? Is goodwill even toward someone who has hurt you important? Whatever is happening around us that we don’t like, all of us are responsible for it: vibrations both low and high are contagious. Make the experiment today!