Auroville, Findhorn and Arcosanti

In the late 1970s a young American, Peter Callaway, had a vision. He saw a globe of the world with three points of light radiating from it. He had no idea what it meant. But when he checked a map he discovered that the points of light corresponded geographically to the communities of Auroville in South India, Findhorn in Scotland and Arcosanti in Arizona.

When he discovered that all these communities shared a vision of a new world, he felt they would play a crucial role in planetary evolution. However, they were working in isolation from each other so he decided to link them by initiating projects. The Karass project funded the communities to make informational videos about themselves and to circulate them to each other. The Hexiad project allowed two members of each community to travel to the other communities and spend time working there.

Since then, quite a number of individuals have traveled between the communities. However, the linkages Peter dreamed of were never established at an institutional level.

One reason is that the communities are sometimes perceived as being very different from each other. In Auroville, for example, Findhorn has been stereotyped at times as “touchy-feely New Agey” while Arcosanti, if it is known at all, is sometimes dismissed as a failed utopian architectural project in the desert.

And there are major differences between the communities. Today, Arcosanti has a core community of only 70 people, Findhorn’s population is around 400 while Auroville has 2,500 residents. Auroville is also far more culturally diverse than the other two communities and there are profound differences in their core philosophies. Arcosanti is essentially an architectural experiment that seeks to promote a new form of urban living, Findhorn has a spiritual dimension but it tends to be rooted in a ‘New’ Christianity, most profoundly, Auroville’s role is to hasten the evolution of a new humanity.

However, there are also striking similarities between the communities. They were all founded within eight years of each other in a particularly idealistic decade (Findhorn in 1962, Auroville in 1968, Arcosanti in 1970) and, unlike most of the other communities set up in those years, all have survived. All had charismatic founders who had a vision, albeit a rather different one, of a new world and all saw their communities as embryos or laboratories in which to explore new ways of being and living.

What is also interesting is that all these communities are facing similar challenges today. These include issues of governance, of an aging membership and of how to inspire youth to pour their energies into community. All three communities are now without their charismatic founders, so another challenge is how to interpret the original vision in the midst of a changing world and when few who knew the founder are still there.

Is it time for closer collaboration? Could we gain from what each community has achieved in its area of expertise? For example, Findhorn has done a great deal of work on group process and empowered leadership, something which both Arcosanti and Auroville are rather weak on, Arcosanti’s experiments in dense urban living and ecological design may hold clues for Auroville’s urban development, and Auroville’s multicultural setting and foundation in Integral Yoga may offer a way forward for the other communities to realize a deeper form of human unity.

In fact, between them these communities have over 150 years of experience and experimentation in areas like education, finance, sustainable construction, renewable energy, interpersonal relationships and the arts.

Interestingly, at the outset of the Karass and Hexiad projects some form of creative complementarity was anticipated. Here is an extract from an article in the summer, 1979 issue of Collaboration, the magazine of the Sri Aurobindo Association in the U.S.

If Arcosanti identifies itself with the physicality and goal of creating an urban container, then it may be one side of a triangle of physical-social-spiritual communities. Findhorn offers the emotional, social workings through its experiments in group process, family living and emphasis on human relationships. Auroville represents a transcultural undertaking which is oriented to spiritual matters. By networking these three communities, we support each other in that we recognize we are working for the same goals, though in different ways.

Recently, long-term members from both Findhorn and Arcosanti visited Auroville. We took the opportunity to explore with them the possibility of closer collaboration while inviting them to update us on their communities’ present progress and challenges.