In memoriam - Roy Lawrence Chvat
In memoriam:
Keywords: Passings, United States (USA), Aurodam community, Pottery, Matrimandir workers camp, Hers Home Needs Shop, News and Notes (N&N), Dreams and Auroville pioneers
Roy Chvat
Roy, who passed away in Auroville on 6 November 2025 at the age of 76, came to Auroville from the USA in 1971. Roy had learned about Auroville when seeing an image of the Galaxy in a bookshop in New York. He was in search of a spiritual community after experiencing a higher, non-mental state. He found a yoga teacher who knew about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. In the Lama Foundation community in New Mexico he also met someone who had been to Pondicherry and visited the Ashram.
Roy would have liked to stay in the Ashram, where he had met the Mother, but being advised to go to Auroville, he arrived in the Silence community, where he met Constance, Iris, Jocelyn, Daniel, Jaap, Diane and others who were creating a community near Kottakarai village.
Together with Constance, Roy started Auroville’s first pottery there. They wanted to hire a village potter and teach him glazing as they were concerned that village potters would disappear unless they made more durable products. This attempt did not succeed, but the pottery did manifest in the end; and when Patrick and Angad, both experienced potters, arrived, the pottery took off.
Roy soon started working at the Matrimandir construction site and stayed in the Matrimandir Workers Camp. From there he moved to Aurodam, where he stayed for many years with his partner Gillian. He was involved with the HERS store in Kottakarai and took over as editor of the News & Notes in July 2021, until recently when he withdrew for health reasons.
Roy recalled having a vivid dream in 1972, the year before the Mother’s passing: “In this dream I approached the Ashram, the main gate was closed but a seldom used side door was open. There was a long line of disciples winding its way slowly inside and there on the Samadhi lay the Mother’s body. I approached and kissed her feet, they were blue in color, but a force surged through them and I knew she was not dead but in a deep state.”
Roy was not outgoing, more of a quiet presence. He once described himself modestly as “a short, a bit overweight, Jewish guy from New Jersey who plays guitar and builds tube amplifiers”.
Roy was a good writer, with sharp insights into Auroville affairs. In one post on Auronet, he observed, “Getting Aurovilians to agree on any subject let alone a detailed description longer than a paragraph remains a kind of insolvable enigma and may be so for some time to come. Perhaps we may have to wait till the details of our policies are tackled by those Gnostic Beings.” And he quoted Sri Aurobindo: “In the gnostic consciousness difference would not lead to discord but to a spontaneous natural adaptation, a sense of complementary plenitude, a rich many-sided execution of the thing to be collectively known, done, worked out in life.”
At Roy’s funeral, on 9 November at the Auroville Cremation Ground, one of his friends recalled having asked Roy recently about his psychic being. Roy’s answer: “For the last 60 years or so, my life has been Sri Aurobindo. Now I hope to be near him.”