Crossing an Invisible Boundary

David Hutchinson has been deeply involved with the Integral Yoga for 35 years. He has been a member of the Sri Aurobindo Association in the U.S., co-editor of the magazine Collaboration, organizer of AUM conferences, and moderator of several online lists on yoga. Recently he made a brief visit to Auroville for the first time in twenty years. Here is an edited version of his reflections.

Auroville exists outside – of India, time, place. Passing the gate, a low canopy of trees springs up abruptly; you pass through an invisible boundary; one step, and all is green and red. As we stopped at the intersection of one dirt road with another, the driver uncertain where to turn, a familiar face rolled up, Satyavan, with his young daughter on the back. The first face met, though not the last! In a few minutes, I was walking through the red garden gate at Paula’s and sitting down to a cool breakfast of fresh mango, musli, curd, followed by practicalities and a couple of hours conversation in the garden.

The blaring crowds of Thanjavur lay a thousand miles away; even the quaint seaside resort of Pondy feels metropolitan. Auroville is a blend of Le Guin, Tolkien, Huxley, and Asimov. Buildings are curved, people are known by their first names, tropical birds sing out “Here and now! Here and now! Pay attention!” Consciousness is in the air and on the tongue, large ventures are imagined against formidable odds, a forest springs out of the desert, tradition is honoured and broken in the same breath by the same person, meals are a polyglot babble in a restaurant at the end of reality.

Wandering into Solar Kitchen, an unknown face known for years approaches, Mauna, who quickly arranges all the needful in the efficient Town Hall, where a dozen whirring desktop computers and dutifully tapping staff register, process money, and hand out Aurocards so that one can function in the moneyless economy.

The dome of the Matrimandir looms through breaks in the trees, golden, strange, beautiful, a promise and a challenge, a symbol and a centre. The inner chamber will have to wait for another day, after chits are stamped and permissions granted....

The residents of Auroville have set themselves a formidable task these last forty years, and are still struggling to give it birth. They want to live in the future, in a culture without culture, guided by the unknown, in a society that has yet to come into being. They are surrounded by the leviathan of India, several villages on the doorstep with tens of thousands, the politics and struggle of a developing nation at the start of 21st century exponential change....

Matrimandir: Spiraling upward, the twin flames of two oil lamps mark the beginning of helices on which one slowly ascends, like some organic molecule searching for the lock to match its key, as numberless forms arise in the mind. A golden cell, the seed of an infinitesimal species magnified through warped dimensions, bursting from the earth, almost floating free on electrical forces also magnified ten thousandfold; a ship from future time, landing softly, raising ripples in the land thanks to its dense neutron star mass; the emergence of a new form of matter, dreamed into being through spiritual force, worked on by legions of precursor beings, themselves not yet of this matter even though they have carved its outer form, poured its concrete struts; a point of light visible from hundreds of light-years away, to which future generations of space-faring thoughtwisps are drawn, the disembodied minds of whole planets pulled slowly at the speed of light into the single beam, passing through the portal, into a crystalline globe, there to gaze out with bodiless eyes and quick smiles at the silent circle of humans meditating upon their light and souls.

All true; for all that can be thought has a reality in some realm.

The Matrimandir defies individual description, history, explanation. It was several decades in the making, having been finished only in the first years of the 21st century. Numberless meetings, designs, contracts, scaffolds, rupees, arguments, agreements, sweat, bonfires, celebrations. A steady stream of disciples and tourists, Hindus and Christians and agnostics and skeptics, believers and builders, forerunners and latecomers.

Sitting in the inner chamber as a ray of light pours down through the central opening to land on the crystal, silence and cool air, columns rising, a pure white essence of concentration. The collective aspiration and visions through the years, descent of consciousness, the breaking of barriers. Peace and strength, tears and knots, the flow of energy carrying these molecules further, further up the spiral toward an unknown future.

Pausing at the portal between outer and inner, passing your hand over the intricate granite, passing into opalescent light and slowly falling water, the letters of higher reality beckoning, bliss, consciousness, reality, anandamayi, chaitanyamayi, satyamayi, Aum, the three who are one and play in many worlds.

Sitting in a petal budding from the mother cell, the soul’s warm flame of aspiration opening a portal above, catching a ray of spiritual light glinting from an incorporeal sun.

Walking the perimeter, feeling the blazing sun on face and arms, the cell-ship still rising, still landing, still emerging. Beyond thought, not of this century, apart from culture, a work of art that transcends, transcendence embodied in a massive physical presence.

Later, sitting with those forerunners who lifted buckets of monsoon mud, scaled the scaffolds, glued tiny scales which became the discs catching the sun, calling to thought-wisps, transforming the dreams of later generations.

Under the canopy of the central Banyan tree, the rays of Tamil Nadu’s sun caressing my back, a villager sweeping leaves from the tile path while a few residents sprawl on the grass chatting, and the sibilant splash of water gives a background to morning birdcall.

Auroville wakes and works. Gardeners are laying sod on the south quadrant, where a thirty-foot hole reveals the deep red clay upholding the city.

In the space of a few days it is impossible to get a feel for this place or its people. In one sense it is like an outpost of the United Nations: at a restaurant there are snippets from every European language, and at many tables heads are in deep discussion of projects, policies, obstacles, compromises, goals and directions.

At the intersection near Solar Kitchen, workers are laying cobblestone roadway, and new signs have gone up for tomorrow’s marathon, as well as useful ones indicating the path to the Visitors’ Center. Twenty years ago, the lack of road signs drove me bonkers; it is marginally better now with indicators giving the names of major communities, but navigation is still chancy unless you know the roads by heart. Beware going out at night unless you want to spend it under the stars or in the forest.

The topics of heat and weather come up frequently. May to October is brutal, it is said, with maybe a few days break during the summer monsoon. Air conditioning is available in the newer apartment blocks, but older houses were built with open windows and doorways; they would require extensive retrofitting. Even so, Auroville is probably five or ten degrees cooler than Pondy, due to the city’s heat island effect. ...

Last night Paula, the friend with whom I am staying, described Sita’s role in the Ramayana story: she will be telling this soon to local teenagers. Sita, whose name means furrow, is a child of the Earth, Prthivi. She is abducted by the ten-headed demon Ravana, rescued with the help of the devoted and resourceful monkey Hanuman, and has to walk through fire to prove her virginal innocence.

Most of us live far from such mythic encounters; we feel our lives caught up in the minutiae of daily events, answering mail, making appointments, driving from one place to another, shopping, cooking, taking care of the body. Do we simultaneously live in a larger sphere, engage in heroic endeavours, vanquish gigantic foes against terrible odds?

Of course we do! How dare you even ask! We are voyagers on an infinite and eternal journey, with a thousand discoveries ahead of us, unimaginable complexity, epic colloquies, as Ashvapathy reminds us in Savitri.

Perhaps our view is limited by the close forest canopy, so that only a few steps on the path are visible ahead, and our awareness is cramped in a time-bound personality built up over a few decades seemingly through chance. In reality, though:

In every hour loosed from the quiver of time

There rose the song of new discovery,

A bow-twang’s hum of young experiment.

Each day was a spiritual romance,

As if he was born into a bright new world;

Adventure leaped an unexpected friend,

And danger brought a keen sweet tang of joy;

each happening was a deep experience.

The challenges that Auroville faces are not those of groundwater, electrical capacity, mass transport, housing, or the environment. Known practical solutions exist for all of these. Nor is it a question of resources; abundance is all around, whether one is looking at physical energy or money.

Appropriately enough for a “laboratory of evolution” where the experimental object is humanity itself, the issues are those of human nature. More specifically, in the context of Integral Yoga, the challenge is for residents to practice and manifest the triune qualities of the highest consciousness: unity, mutuality, harmony.

Unity in the sense of looking beyond differences of opinion in day to day interactions, starting from a point of a shared goal and reality, and moving out from there to the things to be done. Mutuality in the sense of a give and take on every level. Harmony above all; bringing a practical blending of the different tones, shapes, colors, energies – with structure where it is needed, flexibility to let go of past habits when they are non-functional, forging new patterns as they become necessary.

Red ants are racing over the bench in search of food, and a centipede waves across the flagstones. A fever bird ratchets up his manic call from the branches of the Banyan tree above. Time for a walkabout, time to get lost in the city of dawn....