Discovering the oneness of the Matrimandir Garden

Marc and Meera, who together work for the Matrimandir Garden Design Office, took up the much needed task of diving deeper into the experiential reality of the rest of the gardens. Having executed together with the larger garden team the first three gardens, they still constantly faced questions like, did anybody experience ‘existence’ in the Garden of Existence, or ‘consciousness’ in the Garden of Consciousness? If people didn’t, wasn’t this due to the garden designs? “It led us to the essential need to continue diving even deeper,” says Marc. “Our only mantra was: ‘dive deeper, find the answer, and come back.’ That became a two-years process.”

It was a very hard challenge. “The Mother hadn’t given all that many indications. We had the name of the gardens, the name of the flowers and the brief description of their significance, but not much more. We started going deeper into each of the names, comments and significances that Mother gave, and we also collected whatever we could find in the works of the Mother and the works of Sri Aurobindo,” says Marc.

“At the beginning of the new process each of us would write down our understanding about the significance, such as Existence,” says Meera. “We were writing key words, not sentences, to remain focused. Then we would share our insights and then read again what Mother or Sri Aurobindo said about it. Often we would realize that our understanding was at quite a low level; and then we would repeat the exercise, together with long moments of spontaneous silence that came frequently. This went on for weeks, and the weeks became months. And gradually, we climbed closer to a deeper understanding of the very high dimension Mother has put into the significances of these gardens.

“Take the significance of ‘Power’ garden, for example. Some years ago the general understanding was of the Kali or Durga aspect of power. We knew that Mother talked about “Power of Beauty”, but when we studied the significance in its depth, we discovered that Beauty, together with Love and Bliss, is the expression of Ananda, as Sri Aurobindo mentioned, and not at all a Rudra or Kali power.

Similarly for the first garden “Existence”, the significance is “Psychic Power in Existence”: the psychic aspect is clearly prominent here. Of course, we had read Mother’s words on these gardens many times and again, but our experiential understanding came only recently. And we also came to realize that each of the 12 gardens is connected to the Psychic Being; that was a discovery for us.”

“We did this process for each of the 12 gardens and not only for the nine that still have to manifest,” says Marc.

“Through this process we came to the understanding that there are not 12 gardens with different significances, as we had previously thought, but that there is One Garden, “The Garden” of Matrimandir with 12 different aspects, with Matrimandir itself as the higher dimension which is holding them all together. So Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, Life, Light, Power, Wealth, Utility, Progress, Youth, Harmony and Perfection, are all to be seen as aspects of one higher reality, which is the Supramental as clearly expressed by Mother in her comments on some gardens. We also came to realize how much each garden is connected to all the others. For example, how much Bliss is connected to Power and Power to Youth, and Youth to Perfection.”

“That was a revelation,” says Meera. “And that brought us to another discovery of the relevance of these significances for all of us. Our next understanding dawned: that “The Garden” represents a journey of all the Aurovillians who have chosen to be here in The Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s light, and we realized that designing these garden segments is, in fact, a shared responsibility.

“This spontaneously led us to the next step of inviting many Aurovilians, for informal and unofficial personal sessions with them to share their connections, their insights and their views on these gardens, while we shared our approach and development with them.

“Over the months, around 50 people visited our office. We experienced many touching moments as well as some emotional outbursts.

“Some people liked what was done and some came with suggestions, such as planting trees for shade, others complained about too much pavement or concrete and wastage of water. Most of the time we would get a hint or even an explicit comment that we were on the right track. It helped boost our confidence. Overall, it was a sharing experience that was very positive and harmonious. We felt very united.”

“Meanwhile our understanding grew,” says Marc. “Once we had firmly realized that we are dealing with One Garden instead of 12, we started looking at elements that could express that oneness throughout all the 12 garden segments; that could express the unity in the multiplicity. So our task became twofold: expressing the unity as well as each garden segment’s individual personality. We were no longer designing each of the different segments separately.”

Marc and Maurizio studying the Matrimandir Garden model

“Today we have five elements through which we want to express that oneness of the gardens,” says Meera. “The first element is the flower of the garden: we call it the “Spiritual Presence”. Mother has given a specific Hibiscus variety to ten garden segments and for the other two she has given water lilies and Psychological Perfection. The Second element is the “Cube”. A cube is a symmetrical three-dimensional shape, contained by six equal squares. The square, according to Sri Aurobindo, “represents the supermind”, the Supreme Consciousness. The Third element is water – we call it the “Living Link”. Mother mentioned this living water in the gardens. Each of the garden segments will be linked through a water channel. Each garden will also have water in it, with the possibility of it getting linked to the future lake. The fourth element is the circulation in the garden – we call it the “Physical Link” or “Sugar Crystals”. We will minimize the hard paving in the garden paths and do them as stepping stones to bring in more fluidity and subtlety. And the fifth but the most essential element is the Axis – we call it the “Experiential Link”. It is the most subtle element that helped us in the expression of the garden design and it is also going to guide the experience of our visitors in time to come.

“Along with this we concentrated on the specific nature of each garden,” says Marc. “Here we, together with Maurizio, explored the expression of the garden through different media, such as water colours and sand. Maurizio is a visiting professional garden designer from Italy. He has worked in different places in the world, including Japan. He introduced us to the sandbox and asked us to make models in the sand, which we wiped out afterwards. The next morning we would start again; and when we came to something which, we felt, expressed what a garden could be, we started drawing the garden with water colours. The medium of water colour has its own specialty, and we let the water and colour express itself while we made the brush strokes. For a long time we held back from making clay models, because we were afraid that we would fix ourselves into a certain concept which would be more difficult to change later.

Side view of the model

“We wanted to concentrate on the experiential aspect of the garden, and no longer so much on its defined physicality, which is what we had been doing in the first three gardens,” adds Meera. “It became clear to us that the garden needs to be more fluid and more relaxed in its physical personality. This would give us a better possibility to catch the essence and touch the subtler levels. Maurizio mentioned the Kyoto gardens in Japan, for example. Here you see minimalistic physicality; the visitors are supposed to feel what is behind the expression, and almost all people experience silence. We believe that this is what Mother really meant to say when she spoke about the Japanese gardens. Not that the Matrimandir gardens should be a copy of the Japanese gardens, but that, as in the Japanese gardens, people would experience what the gardens express, what is behind them, what helps you to connect to your inner being. We feel now that the physical aspect should be more subdued in order to bring out more this experiential aspect.”

“And then the decisive moment naturally came which led us to design all nine gardens in one go, and not to restrict ourselves to designing only the next three,” says Marc, “and it worked. The conceptual design has now been done for each of them, expressing their deepest aspect and inter-connection as we have understood today.

“We also looked once again at the three first gardens that are already in place. We know that today our connection and understanding is much deeper, even for these first three. Today, we would have done them differently, and we will propose some changes when the time comes. We are well aware that we will keep growing in our awareness and understanding as it is said that ‘the Gardens will evolve with the consciousness of the Aurovillians’, and we have the living example of this through our experience with the Existence, Consciousness and Bliss gardens.

“The designs are now being refined and the models will be ready for community feedback at the end of February,” says Meera. “We are looking at the best way to inform the community. We would like to explain about the processes we have gone through and show the new designs. We would suggest that people silently concentrate and contemplate each model and try to experience each one inwardly, for it is not only about mental understanding but about one’s experience of each garden.”

“When approved, we will begin their physical manifestation,” says Marc. “The existing Gardens of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss will be adjusted last, when we have gained experience doing the others through our new flexible approach. These two years have been extremely important for us to get a better understanding of what Mother wanted. During this process we beautifully experienced Sri Aurobindo’s motto Solvitur Ambulando, which could be translated as ‘One step reveals the next step’. In the coming years we hope that our understanding will deepen more.”