A short account highlighting what it feels to have “Auroville fever” from abroad, write about it as a resident, and how its approach to money differs from that of capitalism.
Written May 2023
It took me twenty years to finally settle in Auroville. From the first time in 1999 I went to entry service in Bharat Nivas to register my intended return. Family issues delayed my arrival, but annual visits and AVI membership kept me connected. This delay gives me a perspective of the preciousness of living here.
One of the main ways I stayed in touch with Auroville was through the magazine Auroville Today. Every month when it arrived I would have what I called ‘Auroville fever’, a feeling of wanting to return. So to be able to now write for Auroville Today to those outside about our ongoing experiment is very meaningful for me. I try to capture in words the power and possibilities that this place offers when you settle here to help create the ‘city of Dawn’. There are so many projects and individuals doing remarkable work here, creating new ways of being and exploring inner worlds. To learn and write about these adventures is a rich undertaking and I think of those living away who have been touched by Auroville when I write.
I spent a year as a newcomer working in the gardens of Terra Soul, which helped me appreciate the literal sweat of our pioneers, who laboured in the hot sun, restoring forests, growing food and creating new life in our dry red soil. The efforts to preserve water and bring back our flora and fauna feel crucial, not just for us but also as an example worldwide of the value of earth restoration. Ecology is very immediate here; issues of organic food, saving water, land erosion, encroachment are not newspaper headlines but lived realities.
As the Auroville Dream has it, ‘there should be somewhere on earth a place … Where all human beings of good will who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme Truth’. These words touch a soul place in me, which resonates instinctively with the aspirations expressed.
I’ve seen the effects of capitalism and its baseness on individuals, society and myself, where money is the ‘sovereign lord’, and to live in a place where we aim and try to go beyond that is something that I still feel very grateful for and which I consider one of Auroville’s greatest gifts. The freeing to follow your heart and see what wishes to emerge on its own terms is profound. Money and the need to base decisions on it casts a long shadow and Auroville’s utopian idealism allows so many innovative projects to emerge and unfold that could not when money is the lord.
Given the years it took to settle here, I still pinch myself that I have this wonderful opportunity to work and live in this special place.
By Peter Lloyd