A discussion on the founding of a community, integrating worldviews, and evolutionary spirituality.
See also Part two of the interview
Witness: can you speak of your life before Auroville, and how that changed?
I had a life before Auroville, but it feels in a way so inconsequential compared with the life that came online for me since I landed in Auroville.
Integrating world views
My first years in Auroville were an experiential unfolding. I was living in a small community called Adventure. We were a group of largely newcomers and were invited to steward a fifty-acre plot in the Greenbelt. I lived there for ten years. We were building a little microcosm of Auroville, with a cluster of seven people from seven different countries. That experience revealed to me that we were living in a matrix of diversity of cultures and worldviews.
It was a special kind of constellation. We went through a lot of conflict, turbulence, and challenges in the beginning. We had a lot of idealism and friction. That’s been a big part of my learning.
This kind of conundrum sits at the heart of Auroville and we were in the trenches. We had German, American, English, Dutch, Indian, French, and myself, an Australian. As one example of clashing worldviews, we struggled with how much we expose ourselves to each other, Do we talk about what’s going on inside? Do we share our inner challenges? The French found this kind of self-revealing too personal, almost offensive. They believed you work things out on your own and found this kind of sharing distasteful.
We went through a whole journey as a community. Early conflicts led to some people leaving and others joining who were more interested in a closer community experience. We saw Adventure as an experiment, a microcosm of the larger goal of Auroville. We created agreements around how we would function as a community, and what the non-negotiables would be. For example, early on one of the residents lied about something that really undermined trust, so we created a condition that we needed to tell the truth. We were always trying to strike a balance to ensure individual freedom. Adventure was a beautiful experiment. A lot of visitors came and participated, and it was a very strong community.
A few years in, a young man joined Adventure and became an Aurovilian from our neighbouring village who we learned after some time that he had ripped off the community [selling the cashews and pocketing the money]. From his point of view, coming from the village it was his land, these were his resources. Who were we, foreigners who had come in from outside to tell him what to do? This fundamentally different way of understanding was a wake-up call, and revealed the nature of a lot of what is difficult about life in Auroville — how to reconcile fundamentally different values and ways of understanding things. It became very acrimonious and painful and ultimately led to the collapse of the mini social experiment of Adventure.
Witness: do you think that kind of value difference exists today?
I’m sure it’s still a major factor. I think it was always the elephant in the room in Auroville. Understanding this was a pivotal moment in my own Auroville journey, and in fact the catalyst for starting Thamarai. [Ed: Thamarai is the community centre in our neighboring village of Edayanchavady founded by Kathy and Bridget. Thamarai was a village outreach project that aimed to build a bridge between Auroville and the surrounding villages and focused on initiatives to foster literacy, health and well-being. “Thamarai” in Tamil means “lotus flower” and expresses the wish to see full potential bloom for everyone.]
Many of us in Adventure studied Spiral Dynamics, a system of understanding the evolution of different cultural worldviews and their differing value propositions. We found it very useful and this lens has helped me a lot to make sense of Auroville.
At the time we started Adventure in 1997, many of the local villages were still in survival mode. There was poverty and hierarchical ways of governing and controlling what happened in village life. And right next door in the Adventure community, there are all these idealistic foreigners moving in. We were all hypersensitive about the colonial legacy. For example, the young man who took the cashews, when confronted, accused us of being racist. We retreated, and it muted any real conversation about what was actually going on, because nobody wanted to be racist. This little microcosm is still playing out in Auroville I believe.
There was also a fear of violence. We were literally living right next door to a village, and we were on Auroville island. The village was all around and we felt quite vulnerable. We couldn’t risk a large-scale conflict. How do you navigate these situations? You can’t call the police. At some point this guy was very conflicted. He was also a friend and knew that somehow he was wrong, but was caught between worlds — not being able to lose face in the eyes of his village peers and he was under pressure to make money and improve his personal situation and status.
Witness: How did your community interact with the rest of Auroville?
We were very much engaging with Auroville. As a greenbelt community, we were part of the forest group. We were all working for different Auroville projects, so it’s not like we were a bubble off to the side. I was working with the Auroville Village Action Group and I had my job in the Housing Service. Everyone in Adventure was plugged into the wider collective.
We were trying to also work more intentionally on the communal, social, and collective level. This was more focused than anywhere else in Auroville at the time. Verité would have been the closest equivalent; they were having their own experiment.
In Adventure we wanted to try working with this human unity vision with each other, to bring it into our daily life. We saw intentional collective life as an opportunity for softening the ego. For example we could call each other out if we were doing things that hurt the whole. We took this idea of collective yoga a little bit further, being serious and intentional as well as playful and experimental with it. After a few years we managed a mature level of alignment in Adventure. Outside the community though, many people thought we were a little bit mad, saying “Why would you want to do that?”
Considering Auroville today, Adventure was experimenting in a settled community, whereas now there are probably more affinity groups like “Heartweaving” for example, with people actively working on developing a deeper alignment to work through collective challenges.
Witness: What has been your experience of Auroville’s place in the unfolding of consciousness? Can you speak to how living in Auroville affects that emergence?
This is one of the things that really influenced me deeply over the years of my reading and learning and immersing myself in evolutionary spirituality. Not just Sri Aurobindo and Mother. I got very inspired by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, and their telling of the universe story. [Ed: a framework that integrates modern scientific understandings of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution with a deep, sacred, and ecological consciousness.]
I am deeply inspired by the idea that the universe is a conscious being. That as humanity wakes up and evolves, and as we develop self-reflective consciousness and understand ourselves as being like cells in a whole organism, that we can become co-creators and partners with Gaia in this unfolding journey. This is how I understand what Sri Aurobindo and Mother are referring to when they speak about the potential of humanity and the evolution of consciousness. It feels to me that all of us here in Auroville or who feel this impulse, have an incredibly important role to play in shepherding Earth through these perilous times and this is my way of understanding the deeper reason for Auroville’s existence — to cooperate with and hasten this change. Auroville provides extraordinary conditions for this play — the founding vision, charter and grinding forces that are inherent in daily life, accelerate this evolution, if we are open to it.
Interview on April 19, 2026
1 Comment
Hi Kathy, thanks for this sincere interview. I find it it very helpful.
Amongst others you refer to one (of several) elephants in the Aurovilian room: To value and to merge each of the different cultural origins of the Aurovilians. Mother contributed incredible basic treasures, but not in detail these tools. Spiral Dynamics is such a tool, which obviously you and Adventure discovered too. There is also a book from me about the Soul of Nations in the AV library. But this location might be more then 8000 km from you right now…
In any case I wish you Mothers Blessings for your new life and I pray for an evolutionary miracle for Auroville.
Wolfgang Aurose