The continuing chronicle of a diverse passage from Australia to the Mother, meeting Aurovilians, building houses, and settling in.
See also: A tribal music scene (Part 1)
Previously published 2008
After we first began here in Fertile, she [the Mother] called us on a Sunday afternoon, Boris, Namas, Aruna and myself. It was a Sunday afternoon. No procedure, nobody, we went straight in, it was like going to see your grandmother. She only spoke to us in French, which limits me a bit. She gave us the sign “Fertile”, but she also gave us a seedling to plant. It was a “New World”, a little pod with orange seeds.
I personally saw her twice on two birthdays. And then there were the Darshans. These were incredible, because they attracted people from all over the world, very big crowds. People flew in for the Darshan. The whole thing was dead silent. Mother could barely get above the parapet. She would appear only for five minutes. A powerful silence. It was very moving.
With Mother I always felt right from the start that she knew me, that she recognised me. I had a very powerful grandmother; she looked a little like Mother and I thought that of all the grandchildren in the family she loved me. I had a very powerful connection to her. And it was the same with the Mother (by then my grandmother was already dead). I had the same feeling that she knew me, she supported me.
I remember the day she died. I thought I was dying actually. I had a fever for about a day. I was lying up here in this house. I was pouring with sweat. Bernard Borg came riding here on a horse and told me.
I have never felt like leaving Auroville. There was a point in 1989 when a friend in Australia died and gave us a small cabin in a forest. Then I decided to go and try to live like a hermit. I always imagined that the ideal life is a hermit’s life. You live alone and you can decide all the time what you are going to do. In fact I found that the hermit life is most difficult for me. But I experienced at the time a very powerful connection with Sri Aurobindo. It was the first time in my life that I suffered what I would call spiritual anguish. I felt I was going crazy and I needed spiritual help, and the only thing I read was The Life Divine. I used to get up in the morning and just one single paragraph was enough for the whole day. And now I look back at those paragraphs, those notebooks, and I don’t know what I was thinking then. That’s how I understand spiritual writings. It always speaks to a need. If the need is not there, then… It doesn’t respond to curiosity.
So I was there for a year in Australia in this cabin, and Jan came, and Jina, and for the first time the whole family was in Australia. Then it happened that Jan’s great grandfather had been an Irish immigrant into Australia and he had built a mill on a river and we found the original mill he built. It was a ruin by the river. Suddenly I had the image that I could rebuild it and use the wheel to make electricity and all the family could live there. But the guy didn’t want to sell it, and I got news from Auroville that there was a dispute between the people living here. I was told that I should come back. It was 1990. It was a critical moment, because then I decided to come back and Jan decided she would stay for a while, and then decide if she wanted to come back. I came back and when I got here, there was no quarrel. I was back here alone.
Jesse, my second eldest and his wife Jyotis have lived solidly here for about the last ten years. But now my oldest boy Jonas 1 has come back
…
Each of these little things is a story in its own right. The history of reforestation in Auroville actually makes quite an interesting story. In the beginning we knew nothing, we just wanted shade. Then there were the days when they were “planting maps”, for all the trees in Auroville had to be in a spiral. When we first planted, we were supposed to plant all the trees as part of the spiral, the galaxy. And on Sundays we used to have bus loads of Ashramites who would come up here to help us plant trees. But for us to get the holes dug, and the compost and the seedlings and the water, and the whole thing and then… Forget about the spiral! (laughs) We slowly gained expertise. Now you have within the community maybe five or six really professional botanists. The knowledge of the trees, and how they grow, and what grows with them, and indigenous forests and medicinal plants: it is such a powerful bank of knowledge! And one which has only grown through enthusiasm. It never had anything to do with money. It was always people working from the love of what they were doing. And that is why the forest project works. The people that work in the forest love the forest. But that is a separate book.
Auroville is a wonderful place for an anthropologist. Here is a finite community like an island. It has gone through very rudimentary laws of trying to govern itself. When you think of all the different attempts to coordinate, the different types of meetings, the “envelope meetings” 2 , etc. When we first came here, once a week we used to take a basket full of food to the Matrimandir, in the big keet hut, and we all put it there and we shared all the food and would go back to our house. And every full moon, the whole of the green belt would come here or go to Forecomers or Kottakarai and all sit down and have a big picnic and play some drums, with the children running around.
The thing that disturbs me is the life of the children now when I compare with the life that our children had, when they came by horseback, with bows and arrows. Even if they didn’t come home at night sometimes, no problem. But now with motorcycles and everything, the quality of life for children is not… to my liking anyway. Too much technology and too little adventure.
It is nice when the children brought up in Auroville come back.
I think it is nice when they come back for the same reason we came, when they are not just here not knowing why. I always say that children should go out and then decide. I think the ones that are most confused are the ones that are here and who never went out. They don’t know what money is, what work is really; I always tend to push them [to make an experience outside].
Does the unwanted development in the Green Belt distress you?
Either you take a stand and you wall yourself in and become a hostile presence to development or… One remembers the time when most people walked. Villagers walked from village to village and you met whole families walking on the road. And at night you would hear a single wooden bullock cart’s wheels going up the road, like the bullock cart that used to go down with firewood to Pondy; the guy would get a bit drunk and he would lie in the back of his bullock cart, and sing Ohah… (croaking voice). To lie here at night in that environment was totally magical. Slowly by degrees the first tractor and the first lorry… At the beginning when the first tractor came into the forest, I threw myself on the ground in front of it. “Don’t come here!” But with the next tractor, I just stood behind a tree. I wasn’t going to fight tractors the rest of my life.
I still believe in the magic of Auroville. I believe that it has a destiny in which we don’t have much say. And sure, with the population increasing, you are going to have all sorts of things you don’t really like. You see, in the beginning you had Aspiration, and you had here [Fertile], and three kilometers in between. The next to come was Jean and Colleen from Two Banyans, maybe a kilometre from here. Then Patrick and Heidi a little closer to us, and then Charlie and Suzie. We all had a little bubble, but there were gaps between the bubbles, and slowly Turiya and all these different people came. And all these bubbles started to touch, and often they touch and suddenly you’re too close to your neighbour. Loving your neighbour, you slowly come to realise, doesn’t always mean you have a choice who they are.
In the beginning when these people come, you are hostile to them, because it is difficult to accept them. And here we are dealing all the time with people coming. Every Sunday we have an open day for anybody who wants to come, and we get many people coming, and sometimes people come whom I don’t like at all when I first meet them; but then you slowly get to realise that basically everyone is OK. This is my feeling. So this guy [who started a spa right in front of Fertile] doesn’t know what he is doing, but he is trying in his own way to contribute. And even this Madras politician is the same. When you go and speak to the guy: “No, no, I want to plant forests here, I want to do what you are doing!” (laughs).
Villagers had started a chicken house in the forest, and for us this was a real menace. The guy was always drunk and cutting trees and it stunk in the monsoon, and he was throwing dead chickens all over the place. Now it is a little family from Bangalore [who bought back this land] who want to plant a sanctuary. Development isn’t always incongruous.
So you look around and you think, well, it is happening. It is not happening the way we thought it was going to happen, but it is happening. Sure, I enjoyed it when it was absolutely dead silent at night, but you get used to it a little more every day. I still value so much the gift that we were given.
From a conversation with Johnny
8. “He was 16 when he went to Australia; he got an industrial design degree, then became a graphic artist, was quite successful, had a good business, was quite rich, and then it all collapsed on top of him, his business and his family collapsed. For three years he has been working to pay his debts and about six months ago it was too much. He went to a Vipassana centre, he had Vipassana meditation and he had this revelation that he had to get rid of everything, house, car and job. He packed up, and he lives here with me and his two children, who go to Deepanam school. Even his estranged wife also came.”
9. The “envelope meetings” were held regularly once a month (from the end of 1978 to the early 80’s) to decide about the allocation of funds available.
Excerpt from Turning Points: An inner story of the beginnings of Auroville (Auroville Press, 2008, pp. 32-37)
Turning Points is one of the best-selling books by Auroville Press, and available locally through these outlets. The book features twenty-one true stories recounting how in the sixties and seventies some men and women’s lives changed radically the moment they entered in contact with the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and they discovered a place called Auroville.