The continuing chronicle of a diverse passage from Australia to the Mother, meeting Aurovilians, building houses, and settling in.

Portrait of Jacques, an Aurovilian La Lettre Bleue: Hello Jacques, you are one of those Aurovilians who arrived in the 1980s during the years when Auroville was being built. Today you are just as enthusiastic as ever. Can you tell us about your journey? Jacques: Let me introduce myself — Jacques, French, who settled permanently in Auroville in 1981 after several stays of a few months. India has always been the country of my heart. At age seven, I had a premonition with the word “INDIA” that stood out in my mind. I discovered Auroville in 1969 at an exhibition in Avignon, standing before a photograph of people meditating in front of the excavation of the Matrimandir at sunrise — it touched me in an extraordinary way. Later, in Berlin, I came across a brochure with the Galaxy and the Charter, and I knew in an instant that this was where I wanted to live — but it took me eight years before I actually came to Auroville. I left France hitchhiking from the Mont-Blanc tunnel on December 5th, 1976, heading East for good — with no time limit in my mind. Despite a dream life in France, there was always “something” missing. So I sold my dental practice and cut all ties in order to be completely free to live the experience in India without time constraints, following the path of my heart — at the age of 35. LB: When you arrived in Auroville, did you think of resuming dentistry? Jacques: I came for the Auroville experience, not for dentistry — but as a stateless human being, to stick my fingers into a 220-volt socket (the symbolic image I visualized at the time), to dive headfirst into the experience and live that extraordinary  human unity. But before arriving in Auroville, I searched elsewhere (the Himalayas, darshan with Ma Anandamayi, etc.) because I was afraid of getting stuck in something, always keeping a way out. When I returned to Auroville for good, with a one-way ticket, I decided to be “the dentist of Auroville” because there was a real need. Eight days after my arrival, an Aurovilian gave me a small building at the community of Protection, which I gradually transformed into a clinic for Aurovilians, while continuing to treat villagers at the Health Centre. LB: At what point did you become more involved in dental care in the surrounding villages? Jacques: Fundamentally, dentistry was not my goal but my means of expression. I naturally became interested in schools, beginning checkups at André Tardeil’s school for village children, then continuing progressively at other schools. Having only two hands, I had to train hygienists. Everything I did, I did without a plan, responding to needs in the moment as they arose, through intuition.  And everything came to fruition despite very limited means — through the Grace of the Mother, like a miracle — with outside help in terms of equipment and human resources, with my fellow Aurovilians as the priority. LB: When you walk into your practice, there is one striking feature: flat equipment — patients lie down! Jacques: One of the turning points in my life came from unbearable back pain lasting 18 years due to poor posture — persevering through physiotherapy until that day in March 1986 when I wanted to either give up my profession or find another method. That led me to Japan in 1991, where I discovered a new universal concept with equipment adapted to our physiology, allowing one to maintain a natural posture behind a reclining patient — a revolution in the profession (and a revelation) — which made me happy to continue for another 10 years, and to introduce it with short training sessions for my assistants and colleagues in particular, since they had all been trained to work in contorted positions over a conventional dental chair. There is powerful resistance across the world of dental healthcare, due to habits and preconceptions — even refusing to accept a paradigm shift. I had the good fortune and privilege of conducting my experiments in complete freedom in Auroville, in India, which would have been impossible elsewhere. LB: Has Auroville always been fertile ground for what is possible for you? Jacques: Another important moment in my life came when I clashed with the community trying in vain to integrate dental care and prosthetics into a global economy. I suffered for twenty years from this lack of understanding, until it brought on a devastating crisis lasting eight days — after which I finally accepted that the community is me, and I am the community. I came to Auroville to grow in consciousness and to give to Auroville; otherwise I would have left long ago. I have been well molded, and it continues nonstop, through the daily grind, but the small difference is that, despite everything, I generally face this battle in the physical and human realm with more humor and good cheer — like a one-man band. LB: How do you see the future? Jacques: I would need an engineer to relieve me of equipment maintenance and other tasks, which would free up time for me to pass on the best of what I have learned — to be a catalyst for sharing knowledge and instilling a somewhat rebellious spirit, to offer a different perspective in this very conventional and hard-to-change world of healthcare. Practicing dentistry differently by offering quality service to everyone without money changing hands is my most heartfelt wish, but I remain obliged to make compromises while waiting for a collective will to change our economy. For the surrounding rural region, I have trained village women as hygienists under the Zero Concept, who continue our program in schools with prevention, manual scaling, and minor treatments on simple tables — even without electricity or running water. A genuine solution for the 90% of rural India without dentists, and recommended by the WHO in developing countries. I would now like to spread this Zero Concept

Ecology brings in a sense of nature as relationships, and recent developments in this field have changed the sense of identity. Milla speaks of the potential uses of fungi and how recent development projects arise from a worldview that doesn’t prioritize nature.

What the green cover in Auroville means in terms of pioneer afforestation, development, and the right conditions to work harmoniously together.

Previously published 2008 A conversation with Johnny To be perfectly frank, I came here looking for Jan, my wife at that time, and our first child. Our life in Sydney had been pretty turbulent. Although I had been to university and studied architecture, I dropped out of university. I was driving a taxi and we were leading a hand-to-mouth existence, sometimes without food. It was the sixties, a very turbulent society, but in the end Jan decided that I was hopeless and she took Jonas and went to Pondicherry. She had known about Pondicherry through the Theosophical Society. There was a Hungarian woman, Georgette, from the Ashram, who would come to Sydney for three months every year and work there for the Theosophical Society. She told us about the Ashram. The Theosophical Society was the only place in Sydney where you could find the writings of Mother and Sri Aurobindo. They weren’t even in the public library then. It was at the same time as the French New Wave cinema, Truffaud and Godard, and you had a small cinema that showed only these films. Everything else showed only American movies. That small cinema showed the New Wave, and underneath was the Theosophical library. There you could get a sniff of incense, and inside there were all the works of Sri Aurobindo. And it was a place where you could take a cushion and sit on the floor and read books. People at the counter would suggest, “You could read this and that”. It was not like a normal bookshop. When Jan gave up and came to India, she lived in the Ashram, at Parc à Charbon [Guest-House]. Our eldest boy Jonas was in class 3 and he went to the Ashram school. Eventually he went to what they called Equals One (=1), with Medhananda and Yvonne Artaud. 1 So Jan was there and I was in Australia. I was reading spiritual books in those days and I did know who Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were, but when Jan wrote to me she described Auroville as “a tribal music scene”; I think because she thought this would sound attractive to me. I often think that many of the first Aurovilians that came had a common experience: somewhere in their lives they had a common contact with Mother somehow. I had one interesting experience. I was right up in the north of Australia where you have the deep rain forests, and it was on my birthday, the 2nd of February 1970. I was walking through a forest where there was no path. I got really badly lost. I was so lost that I took the compass and threw it away, so wrong I thought it was. I was climbing a hill to try and see where I was. And really I got to a point where I was in such despair that I sat down with my head in my hands, like this, “What is going on?” And then I got up and when I turned round, there was a gate. A gate! I opened the gate and there was a path. And the path led into a road, which led me down to a river, where I found some Aborigines who picked me up. But this was around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and that was the time when Jan said she took my photo to the Mother. For me that was a powerful connecting experience. I later saw a painting of the Mother’s called Ascent to the Truth that reminded me of that hill. When I came here, Jan already had a house on the beach. It was not Auroville land. She was very connected to Austin Delainy, this Irish Canadian psychologist who was working with sand boxes. 2 A very interesting guy. But he was very traumatised, his legs were covered with shrapnel wounds from the second World War. He was working with the people of Equals-1. He had a very big house built on the beach there and he dressed only in white. He would have long depressions for three months, when he would only drink and shout and play wind-up phonograph records. Then he would come out of it and would be quite sociable. He had a very large shed there with sand boxes, and a huge array of little things. He was very good with children, and he had a particular interest in the children in Equals-1, and that included Jonas and Chali and a lot of kids. When he moved to where Quiet is now, Jan built a small house just beside, and Jonas spent a lot of time relating to Austin. That’s how she came to be there. Then I turned up. I actually had come for a week, just to say hello, and if I am not wanted I go. But I came and everybody seemed glad to see me, so I stayed. Then because I had had some experiences in Australia with building houses like this (and Vijay was building in Udavi) I worked with a small group of villagers, in particular Ramu from Bommayarpalayam. They would come by my house in the morning — I must say that the minute I got to India I felt I had come home. For me right from the start, when I travelled by train, India looked to me much more like home, like a country I knew, than Australia. And Australia is quite similar to India when it is hot and dry. I felt at ease with lungis and a big beard. Ramu and these guys used to come by in the morning, with tundu 3 and tiffin 4 and lungi, 5 and we used to build. If you have studied architecture, you have many ideas but you never get a chance to do anything. But with bamboo and casuarina and keet and ropes, you can do it, it doesn’t matter what mistakes you make, it is not concrete. So it was

(English/French) Olivier recounts the plan, process, images, and other elements of the movie he is making on the lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Milla walks the reader through her experience of Auroville’s forests, the Forest Group, and fungi as a keystone species.

(English/French) The evolution of an artist and of Auroville’s media, from stills to streaming.

An unflinching examination of the narrative put forth by the AVFO about Auroville’s history, and how it diverges from the true history and spiritual basis.

A broad envisioning of Auroville in relation to its spiritual basis and the practice of spirituality in action through karma yoga.