On Auroville 2022 to 2025

sense of Auroville. I shall not broach the matter of those influences that have weighed on these choices, for here is not the primary issue. Listening to all that is being said – and affirmed – presently, one might well observe that, at the same time, everyone is wrong and everyone is right. Everyone is right, each one is right, for no one may live in Auroville without grasping some glimpse, some aspect, some clue to the truth that waits to be lived upon earth. And everyone is wrong, everyone can but be wrong, insofar as we have collectively deviated from the adventure which was offering itself to us - which, I believe, still offers itself to us. It is not to one, but to several consecutive deviations, that I shall try to testify. I shall first list them, with no particular order, as they expressed themselves more or less simultaneously or within the same period of time; then I shall return to each through anecdotes or short accounts. The first of these deviations was to accept enmity within the very breast of the family (all those who would serve Mother) and to identify the adversary with the “other”, rather than strive for our own transformation. In actuality, as soon as Mother was no longer visible and accessible in Her rooms, the general atmosphere was considerably impoverished and the individual egoistic natures were as if reanimated and, on the still virgin territory of Auroville, we had to cope with far too narrow and limiting conceptions and views of control far too arbitrary for us to accept. Yet, as a collectivity, we did compromise with our faith: we began to judge, to condemn, to pretend we could “discern” the presence and action of the adversa ry through those who were not supportive of our stance and this “us” fragmented as a consequence. These deviations are like bad habits, wrong folds in the fabric: one wants to straighten them, they form again and again. There were indeed efforts at reconciliation over the years, but they were weighted with an emotionalism deprived of force or reach. These folds are contagious and corrosive; each individual becomes as if a relay, situating the enemy or obstacle in some other person, some other group or association, and a whole dynamic of distancing and separation spreads about. When the two opposite “camps” became so entrenched, there was only the option of an intervening exterior power, superior in ordinary terms, to try and safeguard the very material possibility of the adventure. The second deviation occurred gradually, once the dual administration as defined in the Act of Parliament giving birth to the Auroville Foundation was put in place. At first, it was understood that this would only be a temporary measure of legal protection, which would provide the volunteer residents of Auroville enough time to elaborate their own organization according to the collective intuition of a future yet to be discovered. Then, almost insensibly, two temptations loomed, with their joint effects and consequences: one was to request the Central Government issue enough funds for the development of certain domains of research having a universal import, beginning with that of education.

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