On Auroville 2022 to 2025

- -16: November 2024: “For a new beginning: Greetings.

Here is a first document conceived for a collaborative work of scrutiny and research so as to reach, now itself, in 2024, a new threshold of common commitment at the service of Auroville. The document which will result of this shared research can then serve as a basis for a unified collective action.

Notes for a new beginning.

Introduction:

There has been a break, a fracture, a disruption in our collective experience and in the temporal history of Auroville: in 2021, the central Government of India took over the control of all assets, lands and services of Auroville and massively invested public funds, through its Ministry of Education, so as to hasten what it deems to be a priority in the outer development of the “project”. This orientation has been made possible by the conviction a number of Aurovilians held of the imperative necessity to win back all the time lost in the meanders of a collective experiment too nebulous and vitiated by egoism. According to them, the general plan of the city-to-be as prepared by the team of Roger Anger in the 70s, constituted an indefectible program of action decreed by the Mother and neglected, ignored or contested for far too long. This particular approach has provided a laudable argument for the Government to actually engage in its own principal objective of reclaiming this whole enterprise of international repute as its own on the world-scene, determining its actions on the ground through its chosen representatives. This intervention has had many consequences, materially as well as psychologically. Everything has been questioned. Our various comprehensions of the “Spirit of Auroville” have certainly suffered. However, if one refers oneself to the Mother, this episode too must serve the progress of our consciousness, for Auroville cannot fail, since its conception and its birth, as its goal and action, do not ultimately depend on our humanity alone, but on the Consciousness-Force at work upon earth. This document is offered as a tool of work and reflection, so as to assist us in elaborating the terms of a renewed commitment, individual and collective. We have at our disposal to sustain this task more than 50 years of experience and, if one may well be proud of the quality of the realizations and achievements, it is time for us to look at, with the acquired discernment and with sobriety, all of the weaknesses, betrayals, all the small failures and imitations and poor approximations that have weighed on and slowed our progress; for, had we acted and developed

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