journal d'une transition

189

Today the Madras engineers have come and we are to run the test for the ramps. It takes us the whole day. There are over 50 of us, besides the many sand bags; we have to gradually load each hanging spiral ramp in turn to test its strength and flexibility. The test is positive.

*26-1-1979, Auroville: After the work Gl waited for me to give me this beautiful news: yesterday she and Piero met secretly with Huta and found that she had now fully understood our position here and is now fully supportive of it and of Satprem’s… What a lovely being this child of Yours! *28-1-1979, Auroville: There has been havoc in Pondy for the past two days, with complete curfew… Cl.B and Fr.V come by with Kripa and Vrata and Ritam is also there, I make everyone a drink and they tell me that even the Ashram gardens have been wildly ransacked as well as some of its departments and factories… *29-1-1079, Auroville: This morning Rajan and Poddar came to the office to inform that houses had been burnt down at “Far beach” and that there was a threat of an attempt to come and “burn Matrimandir”… It brings a very unpleasant vibration of fear in the atmosphere here… This evening also Mangini came to warn me that some people in Alankuppam were now intent on causing some harm here… *31-1-1979, Auroville: It is very quiet this afternoon, yet the pressure is very strong and constant and I experience more and more the difficulty in opening my physical consciousness… It is hard to describe. It is not that anything in particular distracts or disturbs or contradicts the need and aspiration; it is rather like a persisting veil, or contraction: every few minutes, part of the physical mind remembers: “oh, I must concentrate, to open, to receive, I have to concentrate…”, and the mechanics go on and another few minutes pass and again: “oh, I have to concentrate, I have to do it now, it is NOW!”… And so on and on… And yet all the time the pressure is there, absolutely stable, steady… And the two remain. And nothing ever seems to be done. When I am doing some work, am in some way active, I wonder if that activity is not making it tighter and I then yearn for long moments of immobile concentration, but whenever I sit quiet and undisturbed, then I am faced with the poverty, the nullity of the stuff I’m conscious of… no light, an empty greyness, not even a single interesting thought comes to the brain, nothing, worse than nothing… But if I look at the house, gaze at the trees, the birds, the light, then it rises and rises like an almost painful ecstasy, a grateful, intense perception of beauty… There is this yearning to be taken in by the flow of the Force, into its every being and its every movement and its every cell, this entire fact of the universe… This need is concrete; the words come afterwards, when I want like now to write… I have somehow the sense of an attitude – not a mental attitude but almost a physical one – that would be less of an obstacle or a vain effort; it is a question of