journal d'une transition

741

this land unless they are accepted as residents of Auroville, and then their say would be equal to any other resident’s.

This is, roughly, what I feel could and should be formulated now – and that is for the temporal issue. The permanent issue is clearly enough stated in the Charter of Auroville. Such an agreement would leave open the channels of creative cooperation with the Government such as the Institute, Educational Research, Village Action, Ecology, etc; depending on our ability for discipline, it might even fortify them. This is a contribution. Please consider the substance, not the name. (These points, if found useful and acceptable, must obviously be developed in some detail, and rather carefully I suppose!)

Divakar”

***

*1-8-1987, Auroville: Late this morning, after some hesitation, I went to see the exhibition on Tibet at the Bharat Nivas; just to see the face of the Dalai Lama makes me happy, the spirit of this man is so manifest, so real and simple! And the nostalgia hugged me, of these spaces of pure air and crystalline light, the far distances and the sound luminousness of that high country… while, down here, one has so often the sense of being steeped into a fog of miasma! I didn’t stay long, just took in the fragrance of their medicinal herbs, the colour of their clothes, the roundness of their faces… … I realise that this formation that keeps hovering over my life, this strange twist of nature that has been my lot, is holding me back like an iron shackle, a heavy band; and that when it will at last be broken, I shall perhaps simply jump into the true state, because there is nothing else to prevent me… Sometimes, suddenly it is almost there, like a great sweeping of the space, free and clean…

*2-8-1987, Auroville: How to break free into the re-birth of the Lord’s present? Often I feel just like a baby – un-fixed, spread and un-defined, yet perceiving, sensitive…

*3-8-1987, Auroville: I am bad-tempered. There is the wear and tear of more than two years of continuously, day after day, interacting with these 15 or 20 men, and no other activity to balance the weight of it; all the small lies, the meanness and duplicity, the jealousies, the rivalries and the vying for status and the exploiting – and yet that open space within, and their smiles and their resilience and their simplicity… Nothing ever feels quite straight or one, with them; and with N too it is often so: it is slippery, dramatic, and elusive; it is contradicted at each and every step, and yet it is somehow profoundly attaching… Shahbahadur, the Ghurkha, who is Nepalese, is of a different substance altogether; he is the one person there who would be