City of the dawn – where men of all countries are at home
Imagine the center of your city was a place of silence. A place that sets free your energy of concentration and focus.
Imagine you start your day with space in your heart, with the space to consider all your thoughts and actions.
Imagine this city does not belong to anybody and all nations would live there together in peace.
Imagine free access to an incredible amount of never ending education. Where learning never stops and where each indiviual, from the earliest age, is supported to bring out the best in themselves not through being taught but through self-education.
Imagine a city with a focus on protecting nature, art and bodywork.
Where you have free choice of work and you learn what you´re doing right there with the possibility of changing it whenever one´s own interests are changing. Where titles and positions would be replaces by opportunities to serve and organise.
A city that works towards being self sufficient in food and energy needs, eco friendly on almost all levels and where everyone has equal access to food that is delivered daily from the own farms and other suppliers.
And yes, a city with red sandy roads that wind through millions of planted trees where you can drive on your motorbike without helmet with an incredible feeling of wildness & freedom 🙂
“A place for individual concentration for the discovery of one´s unique center and through this: deeper realization of community“*
How many inspirational and warm and humeours people I met here in my 5 weeks!!!
“Imagine there´s no countries, it isn´t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace.“ John Lennon
WELCOME TO AUROVILLE!! (Pondicherry, India)
A green city born out of of a hard, eroded red sand dessert in India´s south with a huge aforestation program. A city that is not about constructing just another city, but a new man.
SOME BACKGROUND?
THE DREAM AND IT`S START
„Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nations. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity“ 1965
At the day of it´s inauguration on feb 28 in 1968 Auroville began with a DREAM of a city as a bridge between the past and the future, a single tree in it´s geographical center, a few handfulls of earth from all over the planet braught together by people of 124 nations, and a CHARTER:
1 – Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But, to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the divine consciousness.
2 – Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3 – Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
4 – Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.
THE FOUNDERS
Auroville – the city of dawn – was thriving out of the Pondicherry Ashram as a next logical step of trying to put into practice the teachings of SRI AUROBINDO as a manifestation of Divine life on earth. An indian philosopher, politician, poet, guru, yogi and nationalist, Sri Aurobindo also was a spiritual reformer with a vision on human progress and spiritual evolution who believed that man can transform his nature, enabling a divine life on earth: the working of the new consciousness force. Of human unity.
Inspired by his teachings and sustained by an immens energy, the driving force behind the DREAM and it´s realization was Mirra Alfassa – known as THE MOTHER – a remarkable woman with french roots who in her last decade launched and guided the Auroville project until her death in 1973.
“The Ashram will retain it´s true role of pioneer, inspirer and guide. Auroville is the attempt towards collective realisation” June 1968
THE PIONEERS
„After the crowd of the Inauguration had gone, a small band of pioneers was left with these ideals and symbols and 2000 acres of barren land.“* Working under worst conditions – the heat, no water, the hard soil and the wild monsoon – they began the DREAM with planting almost 2 mio trees which they raised from locally collected seeds in their own nurseries. Every tree meaning one big hole, digged by hand, and water transported by women and trucks. Errosion control for the monsoon season had to be done on all costs, otherwise the rain would wash away all the effort, so under hard work they retained the water high up on the plateau. Until today this aforestation project is internationally claimed as a model of successful restauration of the earth.
„The people who stayed there and worked on the dream were people of all different temperaments and a large variety of consciousness: those who saw the opportunity to perfect their special vocation, those with the wish to work on human unity and a new way of life, and those who saw in Auroville the answer to their spirit of adventure or the wish of expressing something new“*
“Auroville is not an Indian village or a western city. It is a melting place of all cultures of the world and it´s a place of universal expression“*
ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN PLANNING
The french architect ROGER was first invited by The Mother in 1965 and returned in 1968 with the urban plan of a city for 60.000 people as a galaxy model with the entity of the MATRIMANDIR as the soul and the BANYON TREE as the geographical center in it´s middle.
THE MATRIMANDIR
„The Matrimmandir will be the soul of Auroville, and the sooner it is there, the better for everybody.“ „It is a place for individual concentration, for the discovery of one´s unique center and through this: deeper realization of community“.
With european standards it is hard to imagine the work that had to be done to realize the Matrimandir: excavations and all the concrete and other construction work but also every single golden plate on the facade discs was done by hand and was only fully completed in 2008.
An elevated golden globe containing a beautifully designed inner space where 2 spirals lead up to the all-white „inner chamber“ with floors covered with a thick white carpet leave no noice of walking. Silence. Concentration. No Religion. A beam of light leading through the whole globe, continuing below it and ending in a cristal ball in the middle of a fountain of lovingly polished white marbel petals. The elevated globe and the fountain below it are surrounded by the 12 „petals“: meditation chambers of different colours (only inside) which represent the 12 powers of The Mother such as goodness, progress, courage, perseverence and humility. From the outside they can be seen as the earth, breaking up as the Matrimandir grows out of it.
THE BANYON TREE
A simple tree – once quite small – was chosen as the geometrical center of all Auroville and has grown until today to be an amazing piece of art: from its branches, these trees grow down roots that transform themselves into actual trunks, supporting the branches to grow towards the outside further and further. Below it: Silence. As soon as you enter the tree´s cooling shadow, you are touched by an amazing grounding force that fills you with nothing less but profound PEACE and connectedness to the earth.
THE URBAN PLAN
Around this Center – the Matrimandir with it´s surrounding gardens and the Banyon Tree – there is an inner circle dedicated to different spaces such as the residential, the cultural, the industrial and the international zone, organized in an urban plan of a galaxy, followed by a yet incomplete outer circle – the green belt: a large aforestation project where only after 5 years of growing an initial protecting canopy, other plants could be planted and grown. Still large pieces of land do not belong to Auroville and are missing to complete the full vision.
In it´s beginning and still today, Auroville is in need of the work of the surrounding indigenous population. These people are given the possibility to provide their work power and with the money raise their standards of living, and with access to education for their children, or they might even chose to become Aurovillians.
“Auroville is the ideal place for thosewho want to know the joy and liberation of no longer having any personal possessions“ 1969
HOUSING AND CONSTRUCTION
Whatever one creates or builds or buys in Auroville does not belong to him. You can live exclusively in the house while you are there but it will belong to Auroville (and new inhabitants to come) when you leave. For construction, ferrocement technologies are used and combined with earth construction (pressed earth blogs), and great focus is put on rainwater harvesting, recycling, integration of solar energy and a efficient, natural, durable and cost effective waste water treatment.
EDUCATION
“The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught“ Sri Aurobindo
In Auroville, a teacher is a helper for self-education. In 1971 the First School opened, in 1985 Last School which has it´s name out of the attempt to let go of the school concept for good and instead create ALL Auroville as an open, dynamic educational center in which each person will be at once a teacher and learner in the Art of Life (which is not yet realized, but on a good way).
Adults have acces to an amazing pool of ongoing education. Beauty in all it´s artistic forms. One of them being the wonderful field of body work (massages and therapies). In my short time I was able to witnes all Kinds of massages and Courses like Thai massage, Lomi Lomi, Ayurveda and Watsu (water shiatsu) and I was thrilled by the many ways of offering unconditional love: how one can give so much love and affection to another person without any other Intention than the one of giving. How precious is a touch!!! Giving. Receiving. Developing sensitivity on both sides. Parents treating their Children. We cannot over evaluate this ways of learning to touch and being touched. It keeps us alive!
CULTURE & WELLBEING
For being a still very small town of not even 3000 habitants, Auroville offers an incredible abundance of cultural events. For free! Concerts, art exhibitions, workshops in painting, pottery, ayurvedic or Indian cooking, permaculture, dance classes, daily movies in the Cinema Paraiso in different languages, yoga classes, meditation, chanting, different massages and much more. No single day to be bored if you seek for entertainment.
WORK
„The guiding force is Mother and Sri Aurobindo, but within those guidelines there is a lot of freedom to do whatever you like and to do it HOW you like. That´s why you have so many people doing so many different things“*
Every adult is supposed to work for the community and through this work, everyone has the same access to food supply. Like this there is no job more worthy than the other. Auroville is striving to work without exchange of money. Still, this does not work 100% but is on a good way.
Volunteers from all over the world come to Auroville to learn and work in fields like permaculture, the spirulina farm, with hydrophobics on roof tops, eco-construction with earth and bamboo, dry toilets, solar and wind energy, etc.
COMMUNAL CANTiNE
The Solar Kitchen, opened in 1997, is a eco-friendly cantine for all Aurovillians, where the main cooking method is steam, produced by solar concentration by the means of a huge spherical structure on it´s own roof. Every day more than 1000 meals are prepared there. Those who are able come to meet here every day at lunchtime.
AUROVILLE AS A GUEST
It is quiet easy to come to Auroville as a guest: Either you come as a volunteer or you look for a room in one of the many accommodations in guest houses or home stays (www.guesthouses.auroville.org). It is advisable to rent a bike or a scooter while there as the distances are far and it is Always very hot.
For visiting the matrimandir for concentration or meditation you can sign up at the Visitor Center. The meditation chambers of the 12 petals (and with it the Banyon tree and the surrounding gardens can be visited daily at a specific time (usually 10 am) without the need of prior registration. Just come to the entrance of the Matrimandir and follow the instructions you get there when you say: „petals“ ; )
My personal experience could not have been better. I came as a total stranger, not knowing what to expect at all, and left with the feeling I would leave my home and family there. After only 5 weeks… Don´t expect to get to know the place in dropping in one weekend of sightseeing. You might be disappointed because it´s the subtle things that make it so special..
THE MOTORBIKES
If there is anything I feel critical about it is way people move through Auroville: everyone on his own motorbike. Even if also me I found great joy in doing that and a freedom I never felt after leaving the endless sandy roads of Namibia, there should be a more ecological way of moving around sometime in the future. But the again: Motorbikes even serve as taxis and transportation for almost anything 😉
BECOMING AN AUROVILLIAN
“… in Auroville simply the good will to make a collective experiment for the progress of humanity is sufficient to gain admittance“ 1969
The first necessity is the inner discovery in order to know what one truely is behind social, moral, cultural, racial and hereditary appearances. At the center there is a being free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the active center of our being and our life in „Auroville.“ 1970
Unselfishness is the first need to participate in the creation. Each one must know if he wants to associate with an old world ready for death, or to work for a new and better world preparing to be born
The present: Although Auroville was meant to belong to everyone, the obstacles of becoming Aurovillian are quite big. At least financially. Not out of an Intention of accumulating money, but the mere fact that still there are not enough houses who could be given freely and have to be bought in order to be able to stay. In your first year as a „newcomer” you would be working voluntarily in diffferent fields of jobs usefull for the community and figuring out what your true skills are. Which means that in this first year you need some financial resources to live off. Still the project is in its development and needs financial support from the outside.
THE FUTURE
„The conception of Auroville is purely divine and has precededits execution by many years. Naturally, in the details of the execution the human Consciousness intervenes“ 1969
“Each man has his solution, and that is the great difficulty. To be in the Truth, each one has his solution. And yet we must find a way for all these solutions to work together. So the framework must be vast, very flexible, and there must be a great Goodwill from everyone: that is the first individual condition – Goodwill. To be flexible enough to do the best thing to be done at the Moment. “
No one claims Auroville as a yet completed town or project. Neither in its urban nor in ist spiritual sense. Still a lot of architectural, environmental, educational and human work has to be done and IS done. It remains „a city of search of its soul of a sustainable future. Searching, searching, searching“*
ME + AUROVILLE
I first heart of the existence of this place last year in Spain in a yoga retreat center combined with a permaculture project where I volunteered (thank you Suryalila & Joaquin!!!). I could not believe an international place like that exists and why I had never heard of it. Not even in my architecture studies… Then, after working 3 month in Sri Lanka as a yoga teacher and massage therapist, I developed a true love for thai massage and somehow a teacher in Auroville was recommended to me. This must be fate I thought and booked my flight to Chennai. I was not disappointed.
I think I fell in love with this red-earth-and-huge-trees-with-loud-birds at first sight. In no other town had I ever felt such peaceful and inspiring energy. And met so many beautiful habitants from all nations and temperaments. (but also: Maybe a place llike this can only exist in India with a common spiritual ground and also with the wonderful tamil People).
NANRI. THANK YOU. MERCI. This story has just begun….
If not mentioned, all quotes are from The Mother. Quotes with a * and some pictures are taken out of a video from AuroMaa
I apologize for everything incorrect. This blog is a mixture of my own experiences of a 5 weeks stay and literature I bought there. Although I was lucky enough to meet wonderful Aurovillians and had a lot of input, a place like this cannot be fully and truelly observed in 5 weeks (and: observing wasn´t even my purpose. I just came here for a thai massage course and ended up staying twice as long as planned 😉
If you are hooked, please visit www.auroville.org for an abundance of more information and inspiration!