My first interview was with one of the first residents of Auroville, as it were, and the flag-holder of the Swedish flag during the inauguration of Auroville in 1968. She had spent time living in the ashram and a house in Pondy during pre-Auroville years where she was seeking for something more to life, or anything more to life. S (as I will refer to her in this entry), was also the mother to the first child born in Auroville. Prior to coming here and encountering the Mother and the yoga of Sri Aurobindo, she said she felt that her life was at its limit, unsatisfying and without a reason continue. It was by coming here that she discovered freedom through spirituality. In the interview, I ask questions about Auroville, difficulties faced by Auroville, possibilities and dealing with these difficulties, potential disapointments, lessons learned, etc. The interview also unfolds naturally according to each person.
S is the first pioneer I met in Auroville. When listening to her, you can feel her conviction, empathize with her disappointments, and hear the frankness in criticisms. "That delightful joy, that everything is possible, " she reflected in the book Turning Points, a compilation of interviews with about fifteen of the pioneers published last year. "We were all so naive," she continues, "we didn’t understand what the yoga involved: what a fundamental change had to take place...One of the strange things for me is: Here the Divine gives us a piece of land and says, ‘Build the divine city!’ Total freedom. Total freedom! We are the ones who very shortly said, ‘Hey, Christine! You shouldn’t do it like that!’ We can’t even hold that freedom." The word 'yoga' in Sanskrit translates to 'union.' It is often interpreted to mean a 'union with the Self," or the "Atma," or for Sri Aurobindo, the Supreme Consciousness. Although a lot of Indian traditions associate this practice of yoga with a withdrawal from the world, Sri Aurobindo advocates a sort of descent with the material world while at the same time being mindful of the development of consciousness within the human. Until the human, Nature led the way for evolution; now that the human is self-conscious and thus self-reflective, he ought to strive to tap into the Self that transcends the differences of the material world, perhaps most importantly the ego.
We spoke a decent bit about religion and Auroville; it's fears of being considered a religious cult, its fear of religion in general, and also the relationship of religion and spirituality. For Sri Aurobindo, religion is, at its heart, indistinquishable from spirituality, but religionism indicates the empty, blindly followed conventions and rituals of mass religions, such as Christianity in Christendom. In fact, in Turning Points, she even relates meeting the Mother to meeting Jesus. During the interview, she reflected upon the difficulty of discerning the truth without the Mother: "And it is true, you see, I mean I am always a little hesitant [to declare the truth] because I lived with the Mother; what is true, what is false. And for me, what I learned with Mother, everyone could write and you had this feeling that this is totally the truth, you know." Without the Mother as a vessel of the Divine Mother, or the Higher Consciousness (as Sri Aurobindo named her), S sees Auroville as struggling to recognize the truth. In regard to the politics of Auroville, she said "there is something old and stuck...playing in Auroville, which is a pity."
But S does not lose hope, despite her disapointments and criticism of AV today. When I asked her if she lived with any regrets, she replied not. She commented that she had left AV for ten years after the Mother died, but in end she came back. She said, "No the dream is very deep, and the truth of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother represent. And this is after all the experiment she launched, and its like, 'Well i’ll give my life to this.' I don’t think I’ll see any results in my life, but I’ll give my life to this. There is nothing else that makes sense to me." She also said,"It seems to me that for Auroville to be what it’s supposed to be--this is my interpretation--the city of oneness, you will have to have sufficient people that have realized in themselves. You can’t possibly impose this. How can you, no? What does that mean? Then you would have uniformity, or squash it. You see we have been given an impossible task because we aren’t equipped for it! So, as I keep saying, we muddle on and the dream is alive, still. And I say it takes time, it will take generations and generations. "