Auroville was founded on a dream to create a place where people from all over the world can live together in harmony, in a community based on spirituality, peace, and love. However, over the years, this dream has been compromised as some individuals have taken advantage of the resources and opportunities available in Auroville. As a result, it has become necessary to uncroach the dream and restore its original essence.
Continue readingTaking Responsibility in Auroville: Uncroaching Positions and Rights
Auroville is a unique community that emphasizes collective decision-making, shared resources, and mutual respect for each other’s rights. However, the community has faced challenges in recent years as some individuals have encroached upon Auroville’s assets, including positions and rights that were intended to be shared. This has led to a sense of inequality and resentment among some members of the community.
Continue readingThe Importance of Uncroaching Auroville’s Assets: A Call to Action
Auroville, the experimental township in southern India, was envisioned as a place where people from all over the world could live together in harmony, devoid of social, political and economic distinctions. The township was also meant to be an example of sustainable living, where people live a simple life, share resources and work for the betterment of the community. However, over the years, the concept of Auroville has been compromised by some unscrupulous residents who have encroached upon Auroville’s assets, such as common spaces, parks, workspaces, and even houses.
Continue readingROGER ANGER : 100 YEARS
Auroville will undertake a perpetual search for the future with beings of high quality who will have, for a great deal, overcome their limitations, achieved a true communication, a true fraternity, based on openness, and an understanding of the other in a beautiful and harmonious environment within the context of an exceptional city…
Continue readingAnger’s Auroville
His close associate, ANUPAMA KUNDOO recalls his vision for the commune There are few people who manage by their very existence to raise standards. Roger Anger (24.03.1923 – 15.01.2008) will be remembered as a person who set a high benchmark. An exceptional architect, he belonged to the avant-garde trend that was emerging in Paris around the mid-Fifties.
Continue reading10-point game results 3 – Development of Community Life
3 Development of Community Life
3.1 NEED FOR BETTER COMMUNITY
3.1.1 To create again a community where we all feel home and part of a big family, beyond cultural, social, financial, racial differences. A community where our youth want to live when they grow adults, not because they don’t know where to go or what else to do, not because life is easier than in the villages, not because they don’t have the financial means or the educational background to live somewhere else in the world, but because the community has developed an atmosphere of growth, of adventure, of brotherhood that gives a special sense to their life
3.1.2 We as a community as a whole need to find our CENTRE. Why is it only, that when there are extreme cases like Sydo’s murder, that we all come together for a short while…that we feel bonded to one another, for a short while, and then everyone continues to live in his own way…what is lacking? what will bring us all together and keep us together, not just for a short while, but for years to come???? What, what??
3.2 COMMUNICATION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS
3.2.1 Smile more… J
3.2.2 Respect for all, for Aurovillians old ones and new ones, Newcomer and Guests and their individuality
3.2.3 Invest more time in knowing and improving relations with our neighbours
3.2.4 Replace criticism by support + loving feed back
3.2.5 Increase communication within Auroville.
3.2.6 Be friendly with each other: No more grumpy faces!
3.2.7 Get people to loosen up –take themselves less seriously
3.2.8 I wish Aurovillians to inform themselves about each other without gossip, care about each other so that also the share of financials is easier
3.2.9 Build trust- through regular sharing of information
3.2.10 Better relation among Aurovillians (more unity)
3.2.11 Better communication between the Aurovillians.
3.2.12 Community wise consciousness – Family is unity
3.2.13 Personal contact with people.
3.2.14 Inter community interactions
3.2.15 We don’t know each other anymore. A systematic, periodic way of introducing new people to the existing community should be created. I would like to be able to hear people, both new and old, speak about what brought them here – their commitments, circumstances, vision. I’ve been here almost 9 years now and have always had the sense of not knowing what we had to work with, human resource-wise. Entry Group announcements of Newcomers in the N&N should include a photo and be much more substantial in terms of introducing people
3.2.16 More smiles and smiling.
3.2.17 Enhance inter Aurovilian communication.
3.3 LANGUAGE
3.3.1 Spoken English and Tamil
3.3.2 Get everyone really learning Tamil!
3.3.3 A compulsory fulltime crash course in Tamil language and culture for any person that is going to live in Auroville. A three month course 30 up to 40 hours a week could be considered. The situation of people living for ten years or more in Auroville without being able to put up with a single conversation in Tamil is really too much.
3.3.4 Give classes in Tamil to Tamil Aurovilians about life in a community, human unity and how to achieve it
3.3.5 More courses for languages – eg Tamil and English
3.4 METHODS OF COMMUNICATION
3.4.1 Radio Station (with 2 KM radius)
3.4.2 See to it that everything in “News and Notes” is translated into Tamil. Encourage Annemarie to free herself from self-censorship.
3.4.3 Invest in communication infrastructure – for rapid communication / feedback/ decision making.
3.4.4 Communication (telecom, internet, radio, TV, print …..etc)
3.4.5 A magazine called Vision Auroville
3.5 PLACE TO GET TOGETHER
3.5.1 Would be great if Auroville had a place where one could ‘hang out’ in the evening, chat with friends, have a good juice and a sandwich. Just a place for clean fun – we are so uptight due to all the work pressures.
3.5.2 There should be a place where all can meet casually for games, talk, videos, listening to music. Kosmos Kafe was a step in the right direction.
3.5.3 Places to meet, others than meetings or restaurants, to enjoy being together after the movie for ex., a convivial place, like the Kosmos coffee, that is not closing at 8.30PM… To share, to communicate, to drink a lemon juice, to dance on life music, etc… Even if it is just a place opened just once a week or a month, will be great.
3.5.4 Create place like cosmos café
3.5.5 Create a space for Kosmos – like activities.
3.5.6 Have public spaces for the youth (open beyond 9pm!)
3.5.7 Go on with more gathering “cosmos café type”)
3.5.8 Have a permanent meeting place in interaction and exchanges
3.5.9 Entertainment (restaurants, cafes, movies, theater, sports …. Etc )
3.5.10 A community centre to meet – like the Kosmic café.
3.6 WAYS OF COMING TOGETHER
3.6.1 More celebration, coming together with whole of AV
3.6.2 Collective festivals, Deepavali, Pongal, Christmas, New Year ,AV, Ma’s Sri Aurobindo’s B’day
3.6.3 Take steps to improve the quality of our communal life-community Eating, community games, festivals etc.
3.6.4 Music live once a week.
3.6.5 Develop outing from AV to other places in India.
3.6.6 More full moon walks, cycling trips and just walks around AV in day and night times.
3.6.7 Let’s build ring road together!
3.6.8 Community picnics, tours, outings, get-togethers with lunch, dinner, amongst Aurovilians, with friends of Auroville, with long term associates, etc.
3.7 TAKING CARE OF EACH OTHER
3.7.1 A way to take care of people, particularly youth who become psycologically unbalanced.
3.7.2 To bring about a greater caring for each other by creating a safe, homely, medically oriented and realistic approach and place for those of us who may be, temporarily, disoriented or otherwise in need of psychological care (this certainly in regard to our youth).
3.7.3 Parties with alcohol and drugs do incalculable harm to AV on many levels and a way must be found to stop them once and for all, whatever it takes, even if it involves not renewing the visa to the incoscients who organize them.
3.7.4 Encourage rather than discriminate against each other.
3.8 INVOLVE THE YOUTH
3.8.1 Mobilize and Auroville youth to take an active part in the management and realization of the city. That means how to motivate them to learn something useful for Auroville and to do it?
3.8.2 Youth gatherings.
3.8.3 See what more we must provide for the adolescent youth in Auroville and do it.
3.8.4 Kids go into dope. Can we arrange for them a group with a few adults who know how to use “the profit of smoking”? It could let kids not use “grass” as the way of wiping from the reality. Mauna has some Information.
3.8.5 Give youth responsibilities and bring them to the main stream.
3.8.6 To train the youth and children to become true Aurovillians for which adults should be role models
3.8.7 Read and explain Mother + Sri Aurobindo To the kids – explain to them the goal of AV; What it mean to change one’s consciousness, How to change one’s consciousness.
3.8.8 Channel the youth force
3.8.9 Support the youth rather than building retirement homes.
3.8.10 A light point for the game: The peacock’s population is exploding and destroying gardens and silence. Unfortunately the peacock is in India is a protected bird. May be as part of a new game, children can be rewarded if they can find and collect their eggs!!?
3.8.11 Craft training for AV youth.
3.9 SECURITY
3.9.1 Security (especially in the evening/nights and holidays) also more security for women (example. Eve-teasing by locals and etc..
3.9.2 Finally an idea could be picked up form Holland as regards the crime situation. There in the 250, 000 Citizens city of Almere, the safety situation had been deteriorating over the years. Finally a mediation group did an offer to the Town Council. They promised to bring down the crime rate with 25% meditating each week on bringing down crime. They got a place somewhere in the centre of the city and in fact they brought down crime by meditating on it and nothing else. The experiment worked and has been going on ever since.
3.9.3 Security (No police!! internal or alternative presence)
3.9.4 Better security (though I feel this is now being implemented )
3.9.5 Auroville guards – training, replace MM guards, etc
3.10 OTHER
3.10.1 Provide opportunities for meditation at MM and silence………..
3.10.2 Summer exodus.
3.10.3 We have become too Tamil in composition, which limits possibilities for all of us (including the Tamil Aurovilians).
3.10.4 Reduce the flourishing materialism in AV.
3.10.5 No more junk food!
On drugs and alcohol in Auroville
Excerpt from a conversation with Satprem
Continue readingWilling Servitors of Auroville
The concept of “Willing Servitors” is central to the community of Auroville, a utopian township located in southern India. The term refers to individuals who are willing to serve the greater good of the community, putting aside their personal interests and ambitions to work towards the collective well-being of all members.
Continue readingA society aiming at human unity
It’s often said that Auroville is like a microcosm of the world. And so it is. Represented within the project are virtually all the major polarities found in global society, plus the inevitable subtle tensions that exist as a result of them.
Melting pot
For example, there are men, women and children here representing the East-West divide, the North-South gap, all sorts of religious and cultural backgrounds, the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the sophisticated and the unsophisticated, people of different races and colour, from villages, towns and cities, from democracies and socialist societies, from first, second and third world countries, some easy to relate to, some not so easy, some hard workers and some more lazy, all with different preferences and priorities as they go about their daily lives – as smokers/non-smokers, drinkers/teetotalers, vegetarians/non-vegetarians, meditators/non-meditators, office workers/foresters and so on. The one thing that all these people have in common, however, is that they have ALL voluntarily placed themselves in the melting pot which is Auroville, and have accepted to work out their differences in a new and higher way, changing themselves instead of trying to change others as they seek to realise the ideal of human unity in diversity.
Representatives of humanity as a whole
We say “changing themselves”, but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean trying to become the same as everyone else around them. That would be a sort of unity in conformity. What Auroville is attempting to achieve is something quite different, accepting and allowing the full, rich and wonderful diversity of mankind to flourish in complete freedom, while yet achieving an inner unity and experiencing a unified and harmonious society. Sometimes the human mix seems too much, too complex, as hidden tensions rise to the surface or old behaviour patterns take over, but actually it is perfect, just as it should be, if Auroville is to be a valid experiment representative of humanity as a whole.
Inspired by The Dream, this is the ideal Auroville aspires to realise.
Towards human unity
“A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race…”
Towards unity?
Vasudhaiva kudumbakam, said the ancient Indians: the world is one family.
The ideal of human unity, which was already present at the dawn of civilisation, has never appeared so close to realisation, but paradoxically the closer we come to it, the more it seems to elude us. It is as if at the onset of the 21st century the need for human unity has never been so great, and yet quite often this very unity, seen as inevitable, is perceived as somewhat threatening.
World in crisis
We speak of mondialisation, of globalisation, and in the same breath we deplore the dangers of uniformity.. We speak of democracy as a universal ideal and of the progress of all nations towards it as irreversible, and yet at the same time this democratic model is perceived as a system imposed by some nations on others. We are facing environmental problems which threaten the very survival of our planet. We are aware of ‘global warming’ and a decrease in the finite resources of the planet, and we know that in order to tackle these common problems the individual nation-state is not an adequate institution anymore. But the very concept of a supra-national body is perceived as a possible infringement on the sovereignty of the nation-state, won in numerous cases after many decades – or longer – of struggle and pain.
Erasure of cultures
We claim that today’s world is a global village, because technological progress has made our earth very small, and news can instantly reach every inhabitant of the earth through the highroad of information. But there is the fear that this global village culture may erase the diverse cultures of the earth; indeed it is argued that there is already an immense drive towards uniformity of life habits and uniformity of knowledge.
Economic front
On the economic front, the much-talked-about liberalisation process is seen by many as an attempt to impose everywhere a model only suited to some countries, and to spread everywhere a culture of consumerism. A computer for everyone and bread for only one quarter of the world population; is this the goal towards which we are advancing?
Science
In the 19th century, intellectuals saw the progress of science as the great factor which would lead to the unification of mankind, since science was a thing common to all men in its conclusions and was international in its very nature; but we know now that science can be misused, and is being misused, to discover more and more means of destruction. We have lost faith in science as a panacea for all evils, but what is there to replace it?
Biggest obstacle
We know that egoism is the biggest obstacle to a life of harmony and peace on earth, but after so many centuries of civilisation no amount of religious preaching or moral teaching has been able to convince the ego to forego its claims, as to speak to him of fraternity is to speak to him of something fundamentally contrary to his nature.
Need for real unity
Therefore it appears that although we are moving somewhat reluctantly towards a kind of unification, this is not a process likely to solve the many acute problems of the earth, nor will the envisaged unity answer the deeper needs and aspirations of the human being. In fact, we have begun to understand that if we want to preserve the freedom for man to develop and grow in all liberty, this unity cannot be built through mechanical means. It cannot be achieved as long as man does not recognise a real unity between man and man; it cannot be arrived at through social and mechanical devices; and we have even started to realise that if its aim is not to bring about a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind, this unity is hardly desirable.
Man will be surpassed
It becomes therefore urgent to understand what this unity is towards which we feel pushed in spite of ourselves. Man is a transitional being, said Sri Aurobindo shortly after the first World War, evolution continues and man will be surpassed. Not only did Sri Aurobindo foresee the next step in the evolution of man, but he told us how to participate in it: instead of remaining a passive spectator in a painful and incomprehensible process, we could consciously collaborate in our own evolution and break free of our seemingly inextricable bonds.
Using inner means
But for this, we have to reverse the process, said Sri Aurobindo, and instead of using external means, we have to turn inward, because without a change in man’s nature no real changes in the external circumstances are likely to take place. The only way we can move towards unity is to progressively realise that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality in which we are all one – not only realise it mentally but discover it in ourselves and live this knowledge. The secret of unity is within, said Sri Aurobindo; the secret of brotherhood is within. There is no unity except by the soul, there is no real brotherhood except in the soul and by the soul. Only when we live from the soul and not from the ego will a real unity reign on earth.
Connecting with the new consciousness
This ‘spiritual age of humanity’ then will represent a transformation in the nature of man as momentous as the appearance of the thinking mind on earth. In the same way as for millennia the mind was the centre of our life, so, in the new age opening for humanity, or ‘supra-mental’ age, the soul will become the centre of all life and activities. A new stage in the evolution of man has already begun; a new consciousness, higher than the mind, a truth-consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo said, in which the dualities, hesitations and limitations of the mind and the greed and blindness of the ego will no longer exist, has already started to appear, and all the upheavals and convulsions that are at present so painfully tearing our earth are the outward signs of this evolutionary crisis. This new consciousness is already at work in the atmosphere of the earth: we can connect with it, we can call it in ourselves, we can use it to transform our entire nature and consequently the world in which we live.
It is in this wide and far-reaching sense that Auroville is dedicated to human unity. All are invited.