I went for a short visit to Auroville, India this December as there is talk in the air about starting a ‘sister’ publication to Biophile in India. My dear friends Stacey and Martin have this idea, and with a little dedicated action great ideas often materialize, so we are visualizing it and if it is meant to be, it will happen in perfect divine time!
Auroville was inspired by the evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo and founded by Mirra Alfassa, known as “The Mother”. It has been planned as an international experimental township, and I just loved every minute of my time there, even though it was a fleeting 8 days. I stayed with Martin and Stacey in the community, (within the greater Auroville community) called Verete.
We ate sensational auvedic organic food cooked by the Amah’s and a couple of times went to the solar kitchen for lunch. It is one of the biggest solar kitchens in the world and caters for 1000 – 2000 people a day, and the food is all vegetarian and delicious! I had a humble, beautifully clean little room called ‘Faith’, and my showers were from a bucket with water from a solar geyser…..what more could anyone want? We laughed, sang, played music and zooted around on electric bikes! I met some great people, dedicated to “The Dream”, which you can read below.
It is a place that aspires to true brotherhood, and while it is not perfect yet, the blueprint is there and people are doing their best to live in brotherly/sisterly love, consciously and creatively.
THE DREAM
“There should be somewhere upon earth a place that no nation could claim as its sole property, a place where all human beings of goodwill, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony, where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his suffering and misery, to surmount his weakness and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the care for progress would get precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the seeking for pleasures and material enjoyments.
In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their soul. Education would be given, not with a view to passing examinations and getting certificates and posts, but for enriching the existing faculties and bringing forth new ones. In this place titles and positions would be supplanted by opportunities to serve and organize.
The needs of the body will be provided for equally in the case of each and everyone. In the general organisation intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority will find expression not in the enhancement of the pleasures and powers of life but in the increase of duties and responsibilities. Artistic beauty in all forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, will be available equally to all, the opportunity to share in the joys they bring being limited solely by each one’s capacities and not by social or financial position. For in this ideal place money would be no more the sovereign lord.
Individual merit will have a greater importance than the value due to material wealth and social position. Work would not be there as the means of gaining one’s livelihood, it would be the means whereby to express oneself, develop one’s capacities and possibilities, while doing at the same time service to the whole group, which on its side would provide for each one’s subsistence and for the field of his work. In brief, it would be a place where the relations among human beings, usually based almost exclusively upon competition and strife, would be replaced by relations of emulation for doing better, for collaboration, relations of real brotherhood”.
–The Mother
We at Biophile wish all our readers a peaceful and blessed 2008.