A Quest for Community
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Like many people, I've been searching for years for my "tribe," a group of
like-minded people, a community where my wife Kim and
I
can settle that integrates art, science, metaphysics, spirituality,
ecology, politics, economics, all of it. We're looking for a collaborative group where we
can work together to embody the alternatives
we've been researching for many years. We want to be able to walk our
talks.
We're looking for a place where people commit their lives to
exploring the
next stage of human evolution. We believe that practical prototypes of
a better way of living together can help inspire others and thus create
the seeds of transformative change on a global basis.
In March of
2001, I first visited Damanhur,
an
esoteric mystery school of about 500 full-time citizens located in the
Italian Alps. My first impressions were very positive and I thought I
had perhaps found our community. So I've spent 6 months
per year there for the past two years, and Kim has visited there 3
times for a couple of weeks each time. We've learned many things and
deeply respect what the Damanhurians are attempting to
do, but slowly began to realize that we didn't feel inspired to live
there
full-time.
There were many reasons for this, which I'll perhaps get
into later. But one of the strongest for me was the deep influence
of its location in Italy. Most of the resident citizens
are
Italian, so you really need to speak fluent Italian to assimilate into
Damanhurian culture. I don't, though I've spent hundreds of hours over
the past couple of years trying to learn it. So even though the
Damanhurians were very friendly and I participated in many different
projects and activities there, I couldn't get over an uncomfortable
feeling of being outside the core of their community, even with the 20
or so English-speakers that I became close friends with. I'm still working
on a few Damanhur projects via the Internet, but my focus has shifted toward a new possibility, a fascinating
community in India
called Auroville.
This past summer, I met some people at
Damanhur who were talking about their recent visits to Auroville. Their
stories sounded great and reminded me of some friends at Arcosanti
(I've been co-directing the biannual "Paradox Conferences" at Arcosanti for
the past 6 years) who also raved about Auroville. So I started reading
Auroville's website at www.auroville.org, and became increasingly
impressed by what they're up to, especially a beautiful feminine energy that suffused their stories and projects.
Auroville was founded in 1968, about 10 years before Damanhur, so it's more developed than Damanhur. It's now reached a critical mass of about 2000 Resident Aurovillians from 30 different countries, plus another 4500 or so Tamil workers from local villages, plus about 500 visitors at any given time. So it's a much bigger, more complex culture than Damanhur (and its official language is English!). Then Sychronicity began working and I learned about the Global Family trip to Auroville being planned for October. When I discovered that my old friends Kathy and Makasha (Howard) Roske, from the Hummingbird Ranch intentional community in New Mexico, were going, I decided to sign up.
The Auroville trip is being
facilitated by Prapanna Smith,
a long-time member of the Sri Aurobindo
community both in the US and in India who has been to Auroville many
times. He's the founder of the Center for Integral Education, and
presently the Principal of the Rainbow Kids Integral School (RKIS),
located in San Diego, California. RKIS is the first Integral Education
school (based upon the Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother) established in the USA. Prapanna has been a great help in
getting us organized for the trip. Click
here to learn more about it. (I think there may be a couple of seats left for anyone who's
interested.)
Our journey to Auroville begins on Oct. 14, a week from next Tuesday. We fly out of Los Angles at 1:30am, via Singapore Airlines, and arrive in Taiwan 12 hours later. After a one hour layover we will reboard our plane and fly to Singapore in about 6 hours. At the Singapore airport we'll have about 8 hours to rest, shower, dine, take a tour of the city, or to simply wander what Prapanna says are excellent airport facilities. (I've reserved a small room at the Singapore Airport Hotel in case I get tired of wandering.) Then we take another plane for our 4 hour flight to Chennai, formerly called Madras. Upon arrival in Chennai we will travel the 250 km (150 miles) to Auroville via taxi or van, arriving at the Verité Community on Wednesday October 16, around 4:00 AM.
Most of the group will leave
Auroville on October 31 and return to LAX on November 1, but Kathy and
Makasha and I will be staying in Auroville for another week or two.
It's a long flight from my home in Marina del Rey (on the coast just
south of Santa Monica and Venice) to Auroville, so I want to take the
time while I'm there to discover if this is the community I've been
looking for.
I've been spending lots of time
on the Auroville web site preparing for my journey. One of the first
things that impressed my was the fact that the founding of Auroville in
1968 was officially sponsored by both India and UNESCO. UNESCO's
website says, "UNESCO - the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization was born on November 16, 1945. For this
specialized UN agency, it is not enough to build classrooms in
devastated countries or to restore world heritage sites or to publish
scientific breakthroughs. Education, Social and Natural Science,
Culture and Communication are the means to a far more ambitious goal:
to build peace in the minds of men..."
This sounds like a right-on purpose to me.
With UNESCO's help, all of the 124 member nations of the UN and 23 Indian states were represented at Auroville's founding ceremony in 1968. The Sri Aurobindo ashram had just acquired about 15 square kilometers of barren dessert land 10 km north of Pondicherry, located in the province of Tamil Nadu on the southwestern coast of India. It was an inspiring ritual, with a grand procession of the national flags and music playing as a young boy and girl from each nation walked up a just-finished spiral pathway and placed soil from their homeland into a raised marble urn that was to become the enduring symbol of Auroville. As 5000 invited guests watched, the then Prime Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, described Auroville as: "An exciting project for bringing about harmony among different cultures and for understanding the environmental needs of man's spiritual growth."
Then the Founder of Auroville, called the Mother, read the Charter of
Auroville in French from her room in Pondicherry, and it was broadcast
live to the 5000 invited guests gathered in the new amphitheatre. She said:
Auroville belongs to nobody in particular.
Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole.
But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
Auroville wants to be the bridge
between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries
from without and within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future
realizations.
Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
Thursday, October 02, 2003
So who is this Founder of Auroville called the "Mother" I referred to in the previous post? There's lots of information on the Auroville website. Here's my edited short version, quoted from there:
Early years
Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris on Feb. 22, 1878 and died in
Pondicherry, India of Nov. 17, 1973. She was an extraordinarily gifted
child, who became an accomplished painter and musician and had many
inner experiences from early childhood on. In her twenties she studied
occultism in Algeria with Max Theon and his English wife Alma, who was
a highly developed medium. After her return to Paris, the Mother worked
with several different groups of spiritual seekers. ...
Meeting Sri Aurobindo
... She first heard of Sri Aurobindo in 1912 and in 1914 traveled to
Pondicherry to meet him in person. There, she immediately recognised
him as a mentor she had encountered in earlier visions, and knew that
her future work was at his side. In April 1920 she returned to join Sri
Aurobindo in Pondicherry and never left again. Sri Aurobindo recognised
in her an embodiment of the dynamic expressive aspect of evolutionary,
creative Force, in India traditionally known and approached as the
'Supreme Mother'.
Auroville
In 1968 she founded the international township project of Auroville as
a field for practical attempts to implement Sri Aurobindo's vision of
new forms of individual and collective life, preparing the way towards
a brighter future for the whole earth. In 1966 she said:
Humanity is not the last rung
of the terrestrial creation. Evolution continues and man will be
surpassed. It is for each individual to know whether he wants to
participate in the advent of this new species.
Transformation
... After Sri Aurobindo's passing in 1950, the Mother continued his work of
psychological and physical transformation with the help of the a new
force that had entered her consciouness. An account of her experiences
in the course of this work is given in The Mother's Agenda, an intimate record of the last 18 years of her life.
Their work continues.
The more I read about the Mother, the more I realized that she was a primanry source of Auroville's beautiful feminine energy.
During my years of spiritual
seeking I've been involved with several pretty male oriented groups,
including: the Gurdjieff Work, Scientology, Budhism, TM, Sufi Sam, est,
the Landmark Forum, and most recently Damanhur. These groups were all
led by charismatic male figures with a tendency toward dividing the world into "us and them" combined with systems of top-down hierarchical control, a style that I find myself less attracted to at this
point in my life. Somewhat ironically it was an experience at Damanhur
that woke me up to the more feminine domain of the "Goddess."
During the big Summer Solstice celebrations at Damanhur in July 2002, I had an opportunity to spend the night in Damanhur's magnificent underground 'Temple of Humanity.' It's been built by the Damanhurians over the last 25 years, in complete secret for the first 15! - It's located inside a small mountain in the foothills of the Italian Alps, is 21 stories (210 feet) deep and consists of 8 large halls filled with monumental Damanhurian art work. For example, the Tiffany glass cupola in the 'Hall of Mirrors' is the largest in the world, the floor of the 'Hall of Metals' is covered with human figures each composed of thousands of pieces of hand-wrought ceramic tiles, the walls and ceilings of the 'Hall of Spheres' are covered with 24-carat gold leaf, and in the 'Hall of the Earth' a beautiful hand-painted ceiling is held up by eight 20-foot high columns, each covered in silken smooth white varnished ceramic adorned with hundreds of raised ideogrammatic symbols embossed in pure gold.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
I had spent all of Sunday
participating in the Summer Solstice rituals with several hundred
Damanhurians and Guests. It's perhaps the biggest celebration of the
year at Damanhur with many people traveling from all parts of Europe
and even flying in from places like North and South America, Iceland,
and Japan. It was a beautiful sun-drenched day and the pristine air was
charged with a kind of electric energy.
Soon after the final ritual ended about 20 of us piled into two white
vans painted with colorful Damanhur logos and were driven up the
precipitous winding road to near the top of "Sacred Mountain," which
rises behind the hill village of Vidracco. It was a hair-raising drive
with the typically crazy Italian drivers as they careened the vans
around the narrow hairpin curves. I could feel my heart thumping as our
van leaned out over the token tiny stone wall along the road's edge and
I could often see straight down for hundreds of feet to the jagged
rocks below. I tried hard to believe that the copper spirals of the
"Car Self" that all Damanhurians have glued on their car dashboards
really did offer some degree of magical protection.
We finally arrived at the large
white Damanhurian nucleo "Ognidove" that guards the entrance to the
Temple. The nucleo members had prepared a delicious 5-course dinner of
pasta, fish, fresh vegetables just picked from their own gardens, and
fine red and white Aval wine brewed at Damanhur's vineyards. The meal
was hosted by two friendly Damanhurian Initiates, Orango and Vultura,
who would be our guides for our night in the Temple. Orango is a
talented Italian healer who years before had given up a promising
career in Information Technology to set up "Pranatherapy"
(Damanhur's version of 'laying on of hands' healing) centers throughout
Italy. Vultura is a German Registered Nurse who speaks Italian and
English fluently and had been asked to translate for the 6 or so
English-speakers in our group.
After dinner it was time to
enter the Temple. We followed our guides single file through a
once-secret door located in the wall of an ordinary-looking tool-shed
in the back of the house. It led into a winding narrow tunnel hewn out
of the rock of the mountain, dripping with moisture from the rain-laden
mountain above, and lit by work lights strung along the ceiling. It
felt like we were entering into an old long-abandoned mine. But after
about 100-feet, we turned a corner and the tunnel suddenly opened into
a tall passageway,
whose smooth white alabaster walls and lovely curved ceiling were
covered with beautiful hand-painted magical symbols in Damanhur's
sacred language. The sudden transition from the unfinished roughly hewn
mine shaft to this elegantly decorated hallway was a wonderful surprise.
We walked in hushed silence through the passageway for what seemed like a long way, passing several side-passages and closed wooden doors from which we could hear the muffled sounds of strange melodies and mysterious chanting. Then our guide beckoned to us to take a sharp turn into a short hallway that ended in a low open door though which we could see a stone staircase. We had to bend our heads to enter through the door and then carefully climb the narrow steps. When we reached the top and were able to look up, we discovered we were inside a huge chamber of mirrored walls crowned with a magnificent Tiffany glass cupola, the largest in the world. This was the Hall of Mirrors, a space of 1,200 cubic meters, dedicated to the sky, the air and the light.
The focus of our exploration
that night was "Contact with the Cosmos." The intent was to contact
alien civilizations by using as a planetary transmitter a complex
selfic system of over 350 tons (!) of copper, precious stones and other
metals concealed behind the walls and under the floors of the Temple.
One of its many functions was to amplify the subtle senses of those
participating in certain magical rituals like the one we were now in.
It's an incredible claim, but my natural skepticism was moderated by the fact that we were sitting
inside a magnificent underground Temple that had been secretly
hand-built inside a remote mountain in the Italian Alps by this small
group of Damanhurian Initiates.
Our guides explained to us that one of the instruments we'd be using that evening was the set of spheres located in the Hall of Spheres,
which was easily accessible from the Hall of Mirrors. Eight large (~
2-feet in diameter) crystal spheres were arranged in eight mosaic
niches along two long walls. A ninth sphere is located at the central
point
of the narrow wall opposite the entrance. Each sphere is filled with a
different colored exotic alchemical liquid, which I've heard said were
passed to Damanhur by an esoteric alchemical lineage that had been
distilling the liquids for hundreds of years.
I'll not describe in detail
what occurred in the next few hours. Suffice it to say that our guides
led us through various rituals designed to amplify our subtle senses to
tune to energies and cosmic communications we're normally unaware of.
They activated selfic devices in the walls and floors and at
one point they rhythmically struck a large bronze hanging gong whose
overtones reverberated into increasingly subtle harmonics. As I focused
on following the complex frequencies echoing from the slanted mirror
walls, I began to notice a strange humming sound composed of extremely
high and low tones that continued to fill the room long after the
echoes of the gong had faded away. I tried covering my ears and to my
surprise the sound continued undiminished, as if I was hearing it
directly inside my brain.
We were also allowed to sit
alone in front of the spheres, gazing into the pastel liquids filling
them. The first time I tried it as part of the group, I didn't notice
anything, but later that night I came back alone and sat for hours
before the spheres while most of the other members of the group were
sleeping. I still didn't see much, but I did notice very subtle rapidly
moving swirling patterns in a couple of the spheres.
The morning came quickly. I had
stayed awake most of the night along with one other person. When we
came back out of the Temple into the dawn of a new day, all of the
colors were unusually intense - the green of the trees, the blue of the
sky, and the view of the valley from the helicopter platform outside
the entrance was startling in its beauty. Misty white streamers of fog
were swirling upward as the sun's rays penetrated into the valley. And
the air itself was sparkling with golden prana. It was beautiful.
Our guides treated us to a
delicious breakfast of pancakes and cheeses and fresh fruits and strong
Italian expresso coffees. Everyone was chattering away sharing the most
remarkable experiences - lots of visual and auditory contact with
strange alien entities. I confess that my scientist personality was
feeling pretty skeptical about some of their stories - they sounded
just too outrageous to be true. And another part of me was feeling
disappointed that I hadn't had such amazing experiences.
Then we were then taken in another harrowing drive back down the mountain to the Damanhurian administration center at Damjl. I spent the morning catching up on some of my work in the computer center, and had lunch at the Somachandra Cafe.
So there I was on early Monday
afternoon walking slowly from Damjl toward the Gusteria bar a few
hundred yards up the street. My sleepless night was beginning to get to
me, so I was feeling kind of weak and light-headed. I had decided to get a
quick glass of carbonated springwater at the Gusteria and then ride my bike home and get some sleep.
It was then that it hit me,
halfway between Damjl and the Gusteria, walking alone alongside a tall thick green hedge. All of a sudden my
head filled with a sort of luminous light, so intense that it blotted
out the external world. I stopped walking and watched in amazement as
the most remarkable scene unfolded in front of me. I saw a long, very
long row of what at first looked liked playing cards. It was curving
sinuously into infinity, like a row of dominoes. And each card had a
video playing on it. When I looked more closely, I saw that the videos
were 3-D holographic windows into what I somehow knew were my own "past
lives." - (I put that in quotes because I'm not sure I believe in the
traditional theories of reincarnation. It seems more likely to me that
our normal sense of time is an artifact of our cognitive processes, and
that the Cosmos is really all happening at once in a kind of "Eternal
Now." So I tend to think of past lives as resonances between co-present lives
being lived out in simultaneously parallel universes.)
When I focused on any
particular window, it instantly opened to reveal a full-blown life
scenario, complete with all the sensations of 'real-life.' And as my
focus moved rapidly from card to card, I realized that there was a
common
element running through them. They all had something to do with the
"Goddess." Most of the scenarios involved actual temples
and rituals dedicated to the Goddess, complete with beautiful
priestesses in flowing robes and all, though many of them weren't in
human bodies. I was a female in some of them, but a male in most,
having various roles as guardian, protector, lover, teacher, adept,
etc. Some of them involved sensual tantric rituals, others were of
serene contemplation, and others were of wild battle scenes where I was
fighting with vicious aggressors who wanted to destroy the temples and
their priestesses. I skimmed through an incredible number of
inspiring spiritual scenes sprinkled with horrifying scenes of rape and
plunder.
The experience seemed to last for hours, but when I came out of it and looked at my watch, I realized it had been less than five minutes, a tiny slice of time that was to change my life. - I had been gifted with an answer to the perennial question "Why Am I Here?" Suddenly I knew with undeniable clarity that "I am here to serve the Goddess."
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Though I had met quite a few
women who were "into the Goddess" in the past few years, I didn't
really understand what that meant. As I sat in the Gusteria Cafe, I
knew that I needed to start learning more about this Goddess stuff.
But where to begin? I decided not to mention my experience to anyone
till I did some personal research.
One of the remarkable things
about being at Damanhur is that the synchronicity index is off the
scale there. Nearly everyone who visits for more than a few days, me
included, experiences an increasing number of fortuitous coincidences
that start opening up new directions in their lives. Damanhur's
metaphysics says this is due to several factors: Damanhur's location on
the nexus of 4 'synchronic lines,' the presence at Damanhur of many
specially designed devices designed to enhance synchronicity, and the
focused spiritual work and magical rituals that the several hundred
members of the School of Meditation are continuously engaged in.
But I had forgotten about all that as I wondered how I was going to begin
my research into the Goddess. I had no idea that a series of seemingly
unrelated events were arranging themselves into an answer to my
question...
The next day, on Tuesday, I received an unexpected phone call from a senior Damanhurian Initiate that I had taken a workshop from a couple of months earlier. She said that her cousin Anna, a Professor at the University of Turin, was involved in a French to English book translation project and was looking for a native American to help proof the manuscript for the American edition. As she spoke, I had a tickle of anticipation that often signaled a synchronic event, so I immediately agreed to meet the next day with Anna for lunch.
I was picked up at the Damanhur
Welcome Office at noon on Wednesday by Impala, the French woman who had
been translating the book. She drove me to Anna's home, located past
Vidracco up into the foothills of the Italian Alps in a picturesque
hill village called Rueglio.
We introduced ourselves in Anna's kitchen as she served us a fine lunch
of fresh bread, cheeses, and salad fixings from her garden. After quick
introductions, Anna placed a copy of the French edition of the book
Impala was translating on the table in front of me.
The author was a French psychic named Ioana whom Impala and Anna were both students of. I picked it up and turned it over so I could read the back cover material, and my attention was caught by a photo of Ioana. She was a beautiful woman, a former teacher of dance, but it was the look in her eyes that struck me. As I was drawn into their serene depth, I felt a sort of electric energy move through my body, and started seeing again my Monday vision of "Serving the Goddess.'
Anna and Impala looked at each
other and nodded, then said, "Yes, we can see that you are right for
this work. What are you feeling?" I looked at these two professional
women and said, "Well, this is probably going to sound a little crazy,
but I'm recalling the most amazing experience I had a couple of days
ago ..." I summarized it to them and concluded with my desire to learn
more about what it could mean in our day and age to "serve the Goddess."
After hearing my story, Anna
looked intensely at me and said, "If you truly do want to learn about
the Goddess, then follow me." She led me through a couple of doors into
her private book-lined study and pointed to the bookshelves covering
one of the walls. I could hardly believe it as I began to read their
titles; they were all books about the Goddess! I looked at Anna in
amazement, and she grinned at me and said, "Yes, that's one of the main
subjects I teach at the University. I'm a specialist in the historical
mythology of the Goddess and the current revival of interest in Her.
And if you'd like to learn more, I'd be happy to help."
Another example of Damanhurian
synchronicity in action! Here I was just two days after this crazy
experience that I hadn't yet told anyone about, standing in the study
of a Goddess scholar I hadn't known before, in a town I'd never been
in. How wonderful!
I spent the next couple of
months studying the materials that Anna recommended to me, and slowly
began to appreciate the incredible new knowledge that's been surfacing
in the past 20 years or so about the influence of the Goddess in human
history. To summarize, recent anthropological discoveries have revealed
that humans have been worshipping the Goddess for most of our cultural
history, which is now believed to be nearly 100,000 years old. For
nearly 90,000 years many, perhaps most, of our tribal religions seemed
to revolve around her. There is evidence that those cultures seem to
have been mostly partnership societies with a surprising degree of
equality between men and women, little violence, and harmonious relationships with their natural environments.
But in the last 10,000 years or
so all this changed. Male sky-god oriented warrior cultures began to
surge down from the Mongolian steppes and the Scandinavian high country
into the European centers of the Earth-oriented goddess cultures. Over
a period of a thousand or more years they slowly vanquished the more
peaceful goddess cultures, replacing their partnership societies with
more male-dominant aggressively hierarchical cultures. They destroyed
the temples and sacred places of the Goddess and built their own
temples on top of the ruins. And they placed women under a macho male
subjugation that has continued to this day.
It was against this background
that I began to hear about Auroville a few months ago. And as I
mentioned above, I immediately tuned into its more feminine energy,
especially in contrast with my experience of Damanhur. I learned that it is Auroville's Founder, the talented Parisian
intellectual, musician, writer, mathematician, and occult adept
originally named Mirra Alfassa, who is so much a living embodiment of
this energy that she is known affectionately by all Aurovillians as
simply "The Mother." - So, I've been researching her philosophy in
preparation for my journey to Auroville. One of the sources I've been
reading is called "The Matrimandir Journal," a beautifully written
summary of the Mother's thoughts about the design and function of
the Matrimandir, Auroville's monumental temple located at the central point of the
circle of Auroville's 25 square kilometers of land.
So what is this 'Mother' energy? Issue #6 of the Matrimandir Journal puts it this way:
"Here, at the very
borders of the Supramental plane, the plane of Truth life, the Truth
creation, we may meet the ineffable presence of the Mahashakti [the
divine Conscious Force] of this triple world of the Ignorance -- the
Universal Mother. It is from this plane, where she stands above all the
Gods, that she puts out all her Powers and Personalities.
Sri Aurobindo
reminds us that even the quickest mind and the freest and most vast
intelligence will hardly be able to follow the movements of the
Mahashakti -- the divine Conscious Force -- as she presides over her
creation. It is only with our soul, our psychic heart, that we may
sense her action in us."
...
...
The Mother's Cosmic Godheads
Maheshwari,
Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. It is they who most closely
embody the Mahashakti, expressing herself sometimes through one,
sometimes through another of these Personalities of hers which have so
far acted in the world play. But to begin to understand them we must
have risen somewhat above the entangling web of our lower nature. For
it is only then we may meet these Goddesses [emphasis added] as Sri
Aurobindo describes them. ...
In one of her conversations Mother indicated the plane from which they act:
"I believe I have already told you once that there are the
original beings in their higher reality and these are of a particular
kind; then, as they manifest in more and more material regions, nearer
and nearer the earth, they assume different forms and also multiply in
a strange way. If you like, the beings Sri Aurobindo speaks of here
belong to regions quite close to the Supermind, they are still in quite
a clear and conscious contact with the supramental origin. These beings
manifest also in what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind and there the
form becomes as it were more marked, a little more precise and at the
same time reduced in power and capacity. Then, from the Overmind they
come down into the human mind, the terrestrial mind..."
In his letters, Sri Aurobindo too has clarified:
"These four Powers are the Mother's cosmic Godheads, permanent in
the world-play; they stand among the greater cosmic Godheads to whom
allusion is made when it is said that the Mother as the Mahashakti of
this triple world 'stands there (in the Overmind plane) above the
Gods.' "
"In a sense the four Powers of the Mother may be called, because
of their origin, her Emanations, just as the Gods may be called
Emanations of the Divine, but they have a more permanent and fixed
character; they are at once independent beings allowed their play by
the Adya Shakti and yet portions of the Mother, the Mahashakti, and she
can always either manifest through them as separate beings or draw them
together as her own various Personalities and hold them in herself,
sometimes kept back, sometimes at play, according to her will. In the
supramental plane they are always in her and do not act independently
but as intimate portions of the supramental Mahashakti and in close
union and harmony with each other."
When asked what exactly is meant by an 'emanation of the Mother', Sri Aurobindo explains:
"An emanation of the Mother is something of her consciousness and
power put forth from her which, so long as it is in play, is held in
close connection with her and, when its play is no longer required, is
withdrawn back into its source, but can always be put out and brought
into play once more. But also the detaining thread of connection can be
severed or loosened and that which came forth as an emanation can
proceed on its way as an independent divine being with its own play in
the world. All the Gods can put forth such emanations from their being,
identical with them in essence of consciousness and power though not
commensurate. In a certain sense the universe itself can be said to be
an emanation from the Supreme. In the consciousness of the sadhak an
emanation of the Mother will ordinarily wear the appearance, form and
characteristics with which he is familiar."
Sunday, October 26, 2003
Well, it's now Noon, on Monday,
27 Oct., 03, and I'm in Auroville! It's taken me awhile to adjust to
being here in India for the first time since 1963, so I haven't been
keeping up with this journal. It's also taken me awhile to find a
wideband connection here in Auroville where I can login using my own
computer (a Mac G4 12" laptop). But yesterday I discovered that the
Internet Cafe located next to the Auroville Solar Cafe (on the rooftop
terrace of the Solar Kitchen) has an upstairs room where I can plug my
Mac directly into the Net via an ethernet cable. They've even given me
my own IP number. And the cost is just 60 Rs. per hour (exchange rate
is about 48 Rs. to $1.00 USD), or about $1.25/hr., which I can pay for
with my Auroville "Pour Tous" Guest Account! So that's where I am now.
I'll post a few brief comments for the last couple of weeks to bring us
up to present time, and then continue from there.
Let's see, the last postings I
made were on Thursday, 9 Oct., so I'll continue from there. I spent
Friday and Saturday doing my final packing for the upcoming trip to
Auroville. Kim and I had a wonderful day together on Saturday doing
last minute errands and a quick walk on the beach in front of our home
in Marina del Rey, California. At about 10:00 pm, Katherine and Howard
Roske and their 22 year old daughter Mirra arrived, after a long drive
from their home in Boulder, Colorado. They're my old and very dear
friends from when I lived in Boulder in the early 80's and then when we
all moved to Maui, Hawaii from 1986 to when I returned to California in
1992. Mirra is now a grown-up young lady, very cool and sexy. And
Howard has now taken on the name Makasha. They're all in great health,
Katherine looks almost exactly the same as 10 years ago and Makasha has
a few more wrinkles but is till full of loving and alert compassionate
energy. It's so good to see them and to introduce them to Kim. We spend
the next couple of hours catching up on 10 years of stories, full of
synchronicities and amazing Grace.
On Monday, 13 Oct., Kim's at
work and Makasha has gotten up early to drive to a meeting with a
friend in a town outside of LA. So Katherine and I take a long bike
ride North along the beach bike bath, through Venice and Santa Monica
to the turn-around at the end of the bike trail on the border of
Malibu, about 8 miles. Then we rest and share stories at the abandoned
lifeguard station near the turn-around, overlooking the crashing ocean
surf and circling seagulls, the spot where Kim and I always do the
same. It's a beautiful day and Katherine is very happy. She loves
biking and the ocean, so first sheds her shoes and runs into the ocean
to pay her respects to the great Mother Pacific. Then we ride back to
the Novel Cafe in Santa Monica and get Chai teas to fortify ourselves
for the rest of the ride home. We run into Mirra waiting for us in a
fried chicken bistro on the corner of Washington St. near the Venice
Pier. Mirra is exhausted so we make arrangements for me to come pick
her up in my car in half an hour. When Katherine and I get home at
about 4pm, Kim has just arrived home from work, so after a few quick
greetings, Katherine and I use Kim's Toyota Prius hyrid-electric car to
go pick up Mirra and then I take them to do some last minute shopping
for the trip to India. We arrive home at about 5:30 pm, to the
delicious smells of a wonderful dinner that Kim has been preparing for
our farewell meal. Our flight for India leaves at just after midnight
tonight, so the excitement is beginning to build.
After a relaxed meal sharing
Kim's delicious stew and huge salad, we pack our bags into the Roske's
big station wagon and at 9:30 pm Kim drives us to the LAX airport. It's
finally becoming real to me that I'm actually flying off to India in a
couple of hours. Kim and I embrace a bit tearfully and say our
fare-thee-wells. I watch her driving off and realize for the hundredth
time how very much I love her. What an incredible woman to not only
accept but to actively support my crazy adventures in Arcosanti,
Damanhur, and now Auroville! And she's my wife! How graced I am.
After an uneventful checkin,
our big, new, Boeing 777 wide-body jet leaves LAX at about 12:30 am
Tuesday morning, Oct. 14 on the first leg of our journey to Auroville,
a 12-hour non-stop flight to Taipai, Taiwan. Kim told me that Singapore
Airlines is considered the best airline in the world and I soon realize
why. The service is excellent, kimono-glad China-doll stewardesses await on
us with gracious attentiveness. I'm sitting in the left aisle seat of
the 3-seat center column, next to Caroline and her husband John,
founders of Global Family, and co-creators of the Hummingbird Ranch
Intentional Community in Northern New Mexico with Katherine and Makasha
and a few other homesteaders. They're tired, so go to sleep soon, but
I'm so excited that I stay awake and watch Terminator 3 on the
flat-panel private TV in front of me (I have a choice of 20 or so
different free movies I can watch via real-time DVD). T3 has impressive
special effects as usual, but the plot is getting a bit tiresome, and
it's rather strange watching our new California Governor-elect acting
out the role of the Terminator.
Monday, October 27, 2003
Our flight to Taipai is
uneventful, interrupted only by the serving of delicious meals, the
best airline food I've ever had. We have a smooth landing, then are
asked to take all our carry-on baggage off the plane with us while they
clean and refuel the plane during our one-hour layover. I have a quick
lunch of a Won Ton type soup in the airport, and then it's back onboard
to the same seats for the next leg of our flight to Singapore. Our
group has done some seat-shuffling and I find myself sitting next to a
lady in our travel group named Jan, a former school teacher and Guide
for Barbara Marx Hubbard's online Web-based "Gateway" course. Jan turns
out to be the Mother of Teresa Collins, Marshall's Leffert's
Significant Other, and the Co-Director with Marshall of the Santa
Barbara Project, including the online Peace Room, the Gateway Course,
and the new Evolve! website. I've always considered Teresa to be a
remarkable woman, a real modern Goddess, and once asked her how in the
world she got to be so neat. She thought for a moment and then answered
with two words: "My Mom!." So here I was sitting next to her Mom, and
it didn't take long to discover how amazing Jan is.We have a great time talking during our 6-hour flight to Singapore.
We arrive in Singapore after
another smooth flight, where we have an 8-hour layover before the last
leg of our flight to Chennai airport. We quickly checkin to our
reserved rooms at the very nice Singapore Transit Hotel. I share a
triple room with Prapanna and John Robert, both of whom have been to
Auroville several times before, though their involvement has been more
with the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry than with AV itself. It's
great to be able to take a shower and sleep horizontally in the
comfortable air-conditioned room, and I'm surprised how quickly the
alarm rings and it's time to get to our boarding gate. After
checking-in, Makasha and I take a quick run to the airport pharmacy to
buy some spring water and snacks. Then it's onto the plane for the final leg of our flight to
Chennai (formerly Madras), India.
The flight to Chennai is a bit
bumpy as our pilot skirts the turbulence around the incipient monsoon
being born in the Bay of Bengal. I find myself sitting next to Prapanna
and he strongly recommends that I watch the movie "Pirates of the
Caribbean," which he's already seen at a movie theater in California
and liked so much that he's decided to watch it again on the Singapore
Airlines screen. It turns out to be a great movie, with special effects
so smooth that the great sea battle scenes between the pirate ships and
those of the British fleet seem totally real. And Johnny Depp's
performance as the ironic pirate who has lost his ship to his sneaky
first mate is top notch and hilarious. It's a great way to pass the
time as we fly through the night toward India.
When the movie is over, I set
my screen to the automatic tracking system that shows a map at various
scales of our path, with our position continuously updated. I watch
fascinated as the terminator line of the sunrise slowly catches up to
us from behind. I can see that we should begin to see the first light
of dawn just as we arrive over Chennai, and indeed we do. But our plane
dives again into the night as we descend from our cruising altitude of
35,000 feet into the black night of India.
We arrive safely in Chennai
Airport at about 12:45 am. The airport is modern and uncrowded this
late at night. The passport inspections go smoothly, and we emerge into
the main part of the International Arrivals Terminal as part of a
long-line of mostly Indian travelers. We pass down a long line of
relatively well-dressed Indians holding signs for various names and
high-tech firms and hotels, and finally reach the sliding doors leading
out of the terminal. As we walk through the doors, we are first struck
by a wave of heat in sharp contrast to the AC comfort we've been
enveloped in since leaving LA. ...
My next impression, even more
starting, is to find myself staring into a sea of hundreds of
dark-skinned faces, arranged by height as if for a photograph. Each
face has a pair of very white, almost bulging eyes, surrounding dark as
night pupils. They all are perfectly still, staring at each of us as we
come out of the terminal. It's a strange kind of greeting ritual,
they're not as well dressed as the people allowed inside the Terminal
building, but all seem attired in nearly identical long dark pants and
very white long shirts, almost starched-looking. I can hardly believe
their motionless silence, it's as if they've gathered to watch these
alien creatures from another world entirely, emerging from their flying
machines onto their native soil. The impression is one of those that
you feel will stay with you forever, and at that moment I know
viscerally that I have arrived in mysterious Mother India.
Our colorfully painted bus and
driver are waiting for us, along with Prapanna's son Matthew, who has
been educated at the Ashram school and is engaged to be married to an
Indian lady he met there. (Prapanna has invited a few of us to attend
his wedding a few days after our main group leaves on Oct. 31.) Matt
and the driver load our huge amount of baggage onto the roof of the
bus, and we finally pull out of the airport and head for Auroville at
about 2:00 am. It's a three-hour drive through Chennai to Auroville,
through the long, hot silent Indian night. I'm sitting with Jan on the
bus and after a few minutes she asks if I'd mind if we change her
window seat for my aisle seat. I'm happy to do so, but after a few
minutes sitting with my head out the window to catch the cool breeze, I
begin to understand why Jan didn't like it.
When I lived at Damanhur, I
never thought I'd see drivers as crazy as the macho Italian males
careening around the mountain curves while using both hands to
gesticulate their stories. But as I leaned out the window of our bus
honking its way through the sweltering Indian night, I could hardly
believe what I was seeing. We were driving on the left side of the
undivided road, and I was sitting at the window on the right side of
the bus. As I watched with amazement, I could see huge trucks bearing
down on us, taking up the entire road and honking wildly. And our bus
driver was doing the same. It was like a continuous game of chicken,
head-on collisions seemed impossible to avoid, but at the very last
second one or the other of the onrushing vehicles would grudgingly move
aside, and we would zoom past each other with only a few inches to
spare. I quickly realized that I had to anticipate this moment and pull
my head of arm inside the bus to not have it lopped off. It was
impossible to compute how they could possible manage this crazy dance,
it seemed like some kind of supernormal coordination was going on. It was simultaneously weird, wild, really scary, and exhilarating.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Th.16Oct. We finally arrived at
the Verite Community at about 5:00 am. Kathleen, our designated contact
person, turned out to be sick, so we were met by Aurelio, a slight man
from Australia I think, who is involved in the Auroville Village Action
programs. He helped us unload our bags and then showed us to our rooms.
I ended by rooming with Bill Lathrop, a very nice guy who first came to
Auroville in 1968 and was present at the famous Auroville/UNESCO
Founding Ceremony. We sleep for 3 hours, then rendezvous at 8:30 am for
our first breakfast at the Verite dining veranda. We then rent bicycles
and pedal 3 miles or so for our first visit to the Matrimandir.
Auroville has worked out an efficient method for dealing with the
nearly 500,000 people who now visit the Matrimandir each year. Every
person on their first visit must take their place in the very long but
steadily moving line that winds past the sacred Banyan tree located at
the geometric center of Auroville's inner "City" circle, where we are
instructed to leave our sandals and proceed barefoot on the long hot
gravel path. It takes about half an hour to finally reach the huge
gold-plated sphere rising from the upward curving pedals of a giant
lotus flower. We then descend down into the cool underbelly of the
sphere and then begin slowly walking up one side of the double helix
ramp that winds its way to the inner chamber. We are allowed only a
quick glimpse through hand-carved wooden doors of the inner chamber
with its huge crystal sphere that sits at its center, surrounded by
eight pure white pillars reaching upward to the vast white ceiling
vault.
Th.16Oct. ... The very polite
attendants keep the line moving past the door and back down the same
ramp we just came up (the other side of the double helix is still under
contruction), where we now slowly pass the hundreds of people slowly
moving up the ramp. The absolute silence and respect of these crowds of
people from all over India and the world is impressive indeed, even the
small children seem to be under the spell of this vast offering to the
possibility of the Divine Consciousness arising within the Earthly
plane. When we again reach the lower level of the Matrimandir and
proceed up the long red tiled ramp into the bright sun of the
surrounding gardens, I see everything as if through newly opened eyes.
What a wonderous gift is this life and our beautiful planet Earth! ...
Th.16Oct. ... Our visitor cards
are then stamped verifying that we've gone through the ritual of the
first visit to the Matrimandir. Then Prapanna leads us out of the main
Visitor's entrance and down the road a few hundred meters to an
inconspicuous entrance reserved for those who are coming to the
Matrimandir for a second or later visit. We go through another sign-in
process and are issued special time-stamped passes which will allow us
to enter the Matrimandir during the four hours per day reserved times
(6-8 am and 5-7 pm), when it is closed to the general public. By now
it's 5 pm, so we are allowed to pass through the reserved entrance
which has no line at all. After another check of our special passes by
the tall dignified Nepalese Temple guard "Jai Ram" and another log-book
sign-in, we pass again into the Matrimandir and walk quickly up the
spiral ramp. It's almost empty inside, a much different experience from
the long lines of a few hours earlier. We are met at the now closed
massive double wooden door by a volunteer Aurovillan doing Temple duty,
where she gives us each a clean pair of white socks and motions us to
the wooden benches to put them on over our bare feet. She then very
carefully opens one of the double doors and gestures for us to enter
the inner Chamber. ...
Th.16Oct. ... And so we enter
for our first time inter the Sanctum Sanctorum of Auroville, the great
inner chamber envisioned by the Mother so many years ago. There are
only a few people already there. Another volunteer Aurovillan sitting
on the inside of the entry door points us to piles of square white
pillows stacked along the great white curving walls and we each take
one and proceed to choose an open spot to join the other in sitting in
a circle around the glowing 70 cm. diameter transparent crystal sphere.
The Mother has given concise instructions for the appropriate protocols
for "Contemplation" of the sphere ... [more]
Fri. 17Oct. After
breakfast at Verite from 7:30 to 8:30 am, Prapanna herds us onto a bus
for a tour of the Sri Aurobindo [more]
Tues.28Oct. I'm now sitting here
typing out this entry in the AuroNET Internet Cafe, located just to
the left of the Solar Cafe, which I've mentioned above. I was able to
get a personal IP number assigned to me so I can use my own computer
via a direct ethernet connection to the net. So here I am, in "Geek
Heaven," (GH) a sort of reserved section located in a mezzanine up
above the main section of the Cafe. There's even a big fan directly
over me which is keeped the hot air moving so for once I'm not drenched
in my own sweat.
I had breakfast at Verite this morning and then a short morning circle
starting at 8:30am in the Verite meeting hall. I left at 8:55am for my
meeting with my Tamil friend and Peter at 9:00am. We decided to meet in my
room for the sake of privacy. It was an interesting meeting, which I'll
post more about later.
Afterwards, I rode my motor scooter down here to
AuroNET and got here about 11:30pm. The net connection was down so I
busied myself typing entries for this Journal into text edit, which I
started uploading when the net came back up at 12:30.
But first I checked CNN for news about the fires in Southern California
and was amazed to see that they're now totally out of control, raging
firestorms fanned by the dry hot Santa Anna winds, the worst fires in
over 15 years. Over 1500 homes have been destroyed so far, 14 people
killed, mostly in the hills to the East of San Diego and San Bernidino.
But there's also a cluster of fires burning in the Ventura Hills and a
few have just crossed over into northern LA County. Pres. Bush has
declared the whole area a Federal Disaster Area, including LA County,
and 8000 firemen are battling the blazes. Gov. Grey Davis has activated
the California National Guard, and hundreds of additional firetrucks
are racing to the scene from as far away as Arizona and New Mexico.
Sheesh!
I download a recent satellite view of the area and am amazed to see
huge plumes of smoke billowing toward the Pacific Ocean. Much of the
coastline from San Diego to Ventura County is shrouded in smoke and
ash, with the lucky exception of Santa Monica and my home in Marina del Rey, which
seems relatively unscathed so far.
Mirra Roske showed up at about 1:00pm, as agreed, and I treated her to a
quick lunch at the Solar Cafe. We ran into an Aurovillan couple named
Jill Navarre and Swar Weinberger, she from the USA, he from an area of
France bordering Switzerland. Jill says, "Ron, Ron, are you Ron
Anastasia?" It turns out that she's on the Auroville Development Group
and got to know David and Nadia while they were here, who have since
told her via email about my visit to Auroville. They're involved with
David and Nadia in an exchange program that has been sending teenage
Tamil Aurovillans to Arcosanti for the work-study program there. It's
the same program that Ashok was telling me about the other night that
he has friends in. We connect immediately and spend the next hour
sharing story. It ends up with them inviting me for dinner at their
home in the Prarthana Community this coming Friday evening.
After they leave, I rejoin Mirra upstairs in GH, where she's huddled
over a computer with Ashok. We upload a bunch of her really good
digital pics from her camera onto my computer, then she borrows my
motor scooter to replenish her account at Pour Tous. She's just brought
it back and now I'm sitting here typing this. Dhulpsi, the Tamil AVian
who runs AuroNET, tried to increase the security of his system last
night, and now my OSX "Mail" app doesn't work. He plays with it and we
can't get it to access my Verizon.net or Damanhur servers, so he
recommends I use my Apple.Mac Web mail account till tomorrow. So that's
what I'm using now, but it's very slow since every action requires a
reloading of the Web page. Also it's accessed all of the messages
stored on my Verizon server, which number over 500, mostly junk mail.
So it takes me the rest of the afternoon to go through and delete them
while saving the 5% of important personal mail to respond to tomorrow.
The time flies by and I suddenly realize it's after 7pm, so I rush back
to Verite just in time for the last bit of dinner. I talk a bit with
Katherine Roske who asks me how my meetings re the Tamil situation
went, and I explain as best I can without compromising the privacy of
my Tamil informant, who has asked that I not tell anyone his name
because he's fearful of repercussions.
When I return to my room at ~8:30pm, Bill is already asleep, so I
organize my stuff as best I can via my bicycle LED flashlight (Thanks
Kimi!) and then turn in at about 9pm, a new record for early to bed for
me.
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Wed.29Oct. Breakfast and then Global Family Sharing Circle at Verite.
I share my confusion about the New Age good feelings and faith in the
Divine that most of the others often talk about. I talk about the
record-breaking S. California wildfires and point out that "We in this
room are incredibly graced, but our good fortune sits at the peak of a
huge pyramid of suffering humanity, which in our well-meaning attempts
to evolve our consciousness we often also contribute to. I point out
that our jet flight to Auroville and other places plus our car-oriented
lifestyles back in America put our per capita resource consumption and
pollution generation far above the world average and that each of us is
therefore implicated in the vast problem engendered by global warming,
etc.. And how is it that while the karmic consequences of my actions
are at this moment being visited upon Southern California, including my
dear wife Kim having to breath the toxic smoke plumes even in our elite
sanctuary of Marina del Rey, that somehow I'm here on the other side of
the planet sitting in this oasis called Auroville?
And I say that after the first days of idealistic experience of
Auroville, I'm starting to realize that even this remote sanctuary is
in fact deeply embroiled in the problems of the world. I speak about
the rumors I've been hearing about a rising sense of ill-feeling
towards Auroville amongst some of the Tamils who feel that one group of
influential Tamil Aurovillians have been biased toward admitting Tamils from
their own village/family clans into Newcomer status, to the detriment
of the other villagers. Whispers of "corruption," cronyism,
discrimination and a bias toward financially well-off Villagers. And
that these feelings may be indirectly related to the murder 4 weeks ago
by a gang of Tamil young toughs of a much-respected Tamil AVian engaged
in the one of AV's many Village outreach projects. Which I had heard
about early from his close friend Ashok, the Tamil young man, friend of
the Roske's, who led me a few nights ago out of the jungle to the Roma's Kitchen
Restaurant.
Then I share that I feel like I'm having in some ways a repeat of the
life-changing sense I had back in 1963 during my first visit to India
when I looked in the eyes of a starving beggar on the streets of Bombay
and realized "There but for the Grace of God go I," and first felt the
sense of a duty to do something about it. And that I am feeling the
same sense of duty now here in Auroville to do something about this
difficult situation with the Tamil Villages (which brings smiles and
muted laughter from some members of the circle as if the idea of us
naive outsiders being able to do something about such a complex problem
is perhaps a little absurd). I share that I have brought together one
of the Tamil villagers, who was educated in the AV school system but
still is involved with his village, with a member of the AV Council.
And the Council member said that he had also heard of these rumors and
guessed that many of them were true, but that he had no idea what to do
about it.
I end by saying that my perhaps superficial reading of Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother is that they say that individual work on oneself, even
individual enlightenment, makes no difference at all unless any wisdom
gained is brought out into the material world to contribute in
practical hands-on ways to the divinization and evolution of matter
itself.
After my sharing, several other members of the Circle share that they
also have felt this sense of obligation to do something, to "Save the
World," but they now realize that the only thing to do is to surrender
to the Divine in each moment, continue to work on themselves, and let
go of any sense of obligation re the larger world. One person also
repeats the usual New Age mantra about we create the Reality that we
focus our attention on, so it's a mistake to focus much attention on
the problems of the world, since that simply gives them added power,
etc.
After the Circle is over, I set up my Mac in the zafu closet and show a
few of the people the satellite photos of the huge fires and smoke
plumes burning over Southern California. I think some of them are a bit
impacted by what they see.
After the Circle disperses, I scooter down to the Solar Cafe and
AuroNET for another day of connecting with the world. I realize that I
have an aversion to burying myself in any inward-looking domain, no
matter how lovely. My dharma seems to continue to do my best to
integrate all these worlds, searching always for evidence of the divine
pattern that connects.
