1287 / 1424
1287
*”What is it that the Soul of Auroville wants?” Open letter from Walter W,
3-4-2002:
“Auroville started with the Mother’s vision of the central point as a park, in which
She saw the ‘Pavilion of Love’, which later changed to the ‘Pavilion of the Mother’,
the true Mother, the principle of the Mother. She describes this park, which She had
seen repeatedly since She was a little girl, as ‘… perhaps the most beautiful thing in
the world with regard to physical, material Nature…’, ‘… in Japanese style…”, ‘… all
around, there is a circular road that separates the park from the rest of the city…’,
‘… also there must be a silent zone…’, ‘… there should be no noise of any kind…’, ‘…
the Park of Unity must be surrounded by a kind of isolating zone so that it is
solitary and silent…’, ‘… I should like the whole area to be called Peace…’, ‘… the
gardens are as important as the Matrimandir itself…’.
This concept of a lake followed by a park surrounding the Matrimandir Oval has
been the basis of all the work since 1973 in the Matrimandir “Peace Area”. Until in
1999 the architect of Auroville accepted as the new city centre the vision of a
German water engineer and an Austrian landscape architect, to build a huge lake
around the Matrimandir Oval. Thus he eliminated the whole park area with its app.
300 consciously planted trees, the isolating zone, which works as a protection of
the Matrimandir and its Oval and as the indispensable background for the 12 Inner
Gardens. Since the 21
st
February 2002 we can see and feel what the architect’s city
concept of interaction between the city and the soul means, since he cut trees in
the Matrimandir Park area overnight and destroyed forcefully the protective
environment, ignoring former agreements with the people working at Matrimandir,
in order to allow the full view of Matrimandir from the “Town Hall Annex”.
The Soul of Auroville, the Matrimandir, is used by the body, by the city, in the
architect’s concept and all the “modern urban concepts” that come with it, which he
imposes on the Soul and the Peace Area. Nobody asks the Soul what it needs. A
few try to find that out from what is recorded from the Mother. The desire-soul
grabs and wants from the Soul, what it is not willing to develop itself, exposing the
Soul totally by robbing from it its natural protection. In the yoga of the Mother and
Sri Aurobindo the order of things is exactly opposite: development goes from inside
out, while the Soul remains in its eternal silence space.
- A personal observation
In Mother’s conversation on 23 June 1965 with Satprem we find a very interesting
remark. She says “Then, we took up the idea of Auroville again (I was the one who
called it ‘Auroville’), but from the other end: instead of the formation having to find
the place, it was the place (near the Lake) that caused the formation to be born…”
The place caused the formation to be born.
In the beginning of the year 2000 the architect followed his often repeated words
that he as an architect is not able to design the Matrimandir Gardens. He invited
Paolo, with whom the Mother had wanted to build the centre, to take up the design
of the Matrimandir Gardens with the MMCG. Shortly after that day I observed that
the very soil around Matrimandir – Matter – which we had moved, shaped and
worked upon for years, rejected the architect’s concept of the tiny gardens stopping
at the oval road; it threw it off, its imprint was erased from the ground.