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The architect has certainly not considered the vast implications of his action when
he has brought in office bearers of the Auroville Foundation to act and interfere
with what should have been kept as an internal Auroville Process. He has
fundamentally altered the ‘rules’ of the process! Since the last year, much has
accelerated; he and his friends have attempted repeatedly to make the Auroville
Foundation ‘take action’ – of course in his favour! The Auroville Foundation cannot
be a tool of some Aurovilians, however sympathetic it might appear at present. It
remains always answerable to the Parliament of India. The simple truth is: if today
there are persons ‘sympathetic’ to a particular perspective, tomorrow the opposite
could be true. A door has been opened that could have unforeseen consequences
for the Auroville Experiment. There is much in Auroville which could suffer ill a
deeper scrutiny. Once interference begins it will automatically encompass wider
areas – why has no one thought of this?
What are the underlying factors that have permitted all this to come about?
1. A vision of the soul of the ‘City at the Service of Truth’.
It seems to me that the most important issue at stake is the vision of the city as
Mother conceived it. The city has been gifted a soul to hold in trusteeship for all
aspiring humanity. Mother’s vision placed the Matrimandir at Auroville’s centre as a
living and vibrant spiritual symbol, a central and cohesive force with the power to
radiate its dynamic peace to all of Auroville and beyond. She never spoke of a mere
city centre; She speaks of a spiritual symbol, powerful, active and creative. She had
its vision and She described it at length and in a manner that She elaborated for
little else in Auroville. It would seem that while the humans were given much
freedom to experiment with the city, the spiritual centre was to be Her Vision. And
this is as it should be for only She has the Consciousness to give this Centre its
universal dimension. She spoke of it as a double symbol: the Divine’s response to
mankind’s (not merely the Aurovilians’!) aspiration for perfection; and also the
expression of Auroville’s aspiration for the Divine. But it is also in itself ‘
the symbol
of the Universal Mother according to Sri Aurobindo’s teaching’
. It is in this message
that Mother definitively makes every single element of the Peace Area essential to
Matrimandir’s total truth. It creates the mandala of which one of the crucial
presences is the structure that houses the Inner Room. But this sanctum, housed in
the Matrimandir structure, in no way downgrades the other elements. On the
contrary Mother Herself states that ‘the gardens are as important as the
Matrimandir itself’. In unmistakable terms, She speaks of Her repeated visions from
childhood as She describes the living, pulsating and sublimely beautiful
environment She wants around the Matrimandir structure. It will be a golden jewel
arising from and housed in a fairytale bower of Nature.
This vision is now sought to be proven ‘outdated’ by some chronological sleight of
hand. Why would anyone want to deprive Auroville of something so unique and
precious? Something that will turn its central point into a thing of immense beauty
and harmony, capturing the most sublime elements of Mother Nature’s genius:
flowers, shrubs, rocks, ponds, lake, trees, groves filled with birds. If the Centre
looses some of its essentials not much can remain of the truth of the city and its
Green Belt. (Already we observe Auroville’s physical body beginning to experience
all sorts of ‘threats’). So what exactly is happening? Why are persons who should
be familiar with all of Mother’s marvellous work in the domains of material nature