

719
*2-4-1987, Auroville:
This evening, after a dinner alone at the Kitchen, I decided to walk over to the
“Field” and visit with F and L; I found them quietly settled, with a good atmosphere.
They are in the phase of enjoying their re-discovery of Auroville, and the
comfortable distance their years of America have created in them towards all issues
in Auroville… About “Ravena”, and about D.M and Janaka, I gathered, almost
implicitly, that the impressions most people share are quite negative, heavy,
burdened; that they don’t even want to see the place for themselves; it is a kind of
superstitious rejection, very ignorant, but very persistent…
… I guess I could be said to have a “tormented nature”! And I didn’t know that!
Of everything that I have experienced so far, and all the perceptions that have
accumulated, how much of it is pure – un-slanted -, objective in the sense of not
being influenced by my own limitations and the positions taken by my ego at any
given time? And what do I truly understand, adhere to, of Your Work?
Formations regarding Your Work keep coming, almost all tending to present it as an
interference in the “course of things”, and they are legitimised by the gap that
yawns between what people who define themselves as Yours do practice and
spontaneously, “naturally” express and the very nature of the Truth You have
incarnated…!
… The matter of “Ravena” worries me no end; I wish I would know what to do and
be able to hold the right position towards it; I wish I’d be given the means to bring
it to its harmony and offer it, ready and clear. But the way it is now, I find myself
antagonised from all sides, bumping into a mesh of incomprehension or, worse,
aggressiveness, jealousy and obscure superstition; somehow people resent the
whole thing, and resent D.M; they are hard, because – I suppose – they feel
threatened in their little worlds…
… This seems to be another crisis… There’s no breakthrough anywhere.
There is only either hardness or a slippery ground sloping back to an absurd
forgetfulness.
Self-consciousness must go, must go.
But it sticks…
It is the will for transformation that brings up all the resistances, the obstacles and
the contradictions.
Death sits at the centre of life, pointing the way back to salvation, away from this
manifest world of Matter…
One cannot strive past it, down here, past its swallowing mouths and its tentacles,
without Your Help and Force and Will and Drive. And I can’t open myself to it.
There’s interference.
I feel intensely that need to reach timelessness in the physical consciousness itself.
I see that, without it, all the proportions, perspectives as all the attitudes and
strivings, are falsified.
And yet, to reach that, one would have to be sufficiently transformed already, at
the other levels, so that the experiences arising from the constant interchanges can
no longer affect or bear on one’s physical condition…
… I have fixed myself some dinner here and I am sitting outside under the Service
tree; I hear Krishna playing his loud, disharmonious music, on and on; he is
entrenched, barricaded in his own enclosures, making the few young people who
follow him turn into fixed, blank, hard masks, shunning everyone else with this
bottomless hatred that is only the other side of his devouring need for love…
And I too am entrenched, and the victim of my own affirmations and self-
consciousness; but crying within, and seeking, searching for a state that will trigger
a full, unconditional “yes”, a flowing wholeness…