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The majority of these foreigners come here for one thing only - the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo.
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An ashram, strictly speaking, is a gathering of disciples with their guru,
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but this Ashram has a 20th-century style that sets it apart.
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I came every morning to participate in a popular ashram activity - gossiping
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outside the ashram post office and wondering how one became a seeker of the divine harmony.
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The aim of the Ashram, as I understood it, can be simply stated as the harmony of the physical being
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with the inner spirit in divine unity. Every day people come to the courtyard of the main Ashram
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building there to meditate before the tomb of Sri Aurobindo, but today, April the 24th is a
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special occasion - at 11 o'clock sharp there is to be a mass meditation for all devotees.
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Born in 1872, he was educated in England. When he went back to India, as a young man,
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he joined the nationalist movement and soon found himself in trouble with the British.
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In 1910 Sri Aurobindo fled from British India to Pondicherry
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where the French gave him political asylum.
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The Ashram bears witness to his attempts to bring about a synthesis between the East and the West.
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There are now thousands of followers, though Sri Aurobindo once said:
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"I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples, it will be enough if I can
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get a hundred complete men, empty of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God."
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Who, I wondered, are these instruments of God today at the Ashram?
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Perhaps one of the practical men, like Mr Pinto. Trained as an aeronautical engineer,
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he came to the Ashram in the thirties. Sri Aurobindo called him Udar, meaning generous.
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I talked to him in the courtyard of one of the Ashram Guest Houses.
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Udar has helped build up many of the ashram's successful commercial enterprises.
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These shops, factories and restaurants may surprise the visitor to the Ashram,
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who may have been expecting the eastern tradition of poverty and austerity.
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Tell me would you say that this particular ashram is an exceptionally westernized
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institution? Not westernized but it is the first time that an attempt has been made to synthesize
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the progress of the West the material progress of the West with the spiritual aspiration of India.
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And Sri Aurobindo has tried to synthesize the two because both are necessary for the growth of
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the individual. Surprising enough it has also attracted a number of technical people like
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engineers and doctors because the yoga of Sri Aurobindo is something which really appeals to the scientific
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mind. And here I find something very concrete and something that the really spiritual
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life can be put in a form that is practical and can show some practical approach,
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not just sitting around meditating the whole day. But you can do some active constructive work
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and at the same time progress. The feeling for this progressive spirit is shared by Mr Malik,
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one time - an executive with Unilever. What had really attracted me to this place was that Sri
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Aurobindo attached more importance to changing and transforming life rather than abandoning it. To me
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what had always taken me away from the old yoga was their pleading for running away from life.
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Now here Sri Aurobindo offered the answer to that and he said no, you don't withdraw,
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you don't run away, - you live here, face the problems,
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and bring that Supramental force down into yourself to change your physical nature.
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When Aurobindo died in 1950, his place was taken by a French lady known as the Mother who is
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regarded by many as being the incarnation of the Divine. Her appearances four times a year draw
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large crowds and today's special occasion is the 50th anniversary of Her arrival in Pondicherry.
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Now 93 years old She still dominates the ashram with her powerful personality.
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93, some people believe She will never die
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And She's really Divine, I have no doubt. I didn't believe it, the first time, She was
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a funny old lady for me, but She's really Divine, and if you see her you can't avoid feeling it, and
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I mean the Divine is beautiful.
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And I think without Her understanding and forbearance very few of us would be able to
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go on for long. And She constantly bucks us up also because this yoga is a very difficult job,
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it is like swimming upstream, and without her help, it would be almost impossible. I think
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that everything that we have to do here is for the sake of the Divine and for the sake of the Mother.
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She was born in Paris in 1878. When She arrived in Pondicherry in 1920,
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She was already a follower of Sri Aurobindo. As a little girl,
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spiritual and psychic experiences had revealed to Her the existence of God.
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In 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into solitude, the ashram first came under her guidance.
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Nowhere is the Mother more revered than at Auroville.
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Auroville, one of Mother's favourite projects, is now being built on the outskirts of Pondicherry.
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It is to be a city where the inhabitants can lead a life of harmony, a kind of spiritual utopia.
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But I wondered is it because utopia is a western concept
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that there are so few Indians at Auroville. The Auroville pioneers are mainly westerners.
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Most of the Indians around here are the local Tamil villagers,
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who are more concerned with land values than the spiritual preoccupations of exotic westerners.
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Naturally, the people who are applying to stay in Auroville or to work for Auroville
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are of different temperaments and represent a large variety of consciousness. Something clearly
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in Auroville [offers] an opportunity to perfect their special vocation; some are applying because
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they see in Auroville an opportunity to work for human unity, working out a new way of life;
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some are applying because Auroville answers to their spirit of adventure
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spirit of finding something new a field of expressing something new. Moreover, Auroville is
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the next step after the Ashram for trying to put into practice the teachings of Sri Aurobindo.
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That's quite a link in the spirit.
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I came in contact with this spirit in a bookshop. I saw a picture of Sri Aurobindo
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and this was enough, then we decided to come in contact with this spirit. And this contact was very good and then we left Germany and now we are here.
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I'm working in the small hospital we have for the villages and we dispense free medicine and
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distribute milk to the children, and wheat. After they come here, their vision becomes more clear,
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more integrated, and they know what exactly has to be done and how it has to be done.
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We are working on an art project. We want to work for
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for the formula of a world culture.
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We are going to expand this start, this first community by building much more huts , so that
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this can grow up to 100-200 persons very fast, and we are going to build a number of workshops
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of handicraft centre to work in connection with the Tamil village which is just behind this setup.
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Sri Aurobindo said that work was the best prayer that the body could offer. When one does
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work in a country where one has to depend upon money for one's living and has to sort
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of fight to keep oneself going, one tends to work merely as a means of
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surviving and so, therefore, it becomes not a pleasure but an obligation.
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And because work is not an obligation here but a pleasure, there are no wages.
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All are welcome to come and put their hand to the plough provided they bring enough money with them
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to keep themselves for a year after which period the Ashram will ensure a subsistence level.
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But from what I gathered, most people seem to have some little nest egg to fall back on, - savings,
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pensions, private incomes, money from parents at home.
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Gerard from Switzerland has been here for 18 years. He manages the orchard which supplies
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the Ashram and Auroville kitchens and sells the surplus. They have made the place productive
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despite the shortage of water. No, there is plenty of water here
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but there is no money to develop the water resources. There's an average annual rainfall
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here of 49 inches, most of which flows into the sea unused. The project I'm working on now is
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to build 22 percolation dams to conserve the now wasted monsoon rainwater. And
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this project should cost about 66 thousand dollars. Somebody in the United states sent
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us three thousand dollars to build one damn, and one dam has just been completed.
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Janet Fern came to Auroville from Saint John's, Newfoundland.
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I wondered what her friends and relatives would think, seeing Janet in the trim little
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house she's built for herself, tending her garden, raising money for her water conservation projects.
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She's the first Canadian woman to settle in Auroville. It's a far cry from the Maritimes.
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Well, Auroville may have been home to Janet, but it wasn't to Jacques and Maria Buma.
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I found them ready to quit after about four months there.
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When they'd heard about Auroville in Holland, it had seemed then the realization of all their
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ideals. They sold everything and sailed to India, and rapidly disillusioned.
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When we woked the first morning at five o'clock and we found ourselves in the
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middle of this village with its noises, children crying, women shouting and so on,
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which we had not expected at all. And then all of a sudden it struck you this is going to be your
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life for the next of your time, which was rather hard. That was the first thing, and then all these
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small things - they amounted to really a mountain of deception, so to say, so I won't discourage
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anybody to come and try but they should be prepared for some hard
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moments especially in the beginning. They returned to cool, clean, predictable, quiet Holland.
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Some people at the Ashram were a little nervous about my talking to Freddie Bushnell.
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He is a devotee, but I wonder if he could be considered typical of the Ashram,
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with his well-to-do proper Bostonian background and his lush little island,
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presented to him by the Mother. On this island, developed and beautified by his own hand,
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Freddie displays his enthusiasm for ancient Greece. As you can see,
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this is Athena, but this is not a return of paganism. This is symbolic of something,
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when asked, inner aspiration, otherwise, how could I keep the balance for me personally.
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There we are. There are lights. Here it's like a greek icon. It's symbolic
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as a stepping stone to the
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near future. Mind you this is symbolic, this is not a cult or a religion or trying to bring
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back pagan gods, but is for beauty. Until three years ago during the terrible flood, gentlemen, there was no land here whatsoever.
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All the land was taken away from my island and was thrown over like this, the whole island was undulated.
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That's a damn good shot, really, that's a damn good shot.
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Eventually, I'm gonna build a tower here.
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My French Canadian friends told me, they said you can't build on this structure.
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I will either have to build here or build it up like a fire tower. I want to go way up, 60 feet.
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As a result of the fact that we, of not only the study and practice of yoga but of
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an intense examination of Jung, I mean I have been fascinated by his development of the two
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attitudes - the introverted attitude towards life and the extroverted attitude. For example,
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I'm an extrovert, and I have had tremendous difficulties in India, because the yogi has been
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identified with introversion. And after years of trying to make force myself to being an introvert,
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I realized that there could be a realization in the extroverted sense - organizationally,
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administratively, scientifically. Austin Delaney from Vancouver, once a paratroop officer,
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a union organizer, an advertising man, a character in a novel. And in my encounter
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with McCoon's work, I came to realize that he was, even if he doesn't know it himself,
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in the extroverted sense, in seeing what the media are, in seeing their application in terms
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of a transformation of man's consciousness, of an extension of his consciousness, in terms of the
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whole of the machineries of joy, if you like, as he might well call them, as Bradbury calls them,
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that we do have man there who has realized the truth of the universe as it marches towards him,
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whereas the traditional Indian yogi sees the truth of the microcosm as it rises within him.
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Now when we have an extroverted yogi and an introverted yogi
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combined in one person then we have the integral man then we have the new man.
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But the conditions for a collective transformation at the level of depth, a soul transformation,
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exists where the wholly new, as it were, a central nervous system
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of the mass media are being developed so there is an instantaneous communication as it were
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of information and accumulation of the requirements for a new collective consciousness.
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And in the smaller countries perhaps Switzerland and Canada I feel that we may see the development
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of an entirely new way of living. I speak now not necessarily politically but in a way [how] we view
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life and look at life, the way we, if you like, love each other and learn to love ourselves.
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I actually returned to Canada in 67 to explore, to see my family after
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20 years absence, and I moved throughout the whole country from Montreal right through to Vancouver
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in a constant state of exhilaration and inspiration. I intuited, against the evidence
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indeed of most of my liberal and socialist and critical friends, who themselves were in despair
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about the North American way of life, I intuited a movement deep in the psyche, if you like,
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of Canada, in the collective consciousness of the northern part of North America indeed,
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which promises that that will be the centre, the nest and the matrix
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of the spiritual revolution which has here been announced by Sri Aurobindo and the great yogis.
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It is this that I saw from expo right through and particularly I might say
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an expo which seemed to me in terms of this yoga to be a descent of the divine right into Montreal.
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I was enchanted by it, I loved it, it was a spiritual experience after 20 years being away.
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Austin's visionary eloquence is very inspiring, it makes us forget
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the unchanging mud huts of the nearby Tamil villagers, who've seen empires come and go.
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They remain largely unimpressed by the flurry of activity on the site of Auroville.
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But beyond the modest beginning lies the grand design.
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The chief architect and one of the main promoters of Auroville
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is Roger Anger, a Parisian related to the Mother by marriage.
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Commuting between Paris and Pondicherry, he's supervising the first tentative steps.
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A city of 50 000 inhabitants of all races, Auroville will be the ultimate expression
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of urban technology. Doomed to fail, I thought, like all utopian experiments. But no, I was told,
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the aspirations of Auroville are not utopian, - they are not social-political or materialistic,
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they are spiritual. Each citizen will be motivated by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
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It's amazing what happens when that sun goes down, you know. I'm sorry you didn't catch a
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real sunset, though. No, no, the sun is under the clouds. It's going to come down name this place as
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peace, and to absorb the peace the Mother said if you could be silent you can feel the peace.
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The American ambassador to UNESCO. Before all these things, when I used to come here,
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I think I've told you about it, that two spirits used to appear every night at 12 o'clock riding
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on the horse and carrying on the battle. The clash of the swords at night. This would appear to you. Yes,
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so I informed the Mother. After the Mother was informed, the battle has ceased. There is a steady
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trickle of VIPs as efforts are made to interest world organizations in the Auroville project.
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The ambassador's visit was associated with hopes
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that a world university might be built at Auroville.
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The world game is already a reality in Austin Delaney's complex of tree forts on the seashore.
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