Auroville
Auroville is a universal township in the making for a population of up to 50,000 people from around the world.The concept of Auroville - an ideal township devoted to an experiment in human unity - came to the Mother as early as the 1930s. In the mid 1960s the Sri Aurobindo Society in Pondicherry proposed to Her that such a township should be started. She gave her blessings. The concept was then put before the Govt. of India, who gave their backing and took it to the General Assembly of UNESCO. In 1966 UNESCO passed a unanimous resolution commending it as a project of importance to the future of humanity, thereby giving their full encouragement.
The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity - in diversity. Today Auroville is recognized as the first and only internationally endorsed ongoing experiment in human unity and transformation of consciousness, also concerned with - and practically researching into - sustainable living and the future cultural, environmental, social and spiritual needs of mankind.
On 28th February 1968 some 5,000 people assembled near the banyan tree at the centre of the future township for an inauguration ceremony attended by representatives of 124 nations, including all the States of India.
The representatives brought with them some soil from their homeland, to be mixed in a white marble- clad, lotus-shaped urn, now sited at the focal point of the Amphitheatre. At the same time the Mother gave Auroville its 4-point Charter.
Auroville is located in south India, mostly in the State of Tamil Nadu (some parts are in the State of Pondicherry), a few kilometres inland from the Coromandel Coast, approx 160 kms south of Chennai (previously Madras) and 10 kms north of the town of Pondicherry.
Sri Aurobindo
Born in Calcutta on 15th August 1872, Sri Aurobindo was sent to England for his studies. He attended St. Paul’s School, London, and then went on a senior classical scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. His favorite subjects were English, French, literature, poetry and European history. He was a brilliant scholar in Greek and Latin. He had learnt French, German, Italian and Spanish to study Goethe, Dante and Calderon in their original tongues. In King’s College he stood first in the classical tripos. In 1890 he also passed the final examination for the Indian civil service.
Sri Aurobindo returned to India in 1893. He spent 13 years in Baroda as an administrator and professor; during this period he made a profound study of Indian culture and the prevailing political conditions of the country. He learnt Sanskrit, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi and later on Tamil.
Sri Aurobindo joined India’s freedom movement in 1906 in Bengal. He published the Vande Mataram daily newspaper. In 1908 he was arrested in Alipore for conspiracy, implicated in the activities of a revolutionary group led by his brother Barindra. During his one year in the Alipore jail, he turned to meditation which changed the course of his life.
In 1910, in response to an inner call, he retired from politics and went to Pondicherry for exclusive concentration on his spiritual practice. In 1914, after four years of intense Yoga, he launched a monthly philosophical review, the Arya, in which most of his major works, such as the The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine, were serialized. These works embodied all of the inner knowledge that had come to him in his practice of Yoga. Having verified all the essential truths of past spiritual experience, he worked for an integral method of Yoga that would transform human nature and divinize life. To this purpose he devoted the rest of his life.
Sri Aurobindo was also a yogic poet: his first published volume was a collection of poetry; his last work was an epic poem, Savitri. On 5th December 1950 Sri Aurobindo left his physical body.
The Mother
The Mother was Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator. She was born as Mira Alfassa on 21st February 1878 in Paris. Spiritually conscious from childhood, she became a talented musician and artist.
About her early spiritual life the Mother has written, “Between eleven and thirteen, a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man’s possibility of uniting with him integrally in a life divine.”
The Mother went to Algeria in 1906 and 1907 to study occultism. In Paris she founded a group of spiritual seekers and gave many talks. In 1914 she came to Pondicherry, India, and met Sri Aurobindo on 29th March. She recognized him as the spiritual guide who for many years inwardly guided her. She remained in Pondicherry for eleven months, helping Sri Aurobindo to publish the Arya, and then returned to France. She went to Japan for four years.
On 24th April 1920 the Mother returned to Pondicherry to collaborate with Sri Aurobindo in his spiritual work. After her arrival, the number of disciples around Sri Aurobindo gradually increased, and so the Sri Aurobindo Ashram eventually took shape. In November 1926, the Mother took material and spiritual charge of the Ashram. In 1943 The Mother started a small school, which has become the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. In 1968, on February 28th, the Mother founded ‘the city of dawn’ named Auroville, an inter-cultural city in the making, situated in a rural area 14 km away from Pondicherry. The aim of Auroville is to realize Sri Aurobindo’s vision of Human Unity. The Mother left her physical body on 17th November 1973.
How to read Sri Aurobindo
“The best thing would be to obtain perfect silence – and achieve a state of immobility of the brain, I might say, so that the attention become as still and immobile a mirror, like the surface of absolute still water. Then what one has read passes through the surface and penetrates deep into the being, where it is received with a minimum of distortion. Afterwards, sometimes long afterwards, it wells up again from the depths and manifests in the brain with its full power of comprehension, not as knowledge acquired from outside, but as a light one carries within.” - (The Mother)
