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Contemplation
Vérité, 30 September 2001
 The following text is from a personal letter
by Aurovilian Bhavana Dee who is coordinating the Village Action groups
and activities in Auroville´s bioregion since years.
The letter was sent to a circle of friends and supporters, and its
scope and vision may be interesting to our readers as well.
Hello!
When I wrote the last time I was off to a
meditation retreat, a time out of time, as one might call it,
containing many reflections on time itself. Before getting to the
Vipassana centre, I stopped at Hampi, a site in central India where
the river Tughambadra flows and beside it lie the ruins of the capital
city of the great Vijaynagar empire.
Hampi
 The
bouldery landscape consisted of mountains of enormous stones - said to
be the oldest stone in the world, where the Earth had first pushed up
its head out of the primeval sea. So amazing to contemplate their
tenaciousness - how long those whirling atoms and electrons have been
holding together, with the conviction of being stone. Looking down on
the wrinkly flesh of my arm, I knew those atoms and molecules would be
fickly off to new adventures, new bodies, long before the boulder on
which I lay and the one leaning against it which gave me shade, would
part. On the hilltops and in the riverbeds stones lay perched atop
others in positions which seemed to defy gravity - like pebbles left
behind by playing giant children - how did they get there? Later
scrambling along the piles of huge stones through which the river
flows, I saw the process happening beneath my feet. I noticed how the
stone was fissured, how a huge boulder, just like a smaller stone when
you hit it with a sledge hammer, cracks into many pieces with the
outside pieces falling away, leaving one or more pieces which balance.
Slow explosion..
And then the perception began to dawn on me
that as we walked and talked along the river flowing over and around
the rocks, swirling and carving the stone like modern sculptures, and
then suddenly rushing giddily into a craggy pile and disappearing not
to appear again for half a kilometer - how different time is for that
fluid element than for the stone - that incessant flowing of the water….
I realized that the stones are also flowing - these precariously
balanced rocks are also in motion, but very very slow. We walked and
talked within a slow explosion - or landslide. The impression of
parallel worlds was so strong….
Parallel worlds
Life in Auroville is also an example of
parallel worlds, but we take them for granted also. AVAG and its work
in the villages sometimes seem completely outside the life of
Auroville. My life in the community Vérité,
with its emphasis on meditation and study of Integral Yoga, becomes
more and more encompassing. The village loudspeakers intrude their
reminder of chaos and clamor, we zone out the intrusion and allow it
to be background. Luxurious houses are built in Auroville, and new
public buildings; gardens are watered, and trees grow greenly, the
Visiting Committee of eminent educationists come from Delhi and are
delighted to find what progress we are making in our research on
progressive education, child-centered, innovative, creative. We live
in the beauty and calm we have co-created with Nature, troubled by our
quarrels and falls from grace.., while at our side, the villages lie
in what is now a progressive squalor.
Progressive squalor
 The days of grinding poverty are now over,
for the nearby villages at least.. TV antennas sprout from roof tops -
and many a roof is now of reinforced concrete, not palm thatch - with
details of the domestic architecture obviously coming from Auroville.
We can see a granite lintel here, a sloping buttress with inset
concrete ring there, the occasional ferrocement roof channels. The
main streets sport shop after shop that cater to the daily needs of
not only villagers but also Aurovilians and the many guests and
visitors. By now, most all villagers look well dressed, well fed, --
if one takes a surface glance. We can take a moment to rejoice in the
progress.
But behind the façade of relative
prosperity, swarm the bevy of problems which face the poor everywhere
- the perennial scarcity of money to fund the newly rising lifestyle,
the dysfunctional and quarreling family life, with drunken husbands
and fathers introducing violence and abuse, the oppressed women and
children, the politics of force and brutality, the shallow show of
prestige and reputation and maimed traditions, the predominance of
superstition and blind belief, stubbornness and fixed ideas.
Daily challenge of real human unity..
Auroville and Aurovilians lead their lives,
looking hopefully toward a new world, a new species, a new
consciousness, or looking to the daily dozen of family and work duties
and challenges, or looking back at the world they've left behind in
cities of this or another continent. They meet the villagers at work,
where they come as the reliable accountants, managers, cooks and
housemaids; as the not-so-reliable tradesmen, 'workers', carpenters,
electricians, contractors; as children collecting money for their
cricket clubs; as friendly shopkeepers, and as thieves in the night
breaking in and running off with tape recorders and laptops.
Aurovilians are committed in their Charter to Human Unity, and they
find the task of working together, organizing themselves in so many
committees and working groups challenging enough -- with the multitude
of languages, the range of types and temperaments and social
backgrounds - they rarely look at the challenge to Human Unity
presented each morning with the arrival of their 'worker'. What is
Human Unity in the face of his or her problem that it rained last
night and the roof is leaking - not only did they get no sleep but now
his/her child is sick… And if the Aurovilian is running a workshop,
it's not just one 'worker', it can be hundreds..
Co-planning Auroville´s future
Auroville Village Action Group is about
being a collective response to the issue of Auroville´s commitment to
Human Unity. As a branch of Auroville, it looks at these problems from
a broad view. It works in a methodical and thorough way to extend a
sympathetic regard from Auroville to the villagers, not with charity,
but with help to help themselves. Especially now, since the Auroville
Master Plan has officially included the nearby villages in the
plan for Auroville´s overall development, it is particularly crucial
that the AVAG programs -which get women, youth, leaders and parents
together in clubs and groups, so they learn to organize themselves and
plan and act for their village development- are preparing them for
participating constructively and intelligently in the master planning
of the future, around Auroville and in the bioregion.
Contact: bhavana auroville.org.in
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