Greetings from Auroville to all men of good will.
Are invited to Auroville all those who
thirst for progress and aspire to a higher and truer life.

Auroville

Auroville is a place in south India where, for more than thirty years, an increasing number of people from all over the world have been quietly and painstakingly working on the construction of a new township, a new way of living, a new way of being. Something is being attempted here for the benefit of all.

"Man is a transitional being, he is not final. Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature," observes Sri Aurobindo. "There is something that he is not yet which he has to be; he is reaching always towards the something yet unrealised; his whole life and nature is a preparation, an endeavour of Nature towards what is beyond him."

Auroville is to be a major vehicle of this evolutionary thrust and, eventually, a platform for transformation.

Getting established

This wide and vast objective of the township has attracted people from its inauguration in 1968 onwards. Today, the Auroville project is quite well established, having found ways of collaborating with the villages in its bioregion, with the Indian authorities, with many non-governmental organisations and world bodies worldwide.

But the real experiment is hardly beginning..

Holding the vision

The present 1,600 residents from some 30 nations living in Auroville are aware that they may not yet be able to live up to the project's high aims. While holding the vision in their heads, hearts and meditations, they turn for the time being their energies to those aspects of the experiment upon which they can actively work.

Challenges

These aspects are all the challenges of daily life which are being faced by so many individuals on earth who attempt to do things in a new way, to approach life in a more conscious manner.

In Auroville particularly, there are the enormous challenges of how to

• shape, plan and build a city for an ideal society of the future

• let the indigenous population of Auroville's bioregion co-evolve along with it

• educate our young in a way that their deeper identity is allowed to remain at the forefront

• organise a collective life without authoritarian structures

• manifest beauty in all facets of living

• consciously, wisely and justly manage the wide variety of resources available

• heal, and to evoke healing energies

• relate to the earth in a truly appropriate manner

• artistically express newly found realities within

The main challenge

Underlying all this is the main challenge of living an actual human unity. 

By their very choice of being here, the Aurovilians commit themselves to be instrumental in the creation of "a universal township where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities". They are aware that "the purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity" so that, eventually, our species may progress.

On this website we attempt to show you how we're doing. Different people have written the various introductions from different angles, different perspectives and different modes of understanding. Taken as a whole, these pages form a colourful quilt, a moment-in-time expression of Auroville's experiment in creating human unity through enormous diversity.

WELCOME TO AUROVILLE, and happy exploring!

The web team