Auroville

Inauguration, 1968

On February 28, 1968, 5,000 people gathered for Auroville's inaugural ceremony on an eroded plateau [Page 76]next to a solitary banyan tree. The government of India classified this site, on the east coast of Tamil Nadu State and just north of the city of Pondicherry, as a backward area on its way to becoming a desert. M. S. Adiseshiah, at that time deputy director-general of UNESCO, was present and expressed his hope that Auroville would succeed where UNESCO had failed in bringing unity to humankind. Youth representatives ceremoniously poured handfuls of earth brought from 127 countries and all the states of India into a lotus-shaped urn. Sealed in the lotus urn with the earth is the original parchment copy of the Auroville Charter (Sullivan 1994, p. 53):

• 1.
  Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
• 2.
  Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
• 3.
  Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realizations.
• 4.
  Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo

The author of the Auroville Charter and founder of Auroville was Mirra Alfassa (1876–1973), who was known simply as the Mother. Born in France, she had settled permanently in India in 1920 to work with Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), a revolutionary architect of India's Freedom Movement. In 1910, Sri Aurobindo left politics to develop an all-inclusive system for the transformation of the human species. He created a synthesis of traditional yoga methods to verify “truth-consciousness,” a state that embraces the most material of realities as well as the ultimate spiritual planes of existence—nothing was left out. The world, as he viewed it, had reached a critical condition requiring an energy beyond the mind, which he termed “supramental.” Sri Aurobindo affirmed that each person now has the capacity to open to this force and participate consciously in the evolution of our species. He wrote in 1911: “The principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness … in order that the work of changing the world … may be entirely victorious and irrestible”” (Sullivan 1994, pp. 37–38).

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