Auroville was founded by Mirra Alfasa, known as The Mother. She was the spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, the great Indian visionary and yogi who evolved a new method of spiritual practice, which he called Integral Yoga.
Auroville is a laboratory for the materialization of a new consciousness. Every one is welcome who has good will and believes Human Unity is possible and aspires for it.
On the 28 th of February 1968 The Mother stated, “Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity”.
Mother’s vision for Auroville began to take shape on that same day in 1968 when an inauguration ceremony took place on a piece of bare ground north of Pondicherry; she read the “Auroville Charter”1 from her room in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.
A Dream is another marvelous writing by the Mother describing a place on earth where human beings obey only the supreme Truth. This Dream of the Divine has drawn and continues to draw many people to Auroville. It touches upon deep aspirations and gives faith for a bright future.
Auroville offers a beautiful vision of a possible New World. Children who grow up in Auroville receive this vision, either consciously because their environment prepares them, or subconsciously.
Auroville is situated near the city of Pondicherry, in the state of Tamil Nadu, South India. About 2,400 inhabitants reside in Auroville at this time. They come from every state in India as well as from 50 different nations.
Auroville Charter
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.
Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
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.
Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
A Dream
There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment.
In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls; education would be given not for passing examinations or obtaining certificates and posts but to enrich existing faculties and bring forth new ones. In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organise; the bodily needs of each one would be equally provided for, and intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but by increased duties and responsibilities.
Beauty in all its artistic forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, would be equally accessible to all; the ability to share in the joy it brings would be limited only by the capacities of each one and not by social or financial position.
For in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social standing. There, work would not be a way to earn one’s living but a way to express oneself and to develop one’s capacities and possibilities while being of service to the community as a whole, which, for its own part, would provide for each individual’s subsistence and sphere of action.
In short, it would be a place where human relationships, which are normally based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in doing well, of collaboration and real brotherhood.
— The Mother
Integral Yoga
In Sri Aurobindo’s vision, the human being is not the last step in evolution. Next will come a new being with a new consciousness which he calls the ‘Supramental’. In these transitional times, where evolution is pressing, and where so many things are just collapsing, we must grow continuously, becoming more true and more conscious. Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga is well described here in his own words:
Life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast yoga of Nature who a empts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality.
Sri Aurobindo, “The Synthesis of Yoga”, p.6
Sonia Dyne expresses this moment in history well, where we can start to feel something at work which is much bigger than our little minds can see:
We see a small group of young people from opposing nations plant trees for peace in Auroville and the Berlin wall comes down and the prospect of war retreats into the background of human affairs. We are reluctant to believe there could be any connection – surely life is more complicated than that? But what if the ‘complications’ are a veil of falsehood, a fake ‘reality’ to which we all, somehow, consent? What if a new light breaking upon the world is using us to build a new consciousness?
Listen to this beautiful talk by Loretta on Mother’s reasons and plans for creating Auroville: