I can’t quite believe that we are leaving Auroville on Wednesday.  I realize that I haven’t written that much about Auroville itself, and I’ve been wondering why.   I think it is because Auroville is tremendously rich and multifaceted.  There’s an outer Auroville—the land, the buildings, the governmental structures or lack thereof, the mechanics of daily life—and an inner Auroville.  The inner Auroville has to do with the spirit which formed this place and continues to hold it together, against pretty formidable odds, and  its effects on those who feel drawn to visit and live here.  Both the inner and the outer Auroville are complex and both have touched me deeply, and so I have found it difficult to capture Auroville in words.

(Peter and I entitled this picture "Close Encounters," for obvious reasons. This is me outside the Matramandir, the temple at the heart of Auroville.  Also known--affectionately, of course--as the "Giant Golden Golf Ball."  Looks pretty weird from the outside, but the sensation of walking to and sitting inside the "concentration chamber" inside is indescribable.  Don't judge a golf ball by its cover!)

I have written already about the joy of living in a community where life is not centered around material gain or material concerns in general, and I have spoken of the happiness and ease that shines from the faces and bodies of the people here.  I have perhaps not said how particularly affirmed I feel; I have devoted a significant portion of my life to the kind of inner development that this community is designed to foster.  So often, living in the West, I’ve felt like an iceberg—the visible, concrete portion of my life is small compared to what is happening under the surface, in the dark depths.  There’s been, at times, a painful sense that I was wasting my time, not “producing” anything of substance, and frequently a sense that what I value most about myself is invisible to others.

Here in Auroville, there’s no need to explain or justify why I’ve devoted the bulk of my “spare” time to spiritual practice rather than to stashing away money for my retirement.  And there’s a sense of being seen—so many people here spend their time swimming under the surface that they know how to look there when they meet others.  I remember, being here, how alienated I have always felt from the dominant culture of the U.S., I remember why I always dreamed of living someplace else when I was in my teens and twenties.  I realize that I am tired of swimming upstream against the dominant culture of the West.  And I am tired, too, of the lurking Puritanism which afflicts collective consciousness in Vermont, making so many of us feel guilty if we’re not working.

Peter and Lisa NOT working, outside the "dojo" at Peter's place in Auroville.  Peter designed this space specifically for meditation, yoga, and other inner explorations.

At home, I feel often swept up in a current of anxiety and guilt that says, “Oh my god, the world is such a mess, and we’ve done so much to create the mess, I should be doing MORE to try to fix it!”  I should be going to more meetings, volunteering for more organizations,” etc., etc., ad nauseam.  Here in Auroville, there is a very different take on the global situation and what to do about it.  It’s not that Aurovilians don’t recognize that we’re in a heap of trouble, only that they see it as a crisis of consciousness as well as an ecological and economic one.  This doesn't mean that they’re not taking concrete steps to respond to the concrete challenges.  Did I mention that the water for Peter’s neighborhood is pumped by a windmill (the old-fashioned kind that you see on Amish farms, not the new sleek kind) and the electricity comes from solar panels?  Auroville has reforested over 4,000 acres of land and reforestation efforts continue.  There is a botanical garden which devotes itself to experimenting with different kinds of food crops and saving seed from those which are particularly successful, and a sanctuary for local medicinal plants.    But no one I’ve met here imagines that we will “save” the world simply by more, and more, and more action, however “good” our actions may be.

You don’t have to be a mystic or even a particularly “spiritual” person to get it that much of what is endangering life on the planet can be traced to our species’ addiction to acting on the world—acting to solve “our” problems without imagining or contemplating the long-term, diffuse consequences for the web of life as a whole.   Are we likely to improve matters by still more frantic short-term action (as they say in A.A., "Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome")?  And if our actions grow out of our species’ present level of consciousness, does it make sense to imagine that we can make better actions without transforming our consciousness?  That kind of transformation requires undoing more than doing.

Of course, you can’t compel transformation to occur any more than, if you’re and artist, you can compel inspiration to arrive when and where you want it to.  But you can show up at your computer, your easel, your yoga mat, on a regular basis.  You can hone your skills and, more importantly, learn to be receptive, learn to look and listen and feel differently so that when inspiration/transformation does blow through, there’s someone there to meet it.  But that showing up, that learning, looking and listening that allows us to collaborate in the process of creation, takes uncluttered time and space.  Auroville was created to enable some people to have the kind of time and space necessary to facilitate “inner” transformation and develop new “outer” forms of life in the process.  While this community, like every other, falls short of its lofty goals in many ways, I am impressed by the degree to which it actually succeeds.  People here do have time and space to open to transformation if they want to, as well as to deal with it when it comes.

So I feel sad about leaving this place, as well as a slight sense of dread about making the turn toward home.  I don’t really want to live in Tamilnadu, India—for one thing, it’s too damn HOT! J For another thing, I love my home—I love the land, my house, my friends and neighbors—but I hate the way we live.  I hate what we are doing to ourselves, the daily psychic and physical violence to which we subject ourselves by the way we organize our economic and social lives.  I hate what we have to do to ourselves, the way we have to numb, delude and deaden ourselves, in order to tolerate what is actually intolerable. 

Like everyone else, I’ve told myself a lot of stories in order to reconcile myself to the unacceptable; experiencing the alternative that Auroville represents has stripped me of those protective fictions.  I wish I could say that I’m turning for home inspired, and determined to move my beloved local community in an Aurovilian direction.  I feel that even a small movement in that direction would be a good thing.  But after thirteen years of earnest conversations with friends and clients in Vermont about the need to change these conditions, I begin to despair of our making real change before ecological or economic collapse compels us to do so. 

Am I really warrior enough to make anything happen, to push that stone uphill against the whole force of the American collective consciousness—not to mention unconscious?  I don’t usually see myself as a warrior—healer, mystic, and poet do not usually accord with the warrior job description!  But maybe, in such drastic times, all of our self-images’ must be open to radical revisions.  “What to do?” as the Indians are fond of saying.  Since I don’t know yet, I’m just walking forward into the next phase of the journey, hoping that the way will become clear in the walking.