I can't leave Auroville without making mention of its spiritual and physical heart, the Matrimandir… though at the same time I feel there is almost nothing I can say that does any justice to the vision behind it, the experience of the area around it, or the power of insight and meditation it brings one.
So. How to talk about it and not talk about it at the same time?
Visitors to the Matrimandir — matri meaning "mother", and mandir meaning temple: the Temple of the Mother — do not simply walk into the inner sanctum, as one often might do in a European cathedral. First, most visitors have no context to understand the intention and therefore the context of this sacred space — and it is a sacred space, though one which does not honor a deity unless it be the spirit one seeks within, and one which does not honor a guru unless that teacher be you yourself, with all of your potential for creation and self-realization. Second, the site is kept silent, and clean, and those few who would appear in the Delhi-cars or Chennai-motorcycles, full of exhaust and speed, and would push their way in past lines and graceful walking would only distract from or disrupt the heightened energy which has been cultivated within.
So first, you must go to the Visitor's Center and actually educate yourself — very lightly — on the history and principles of the vision for humanity, which were the seeds of Auroville and the Matrimandir. A beautiful video of 20 minutes or so details the salient points — from the meeting in 1968 of youth representatives from around the world at an inauguration, to the construction and upcoming opening of the completed structure, almost four decades later.
Once you have seen and asked your questions, you may visit the outer rim of the structure, called the petals — from the air, the dome itself is the bud of a giant flower, flowering consciousness?, and there are twelve rooms radiating from it, meditation rooms used by members of the Auroville community to deepen their practice or connect with the original vision of The Mother.
Once you have visited the petals, you can schedule a return visit for the next day, whereupon you are allowed entry to the inner chamber. A sunlit crystal rests at the physical center of the globe — in perfect silence, in white purity, a meditation chamber written of, and pointed to, in Sri Aurobindo's epic work on human enlightenment, Savitri.
Outside the Matrimandir, a large open-air auditorium. And beside them both, the Banyan Tree — a single trunk whose limbs were thrown outward — trailers reaching down to the ground and then taking root again in a surrounding ring of new trunks — each one the size of a full-grown tree in itself! — then limbs reaching outward yet again, until this huge outspreading tree of life has taken of itself the form of an entire grove of trees… in its branches, many birds singing, parrots, minahs, and under its branches silence and an incredible sense of longevity, wisdom…
Words. Not this few words, and not words without more poetry than I may have at my command to describe it all. Some few pictures are available in a new album called Auroville — which might give at least some color to my writing. But the gift is in the spirit, and spirit is never conveyed in simple images or simple words. If what I write causes you to raise your eyebrows — no worries. But if it caught your ear — or better, your heart — then you should plan a visit, at least once in a lifetime, to this most unique place in all the planet, and really in all of history!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010