Finding Auroville

Aurovillage has existed in Auroville for as long as Auroville has existed. It was present at the inauguration ceremony of Auroville on February 28th, 1968. It is in many respects the primary on-site, organized representation of the individual and collective ego inserting itself into a project that is, or should be, centered around the dissolution of the ego. And if we consider that it was always absolutely inevitable that the individual and collective ego would insert itself into the project and experiment of Auroville (as it does everywhere in the world), then we can see that Aurovillage, as it has existed in all its passive-aggressively narcissistic glory, is simply the primary way that the collective ego has manifested itself in Auroville. The existing conditions at the time of the inauguration of Auroville and the years subsequent to that event were conducive to the formation of Aurovillage as it has developed and endured. And as Auroville currently transitions from its first phase, which has been this protracted hippie village/Aurovillage phase, to its second phase, whatever shape that second phase takes, we can be assured that the ego will continue to raise its head and persist in myriad ways, new and old, just as it did in Aurovillage. The central task for people in Auroville, no matter what other work they partake in, has been and will continue to be the realization that the ego is the primordial enemy of humanity, to recognize it in the multifarious ways in which it exists, and to work to move away from it, both individually and collectively.

In this post I will briefly trace the history of Aurovillage, focusing on the factors that led to it first emerging in Auroville, and then gaining power and control over the project. I have not cited any sources to back up my assertions and observations here, as the description is at a very general level. A more detailed and researched rendering of this topic will hopefully happen at a later time, in one format or another. In this regard the narrative of this post can be considered to be a hypothesis.

Before I begin to talk about the history of Aurovillage, even though I have described it before, I’ll describe it again here: Aurovillage is the name given to a loose network of people who have worked and contributed, right from the beginning of the project, to maintain Auroville as a small, insular, parochial, tribalistic and nepotistic entity. They have strived to keep outside influence out of Auroville, so that they can continue to maintain their control and influence over the project, maintain a privileged and entitled lifestyle on the lands here, and continue to profit off the project financially, materially and socially. These are people who have run away from the outside world because they are psychologically and emotionally unable to function in it in the way they perceive they should be able to, and so they have created in Auroville a secluded emotional oasis in which they can function and thrive with entitlement and privilege. And they are extremely committed to maintaining this oasis, which is why self-governance, administrative autonomy and non-interference from the outside is so important to them. At the core of Aurovillage is a small group that has always been at the center of Auroville’s power structure in one way or another. Some of these people have been here right from the beginning or from the early days of Auroville. Others have arrived over the course of the five decades of Auroville’s existence. This has created a cast of characters that is a mix of old and new. This cast of characters keeps getting replenished by new blood (though often the newcomers are actually quite old) coming to Aurovillage to live an insular, laid-back life in this isolated sanctuary, with the added incentive of being able to exert power and authority. The fact that India is a cheap place for Westerners to live in is a critical part of the reason why the people in the Aurovillage cabal want to live here and why they are protecting this bubble so vehemently. Surrounding this central cast of power players is a larger supporting cast of Aurovillagers who live lives at different levels of passivity, but who always support Aurovillage’s central tenets of insularity, isolation, autonomy and administrative control. To maintain this insularity, isolation and control, Aurovillage has been forced to create a facade for the consumption of outsiders and visitors. This facade presents Auroville as a liberal, progressive and spiritual space that engages in environmentally conscious activities, sustainable practices, wellness and mindfulness activities, alternative lifestyle practices etc. It has been extremely successful in creating and maintaining this facade, and it takes a long time to navigate through the progressive and spiritual smokescreen that has been created here to reveal the much murkier reality that exists underneath. To be able to maintain this facade and the very different reality that lies beneath it requires a grand facility with duplicity, manipulation and the ability not just to lie, but to constantly live within and maintain a complex framework of lies, and be comfortable with living within that framework of lies. As such, central to the success of Aurovillage has been the continuous and pathological lying, duplicity and manipulation that so many Aurovillagers perpetually engage in in order to maintain that facade. The more passive Aurovillagers do not actively participate in the manipulation, but are happy to turn a blind eye to it and lead lives actively pretending that they do not exist in a morass of duplicity. To be able to uphold and perpetuate all this requires people that fit a certain personality profile. And so the atmosphere that has been created in Auroville is one that attracts pathological liars and people with the type of psychological disorders that facilitate pathological lying and delusional existences. This is the personality profile that is attracted to the atmosphere that has been created by Aurovillage, and these are the people who can function most successfully within this bubble. This skill with lying, duplicity and manipulation, honed to perfection over the decades, is what has allowed Aurovillage to successfully sell itself as something very different from what it really is for so long. In the currently ongoing battle for control over Auroville, this skill is what has allowed Aurovillage to put into action such a robust propaganda machine at the service of their desperate but thankfully now futile attempts to hold onto their power and control.

Now on to how Aurovillage emerged right at the beginning of Auroville. Land for Auroville started to be purchased from the end of 1964, and the inauguration ceremony for the township took place in February 1968. Initially, a few people associated with the Ashram settled in the scattered plots of land that had started to be bought for Auroville. In the months and years following the inauguration, as news spread about the project, more people started coming to Auroville, including a couple of caravans full of people from Europe. This was the late 1960s, and the hippie movement was in full swing. Hippies were coming from Western countries to India along the hippie trail, which is also the route that the caravans to Auroville took to reach here. These hippies were a primary source of early Aurovilians. Since Auroville was a project founded on spirituality, and many of the hippies claimed to be coming to India and other places in the East partly in pursuit of “eastern” spirituality, they could easily claim a resonance with Auroville. For example many people coming to Auroville claimed that their decision to settle here was greatly influenced by the writings of Satprem, who was one of The Mother’s disciples. The Mother was by then an old woman confined to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, and she allowed a great deal of leeway in the goings-ons of Auroville. She was administering Auroville from the Ashram via surrogates who were Ashramites, but her control over the activities here were limited. She kept receiving complaints about the misbehavior and indiscipline of Aurovilians, but there was little she could do about it on a material level.

The Mother’s plan at the beginning was to quickly build a township here, and to have Auroville functioning as soon as possible as a full-fledged town with a population of 50,000. However, while funds had been procured to buy a portion of the lands, funds could not be obtained to build the township. The land purchase had happened via the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS), a trust run by Ashramites. This trust was also the entity that was officially in charge of running Auroville. While the money needed to build the township was not available, many of the incoming people were provided with simple huts, designed by architects affiliated with Auroville, to live in on Auroville land. Others financed their own huts and some even commissioned more substantial houses for themselves.

The fact that hippies constituted the largest number of people who settled in nascent Auroville was the beginning factor of Aurovillage. These people were coming to places like India to “check out” of or escape from their own societies for a while. The fact that India and other places in the East were cheap places for them to live made it possible for them to prolong that escape for as long as possible. In hippie hot-spots like Goa and Kathmandu the duration of their stay was restricted by the duration of their tourist visas. In Auroville, these hippies found a place where they could get visas sponsored by the Ashram or the SAS. All they had to do to continue to live cheap, easy lives for prolonged durations here was to pretend to be spiritual, and pretend to be supporters of “human unity”. And the need for this pretense was the beginning of the pathological lying, duplicity and delusional existence of Aurovillage, delusional because the lairs believe their own lies, and start to live an existence that is far removed from reality, including the belief that they are special people who have been “chosen” to come to live in Auroville. It is not that all hippies were delusional and duplicitous, but most of the ones who continued to live here over the long term certainly were. If the majority of people coming to Auroville had actually been even halfway sincere in their pursuit of spirituality and human unity, Auroville would have been a very different place.

As mentioned above, while The Mother was alive there were attempts to find funds to build the township of Auroville, but those funds were elusive. In the meanwhile the reality of Auroville on the ground actually resembled the imagery of the rustic hippie communes from the 1960s that we see in popular media. This is borne out by the many photos and videos that we have of Auroville from those early days. This bucolic setting attracted even more hippies looking to check out of Western society, as well as a few Indians who wanted to live in such a setting. It is easy to imagine a scenario where The Mother wanted people from all over the world to come and start settling in Auroville, and the only people who were willing to do that at that time were hippies, and so she allowed them to stay despite the complaints she was receiving about them, in the hope that they would turn to sincere spirituality. We can also speculate about the type of people who would have settled in Auroville if construction of the township had begun in full-flow back then. At the present moment, some fifty years later, there is similar speculation actively taking place about the type of people who would be attracted to Auroville as the construction of the township picks up pace.

There was therefore a really interesting situation created in Auroville at that moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was a call sent out for people from all over the world to come and settle in what was to be a universal, international township. This call was backed by an established spiritual institution in the form of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The call was made by The Mother, who was a respected spiritual leader with connections high up in Indian politics, administration and business. The wider global cultural backdrop was of a time when, despite multiple wars and the global cold war stand-off, there was a hope and a new cultural energy that the world could move towards a fundamentally more peaceful and harmonious future. The project of Auroville was initiated with all this background as a township centered on spirituality, Integral Yoga and human unity, but as soon as it was initiated two things happened: firstly the funding for the township – the construction of which was to be the initial material focus of the Aurovilians – was found to be elusive, and secondly the people who actually came to settle on the lands of Auroville were mainly hippies. And so the hippies found themselves in a situation where their lifestyle was actually being supported institutionally, as long as they pretended to go along with the project’s spiritual intentions.

This actually brings into question the entire framework of Westerners coming to India purportedly for spiritual purposes, not just in Auroville but also in various Ashrams, in wellness/mindfulness settings, and of course in places such as Goa. Since India is an economical place to live, and spirituality is a very subjective topic that is very easy to spin rhetorical yarns about, spiritual settings in India become targets for Westerners who want to live a cheap and easy life and who are not averse to living their lives lying about their spiritual interests. It would be interesting to trace the history of this trend since India’s independence in 1947 to the present, but that is a topic for another time. However, there is no reason not to assess Aurovilians within this framework. The history of Auroville and the behavior of Westerners here over the past five decades definitely highlights the need to scrutinize the actual motives and activities of Westerners coming to India purportedly for spiritual pursuits.

In early 1972 the construction of the Matrimandir began. This gave a central material sense of purpose to Aurovilians. It also allowed the hippies to claim that they were doing substantial work, though of course the atmosphere of work and life was much more laid back than what they would have experienced back home. The slow pace of construction of the Matrimandir, which took 37 years to complete, allowed the Aurovillagers to make this claim of substantial work through the 1970s and 80s, which as we will see were crucial times in the history of Auroville. Other activities, most famously the afforestation of Auroville lands, continued alongside, but all the while the hippie commune atmosphere persisted.

Then The Mother passed away at the end of 1973, and things took a drastic turn in Auroville. The bucolic easy-going hippie lifestyle that the Aurovilians had become accustomed to over the past four or five years faced an existential threat. The SAS wanted to take over the reigns of Auroville, and they did not appear to be as lenient as The Mother. They wanted to impose stricter rules on the lives and activities of Aurovilians and to exert control over the direction that the project would take. The SAS technically was the organization under which Auroville was being run, owned all the fixed assets of Auroville, and were in charge of giving visas to the non-Indians. A section of the hippies/Aurovilians started to openly defy the authority of the SAS, wanting autonomy from the SAS, autonomy to make their own rules and to run Auroville according to their wishes.

Through the remainder of the 1970s, a protracted battle for power and control over the administration of Auroville and its assets ensued between the SAS based in Pondicherry and this section of Aurovilians who were living on site at Auroville. The purchase of land for Auroville came to a grinding halt, and the Matrimandir was the only locus of collective work. It is not surprising that the SAS had political connections throughout India, but it is quite surprising that a small number of these Aurovilians, including a few of the hippies as well as a few Indians, had even stronger political connections in the country. The Aurovillagers used these connections to get the central Indian government to take over the assets of Auroville from the SAS, first temporarily through an emergency ordinance in 1980 and then permanently in 1988 with the passing of the Auroville Foundation Act. All the assets and decision making abilities were taken away from the SAS, and enshrined in the newly minted Auroville Foundation, whose stakeholders included both Aurovilians as well as the Central Government of India, but not the SAS.

It is in this setting of the conflict-ridden 1970s and uncertain 1980s that Aurovillage truly emerges and consolidates its power in Auroville. While The Mother was alive, there was no questioning of her ultimate authority. However, what the situation on the ground in Auroville had created over the five years that she was alive was a hippie commune where the hippies could stay indefinitely. With her gone and the SAS wanting to take control over Auroville, the hippies and their hippie commune faced an existential threat. But they could also see a very real possibility not just to extend that hippie commune into the future, but to expand it to create for themselves a bubble, an enclave, a sanctuary, where they could have administrative control and power. They could see a place where they could live this life of escapism indefinitely. The institution was already in place in a nascent stage, and they were already living in it. Their task was to convince the people in power that their intentions were spiritual, sincere, and aligned with the vision that The Mother had for Auroville. They also had to convince these people that an essential part of The Mother’s vision for Auroville was administrative autonomy and self-governance. This is where the manipulation and duplicity begins in earnest. Crucially, they also had to convince themselves that they were here for spiritual purposes and for The Mother’s vision, and not just to lead easy laid-back lives. This is where the self-delusion begins.

This group of Aurovilians who revolted against the SAS established the beginnings of visible and vocal Aurovillage. Leaders of the revolt emerged from among this group, the first Aurovillage politicians in a long line of Aurovillage politicians who have spent their time controlling Auroville and making sure it stays small and insular. A few of them are still in Auroville today, joined by others over the years, and they are still fighting for the same things: power and control within the bubble of Auroville, to block the development of Auroville and to keep it at a small-scale village/ecovillage level. The idea is still to maintain Auroville, as much as possible and for as long as possible, at that small hippie-scale of thinking where they can live lives of escapism and ease.

The Aurovillagers used their powerful political connections to get the Indian government to pass the Auroville Foundation Act in 1988. This has been the biggest and most significant achievement in the history of Aurovillage. This Act not only took all of Auroville’s assets away from the SAS and held them in the Auroville Foundation, but it also gave the Aurovilians, in the eyes of the law, a lot of autonomy in running Auroville. A crucial part of this autonomy was the ability to choose who could become an Aurovilian and who couldn’t.

Aurovillage had been latent in Auroville right from the beginning of the project, and it emerged into existence as a cohesive network of people soon after the death of The Mother, acting in defiance of the authority of the SAS. Between 1973 and 1980 it became the dominant, bullying faction in Auroville. With the passing of the Auroville Emergency Provisions Act in 1980, since Aurovillage was the dominant faction and the political center of the Aurovilians, Aurovillage was in effect handed over a certain level of authority and legitimacy, but this authority was still tenuous because the 1980 Act was only a temporary ordinance. When the more permanent Auroville Foundation Act was passed in 1988, the authority that was supposedly given to the Residents Assembly was in effect actually handed over to Aurovillage, as the dominant network of people within the Residents Assembly. In this way, since Aurovillage was the dominant political entity of Auroville, the Auroville Foundation Act in effect bestowed actual legal power to Aurovillage. For the Aurovillagers this was of course the whole point of the Act. Aurovillagers had been involved in writing the Act and had used their connections to push for the Act to be passed by the Indian parliament. Their entire intention had been to get this legal power, under the pretense and guise of wanting to administer a spiritual community.

So between 1968 and 1988, a spiritual project that was supposed to develop into a township actually devolved into an escapist hippie commune that, by a series of events, was given more and more legitimacy, structure and autonomy by the Indian government, till it became the Auroville Foundation. The Matrimandir construction site, with the Matrimandir slowly manifesting throughout this time, stood at the center of this commune, giving its own material and spiritual legitimacy to the commune and its residents, including the Aurovillagers. What the Aurovillagers had been successful at doing was convincing the pertinent people in power that the lives they were leading were in keeping with the freedom and space that The Mother had envisioned for the spiritual growth of Aurovilians.

It has to be mentioned of course that not all Aurovilians were Aurovillagers. There were many who came here, right from the beginning, from near and far, for reasons that were much more sincere than the reasons of the Aurovillagers. Some continued to live here and work in their own way for Auroville to move in a better direction. But the history of Auroville is replete with instances of people who came here, sometimes living here for years and even decades, and then left, despondent over the duplicitous and insincere atmosphere that has festered here over the decades. They came to Auroville with positive energy and optimism, with motivations ranging from progressive and sattwic outlooks to individual spiritual aspirations and collective spiritual aspirations. Once here, they were exposed to and slowly realized how nefarious, duplicitous and insincere the Aurovillage network is, and how distant the true motivations of the Aurovillagers are from their surface actions and their constant rhetoric. And because Aurovillage has throughout continued to be the power center and controlling heart of Auroville, much of its atmosphere seeps into Auroville in general. It takes time for the positivity and optimism of the more sincere people to be eroded by the atmosphere of insincerity, but after a while many of them leave when they cannot deal with the negativity any more. This negative atmosphere below the positive facade is one of the main tools with which Aurovillage has managed to stay in power for so long and keep Auroville’s population small, since the negativity repulses most of the people who have a sincere motive. And it attracts people who thrive and prosper in this negativity.

The increasing participation of the Indian government through ordinances in 1980 and 1988 was a compromise that Aurovillage was forced make to continue its existence and retain power and control. After 1988 Auroville found itself on more secure legal footing, but its recognition and popularity also increased. And Auroville became more accountable to the Indian government. Because of these reasons, Aurovillage was forced to begin constructing the facade with which Auroville has become known and with which it has been promoted to the outside world, continuing and amplifying the duplicitous atmosphere that had existed from the beginning. A lot of work went into the creation and maintenance of this facade, which included small scale manufacturing, afforestation, alternative farming, alternative wellness programs and therapies, various mindfulness and spirituality-related activities etc. The cumulative activities of this facade are by themselves a positive contribution, and the facade itself has a lot going for it. The problem is what lies behind the facade, the bubble that the facade hides. This bubble contains a much more negative, abusive, corrupt, racist, insular and parochial atmosphere. This is the bubble that Aurovillage has created and fostered in Auroville right from its early hippie days. From the viewpoint of the Aurovillagers, the purpose of the Auroville Foundation Act was to give them legal administrative control and authority so that they could continue to live in this bubble and ensure its continuation. It is a grand irony that the Indian Government has given legal sanction to and helped in, for more than three decades, the promulgation of a colonial enclave within India, which is what this bubble is. This aspect will be expanded upon in an upcoming post.

Some people who visit Auroville can get a sense of the bubble beneath the facade quite quickly, but for most people it takes some time of living here to start to understand that it exists. And one only begins to understand the extent and depth of the negativity within the bubble when one stays here for a longer duration of time.

As mentioned above, the insertion of the Indian government into the administration of Auroville was a compromise that Aurovillage was forced to make, and they have worked very hard since then to make sure that the Indian government’s participation in Auroville’s administration remains as hands-off and laissez faire as possible. Another consequent compromise that Aurovillage had to make was the expansion of Auroville that resulted from its increased exposure and popularity. And again Aurovillage has worked very hard to control this expansion, to make sure that it happens extremely slowly and in a limited fashion. Their ability to control the entry of people into Auroville is one of two powerful tools that they have to facilitate this control, the second being the negative atmosphere within the Auroville bubble that anyone who dives through the facade is exposed to. Using the entry system that they have devised, the Aurovillagers either select people who do not have the agency to question and oppose Aurovillage, or else people who are willing to come and live in Aurovillage and are happy to conform to its diktats. This second group are, just like the earlier hippies, people who are escaping from where they are coming from, whether it is from outside India or from within India. These are once again people who are coming here to live cheap, easy, laid-back lives in an insular and isolated emotional sanctuary, because the outside world is not a place that they can cope with emotionally and psychologically. This group also includes people who are attracted by the prospect of wielding power and control in an isolated setting. Those among them who partake in work do so to support Aurovillage and its bubble, not the project of Auroville or god forbid, the Divine. Within the Aurovillage bubble these people do not even have to pretend to be spiritual. Aurovillage only pretends to be spiritual when it interacts with the outside world. And the Aurovillage politicians and leaders are past masters at this pretense. Sincere people, people who truly come here for human unity and spirituality, have to basically slip through the cracks of the entry system to get in. And as mentioned before, many of these sincere people leave after getting disillusioned by the atmosphere that exists within the bubble here. The hope is that with the ongoing changes in Auroville, the atmosphere will change and more people who are sincere in the pursuit of human unity, spirituality and Integral Yoga will be attracted to come and settle here.

Auroville is a project that was initiated by The Mother to be a township where people live according to the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and propagate his teachings. This Auroville is an existing institution, a concrete material reality existing on the ground, as well as a spiritual aspiration. But it has been beset by Aurovillage right from the beginning. We can consider Aurovillage to be a bubble within the larger institutional bubble of Auroville. The smaller bubble controls the larger bubble, infuses its negativity into the larger bubble and influences all aspects of it.

Among the hippies who settled in material Auroville at the beginning of the project, a few realized that they could hijack the project and alter it to become this insular bubble where they could live isolated lives away from the “real world” and where they could exert control and authority. This was the beginning of Aurovillage. With the passing of the Auroville Foundation Act, not only did Auroville get a firm legal footing under the wings of the Indian government, but the Aurovillagers were able to use the Act to in effect legitimize their control and authority over the project. So the hijacking was in effect legitimized in the eyes of the law. As Auroville developed from the 1990s onwards, with better funding, more substantial infrastructure, and more avenues of revenue generation, the Aurovillage network was able to usurp much of this development for the benefit of its own cabal members. Aurovillage was no longer just an insular emotional sanctuary for people who could not fit into outside society, but became a place where these people could actually even earn good money running restaurants, cafes, guest houses, wellness and mindfulness courses, organic farming workshops etc etc. Over the past three decades Auroville has been turned into a place that has a tourism industry similar to Goa. And all this has been done under the guise and rhetoric of spirituality and autonomy. Aurovillage was a permanent rustic hippie escapist enclave before 1988, and has been turned into a permanent sylvan backpacker-esque escapist enclave after 1988. It is slowly turning into a retirement community for people who financially do not have enough resources to live/retire back where they are coming from and psychologically have the ability to live their entire lives as a lie. The activities of Aurovillage are oriented towards supporting this enclave, while pretending that Auroville is a liberal, spiritual project. Anyone who does not agree with this model and structure finds it very hard to enter Auroville as a resident.

Aurovillage has been able to perpetrate this con for so long despite the Indian government knowing for a while about its duplicity and gross insincerity. The reasons why the Indian government is only now acting to correct the Auroville ship will be discussed in an upcoming post. Aurovillage is currently trying desperately to hold on to its stranglehold over Auroville via a procession of court cases. However, its attempts to keep control over Auroville will increasingly be a losing proposition because of the trajectory that India is taking. The coffers of Aurovillage for the past few years are being continuously filled by Indians coming to partake in Auroville’s present consumption economy. The India of today is very different from the India of the 1970s. But Aurovillage in many regards is still stuck in the 1970s, including in its racist perception of India. Aurovillage thinks that it can take material and economic advantage of the new more prosperous India, while at the same time only allowing in Indians into Auroville who are ready and willing to conform to Aurovillage’s version of Auroville. But as new India slowly grows in confidence and expands its activities and interests, it is gaining a better understanding of its spiritual heritage and of Yoga. And this will lead to more and more Indians coming to Auroville who are not looking to escape to the bubble of Aurovillage, but who are much more aligned with the true ideals of Auroville, and willing to work and fight for them. The fact that the Indian government is currently making changes in Auroville can be seen as one indication of this new India. The next phase of Auroville is definitely going to have a lot of its own problems, but there is also a hope that more people will come here who are willing to pursue Integral Yoga with sincerity.

If sociologists or anthropologists ever study Aurovillage, they will probably use the framework that is used to study delusional, brainwashed cults. The denizens of Aurovillage make sure that they stay completely divorced from reality wherever necessary, have a psychopathic belief in their own exceptionalism, have no compunctions in indulging in constant and continuous pathological dishonesty to protect themselves and their cult, and zealously guard and protect the emotional sanctuary that they are a part of.

For this duplicitous, insular, self-centered cult that is hiding in plain sight in Auroville, the most important words that The Mother has ever spoken or written down have to do with institutional autonomy. in 1954 she wrote A Dream which begins with the words “There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own”. The Auroville Charter begins with the words “Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole.” And at one point while discussing Auroville she said: “… to hand over the management of Auroville to any country or any group however big it may be is an absolute impossibility.” Sentences like these are removed from their context and used to demand autonomy for Auroville, and for only Aurovilians to be able to make decisions about Auroville, even though the Charter clearly states that “Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole”. The fact that The Mother’s words should be understood in the context of the spiritual philosophy of Integral Yoga, and that even A Dream and the Auroville Charter can basically only be truly understood in that context, is something that they have no interest in at all. For them, The Mother’s teachings on spirituality are only useful when they can be twisted to bolster their demands for autonomy. For Aurovillage, Auroville is only useful as an insular enclave where they can live far away and detached from an outside world that they cannot emotionally and psychologically handle, and as an enclave where they can harness power, control and authority. And they will lie, deceive and manipulate continuously without compunction to maintain that enclave. The autonomy to continue to exist in this enclave is the only thing that is important to them, it is their only actual focus. Couched in a completely insincere spirituality, their demand for autonomy in effect becomes a political act. Spirituality is just a rhetorical tool to achieve and maintain that political autonomy.

The Indian government is the authority that gave Aurovillage the legitimacy to dominate, derail and hijack Auroville for all this time, through the Auroville Foundation Act. And it is only the Indian government that can get Auroville out of the predicament that it put Auroville in. Aurovillage is using the very legitimacy that the Indian government effectively bestowed on it though the Act to claim and demand autonomy from the Indian government. Some in Aurovillage have such a delusional and audacious sense of entitlement that they even openly demand sovereignty from India. It is taking the Indian government a while to untangle the mess that Auroville has been in for so long, but the end result will be Auroville moving on from the Aurovillage phase to its next phase. The hope is that this next phase will attract people to Auroville who are much more sincerely aligned with Integral Yoga, and the work ahead for anyone with this true alignment will be to help move Auroville towards the audacious goal of an individual and collective transformation of consciousness that is the true aim of Auroville and of humanity. And this transformation is what will allow humanity to embrace an inner autonomy that is based on a fundamental selflessness and desirelessness, which is the true autonomy that Sri Aurobindo teaches and for which The Mother initiated Auroville.