Introducing Auroville!

For the past couple days I have been enjoying this community called Auroville!  There is so much going on here I don’t really know where to start.  This is a picture of the Matrimandir, the center and soul of Auroville as ‘The Mother”, or the founder of Auroville imagined it to look like. 

Yesterday I was able to go inside this very sci-fi looking building, into the ‘inner chamber’ where there is a huge glass ball in the middle with a beam of sunlight streaming down onto it.   

The Mother was adamant about the inner chamber being only a place to find inner peace and concentration, and not have it be any sort of temple or meditation place.  This is how the Matrimandir falls in line with the values of Auroville being a place for human unity without the presence of religion.  Since it was the first time for me going inside I was only allowed to stay for 15 minutes for ‘concentration’, but it was a very surreal experience.
 

When I stood up after the concentration I had to walk down a spiraling ramp from the inner chamber to go outside and meet the group at the stone lotus pond at the bottom.  Unfortunately both of my legs had fallen asleep while I was sitting cross-legged in the inner chamber, so I was wobbling around trying to make it down the ramp without falling and I was holding up everyone else who was walking single-file behind me.  I’ll try a different sitting position next time.

The great Banyan tree is another symbol of Auroville, where fifty years ago people from 124 different nations gathered with soil from their countries to put into a giant urn, symbolizing the unity of humankind.  These trees are crazy-looking.  Everything in the picture is part of the tree - to keep the leaves up, new roots sprout from the branches and grow down to the ground so it looks like twenty different trees that are all connected as part of one.

With everything so strongly symbolizing unity and equality in Auroville, its no wonder that the sense of community is so great.  I could never feel lonely here because it’s like we have all known each other for a long time!