The Spirit of Auroville

Here are some extracts from a conversation of the Mother with people concerned with Auroville on March 30, 1972:

Since we have set aside all conventions, immediately everybody thinks: "Ah, a nice place to fulfil our desires". Voilà. And almost all come with that intention. And because I made a maternity clinic for the children of those people that I was obliged to send away from the Ashram, so that they could have a place to have their child, people think that the maternity clinic is established for all children born in an illegal way. Voilà.

I don't care for legality. I don't care for law, I don't care for convention, but what I want is a divine life and not an animal life.

And they use the liberty for licence, for the satisfaction of desires, and all these things that we truly have worked all our life to master, they indulge in dissipation. I am absolutely disgusted.

We are here to give up all desires and to turn towards the Divine and to become conscious of the Divine. The Divine we seek is not far away and inaccessible. He is in the very core of the creation itself and what this requires of us is that we find Him, and by transforming ourselves personally become capable of knowing Him, unite with Him, and in the end, we manifest Him consciously.

It is to that that we should consecrate ourselves, that is our true reason for existence. And the very first step towards this sublime realisation is the manifestation of the Supramental Consciousness.

To realise and manifest the Divine in our life is the way, not to become animals, living like cats and dogs. Exactly the opposite. The majority of the population at Auroville is an infra-humanity and not a supra-humanity. So it is high time all that must end.

There are people who have just dropped here and now when I tell them, "All that won't do at all", they answer: "We didn't come here for this". That is how it stands. How I would like to go and tell them, to everyone of them, to their face that they are mistaken, things are not like that. But I suppose now is the occasion to write it down in black and white.

How petty it is, a very petty humanity.

The Mother, Words of the Mother - I: Talk of 30 March 1972