Dawnfire:

Welcome to Dawnfire, a blog from a traveller to Auroville, an experimental "universal township" in South India - a self-described "laboratory for human evolution" that is attempting to "realize human unity on earth." In these pages, you will find tidbits about daily life, activities, sustainable initiatives and architecture here in Auroville.

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Cosmick

"Death is but a distortion of consciousness..."

What he is now striving to give this body is the consciousness of Permanence, of Immortality, of the Certitude of absolute security – in Matter, in Life, in every moment’s action. And that is becoming nearer and nearer, more and more constant. Gradually, the mixture of old impressions is disappearing – that’s the BEDROCK, the basis of the transformation. In the true movement, you feel the Absolute and Eternity physically. How?... It’s impossible to describe, but that’s how it is. And the minute you get out of That, when you fall back even slightly into the ordinary movement, the old movement, there’s a feeling of ABSOLUTE uncertainty! Uncertainty at every second.

It would be impossible for an ordinary human being to live in that consciousness, with that sense of total and absolute uncertainty, of total and absolute impermanence – it’s no longer a destruction,1 but it’s not yet an ascending transformation. Absolute instability. It doesn’t last more than a fraction of a second – just enough time to become aware of oneself, that’s all.

If the other movement weren’t getting more and more established, it would be unbearable, as they say in English.

The quality of those two vibrations (which are still superimposed), so one can be aware of them both) is indescribable. One is a kind of fragmentation, an infinite fragmentation and absolute instability: like a powdery cloud of atoms in ceaseless movement; and the other is eternal immobility, just as I described it the other day: an infinite Immensity of absolute Light.

The consciousness is still going from one to the other.

(silence)

Everything else ... what to say? It might almost be called a diversion. Outside of that, all the other experiences are pastimes, just something to fill the void.

A perpetual picture show.

(silence)

And with this new perception I feel, inexpressibly, a concentration of … the truth of what we call Sri Aurobindo gathering around and on and within this body (there is really neither “within” nor “without”).

And the body, which has reopened the doors it had closed2 to be able to go on, feels an increasingly total and unmixed identity, to the point where, if I give my hand free rein, my handwriting begins to resemble Sri Aurobindo’s – tiny, like his. And it’s not what one might imagine, it’s not one form entering another – it doesn’t keep him from being wherever he wants to be and doing whatever he wants to do, appearing as he wants to appear and being

involved with everything happening on earth: it doesn’t change any of that. And it’s not just a part of him … [that is in Mother, but his totality]. And that’s how I know he was manifesting the Absolute, he was a manifestation of the Absolute. Of course, afterwards he revealed himself as what I had called “the Master of Yoga”; that was the reason he came on earth (what people here in India call an Avatar). But that’s still a way of seeing things SEPARATELY: it’s not the thing – THE thing.

We’ll see tomorrow…

All right, mon petit.

(silence)

Actually, what we call “dying”…

Death can be overcome only when it no longer has any meaning. And I clearly see a curve, a curve of experience leading to the point where death no longer means anything. Then we’ll be able to say, “Now it no longer makes sense.”

Only at that point can we be sure.

That’s why I have never been given any assurance, because it’s only when one enters that consciousness that Death no longer makes sense.

We’ve still got a long way to go.

- MOTHER

From: Mother's Agenda 4 December 1962

"Eat, Fight, F**k, Pray"

Something I came across here, interesting and insightful. 

 ---

Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War just published by Random House Crown. He recently spoke with Joshua Frank about his new book, religion, rednecks and what it's like to serve beer to an underage horse.

Joshua Frank: So Joe, what the hell is going on with the redneck strain of the working class anyway? Why do they seem more apt to embrace evangelism rather than a labor union? Is it, as psychologists would say, learned helplessness, or worse, idiocy?

Joe Bageant: Well, Josh, that's a pretty broad brush you're painting with there. In fact, it's too broad to be answered, but that will not stop me from responding with my usual shrillness and tin drum noise punctuated by flatulence. Let me start by saying the term redneck does not apply especially to southerners. I have found indigenous redneck culture and communities in Maine, Oregon Kansas, New York, Massachusetts, and California. in virtually every state and in large numbers. Among loggers, cowboys, poles, Germans, and even Latino rednecks.

Really. Don't you think beer and low riders and macho sports aesthetic of Latinos, the heterosexual, patriotic Jesus focused Catholic is that much different from their Jesus focused Baptist Dixie and Midwestern counterparts? The low riders of LA are the same as beer and muscle cars of the south. In fact the first rednecks were probably the striking miners at the Ludlow Colorado massacre, who wore red bandanas and were seen as tough, surly, angry working class people who had to be kept down. The sun on the neck definition is another more recent one that got applied especially to Southerners, during the civil rights era I suppose.

We have been taught to use these ethnic, regional and racial labels to cover up the real issue in America that the rich want keep hidden another 200 years-that we are a classist country. That one class owns pretty much the whole country these days and that all the rest are left to suck hind tit and pretend they are all members of something called "the middle class." The only real middle class is that thin layer of commissars, lawyers, teachers, journalists, and other caterers to the empire, those people necessary to manage it and count the beans, dumb down the kids and lock up enough people to keep the privatized gulags in business.

Anyway, I assume you are referring the heartland white working class people who attend fundamentalist churches. Ever since around 1800 about one-third of white America has been fundamentalist Christians, about one-third of Americans have had a born again experience. The thing that is different now is that these churches have access to political power. They were welcomed across the church-state wall of separation by cynical GOP strategists to whom giving the Republicans another chance to sack Washington, loot the national kitty and maybe pull off a good oil raid in the Middle East, was more important than our constitution. Now that they've let John Calvin's wooly beast into to tent, we find it chewing on the constitution and generally stinking up the joint-it's not going to leave without a fight.

As to the last parts of your question: When it comes to embracing the church instead of a labor union, I can remember a time when the churches stood behind the labor unions. Have we learned to be helpless? Man, we are helpless. Capitalist conditioning has replaced citizenship with consumerism. I mean, what are you or I doing? I write a book so the global publishing chain of Bertelsmann makes more money; you and I both sit here on the Internet spewing electrons across circuit boards that keep Bill Gates and the stock brokers farting through silk while we preach to the choir who bought our books. There are far better alternatives. We could grab some axe handles and heat up the tar bucket and start to burn some shit down. That still works you know.

Joshua Frank: I've always thought that'd work.

Joe Bageant: But we won't. Because we are all programmed to participate through purchase, whether it is my book at Barnes and Noble or the software that enables us to read CounterPunch. Or choose the candidate that has been preselected and purchased in advance by the people who have essentially made Americans into a nation of iPod implanted pizza drivers and well dressed
lawn jockeys sitting in front of monitors on the empire's electronic plantations.

Trials in Truth

End of the ordeal, out of vows, into this (un)real world.

When I heard that Verité community here in Auroville was hosting this ten-day Vipassana meditation course in the first weeks of June, it was a clue that perhaps I should stay a little longer here… Little did I know about the ordeals of ten days of complete silence and meditation, ten hours a DAY (with breaks and meals of course) would do for the purification of a rather cluttered mindspace… and healing of deep wounds. I left feeling transformed, centred and light. Grateful.

People say, they have no time for meditation nor do they see the reason for such an activity, but I see now that it is but one approach, one method of discovering the Truth in yourself. Who and what are you, Really? Are you who you think you are or is there something greater and more meaningful than that? Why do you suffer? Hindu teachings say that in Truth, we are Sat Chit Ananda, Being : Consciousness : Bliss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satchitananda) – but because of ego and its resultant distortions, we suffer separation from the Universe.

I won’t say much, but if you ever get a chance to undertake it seriously, do so. It may be one of the best things you have ever done in your life.

From an essay:

The experience of anicca (impermanence) through the process of Vipassana meditation leads to the transformation of narcissism and grandiosity into mature participation, service and love. It reveals individualistic life to be a sieve.

It breaks open a stone to reveal a star.

Dhamma

More interesting things I'm coming across...

            According to the book Yoga of Herbs:

            “Evolution is the manifestation of latent potentials… another way of saying this is that consciousness exists in all forms of life. It is the very basis of creation, the power of evolution. Life, creation and evolution are the stages in the unfoldment of consciousness. There is nothing in existence that is unfeeling, nothing that is profane or unspiritual, nothing without a unique value in the cosmos. Life is relational, interdependent, interconnective, a system of mutual nourishment and care, not only physically, but also psychologically and spiritually.

            …Life forms are stations for the reception and transmission of forces, through which all are nourished…

            …The earth, like a giant receptor or radio-station, inhales and exhales stellar and cosmic forces, the absorbed essence of which grows and unfolds as life. These forces are not all material, but include subtle energies of an occult or spiritual nature. Plants transmit the vital-emotional impulses, the life-force that is hidden in light. That is the gift, the grace, the power of plants…They offer us not only their nutritive value but the very light and love from the stars, from the cosmos whose messengers they are. They bring to us the universal light so that we can enter the universal life.” 

            Another reason to ingest only plant life….!

            So I embark into another experiment… ten days of silence. They call it Vipassana: http://www.dhamma.org. We’ll see how the heart of the matter unfolds. I’m anxious, trying to not expect anything… two months since I returned from Hampi’s promise to a supposedly barren Auroville of my heart… now it blooms into every hidden cavity, the moon’s face shines so boldly – why shouldn’t mine? It's obscene how beautiful and radiant it is - it even has a halo. Every form becomes electric and floats in an almost intelligent blue light. The longer I stay here, the more I feel that this is one of the fullest times in my life I've ever felt... closest to nature, closest to quiet, closest to self. Not the little self, the other One.

Auroville and an Architecture for Humanity

Mid-way through May. I end work in an Aurovilian office and move onto working for the Indian chapter of Architecture for Humanity. They have a number of small projects going on and the one I am working on is a women’s community centre in Nadukappam, a village one hour north of Auroville. The community centre will be built using earth materials (compressed stabilized earth blocks or CSEBs) and “appropriate technologies” (meaning a team of eight men at an Auram 3000 press, making hundreds of blocks a day manually, without the fuel consumption and carbon emissions of making fired bricks. Full circle for me – I took that earth-building course at the Auroville Earth Institute (http://www.earth-auroville.com/) in January and now here I am, designing a building with that technology!)

The work will be done in collaboration with Auroville’s Bioresource Centre, which organizes a bunch of outreach and education programs and has initiated other ecological construction projects outside of Auroville – raising local awareness through education, a crucial factor in the future success and impact of a place such as Auroville. It would be useless if Auroville were an isolated pocket of self-referential, spiritual elitism – the goal is to spread seeds of awareness and action, locally and globally.

Star of Fire

            In the midst of this sundering, relentless heat, in what locals call agni rashtra, or “star of fire” – where even riding through the dusty roads offers only a blast of hot air baking your brains to jelly – the first storm of the summer tears through, a force of confusion in the night. Beginning as a silence of moonless air holding its breath for so many days, a sudden blast swells the air with droplets of water, as the throat of night darkens and reverberates with sounds vast and horizonless. Merciless, miraculous downpour, sweat of the earth returning.

            Morning reveals the richness of red earth, overturned chairs, epicentres of rhododendrons, bursting light in the sun.

Water and land situation in Auroville and the bioregion

"I have seen the two presentations, one of a study made by French Pr. Sophie Violette and Dr.Aude Vincent, and by Mr. Jeen Kootstra, the conclusions of which are extremely alarming for Auroville and the bio region. I know almost since I have been here that the situation is not good, but it has greatly deteriorated since the beginning of the nineties. The groundwater resources in Auroville’s Bioregion are greatly depleted by the excessive extraction: the part of the rain which percolates through to the aquifers over 1000km2 are a mean 200 Mm3 (two hundred million cubic meters) when the extraction is above 750 Mm3 – so we consume 3 to 4 times more than what the water recharges…

Only 15% of the rains percolates while another 20% run off to the sea (a limited part is intercepted by the tanks). All the rest of the rain is simply evaporated by the water bodies, the soil and the vegetation. Even by creating large infrastructures to increase the recharge to the aquifers, the balance is still largely negative. Our main aquifer (Vanur) has so much gone down that we should have had already saline water since 1990! The only wellfounded hypothesis why it is not yet so as per our scientists’ findings is that a large volume of fresh water lies under the seabed, protecting temporarily from seawater intrusion. But to investigate offshore would be too costly.

But what they say is that it could happen ANYTIME : next day, next months, but not more than a few years, given the present consumption rate, and given that it increases considerably by the day… And when this is started, within 6 months half of the aquifer will turn saline! And then? It is usually estimated that it takes 15000 years to restore an aquifer by nature ways… Worth mentioning: the 2 main other aquifers of the area (Alluvium and Cuddalore) are already under seawater intrusion in the south! Definitively no, our groundwater resources are not sustainable in the present scenario. Are we willing to act or to let the devastation strike our area?

The picture was very clear: if Auroville does not do immediately its utmost, and on a very large scale to inform the peasants in the bioregion and try and help them for example to switch to other crops which are less water consuming and replace by the drop-by-drop or/and sprinkling irrigation types their present type of irrigation: 21/5 (3 inches pipes gushing water out at full power draw 50.000 litres/hour, in 4 hours 200.000 litres, so if there are 10 peasants in each village who use these pipes 4 hours, that makes 800.000 litres every half day…), the area will have the same fate as Tirunelvelli 16 years ago: it was a rich and fertile region covered by magnificent plantations of coconuts, etc. Their land was highly priced. In a very short time, their plantations died because the water had become saline, and their fields were worth not one paisa: they lost everything: land, home, and had to leave to find work elsewhere, filling the slums in Cuddalore, Puducherri, Mumbay, Chennai..

And, according to the Electricity Minister Arcot N. Veenasamy, 40.000 free electric water pumping are delivered each year, and more than 5 lakhs requests for the same are on the waiting list….40.000 more each year to follow the same patterns of irrigation…

The politicians at all levels should be all contacted by Auroville and informed that the situation is really alarming, a whole agricultural region might die, especially taking into account that all along the east cost Road, around Puducherri and Cuddalore there are a great number of private or industrial settlements which also draw a lot of water…They should completely stop this suicidal policy of giving free access to electricity for agriculture and subsidise instead the less consuming modes of irrigation and encourage the peasants by incentives to switch to less water consuming crops. Actually, they should also subsidise the buying of pure Limonool rather than the purchase of chemical pesticides, which slowly damage and kill the population and their children – but this is another topic…

Many people in Auroville and in the area do not want to believe these warnings that the Water Service, and now Harvest have given repeatedly. People don’t want do believe it. They see that they still have water, and do not want to change their habits in any way.

They act like all the people around the world who live near active volcanoes or in highly seismic regions: like any human being they hope that nothing terrible will happen, cling stubbornly to the land and house where they and their ancestors have grown up and lived for centuries, and want to hold on to them and to their habits until the last moment. The problem is that the last moment is really one moment too late: it is the moment when they have already lost everything including in many cases not only their possessions, but also their lives and that of their families and relatives...

And all those who have bought private lands in or around Auroville or further in the bioregion, thinking that they have made a very good investment, but also the speculators who buy and build all around, might lose all their money. For the big speculators, the loss is less important, because they have an important back up, but for all those local landowners whose only wealth is their fields and their crops and their houses here or there, it might prove tragically catastrophic.

Auroville would soon become again what it was 40 years ago: a barren desert whose land was worth nothing – especially if one takes also into account the wood cutting habits of the inhabitants. And the inhabitants of the area would have the same choice as those of Tirunelvelli…It would be a catastrophe for all…"

By Turiya

Astrologica

            Astral bodies, Ascendant houses, planetary influences, double Libras. I’ve never gotten this kind of earful. Silverback ocean, erasing the sand, erasing the marks of its own incessant sweep, the other coming into the other. Twin echoes in an infinite space, possibly confused but so much to learn – Rubix cubes, puzzles to ponder.

            Then… a message from someone from my first days in Auroville  – how would I dissect this if I had to rework the Pondicherry of our mutual experience in a new light? Deriving from this beautiful Invocation of Light that this friend passed onto me – this is MY memory of my friend:

“I am created by the Divine Light.
I am sustained by the Divine Light.
I am protected by the Divine Light.
I am surrounded by the Divine Light.
I am ever-growing into the Divine Light.

Slowly exhale and relax.
With the arms beside the body, concentrate on feeling a warm glow of Light
suffuse your entire body, outside as well as inside.
Acknowledge silently to yourself:

Every cell of this, my physical body,
is filled with Divine Light.
Every level of consciousness
is illumined with Divine Light.
Divine Light penetrates every single cell of my being,
every level of consciousness.
I have become a channel of pure Light.
I am one with the Light.

The Divine Light invocation is an exercise of will as well as an act of
surrender.
Be receptive to the Light and accept that you are now a channel of Divine
Light.”

            One could say that we are made of stardust, stuff of the cosmos coming together… once light, now condensed, but still Light.

            Another friend has also given me a shout – and about my account of my experiences meditating in the Inner Chamber, hearing a pixie-like voice saying laughingly to me: “So, you still don’t know who you really are, do you?”, he writes:

“…but my own theory, based on specific astronomical experiences, suggests that there are cosmic ‘entities’ all about us which often are perceived in our  ‘normal waking’ dimension as mischievous sprite like beings. Somehow I feel that the sentient human species is the result of a symbiotic relationship between the indigenously evolved primate and another far reaching cosmic ‘entity’ that has evolved to no longer vibrate at a physically tangible presence... or evolved from an origin that it never had one.”

This insight strikes me so much! – lightning clear. but all these circles in the sand are coming together, continually. How tied we are to these experiences of making & breaking, starseeds, cosmic forces come from the “Lovers from Beyond the Stars.”

This Love, you come to me again, carrying me into the clearer waters of life.

“Auroville sont un rêve…”

The breath of this name, Auroville... I finally, finally began to understand the taste of this place, the hope of this place. Hope rooted in the land, in the caring for it, in the struggling for it, in the young people who were born and grew up here, nurtured by all of this. Ideals and hopefully not ideologies. The summary Dream of all multifaceted dreams of plurality: small, ordinary, great or all-encompassing in beautiful intentions, to realize Consciousness on this earth, this planet spinning in the vastful void. Living out dreams into the everyday reality of their lives. "Auroville sont un rêve..." - one that has the capacity and the hope to sustain all levels and manifestations of dreams and consciousnesses that its inhabitants and travellers will bring to bear here... the laboratory without for the laboratory within. Oh, I then felt the open space of potentiality in the air, in my breast, welling up in the quiet music of an Aurovilian night...

I found a magical playground of imagination here last night... Creation's seed of love rejoicing, treehouses of the imagination like you wouldn't believe! Motobike merry-go-round, gyroscope, swings and hammocks in a Daedalusian outpost... and the trees, who always have a particular consciousness of their own. I have just moved to a new place, out of the noisy chaos of the main road, and into the lands of Ami. Apparently, there is a young Indian next door who moved here when he was quite young - who is a self-described "multidimensional handyman" building inhabitable, interactive sculptures and gadgets to delight monkeys such as your dear fableteller. Much stands for itself in a quiet night without electricity, under moonlight's refulgent grace.

Here I was, sitting under a huge, lovely tree with two young Aurovilians last night, the handyman in presence. I am peppering them with questions as one of these Tourists who come here, usually quickly and superficially, to spend their money and time here trying to understand the soul of this place... and while some succeed and some do not... but I think I am starting to break out of this Tourist's skin… and I am beginning to see the gulf between those who root themselves here – and those who only come to pass through: transitory, hedging, unready, unsteady, afraid to plunge in – but taking with them precious seeds of something they can’t put their finger on...