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AUROVILLE
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Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics, and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity.
- The Mother Sept. 8, 1965
The International township of Auroville is situated 160 kilometers south of Chennai on the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu, near Pondicherry. Conceived as a city of 50,000 inhabitants, Auroville was inaugurated on 28 February 1968. During the inauguration ceremony, young people placed soil from 124 countries and 20 states of India into an urn at the center of the city, as a symbol of human unity. The design concept for Auroville has the form of a galaxy divided into four
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zones. These zones, which radiate outwards from the center, are named respectively the Residential, the Cultural, the Industrial, and the International Zone. At the center of the city in the Peace, the area stands the Matrimandir – the Soul of Auroville.
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Auroville is not meant to be an ordinary city. It is a city dedicated to the growth of consciousness and is founded on a spiritual ideal. Auroville is an experiment, where people of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds have come to live and work together in the spirit of peace and progressive harmony.
Presently Auroville is home to about 2500 people originating from 48 countries and every continent of the world. On a daily basis as many as 10,000 people interact with Auroville through work, research, volunteering, and as guests or visitors.
MOTHER'S DREAM
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Auroville belongs to nobody in particular.
Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole.
But to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
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Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
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Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
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The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity. Auroville is based on the vision that man is an evolutionary being with a spiritual destiny and human unity is a necessary next step in humanity’s evolution. The present world order does not provide answers to the human dilemma.
A new paradigm is required to take humanity forward. Human unity is essential for this, not unity through conformity, but unity in diversity. For this ideal to become a living reality nations need to be rooted in their uniqueness and yet aware of their deeper oneness with others.
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The General Assembly of UNESCO has four times unanimously passed resolutions of support for Auroville, inviting: “member states and international non-governmental organizations to participate in the development of Auroville as an international cultural town…” Auroville has also support from the European Union as well as a number of world Governments, and national and international NGOs.
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To discover more about Auroville, see the Auroville website at www.auroville.org
There should be somewhere upon the earth a place that no nation could claim as its sole property, a place where all human beings of goodwill, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony, where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his suffering and misery, to surmount his weakness and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the care for progress would get precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the seeking for pleasures and material enjoyments.
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In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls. Education would be given, not with a view to passing examinations and getting certificates and posts, but for enriching the existing faculties and bringing forth new ones. In this place, titles and positions would be supplanted by opportunities to serve and organize. The needs of the body will be provided for equally in the case of each and every one.
In the general organization intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority will find expression not in the enhancement of the pleasures and powers of life but in the increase of duties and responsibilities. Artistic beauty in all forms, painting, sculpture, music, and literature, will be available equally to all, with the opportunity to share in the joys they bring being limited solely by each one’s capacities and not by social or financial position.
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For in this ideal place money would be no more the sovereign lord. Individual merit will have greater importance than value due to material wealth and social position. Work would not be there as the means of gaining one’s livelihood, it would be the means whereby to express oneself, and develop one’s capacities and possibilities while doing at the same time service to the whole group, which on its side would provide for each one’s subsistence and for the field of his work.
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In brief, it would be a place where the relations among human beings, usually based almost exclusively upon competition and strife, would be replaced by relations of emulation for doing better, for collaboration, and relations of real brotherhood.