By Robert E. Wilkinson ©
‘Thousands of years ago we were already being promised the advent of a new consciousness, a new world, something divine that would manifest on Earth, but all that was really said was, “it will be, it will be.” [Well]… the Miracle has happened... A new world, yes, a completely new world is born and here. Yet even now, there are very few people who are aware of its birth and of the difference it brings into the world.’ The Mother
As the Age of Pisces drew to a close the Mighty God Vishnu, preserver of the universe, took human birth as the 9th in his Line of Ten Avatars. Under the impeccable control of Mahakala, the Time Spirit, his Avatar was born in Calcutta, India on August 15th, 1872. The birth of Sri Aurobindo, as he was later known, marked the beginning of the most important series of events in the history of our planet. It was, said the Mother, ‘a decisive action direct from the Supreme’ heralding the advent of a new consciousness and a completely new world.
During their time on earth, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother worked tirelessly to bring down this new consciousness and create appropriate forms for its physical manifestation. The most important of these forms was the Mother’s plan for a Vedic Temple which was to be built according to the ancient science of ‘Vaastu Vidya’ at the center of the microcosmic world, which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had founded in Pondicherry; the point where its axial power could establish itself and bring harmony to the earth. But owing to the ignorance and bad faith of her disciples the Mother’s plan for her temple was systematically destroyed. One by one the elements of its sublime design were altered until not one was left intact. 1. And when this abomination began to take form in concrete and steel, its mutilated dimensions began to produce calamitous effects in the field of its occult influence generating disunity and a palpable distortion of consciousness that continues on to this very day. The disciples who rejected the Mother’s plan and those who continue to live under the toxic influence of the aberration built in her name, express an almost blind resistance to the new Supramental consciousness. And because of the tamasic intransigence of these so-called devotees who have usurped control of Sri Aurobindo’s work and message, Vishnu’s Line remains unrecognized and unacknowledged and its incomparable influence on the earth’s evolution is virtually unknown.
Today the ‘City of Dawn’, named for Sri Aurobindo and designed by the Mother to be the living embodiment of this new consciousness, has failed utterly to live up to its promise. Rather than being a microcosm of human unity under the governance of the Divine, Auroville has become a botched experiment, a ward of the State and a stronghold of dogma and orthodoxy working at cross purposes to Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s express commands. What was intended to be the soul of their New Creation and cradle of the Supramental Being has instead become a wasteland of consciousness radiating confusion, distortion and disunity throughout India and the World. And if Sri Aurobindo has said, ‘whenever a single soul is realized, there is a tendency to an extension of the same divine self-consciousness in other individual souls of our terrestrial humanity’, what kind of extended terrestrial effect might we expect from Auroville’s obfuscation of the Gnostic realization for the last 43 years? Anyone familiar with the occult principles which the Mother observed throughout her life, and of which she was the greatest adept, will immediately recognize why Auroville’s continuing failures have made it a danger to the world and a willful impediment to Indian unity.
As we explore the genesis of Auroville’s failures we find that it follows an old and familiar pattern found in many spiritual communities. It is a well known fact that lesser mortals rush to fill the void and absence of authority once the guru departs. What inevitably follows is the formation of a cult that seizes the guru’s teachings and crystallizes them into a rigid mental dogma over which they preside as ‘owners’ of the new truth. It is widely known that this is exactly what took place after the passing of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. What was intended as a place for the realization of human unity, unending education and an aspiration for the highest truth quickly became a closed camp. Realization soon gave way to dogma and instead of the hierarchy of consciousness that the Mother envisioned, rule by the many of the lowest calibre became the norm. Qualities of goodwill, sincerity, a constant aspiration to know the truth and a willingness to submit to it, aptitudes demanded by the Mother of those living in Auroville, were supplanted by a rigid mental tyranny stamping out any opposition to the orthodoxy imposed by the usurpers. 2. Under this cultish oppression all discussion stopped, thoughtful challenges to the ills of orthodoxy were rejected out of hand with the added insult that whoever disagreed with them was ‘deluded’, ‘schizophrenic’ or worse.
To illustrate just how intolerable this situation has become, one of Sri Aurobindo’s more thoughtful devotees, Harish Kumar, wrote an Open Letter to the entire Aurobindonian community asking why there is such a lack of meaningful discourse among serious students of Sri Aurobindo’s life and Yoga. Citing an article by Thea (Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet) regarding the revelation of the Supramental Formula contained in Sri Aurobindo’s very own symbol, Kumar writes:
‘…Thea's cosmology has proven empirically that Sri Aurobindo is Vishnu's 9th Avatar according to rigorous Vedic prescriptions, she has proven that Sri Aurobindo's most conclusive victory was the process of his death and return, what exactly that means in the Supramental Manifestation, and why it was necessary. She has presented the Formula he cemented in his own symbol and shown how it has worked meticulously in India particularly through two Lines, Solar and Lunar, and how the entire development of the new independent India has taken place according to His Formula.
Yet, we neither see an enthusiastic acceptance nor an informed criticism of her works. Why exactly are her prescriptions wrong? What exactly is the mechanism of the operations of Supermind, if not the one explained by Thea? We do not hear anything on these lines. Instead all we hear is mindless accusations levelled against her, ad hominem attacks, false charges and accusations of self-glorification from self-styled spokespersons of the community…’
To read the Full Text of Harish Kumar’s ‘OPEN LETTER TO THE AUROBINDONIAN COMMUNITY’
http://www.the-mountaintop.blogspot.com/
To date, there has been no response to Harish Kumar’s letter. His important observations and questions have been answered by the Aurobindonian community with a stunning silence. Of course, having rejected the existence of a Supramental empiricism and its attendant symbol language the community of devotees has NO UNDERSTANDING and NOTHING TO REPLY. This is the pathetic state of those claiming to be at the forefront of the most important spiritual work in human history. Yet these same people continue to hold themselves out as the final authority on Sri Aurobindo’s work and message. 3. Their unexamined self-importance proceeds from an arrogant intellectual egoism that sees nothing yet thinks it knows all. It is the same brand of mental hubris that provoked the Mother to write the following about the disciples who rejected her temple plan:
“…what they see is all mental, They do not know. Who is there that knows? It is only when one sees. There is not one of them who sees...’ The Mother, Matrimandir Dialogues
It goes without saying that nothing has changed since January 1970 when the Mother made this remarkable observation. Today, no one in Auroville SEES and to disguise this self-evident fact, they have closed ranks and adopted a strategy of stonewalling and denial. And since the takeover by the Indian government in 1988, they are now accountable to no one. But the predictable fate of any ‘closed system’, as Auroville has now become, is a terminal collapse. Like a stagnant pond, its atmosphere has become toxic and grows more poisonous every day. And without the constant aspiration for and vibrant exchange of knowledge that the Mother demanded, it is simply impossible to keep the surrounding environment alive. The most poignant example of this stagnation malaise is revealed through Auroville’s failure to its children. In a 2010 report written on the youth of Auroville by Carissa Devine, a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, we find the following statement:
'...Auroville has not reached where it is supposed to be, and despair is a constant threat to its citizens, especially to its own children. Children are amenable; they are curious and teachable. That being said, they are a vivid reflection of the living culture in which they grow. But instead of having faith in Auroville, it seems that most of its offspring are barely holding on to hope… The old won’t let go, they won’t let the youth make their mistakes...Workshops and dialogue seem futile, we have done this. It is something bigger. We have gone through this process and the stubborn dogmatic attitudes stay....Even if you have six months training [to join an influential committee], they dogmatize you; if you don’t understand like them, you’re out!” Instead of feeling empowered and encouraged to express their creative will, they are feeling the weight of bureaucracy, a deadly stagnation for any society.’
‘Losing faith in faith: A brief examination of the youth in Auroville’, Carissa Devine - Fulbright Nehru scholar, 2009‐2010 [bold emphasis mine]
The thoughtful comments of this exceptional scholar testify to the unhealthy atmosphere in Auroville that is afflicting its children with hopelessness and despair. But Ms. Devine’s honest and objective appraisal of the situation barely scratches the surface of the underlying problem because the author does not have the keys to that Gnosis which would allow her to understand the situation at its core. For the most thorough analysis of Ms. Devine’s observations I have included a link to Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s commentary for students of the New Way.
A Commentary for students of the New Way on:
LOSING FAITH IN FAITH:
a brief examination of Carissa Devine’s report on the youth in Auroville
To read the Full Text of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s commentary
http://pnb-questions-answers.blogspot.com/2011/07/auroville-gropes-in-dark-after-having.html
One could go on and on cataloging the problems of Auroville, its lies, fraud, and disobedience but the basic facts remain that after the passing of the Mother in 1973, there was a complete breakdown of order. Unremitting conflict between the SAS (Sri Aurobindo Society) and other factions led to charges of fraud, misuse of funds and lawsuits that finally concluded with the management of Auroville being taken over by the Indian government through a 1988 act of Parliament. This was against the explicit wishes of the Mother who had written earlier:
‘I do not know who told you that – but there is a misunderstanding somewhere because to hand over the Management of Auroville to any country or any group however big it may be is an absolute impossibility.’ The Mother, in a handwritten note, 1970, Chronicles of the Inner Chamber, p. 10.
But by this time, the Mother’s wishes were routinely ignored and Auroville was fully under the control of forces of deception, distortion, and misdirection that had lodged themselves at the heart of her new creation. In the years that followed every publication that issued from the Ashram or Auroville misrepresented the epochal work that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had come to achieve. And because it represented such a dire threat to their pretentions of authority, Auroville’s new rulers vehemently denied the continuation of Sri Aurobindo’s line and fostered the perception that He and the Mother had failed in their missions. In spite of their irrefutable bona fides, any mention of a Third and a Fourth in their line were and continue to be denied, suppressed or ridiculed by the Auroville elites. With only the blind to lead the blind the ignorance and toxicity of the community grew progressively worse. This fact was recently highlighted by the controversial book written in 2008 by Peter Heehs entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. In the pages of this shameful text the author reduces his Guru to a ridiculous caricature and de-contextualizes his life and work in virtually the same manner that the Mother’s disciples systematically destroyed her temple. 4. This has made it abundantly clear that nothing of truth or value can emerge from the black hole of consciousness that Auroville has now become.
On February 28, 1968, over 5000 people from 121 countries and 23 Indian states assembled in what was then the outskirts of Pondicherry and listened to the Auroville Charter being read out by the Mother. Today, the utopian township that was designed for 50,000 citizens has now dwindled to an adult population of barely 1,700 residents. 5. We must ask ourselves WHY has a community that began with such promise failed so miserably? WHY are the children of Auroville suffering from hopelessness and despair? WHY were the disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who so generously supported their work defrauded of over 35 crores of rupees ($8 million USD) poured into the construction of a Matrimandir which was knowingly misrepresented to the public as faithful to the Mother’s original design? And WHY were the repeated attempts by persons of knowledge to correct this travesty and hold open and transparent hearings on the sacred dimensions of the Mother’s temple stonewalled and denied by the Auroville elites; people with vested interests who feared having their deceitful activities exposed to the light of day? The unavoidable answer to these questions is that for 43 years Auroville has been under the influence of ignorant forces hostile to the success and fulfillment of the Mother’s vision. If it were otherwise, given the incomparable wisdom that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought into the world, Auroville would be the most successful spiritual center on earth. But the facts do not lie, what we see in Auroville today is the truth of WHAT IS. And this leaves us no option but to agree with the Mother’s disgust and the statement she made about Auroville shortly before her passing.
‘Auroville will become what it must be: only if and when the people living there will stop lying.’ The Mother, Mother’s Agenda, 1973.
One of the great Sufi teachers of our time made a prescient statement that goes to the very heart of the issues raised in this paper. Describing the complex challenges of our times, Bulent Rauf, known to his students as Hamid wrote:
‘...It is those who have reached the knowledge of their essential unity with God who will forge the way and build a new world. Before this new world can be brought into being, however, it is said that there are to be two confrontations. The first confrontation will be between those who know and those who do not want to know and the second will be between those who know and those who will have to know.’ Hamid [bold emphasis mine]
The first of Hamid’s confrontations between those who know and ‘those who do not want to know’ is going on now with Auroville and the Aurobindonian community. The second confrontation, with those ‘who will have to know’ must be with the leaders of India.
As one of the greatest seers of all time, the Mother had a unique insight into the occult realities of India and the godhead that it represents. India is the natural habitat of Vishnu’s avatars and, as the center of our Aquarian age, the one place on the earth that could extend their yogic achievements out into the world. Looking deeply into India’s soul the Mother wrote the following:
‘INDIA is a divinely chosen country with a unique spiritual heritage. She is not the earth, rivers and mountains, nor simply the collective name for the inhabitants of this land. India is a living being, conscious of her mission in the world and waiting for the exterior means of its manifestation… India alone can lead the earth to peace and a new world order.’ The Mother: Words of the Mother. [bold emphasis mine]
But for India to realize this unique destiny and embrace her mission as light of the world, her leaders must be willing to open themselves to the incomparable wisdom that Sri Aurobindo and his line have unveiled. They must also discover the truth of India’s more esoteric realities and apply this knowledge toward the recovery of her true dharma. The first step of this journey must begin with a clear understanding that the origin of India’s destiny and the means of its external manifestation is written in her ancient Soul. As Thea, third in Sri Aurobindo’s line explains:
‘The destiny of India is guided by a power that descends directly from the world of the Truth-Consciousness; but unless the nation recognises this, it can only respond to a leadership of a lesser force and suffer the ensuing consequences.’ Thea, The New Way, 1981.
An indispensable part of the recognition that Thea mentions is an appreciation of the principles of a new Indo-centric Cosmology by which India is revealed as the Soul of the Earth. When the dynamics of this New Cosmology are understood, Auroville and the Ashram will immediately be recognized as microcosmic examples of the disunity and corruption that presently afflicts India herself. Moreover, they will be SEEN as a cautionary tale of the fate that befalls an individual, state or nation who rejects the truth and imperatives of their own Soul. If this degradation is to be corrected, Auroville must be brought into line with the demands of Truth and the needs of Indian Unity. There must be an immediate end to the obstruction and lies and full and open hearings must be held on the Matrimandir that has been so disingenuously put forward as true and faithful to the Mother’s original Vedic plan. The consequences of continuing inaction in these matters raises the spectre of a wider calamity for Auroville, India and the World. As the Mother warned:
‘Before dying, falsehood rises in full swing. Still people understand only the lesson of Catastrophe. Will it have to come before they open their eyes to the truth? I ask an effort from all so that it has not to be. It is only the truth that can save us; truth in words, truth in action, truth in will, truth in feelings. It is a choice between serving the truth or being destroyed.’ A message issued by the Mother on 26 November, 1972
Any thoughtful person cannot help but recognize that we have reached a major evolutionary turning point. We are living through the terminal stages of an old and dying world. But the New World is born and here, just as the Mother said, only it remains unknown, unrecognized and unattainable for most because the obscurantists in Auroville have suppressed the very knowledge that makes that New World visible. What is required for its realization is a determined effort from all to secure this new knowledge and move joyously into the future as conscious collaborators with Earth's emerging Soul.
******
For a full and comprehensive analysis of the New Cosmology, India’s unique role in the world and the means of its global manifestation, I have included a link to my article:
INDIA & The New Cosmology
An Analysis of Critical Present Events in the Light of Gnosis
To read the Full Text of Robert E. Wilkinson’s essay:
http://indiacosmology.blogspot.com/
Notes & Comments:
1. The Matrimandir and the History of its Deformation: - The Matrimandir Dialogues 31.12.69-17.1.70: http://www.aeongroup.com/momtem.htm While the facts of the destruction of the Mother’s Vedic Temple plan are beyond dispute, her devotees continue to hide behind a wall of impenetrable dogma refusing to discuss the issues that are indispensible for and provide access to the entire Supramental revelation.
2. Tyranny of Orthodoxy: In 1971 Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet moved from Rome to Pondicherry where she worked in close proximity to the Mother absorbing the supramental knowledge that She was giving out and that finally culminated in the plan for Her Temple. Patrizia was an active member of the Ashram, writing books, teaching classes, contributing articles to Mother India magazine and developing important relationships with many of the older sadhaks involved in Sri Aurobindo’s work. After the Mother’s passing in 1973, Patrizia became intimately involved in the activities surrounding the construction of the Matrimandir and in 1977 she wrote a 48 page memorandum for Ashram circulation only entitled ‘What is wrong with Matrimandir – A survey of its first six years, the effects it has produced and their world wide implications’. This memorandum detailed the entire Matrimandir saga from its inception with the Mother’s explicit instructions as to its meaning and construction as well as a chronology of Her followers systematic destruction of the Mother’s plan. Patrizia’s refusal to accept the distortions to the Mother’s true design earned her the enmity of the Auroville elites who, to this day, have done everything in their power to eliminate any mention of Patrizia from the ‘official’ historical record. In spite of her 16 books and hundreds of articles on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Supramental Cosmology, Sacred Architecture and the Vedic scriptures, many of which have been warmly received by the Ashram Trustees and made part of the permanent record of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, you will find no mention of Patrizia on any of the Sri Aurobindo websites or the lengthy historical record of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s work carried on Wikipedia. After numerous attempts to correct the Wikipedia record and cite Ms. Norelli-Bachelet’s indispensible and ongoing contributions to their work, her students discovered that their carefully documented and respectful postings were systematically deleted by Wiki editors. In discussions that followed it was learned that members of the Auroconference group openly hostile to Ms. Norelli-Bachelet and her work had influenced much of this dismissive activity with regard to postings about Ms. Norelli-Bachelet.
3. Example of Authoritarian Hypocrisy: In 2007 Lynda Lester, president of the Sri Aurobindo Association and a member of the All USA Meeting (AUM) Continuity Committee co-hosted a panel discussion at the California Institute of Integral Studies entitled ‘Facing the Challenge of Integral Yoga Fundamentalism’. Her opening remarks read as follows, ‘Sri Aurobindo and [The] Mother did not want to found a new religion… but we do see a few examples of fundamentalism …’. Lester then proceeded through a list of four offenders the last of which is ‘a small but aggressive group of people following Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet who are into esoteric numerology and claim the Matrimandir is a temple of falsehood because the measurements are wrong.’ A conference billed by AUM as an opportunity for greater transparency to heal divisions, and build bridges of trust became yet another occasion to demean, denigrate, and deny anything that would reveal their long standing incompetence and bad will. Ignoring the Mother’s own criticisms that her followers, ‘… do not know... There is not one of them who sees’, Lester continued in that tradition by glibly rejecting an entire field of knowledge that the Mother singled out in her Agenda as essential to making the Supermind knowable. When the Mother wrote in her Agenda of the Supermind being intelligible through ‘Number, Planets and Principles’, she was referring of course to the ancient language of cosmology. But today, those of us who have bothered to study Plato and Pythagoras and appreciate how PNB has raised this sublime knowledge of measure to the level of a non-speculative Supramental empiricism, are considered by Lester and her cronies to be ‘fundamentalists’ and outside the bounds of Aurobindonian orthodoxy. It should also be noted that Number theory, while important as the Mother suggested, does not constitute the whole of PNB’s work as Lester tries to imply. Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet is the most prolific and widely published author on the subject of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the world today. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Rig Veda and has published 16 books and hundreds of articles on Yoga, Myth, Time, Cosmology, Geo-politics, Sacred Architecture and the Vedic scriptures, many of which have been carried in India’s most prestigious newspapers and journals. She has been a keynote speaker at conferences around the world and also at a number of Indian national conferences on Vedic Culture and Cosmology, most recently the 2010 First National Conference on Panchanga Ganitam, sponsored by the Hindu Dharma Archarya Sabha. This is hardly the CV of a fundamentalist as Lester would have us believe. For Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet’s full curriculum vitae see: http://patrizianorellibachelet.com/TNWblog/?page_id=42
4. The Heehs Betrayal: In an attempt to defend the shoddy scholarship behind The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, Peter Heehs excuses himself from what should have been the only genuine concern of his biographical research by claiming that the revelation of Sri Aurobindo as the 9th Avatar of Vedic tradition was a distracting hagiographic idealization in which he had no real interest.
‘…What about the assertion that Aurobindo was an avatar? I can’t say that the question interests me very much. Aurobindo never claimed the distinction for himself, and I don’t think anyone alive is in a position to say one way or the other…’ (Peter Heehs, from the Columbia website)
For persons of knowledge, the arrogance of this statement is simply breathtaking. Unfortunately it reflects a long standing attitude of the Auroville Brahmin who claim to ‘adore Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’ while simultaneously suppressing their work. It is as if the Vedic tradition of the Avatar is meaningless, even though it is sanctified by the Gita in Sri Krishna’s own words, and Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s as well. Moreover, Heehs’ contention that no one alive today is in a position to say one way or another belies an embarrassing lack of research on his part or, more likely, a calculated decision to ignore the volumes of objective proofs that have been published by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet and accepted as part of the permanent record of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives; an organization which lists Heehs as one of its founding members.
Given the voluminous and non-speculative proofs of Sri Aurobindo’s Avataric credentials on file in the Ashram Archives and Heehs ready access to this material, his only reason for making such a disingenuous statement is that he, like his cronies in Auroville, know that the Supramental proofs of Sri Aurobindo’s avatarhood also include the irrefutable credentials of the Third in the line as well as the details of Sri Aurobindo’s rebirth as the Fourth. Moreover, they know that any acknowledgement of these objective proofs would mean an immediate end to the rule of orthodoxy and its stultifying dogma that has reduced this most important spiritual work of the age to an arrogant, fundamentalist and elitist cult.
It is as if a cadre of hard line Tibetan Buddhist fundamentalists had taken over the Potala Palace and refused to acknowledge the rebirth of the next Dalai Lama so they could continue to indulge their self-important pretentions as the unchallenged leaders of their faith.
It is clearly time for this ignorance and hypocrisy to come to an end. For a detailed introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s Avataric credentials, see: http://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2011/06/sathya-sai-baba-counterfeit-avatar.html
5. Census: - Auroville population June 2011 - http://www.auroville.org/society/av_population.htm
