SADHANA FOREST- AUROVILLE

The rich brown red of soil freshly broken, clumps under my bare toes, squelching warm against my skin.

Sadhana Forest is a reforestation project and part of the Auroville international community outside Pondicherry. The aim is to reforest the landscape with native trees and develop water conservation, soil erosion control and vegan organic gardening. We stayed for two weeks-sleeping in large communal bamboo huts, planting trees, cooking vegan food, riding bicycles down dirt tracks with no lights, bonfires by the edge of the mud pool, making close friendships, sun heated water showers from buckets, compost toilets (a profound realisation of the usefulness of our waste and how uncivilised it is to pump it into the sea as 'waste' when its the soil that needs it and can use it) and, of course, trying to find a way to live in harmony with the mosquitoes....and inevitably trying to squash the mothers whenever we could.

I planted my first ever tree and sang quietly to it...a song for growth. Tree planting seems such a powerful act yet sometimes we do it with no sense of wonder. Sometimes the heat, the sweat, the hard digging under the hot sun distracts my mind from the sanctity of planting and growing life. I step back, and see in the recently disturbed red gash below me, a small, fragile branch of green. Almost lost beneath my soil encrusted boots, this small, insignificant and fragile green is what I depend on. I thought I was here to 'help' nature, to look after these trees....only now do I see how they help us, how they look after us. This green, almost irrelevant in its smallness, has the power to grant life with its oxygen and soil nutrients. This work of digging and planting grows trees, but it is also nurtures us.

Auroville http://www.auroville.org/ (make your own mind up)
...a place of unsettling contradictions....they say we are united as they build their walls to keep the locals out, they say we are all equal as they make rules for special treatment....all these thoughts course through my mind as I look on the great ball of gold before me-the Matrimandir.

I have been here for a month, and still I do not understand this international community. Instead of community, I feel clear divisions between insiders and outsiders. Instead of a new humanity I see disturbing snippets of class and race divisions, the same story that has plagued humanity throughout the ages. But on this day, I finally arrange a tour to the Matrimandir...I finally make the effort to learn more about the foundations of this place. Amidst the cold-war world of paranoia and national divisions, Auroville was founded in 1968 as 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 realise human unity." With their own hands and money, people from all over the world came to build this city, founded on unity in diversity rather than national conformity, and live a life focused on developing human consciousness. The 'heart' of the community is the Matrimandir-a space for the meditation needed in order to sustain this search for a new human consciousness.

And so I walk slowly and silently up the stairs, into the open mouth of this golden globe. Inside the soft white carpets, white walls and soft green and red lighting create a sense of a cocoon, the womb, a sense of the source of life...and I try not to think of all the dodgy B-class sci-fi movies from the 1960's! We walk up in spirals and enter the inner meditation chamber...a circular room of white. At it's centre the world's largest crystal in spherical form reflects our inverted image back to us. No religious icons, no visual stimulants other than our own reflection. Just us, the deafening silence, and a solitary shaft of light streaming from the high ceiling onto the crystal. And so we sit, in the deepest silence I have ever heard, we sit, cut off from the world and life, we sit and we settle into the silence and all that it has to say...

"No fixed meditations, none of all that, but they should stay there in silence, in silence and concentration. A place for trying to find one's consciousness" (The Mother)

Stepping out into the day's sunshine later, it takes me a long time to fully return. I sit under an ancient Banyan tree and allow my mind to listen and absorb life again after the darkness and silence. I watch humans moving, breathing, sitting, laughing....I watch humans watching humans watching life...and I realise sometimes we need both the spaces of life and no-life in order to reflect. We have caves in which to cut off from life and enter the dark of our minds. And we have trees and sunsets and sea shores to sit by and reflect on the beauty of life and our place in it. And despite my positive experience inside the Matrimandir, I still cannot reconcile the doctrine of a new humanity to the globe before me- built in gold in one of the world's poorest countries. We have all this God made nature yet we seek to build our own spaces of worship....it leaves me wondering if it is God we are seeking to worship in these spaces or is it ourselves? Is it merely a temple to our own strength and ability we come to worship?