Let it not become a religion

We reached Pondicherry at 9:30 pm. An auto ride got us to the Aurobindo Ashram where we pleaded for two rooms. We got them in the New Guest House of the ashram. Every room in the guesthouse has a name like Dignity, Freedom, and Integrity. My room's name was Miracle. Providence?...We checked out of the guesthouse at nine and boarded a bus tour run by the tourism department. In what still remains of its French connection, there is a uniqueness that makes it different. As a fellow French traveler on the tour bus informed me, "It is different here, outside it is India again, but here it is different."

What I believe instead, is that this also, is India and there in lies her beauty. The tour began at the Aurobindo Ashram, which houses the samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This was followed by a visit to the Manakula Vinayakar temple, which has about 45 forms of Ganesha worshipped in and around India. Then it was onto the Pondicherry Museum, which had sections on archaeology, which displayed remains of Roman amphorae and coins excavated from Arikamedu.

The last attraction of the tour was a trip to Auroville. As the Auroville charter says, "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." On 28 February 1968, some 5,000 people assembled near the banyan tree at the center of the future township for an inauguration ceremony attended by representatives of 124 nations, including all the States of India. The representatives brought with them some soil from their homeland, to be mixed in a white marble-clad, lotus-shaped urn, now sited at the focal point of an amphitheatre.

In the center of the township, one finds the Matrimandir. On the outside, it is a large golden sphere, while the spacious Inner Chamber in the upper hemisphere of the structure is completely white, with white marble walls and white carpeting. In the center, a pure crystal-glass globe suffuses a ray of electronically guided sunlight, which falls on it through an opening at the apex of the sphere. There are no images, no organized meditations, no flowers, no incense, no religion or religious forms. It is the symbol of the Divine's answer to man's aspiration for perfection. I quote the Mother:

"Let it not become a religion. The failure of religion is... because they were divided. They wanted people to be religious to the exclusion of other religions, and every branch of knowledge has been a failure because it has been exclusive. What the new consciousness wants (it is on this that it insists) is: no more divisions. To be able to understand the spiritual extreme, the material extreme, and to find the meeting point, the point where that becomes a real force." by First Rain Monday, January 23, 2006 @ 11:40 PM from:New Delhi, Delhi, India