Thursday, January 20: The Pure White Crystal Sanctuary of Auroville

Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and the Matrimindar Meditation Chamber

Ahhh. So this is what it's all about. It's about escape. Escape from the dirt and cacophony of Indian life. Escape from the psychic bonds of western culture. It is all peace and cleanliness, isolation from the hoards. My friends in San Francisco were right. Ashrams are a necessary part of the westerner's visit to India.

With its wide boulevards and French restaurants, chic shopping street and seaside location, Pondicherry is not a bad place for a westerner. France relinquished it over 40 years ago but croissants and baguettes are as commonplace as idli and samosas. Still, it is an Indian city, full of shouting and blaring horns, open gutters streaming with motor oil, shit, and all kinds of garbage. It is still a constant barrage of the "hello! hello!" of the rickshaw drivers, the "give me schoolpen!" of the children, and the plaintive "ma!" caw of scarred lepers begging rupees with outstretched hands that, if you look at them, are scarred and fingerless. It is difficult to hand a rupee to a person with no hand, to balance it in an outstretched palm puffed and scarred with the scraping of everyday life.

For many westerners, India is an obstacle course to the ashram. It is the test of sincerity. If you can handle it, you're in. I was in, but all I sincerely wanted was to take a look around, to see what the fuss was all about. I left my shoes outside the gates, got a numbered piece of rusty tin in exchange, and crossed the hot black asphalt street to the cool white cement shade of the Sri Aurobindo ashram dining hall. My feet thanked the smooth cool floors as I followed the trail of others into the covered dining hall, through airy rooms where people sat on the floor on mats and ate from metal trays and bowls set on small wooden tables.

Pick up a metal tray and plate and go through the line: someone dollops brown rice on my plate, another contributed a bowl of yellow sauce, another a bowl of yogurt, and another threw a teaspoon of sugar on top of it. Moving along, another placed two tiny yellow bananas on the plate, another two slices of brown bread, at a table was a woman ladling filtered water into metal cups.

I ate in silence, but not in peace. A lovely young Indian girl, her hair in pigtails tied with pink bows, sat with her family and stared at me and other westerners in our vicinity. It was obvious she'd never before been in such close proximity and being only 10 or so, she couldn't help gawking. A breeze brought in the scent of incense. The cement floor was cold on the sides of my feet but sitting on the thin cushion I was surprisingly comfortable. The girl still gawked. I caught her eye and made a silly face. She choked in surprise and nearly had to spit out her mouthful of rice. I looked innocently down at my own plate as her mother softly scolded. When I looked up again the girl was grinning from ear to ear.

Most of the four dining rooms were filled with Indians. Perhaps ten percent were westerners, half of them seasoned ashram-hoppers, some with dreadlocks, all with impressive tans and arrays of cheap handmade jewelry made here or somewhere else in Asia. Most wore colorful Indian cotton pants and shirts, many looking quite threadbare, as were their brightly colored packs. Even to my eye they were exotic looking creatures. No wonder the girl was gawking. The other half of the western set looked straight out of Midwestern suburbia, mostly middle-aged white women wearing long flowing dresses or Indian pants and tunic.

At the ashram itself a few buildings down is the shared tomb of Sri Aurobindo and his "main" devotee cum successor of his vision they call "the Mother." A French-born psychic and occultist, she took over leadership of the ashram when Sri Aurobindo died, and it still exists here in Pondicherry pretty much as it was intended. The Mother had her own vision, too, that of Auroville. "There should be somewhere on Earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world."

An ongoing experiment in communal and ecological living, I took a quick look at it the day I arrived in Pondicherry. The place reminds me a lot of Arcosanti near Phoenix, Arizona. Built by visionary architect Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti is an arcology -- a city structure that leaves the environment around it intact, unlike the suburban sprawl we cannot possibly continue creating. Here in India, Auroville is also a project with an ecological focus, also only built to a fraction of its potential, and also struggling to survive. (I wrote about Arcosanti in the American Borders dispatches and have subsequently, through Michael Gosney and his Paradox Project become a bit more intimate with the concepts around the creation of ecological and spiritual community building, city planning, and the staggering complexities inherent in these kinds of efforts.)

Like Arcosanti, it is difficult to get intimate with Auroville unless you stay there for a couple of weeks or longer to become involved in one or another of its many projects. Riding around on the motorcycle I was mostly struck by the "whiteness" of the place. There seemed more white people there than in San Francisco, and the dominant language seemed to be French. Other than that, it was hard to tell what the place was all about. It's difficult to pick out the city places from the private. Other than the visitors' center and the Matrimindar meditation chamber (the geographical center and "heart" of the whole place), there isn't much to see, unless you go to the solar kitchen area to have a cappuccino and organic muffin at the outdoor cafe.

I picked up a free pass to join the hoards that visit Matrimindar meditation chamber, featuring what is claimed to be the largest crystal in the world. Each day at 4 p.m. busloads of tourists, mostly from India, come to gawk at it, and the structure that surrounds it. It is bizarre, to say the least, resembling a huge gray golf ball capped with flattened gold metal of different sizes, like mushrooms sprouting from its head. It has the bulk of a large apartment building, and sits on a naked stretch of earth in an otherwise lush and expansive garden, including a nearby Banyan tree of impressive breadth.

For admission to this place you must appear at the visitors center, a 15 minute walk from Matrimindar, before 4 pm to receive a free pass. Then you have to check your bags and cameras. Then you have to wait in line. Then you have to walk down a long dirt road through the garden in absolute silence. Then you have to take off your shoes where they tell you to and put them exactly in a row where they tell you to make a perfect square around a specially groomed square of grass maintained just for shoe-organizing purposes. Then you have to listen to another lecture about maintaining absolute silence. Then you have to walk barefoot down the rest of the dirt road to a ramp where a man takes your pass and puts two punchholes in it. Then you may walk into the maw of this huge bizarre cement ball. And then you are finally in it, in the huge round shade of it.

Inside, not surprisingly, it is like being inside a hollowed out huge cement ball. There are some ship-like portholes in many of the flat triangular faces that make up the sides of the ball. A ramp curls up the inside of the structure, following its contour. A cement cylinder protrudes from the top of the ball, and this contains the meditation chamber. People file past, and I move up the ramp, my bare feet sore from the walk up on jute carpets, and tired from standing for so long, hanging on to the metal railing, being in this cement thing that's still under construction. I can't wait to leave, and ride around on the bike a bit more, and maybe have another coffee, find the good baguette shop in Pondicherry...

But then it is my turn to view the chamber and it is absolute white perfection. There was never so much white in one place at one time as in this circular chamber. In a glimpse it is magical. It hovers. It is so pure that it may detach from this round thing and jet upwards to heaven under its own power. The floor is white marble covered in white carpets which are piled with white meditation cushions. The white pillars reach three stories high and fall just short of attaching to a white domed ceiling, at the top of which is an opening where a sunbeam is caught and channeled to the floor where sits a pure white crystal ball the size of which two people might just get their arms around. The crystal glows clear and white and gray. I want to stand there forever, but I'm pushed from behind, my turn is over.

How do you get to meditate in the chamber? I asked. Well, turns out that you only need wait for the throngs to leave, go to the bag and camera checkpoint, and give them your pass that is punched with the two holes. They will exchange that for a card you can keep to meditate from 5 pm to 6 pm up to 15 times. You can then take your bag and camera and walk back to the structure, remove your shoes at the top of the ramp, put on a pair of white socks, and enter.

PURE WHITE CRYSTAL ESCAPE

The door shuts behind me and I am in the muffled white crystal womb of it, warm and silent but for the quiet presence of a handful of other people seriously concentrating. Padding softly around the room I chose an empty white cushion by a column, sit down, cross my legs, and look straight up. The columns, about a dozen of them, are about 2 feet in diameter and shoot to the ceiling. They stop just short of the dome as if they were holding up a sort of air cushion to support it. A beam of light is directed from a small opening at the apex of the ceiling downward to the top of the crystal. This perfect crystal ball is almost too large to contemplate. From where I sit the light beam hits the crystal and separates into seven tiny lights that, like a skipping rock, zigs and then zags from the top of the crystal. My eye follows the lights, three bright white, the fourth prismatic, the fifth, sixth, and seventh also white disappearing into to the bottom of the crystal where it becomes gray and cloudy.

I take another deep breath and concentrate on the prismatic light. Someone else enters the chamber and walks all the way around the round chamber to a cushion at the farthest point from the doorway. The other people in the room re just lumps of flesh, not really there at all. It is actually like what I imagine it might feel like to be in an alien spaceship. An elegant, luxurious alien spaceship. I take another breath and concentrate. Will I be able to sit still for an entire hour? I've always felt a bit frustrated attempting to meditate, and have never really succeeding in anything more than an uncomfortable doze. Accepting thoughts and discarding them becomes a full-time occupation. But here... maybe. I notice that the only thing that isn't white in this room is the gold stand upon which the huge crystal balances. It's formed from gold six-pointed stars that look to be cut from flat squares. Each star is made of intersecting triangles. My eye follows each triangle from start to finish. I count all the things about them, their tips, the number of triangles, the number of holes in the intersecting triangles. I speculate on the possibility that the triangles that I can't see match the ones I can see and I calculate the number of triangles and the number of holes in the triangles and the number of points holding up the crystal and the number of points that attach the four flat star shapes to one another to make the stand. I count the marble segments on the floor to see if they match the number of star-points or triangles or multiply or divide into the number of white columns, and that is the last thought before I think of nothing and I am nowhere. Really nowhere, without being aware that I am nowhere.

But of course I don't know that at the time. It is only as if there was no "I" to perceive that I was nowhere. There is only a fullness and a depth and a profound sense of having rested when the lights come gently up and then down again. It was only then that I realize that I have not kept track of my self.

Which is the point, isn't it?

I float through the cacophony of Indian traffic, so dark and bright and dirty in contrast to the soft white purity of nonexistence that I had just experienced. Bugs fly into my face, lights glare, horns blare, but I have joined the stream of it, acting on instinct instead of fear, beeping and passing and being beeped at and passed, becoming a part of the psychic flow of it until I arrive back at the guesthouse by the sea.

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