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A Nature throbbing with a Heart divine |
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Fall 2003 trip to Auroville, Hyderabad, and Pondicherry India |
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Contents India calls. India's great poet, politician and seer Sri Aurobindo called India the spiritual heart center of the earth, with its incomparable tradition of saints, visionaries and spiritual paths. India repels. Everything - death, beggars, filth, poverty, air polution, piles of garbage, polluted rivers and seashores - everything is out in the open, parading by, assaulting the senses, the conventions, the morality of the visitor. Where would you look? The inner life of the spirit that has produced some of the world's greatest scriptures, visionaries and art? The grinding poverty of the untouchables, the smog, the pervasive corruption, the crowding? Or both, the bright and the ugly, the spiritual wealth and the material poverty, the warmth and friendliness of the people or the theft and corruption rampant? India is on the move. It's people, more than a billion of them, with living cultures reaching back several millennia, are stretching vigorously into the 21st century. This India log is a record of my third journey to India, this time with a group of 18 people, many from Barbara Marx Hubbard's Gateway process, who answered India's call. My old friend, Prapanna Smith, John Robert Cornell Related Links Foundation for Conscious Evolution 
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Flight to LA The furious and focused packing and preparing came to an end last night. I had shut off most other things to concentrate on packing, gathering, deciding, planning. The office was a staging ground. The hard suitcase grew up and bulged. Kindling, planning for Karen, setting up a new TV, little shopping forays, all to create an empty space for the next five weeks. That grace can have room, that Auroville's magic can be experienced, that another trip to Sri Ramana's home can be undertaken. That many unforseen adventures can fall into place. Even today, last day at work for a while, help continued to come. Satyam representative Suresh gave me the contacts I need for Hyderabad. Karen burned a CD for me in a few minutes. All this effort to reach to a new something. I don't know what Mother has in store for me. A group meeting awaits. A set of new hopes, lights and darks. Karen takes me to the airport. Closeness and distance, both, for us. Pleasure in each other's company, sensuality, affection, pulses of loving. She is my sweetie. I care about what happens to her. But she is on her own time frame. I try to hold my tongue, to listen for her special rhythm. We are in the air, headed for LA. A dark child cries two seats in front of me. To be in grace again, a full bodied grace - that's my desire. The plane slants down toward LAX. Below, Los Angeles is lacy jewel strings in the night. Bigger jewels mark moving arteries of light. Everywhere the light seems to be rising out of the earth. Glowing points, partially organized into lines and densities. They come up from the earth, from storage where light buried itself in the earth long ago, undiscovered until our time. It is emerging now, setting the night aglow. But not yet turning the dark into something else. From the plane, all is still night, but night pierced by these emerging points of luminosity. The aircraft, powered by light, descends into a fairyland, earth's lacy garment. A delicate and lovely garment reaching up from the depths, where it has been buried for 250 million years. On the ground the light-lace is gone. Everywhere there is cranking and roaring of machines. Everywhere activity, a mad rush with no obvious pattern. But we can remember a different perspective from a few minutes ago, the same scene from a different angle. From a distance the view is of emergence - purposeful, organized, luminous, new born.
Aspiration The tinkling spots of The Angels, the rising of light from the earth and of the magic from my chest reawakens something sleeping, a kinship with the rising evolution, a sympathy and tolerance for the chaos below, the blind rushing and wanting and zagging in every direction. We are this, the one light is rising in the night of earth. The sun has reappeared after millions of years of burial. Eons. We feed off its stored black light, turn it into kiwis and railroad tracks and laughter. We use its stored generosity to search for the something that is unnamed. The something that makes us a people. 
From a distance, we remember something of origin. We watch the larger play of our own emergence. We long for the inrush of this burning one. Traveling west to the east, we move toward the subtler light that is India. Wild, intense, chaotic India. Like the emerging light of LA, this light is also rising and drawing visitors, the sleeping seekers, rubbing our eyes, looking for the dawn, feeling around for the other story, the new chapter in the creation story.
Whale's belly - LA to Taipei I carry my bags 3 blocks to the Tom Bradley terminal at LAX where the road bends back the way it came. The terminal is cavernous. Prapanna has already arrived with a few others. Carolyn and John come. The Roske's are there. Lots of new faces. The aircraft is huge. The perfect flight attendants of Singapore Airlines smile and point to the aisle where you will find your seat. The feeling of refinement is still there, surviving 9/11: the exquisite Asian manners and dress of the crew, the beautifully designed menu of international and Indian cuisine, the video-on-demand. Probably 25 movies to choose from, video games, TV programs, dozens of audio channels. The sardine feeling does not come on so strong because the plane is less than half full. We are starting to get to know one another. Our group made a circle outside the gate before boarding and spoke our intentions into the din of public announcements and people hurrying by. A groupness is already forming, tentatively, from the common drive to go to Auroville. Impressions of Carolyn and John, Jan, Mira, the two Rons are starting to leave their mark on the fabric of awareness. Prapanna is in charge, with his travel experience and love of India. Bill sits with Prapanna and me in a window set of three seats. He's been to Auroville twice before. The first time during its inauguration in 1968 and again in 1980. His excitement is contained but visible. Karen's presence drifts across my image world. She will be up and getting ready for work today, alone on her own, courageously facing the next steps of her life.
Time and Taipei to Singapore We hurtle along, ahead of the solar dawn, in a bird of steel, a flying whale. We cross the international dateline and instantly hyperdrive 12.5 hours into the future. The long night, racing the sun across the ocean, past Hawaii and Okinawa. 20 hours of night, like the far North in the winter. The sun finally catches us in Taipei. California time is 2:30 Tuesday afternoon; Taiwan time: 5:30 am Wednesday. We land in the shadow of China. Tiny Taiwan, little island standing up to a billion people, who are about to launch their first human into space. We are already in the ambience of Asia. A minor clash back at the LA airport first signaled it. A travel agent had told Prapanna that we could change our Singapore Air return date there. The manager behind the counter at the Singapore Airlines desk was embarrassed. He told me we couldn't do it for economy class. We would have to wait till we reached Singapore or even Chennai. Prapanna was annoyed. The man recoiled at his energy and apologized for something he had not done. The flair quickly died away. I thought of the importance of saving face in Asia, even the little Asia in LAX. First time I really enjoy a flight this long. The service from the crew staff has been gracious, setting a tone for this leg of the journey. A courteous and friendly spirit of service. My friend Devan, who once ran this airline, would be proud of his former staff. The plane is half empty, lots of room to stretch. We speak and read of Sri Aurobindo. The emerging lines of his vision and work a matter of recognition instead of a pipe dream. Taipei is our first stop. It has a huge, rich airport, dedicated to Chaing Kaichek, the Nationalist general defeated by Mao and the Red Army and driven to Taiwan. It feels beautiful in a modern, clean, hard-edged way. No warmth, contrasting uncomfortably with the Singapore Airlines crew on the first leg of our journey. Now we are threading between China and Southeast Asia to the west, and the Indonesian archipelago to the east. The aircraft on this leg of the journey is crowded, few empty seats. We are back to sardineland. The space is diminished in the crowded aircraft. The vast spacious Pacific is behind us. Clouds cover the earth and sea below. Prapanna dozes on my right in the window seat. Bill waits on my left.
Singapore to Chennai I am rummy by the time we get to Singapore. We have an eight-hour stopover here. We wander around the airport trying to get our bearings. Bill and I negotiate Diane in a wheelchair and our carry-on luggage. I am sweating when we finally get to the reception desk. Although the group has reservations to rest at transit hotels at two different terminals, the clerks agree to put us all up at the same place. Prapanna, Ron and I share a room. Simple, clean, quiet, even though we are right beside the runway. A shower is delicious. This still has a Western flavor. We are definitely not in India yet. After a short sleep, I head for the internet station. Can't seem to get beyond the logon screen using the wireless connection on my iBook. I don't think it is accepting my credit card. Just as I am leaving, the attendant comes up to me to ask whether I got in. She tells me that the ethernet hookup is free. I whip out my handy ethernet cable and I'm able to get on and send a quick email to Karen before meeting the group at the gate. The plane is full again on this last hop, from Singapore to Chennai. Soon India will hit us in the face.
Verite First Day We leave the Singapore plane and walk into Madras, now renamed Chennai. I keep waiting for the wave of chaos to hit. Is this the airport where Karen and I spent a whole night drenched in tropical humidity a decade ago waiting for a late plane to arrive? There are newly painted rooms and halls practically empty. The air conditioning works. The long lines of arriving passengers are orderly, and the immigration service has a mission statement posted on the wall, promising, in English and perhaps Hindi or Tamil, swift and courteous service. The agent smiles briefly when I wish him good evening and hand him passport and immigration form. Already this is a new India. Many dark eyes watch as we emerge from the airport, but Matthew, Prapanna's son, is not among them. We mill about in sultry night air, warding off eager taxi drivers and mosquitos. It's about midnight. Finally Prapanna reaches Matt by cell phone. At first we think he has been waiting at the domestic terminal instead of the international one. Instead I find out later that he was in our area all along, just a little confused as to where to meet us.
Musky India. The same smell, a combination of auto exhaust, outdoor cooking, and the vegetation near Chennai, mixed with the odor of piles of damp garbage near the road. Auroville, a thirty-year-old township founded by the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, is our destination. It lies a hundred miles south of Chennai, just north of the old French colonial city of Pondicherry. The bus ride stretches out like the plane ride. This trip seems like one very long night. Auroville looks dark and wild at 4:00 am. It is Thursday morning here, but time has stretched out until its meaning breaks and snaps back in pieces. We have been traveling almost continuously since Monday evening. About 60 hours by the clock, but that includes the 12 1/2 hours we jumped forward at the international dateline. We arrive at Verité, the Auroville community where we will stay the next two weeks, at 4:30. No one is awake. Katherine, an American Aurovillian, is supposed to be our Verité guide, but she is in bed with a fever. Someone arouses Aurelio. His eyes fill with kind amusement as our leaders try to salvage our Thursday schedule. We could go to bed and get up in an hour and a half or just stay up and get some breakfast. There are rooms to assign. Who will stay in the "capsules," the sleeping platforms with thatched roof and woven palm-leaf walls? Who gets a room with an adjoining bathroom?
You climb a ladder to a bamboo floor, suspended 6 feet off the ground on granite pillars. The pillars rest in pools of water to keep out the ants and other crawling things. Auroville is essentially jungle, transformed from a barren, semi-desert plateau by the determined greenwork of Auroville's pioneers. Settlements like Verité, housing an international population of about 1500, dot the jungle, connected by red dirt lanes and paths. Some day Auroville will house 50,000 people. After a rest and some lunch, we set out on bicycles for the Matrimandir. Indian traffic will be an experience for everyone during their stay. You drive on the left side in India, like the UK. The biggest vehicle gets the right of way. This remote corner of Auroville is a good place to try out your Indian driving legs: dirt roads with very little traffic. I am supposed to lead the way to the Matrimandir while Prapanna takes care of some other business. I get some quick directions from Jurgen, a member of the Verité community, to jog my memory. Ron A. and I head down the red-clay, tree-covered lane a little ahead of the others. I look back at him. We are both grinning. Yahoo! Back in India! Headed for the magnificent Matrimandir, Temple of the Mother. India, says Kathleen, is swimming in feminine energy. |
organized the trip. Like his name, Prapanna is a mixture of East and West. He has lived in India and taught at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry. He has founded the 
Matt swings luggage on the roof of the bus Prapanna has hired to drive us to Auroville. Members of our group get their first taste of beggar children and a young man aggressively seeking a "tip" in euros. Several people shop for cold bottled water. Finally the bus is under way.
After a very early breakfast, we straggle to our living quarters. Prapanna and I will share a capsule. Jan and Janette are persuaded to take the other one. |
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