India Log - Family of the Aspiration

The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge.
- Sri Aurobindo

Fall 2003 trip to Auroville, Hyderabad, and Pondicherry India

Contents
(chronological):
Flight to LA
Aspiration
Whale's belly - LA to Taipei
Time and Taipei to Singapore
Singapore to Chennai
Verite First Day
Pondicherry First Day
Auroville Tour
Adventures All Day
Auroville Tour Second Day
Discipline and Mud Bricks
Auroville Tour Last Day
Richard, Kailas, and Danya
Sraddhalu and Prarthna
Arunachala
Around the Sacred Mountain
Goodbye to Tiru
Auroville Gold
Paradise Lost
Blessing
Auroville Overflow
Hyderabad Express
Taj Krishna
Satyam First Day
Golconda Fort
A Wider Context
More Magic
The White Temple
Charminar
Hyderabad Tour
Dinner Party
Tension
Fog
Ravi, Rainbow and Royalty
Glimpses
The Time Has Come
Auroville Once More
Darshan
Big Changes
Day of the Grace
Soul's Home

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, 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 first US school based on the integral education philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. His son Matthew is finishing up 10 years of such schooling in Pondicherry.

John Robert Cornell

About the author

Returning to India is like coming home again. This is my third and longest visit. Behind the noise, the chaos, the dirt on the outside of India is something that deeply appeals to me. Perhaps I live here in some alternate lifetime. Perhaps it's just the ease with which many Indians speak of the other world.

When my daughter was a little girl I remember telling her that her name was a social convention that didn't say who she really was. Now I see that a convention like a name can reveal as well as conceal. Her first and middle names mean, respectively, Promise and Veil of the Divine. In any case, we make use of social conventions, so here are some that travel along with me.

I was born in Kentucky during World War II of Irish/English immigrant stock. My earliest years wound, gypsy-like, along the highway. My dad played sax and clarinet in a traveling band. When my family settled down for the children's school years, I became deeply involved with the Catholic Church, culminating in 10 years of seminary studies to be a Catholic priest. During those years I immersed myself in philosophy and theology, but at the last minute I decided against that direction and began to move and look west (which becomes East, if you look far enough), away from Europe. I stopped along the way in Colorado and Arizona, getting married, fathering a daughter, teaching, earning a degree in anthropology, and doing research in Mexico. All the time I was looking for something more.

You could say that I am a classic Irish misfit, unable to identify strongly with any social role, but finding various loves along the way: Karen, my dear wife. Writing, publishing, teaching, counseling, graphic design, backpacking, folk music. Mountains and wildness. And light. I am haunted by light.

I met Sri Aurobindo and Mother in the early 80's by the grace of a spiritual teacher named Elena DeJoya. For a long time I felt that since I met them in the US, in Sacramento, California, and in the nearby foothills, why go to India? But one afternoon, after a hike in the mountains with a long time devotee, Karen and I suddenly knew we were going to Pondicherry. We made our first trip in 1994, for two weeks. In the winter of 1998-1999 I returned there with my daughter, who had already spent a semester in India during college. Now I am delighted to be going again. Still, I wonder what is the American yoga, because we can't all go and live in Pondicherry or Auroville.

Currently Karen and I live in a small town in the California foothills. I am finishing a book about the epiphany of the sacred in the landforms of the American West and working as a technical writer for a computer company. Karen is a graphic artist and painter. My daughter, Maraya, is earning her MFA in creative writing in Alabama.

I am interested to see what next the unseen Mystery unfolds out of the future.

John Robert Cornell

Time voyages with Thee upon its prow
And all the future's passionate hope is Thou.
- "Because Thou Art," by Sri Aurobindo

Contact information

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