The Consciousness in Things

A very interesting comment by a visitor having until now never expressed herself, prompts me to take up the topic she talks about, as the subject of this next post on my Research Blog:
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On 12/27/2012 11:38 PM, WordPress wrote:

New comment waiting approval on Lab of Evolution Anneli Karlsten Montin commented on The Inner Meaning I See in What Happened Here RecentlyBhaga, thanks for your blog posts, I find them peaceful, funny and curious, and also deeply interesting. I found Olga Kharitidis book about Altai, Umai etc really fascinating, and it reminded me that we can approach the truth about life’s reality from different angles, and still find the same source in the bottom. I wonder now, are you familiar with the work of Machaelle Wright? I have studied her books and workshops for some 6 years now, and use what I have learned from there daily. She is in conscious contact with the intelligence within form around (and within) us, and she simply describes her experiences and what she has come to understand about this aspect of life. She calls it nature intelligence, and it is the conscious life that is all form (more specifically the devic level that designs the forms, the nature spirit level that inhabits and lives in the forms). We humans have our free will, but not the all-covering knowledge about balance. We may be in contact with this nature intelligence unconsciously (when we follow our gut instinct) and create some really good things, or we may be far from in contact with it, and just go ahead and create very unbalanced versions of our intentions. Here, in this conclusion of her discoverings, it is not that we are making manifestations happen, we are not “gods”, but instead nature follows our intentions, our focus, and simply create it for us according to the choices we make with our free will, in order for us to learn from what we just created. We get to know ourselves, and now it is also time, urges Machaelle (after being deeply involved in communicating with nature for 35 years, and to apply their knowledge), to get to know nature intelligence. We are equal, co-creative partners in an involutionary/evolutionary balance, where we make the decisions in what to do and what to create here in our daily lives and on earth, meanwhile nature supplies the matter, means and action to make it come into five sense form. If we keep neglecting all the immediate and all-covering knowledge about dynamic balance in life (in every level of existence, micro and macro), we keep creating very unbalanced results around us. If we start turning to the intelligence within form, and ask “How is it appropriate to build this house/vehicle/garden?”, then we get results that are highly balanced.I both wanted to present you with this concept and hear your thoughts or maybe even experiences from this, and also I wanted to let you know where I come from in my view of life (as a way to present myself at the same time, since I don’t have any blog of my own yet, which by the way seems really stimulating to have…) .Kindest regards, Anneli, Sweden Approve  Trash | Mark as Spam More information about Anneli Karlsten Montin IP: 83.226.78.204, c-cc4ee253.5707940–62697410.cust.bredbandsbolaget.se E-mail: anneli.karlsten@hotmail.com URL: Whois: http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/83.226.78.204 Thanks for flying with WordPress.com

At the time of writing this, my internet connection, as often, isn’t working, so I have been unable to go and check anything yet about Machaelle Wright, but I guess I can still start answering Anneli just from the viewpoint on this offered by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, as well as from the direct experience I happen to have had myself about this for many years.
What is certainly a distinctive aspect of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s evolutive vision and work is that:
1/ it includes the transformation of Matter too, and
2/ this transformation of Matter is to happen through a gradual awakening of the consciousness that has been present since ever in Matter itself, just as in every other level of the One Reality there is.
In this blog, what I mostly speak of regarding this, is the awakening of our body-cells’ consciousness, because this new development is already a fact difficult enough for most people to become used to, for a start!…
But Evolution is definitely not concerned with us Humans only, the new Consciousness-Force now at work everywhere on this planet is affecting everything.
Moreover, the very reason why it was indispensable for this new Energy to be activated at last in the atmosphere and very substance of the Earth, was that only this Supramental Energy, and not the other energies activated one after the other for the previous steps of terrestrial evolution, would have the power necessary for the consciousness in Matter itself to finally awaken back to its own secret divine nature. Without this awakening and divinisation of Matter too, one could never really speak of a ‘Life Divine’ upon Earth, for our poor physical bodies would be condemned to remaining in their present condition, which is far from being divine, with the constant and ineluctable threat of wound, disease or death. The tremendous unused potential that even scientists are starting to see in our DNA and in the normal immortality of our body-cells would remain only that: an unused potential.
In the past some of us humans had been awakening at other levels of our being, thanks to the growing activity of the spirit within each of us, for Evolution kept leading us forward, as a species too, into a life more and more influenced and guided from within by our innermost being: our soul.
But our physical body and generally all things physical were still considered off limits for this gradual spiritualisation of our being: Matter in itself was still believed to be alien and opposed to the Spirit, and devoid of consciousness.
This is changing, though. More and more of our renowned contemporary scientists now refute the materialistic dogma that is still the official basis of our therefore obviously futile attempts to understand the world in which we live, and ourselves within that world: more and more experiments everywhere show the undeniable presence of some form of consciousness, and even of will-power and capacity of choice, in everything, down to the quantum particles that are the very constituents of Matter.
The work of Pr. Amit Goswamy is particularly revealing and daring in this regard.
But we who concern ourselves, not in abstractions, but in what can be practically done already in our lives dedicated to Conscious Evolution, will not wait for the mainstream scientists to finally acknowledge the truth: with or without their permission, we will immediately take advantage of all the possibilities offered to us by this factual truth that Spirit and Matter are actually one, two forms of the very same unique Reality that everything there is, is part of.
Since ever there have been human beings capable of contacting the vibratory contents left in objects (rings, for example) by those who at some point used them on a daily basis, and of restituting the experiential origin of those vibratory ‘recordings’, with all the vividness of the visual and emotional situation, be it from centuries or millennia ago, a capacity known as Psychometry today.
And even more commonly, every modern man who has taken care of his beloved car like so many of them still do in spite of living in a ‘consumers’ society’ that pushes them to change their car again and again; most men build a relationship with their car that they know is really reciprocated by the car in some way, as crazy as this may seem to a dry rational mind. I remember a wonderful book by Lyall Watson that focused on that particularity of objects in general to last longer or remain in better condition than normal, because of the amount of actual tenderness their owners bestow upon them. In Lyall Watson’s findings, the opposite was true too: there were many cases of objects of all kinds taking revenge, so to say, on their careless or brutal owners by finding ways to hurt them or sometimes even kill them if they could manage that!!!
When I read that book, I was not surprised by those findings: in our little world of Auroville, I am well-known for the uncanny way the objects and clothes I use last much longer than they generally do for other people. I must say I am indeed the caring type to an especially high degree, and build up a little relationship with everything that is part of my daily world, and this may include sometimes everything I happen to come in contact with outside of my world.
Some other Aurovilians, not to mention all the ‘normal ‘ persons I also meet, probably consider me a bit queer if they see me saying a few words to the object I hold, or caressing it briefly the way I would an animal pet, but I know I am right, and my body knows it too: just as I am writing this, the body-cells in both my hands, although quite busy typing all these words for me on my laptop, still communicated fervently their own approval to me by suddenly warming up and sending to my central consciousness the memory of a totally unexpected (as usual…) but so moving experience I had years ago:
I was doing the dishes; and I was not doing the dishes consciously at that precise moment, I was doing them as unconsciously as anybody else would who is not leading a life of Conscious Evolution. I must have been preoccupied by some stupid usual human reason for being preoccupied, so instead of paying attention to what I was doing, I was washing those dishes with my mind somewhere else… when suddenly my attention was brought back to what was really happening – for something was indeed happening, something very special, down there in that sink, between my hands and those dishes they were washing: my hands – not me, but my hands – were full of love, radiating it quietly but so strongly it was the intense feeling of that love that had pulled my attention back there; slowly, lovingly, they were caressing the dishes they were washing, with as much tenderness and care as a mama would her child; and the cups and plates and bowls were responding joyously to their touch, and sending back love too to them, it was a wonderful flow of love from matter to matter, like a dance of love within Matter itself, so utterly sweet and moving that a few tears of soul joy rolled down my cheeks, while I was witnessing this so simple, yet so miraculous little event happening silently in that sink, on this small planet, in this tiny corner of the universe…

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• Hands can become independently conscious (auromere.wordpress.com)

The Inner Meaning I See in What Happened Here Recently

Of course as always what has happened here over the last few weeks is not to be seen superficially, but in the context of the evolutive purpose of the very existence of Auroville as a whole, and, within that whole, of my own individual existence as well.
I am certainly not a daredevil trying to prove myself to the world or to my own eyes. I am not the adventurous type, rather the opposite. But whether scared or not, if I see and feel clearly that I must take a certain stand/do a certain action, I can’t help but doing it!… It has been the same already when I came to Auroville: I was terribly scared, actually I thought I was completely mad to go live in a place where everything would be so difficult, but at the same time I knew that this was the only choice for me, the only decision worth taking, the one that would really make the most out of this present lifetime I had finally decided to go on living. So although all the rest of my being was scared, my soul still won, and dragged all the rest, kicking and screaming, all the way to India, because that’s where Auroville was, and my soul wanted to participate in Auroville.
So I am not really brave at all, as some people believe: I wish they were right!… In fact my soul only is brave, the other parts of my being just have to follow, that’s all, however miserable they may feel doing so. Same thing about my so called strong will-power: it’s not strong at all, it’s just that I find myself sometimes saying or doing things with great force from some inner strength, while I am astonished at saying or doing those things without having had any conscious intention of doing or saying them…! Yet, there is a kind of inner certainty that this is the correct thing for me to say or do at that moment, and it is that inner certitude that gives me this unexpected strength against even the opinion of the bewildered others, or physical circumstances.
As for those others, they too are playing their role, whether knowingly or not, in this overall script that will have the best possible result for the inner growth of each of us and for the whole process of our collective evolution as well. Auroville is but one sub-play inside the overall  terrestrial Play at this point of its linear time, illusory but agreed upon by all participants as indispensable to the acting out of the Play.
I’ll explain what I feel I myself and Auroville have progressed upon through these recent events:
I was not quite sure I was really detached enough to let go of that house without much emotional distress if ever it became necessary; well, it did become necessary, and so I was able to see how well I took this loss, which at some point seemed bound to happen quite inevitably. I  can say now that I really was not terribly affected; on the other hand even after moving out to this other house because the worst of the cyclone was still to come according to the meteo, still something in me kept having more faith in the Divine than in the meteorological predictions, and I slept soundly that night… only to discover the next morning that no cyclone had happened and that my house, o complete delight, was still in the vertical position.
Yet the slight threat to the front foundations was still the same, and that is what motivated at last one capable person to intervene without waiting any further.
The funny thing is that at first, like all the others who had come before to urge me to move out, etc, he too came back from looking at those front foundations, saying something like ‘oh my god, what a terrible weather and a dangerous situation’, etc etc; but I suddenly couldn’t take it anymore, I just exploded, and blasted the poor guy right in front of the other persons who were there that morning at the Kitchen:
 ’Stop this!!! Stop this nonsense!!! Of course it will go on like this if all of you keep imagining only that it will, instead of imagining deliberately another outcome, another possible future for this house, for this whole place!!! All those negative thoughts do nothing but attract the catastrophes they predict and anticipate, so please, if you really want to help, first stop this !…’
He was so stunned by my words, which he at once realized were right, it turned him around completely, and he decided there and then that he would not only change his thinking, but also add some immediate action to insure a more positive future: he would take up the protection of my house.
And so he did the very next day.
The email he at the same time sent around to all our major administrative Groups in Auroville had a contagious effect, and they too joined in that effort, each one in its own independant way; the interesting thing is that all of it became a concerted effort and a collaboration that no one had envisaged before, but which nevertheless happened, for the good of Auroville as a whole, I believe, breaking at last through the inertia and apathy that had been until then the only collective response to our plight on the beach.
Then the ocean itself in the following days became so calm I was able to go again in the water, and even to float and swim blissfully on my back, something I had not been doing since many months because the ocean was too rough!…
Next came the change in direction of the current, and the waves starting to deposit sand instead of taking it away!!! Day after day the high cliff dug out all along the shore became less high, it was being filled, and by now there is almost no difference in level anymore.
What a complete change.
Even the expected cyclone’s disappearance may have had to do with a change in way of thinking on the part of all the friends of mine who had come just before, nearly mourning me already, and insistently proposing to me other refuges more inland, in their own places for example; to all I had as patiently as I could explained how their own worrying thoughts were actually likely to make the very result they dreaded become true, and I had urged them to start countering any dire meteorological prediction by deliberate thoughts of a more positive script. Perhaps they all did start to do just that afterwards regarding this anticipated cyclone, and that sent it away indeed!!!
In any case, that time, not having my laptop, I didn’t have any possibility of calling upon you all, visitors to this blog who in other occasions had helped inwardly with such magnificent results; so that time it must have been just my own faith plus the changed thought of those other Aurovilians that were enough to push the danger away… With as always the help of the Divine Grace of course.
Well, all this experimentation with our collective thoughts has been for me a most fascinating thing to watch over this year, every time with a significant outcome… Thanks to all for their participation in this  spontaneously extended research work somehow sparked by this humble blog for the Laboratory of Evolution not only in Auroville itself, but all over the planet!… So, congratulations, and please keep at it, especially when you are not hearing anymore from me, which is generally a sign of trouble, as you may have noticed…!

 

English: Beautiful view of Pondicherry Auroville Beach (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Air du Large

 

Hier soir, j’ai passé du temps allongée sous les étoiles sur ma petite terrasse “Plein Ciel”, simple plateforme découverte, érigée entre ciel et terre. Là, l’euphorie habituelle de la brise marine passant sur moi m’a reprise comme souvent, et faible témoignage des profonds sentiments qui me relient à la plage et à l’océan, un fervent poème a pris forme en moi, que j’ai mis par écrit depuis. Le voici, dédié à l”Air du Large”:

 

Combien de fois sur mon visage
T’ai-je senti,
Air du Large?

 

Combien de fois au cours des âges
T’ai-je chéri,
Air du Large?

 

Ce vent frais, fort, qui caresse au passage,
Vent d’Infini,
Air du Large…

 

Sur ma terrasse au-dessus de la plage
Je te bénis,
Air du Large,

 

Vent de Vastitude où je nage,
Epanouie,
Air du Large…

 

De ta légèreté sauvage
Tu me remplis,
Air du Large…

 

De ce que j’aime en ce monde d’images,
Tu fais partie,
Air du Large:

 

Tu me rappelles, à la fois fort et sage,
Ce que Je Suis,
Air du Large…

 

Did Sri Aurobindo & The Mother Foresee This Time?

Yes, we are rapidly coming already towards the last part of this famous Year 2012 that is supposed to mark the end of things as we know them, and the beginning of… Something Else.

Did Sri Aurobindo and the Mother foresee such a special period as the one we find ourselves in presently?

In Sri Aurobindo’s great poem, ‘Savitri’,  there is a passage when Ashwapathy, the King in ancient India who will become the father of the feminine divine Incarnation that will be Savitri, tells how his consciousness, in a moment of extraordinary vision, saw the far future of the Earth:

‘It saw from timelessness the works of Time.
Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,
Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space:
The unfolding Image showed the things to come.
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past;
There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;
Earth was o’errun with fire and the roar of Death
Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;
There was a clangour of Destruction’s wings:
The Titan battle-cry was in my ears,
Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.”

Well, even for those readers from the West who have no idea what ‘A giant dance of Shiva’ might mean, the following lines make it pretty clear, and rather frighteningly so, I would say. The present period, with its extraordinary profusion of earthquakes and tsunamis and cyclones and weather extremes and the floods or raging fires they bring all over the planet, to the extent that the kind of catastrophe that usually made the headlines in the news, now hardly gets mentioned at all, seems quite correctly described in Sri Aurobindo’s lines, along with the constant threat of generalized war among the bomb explosions by fanatics murdering people in the most unexpected places and circumstances.
As is said from the start, what this ‘giant dance of Shiva’ does is to tear the past. An awful period, but useful…
And then, surprise: the next lines of Sri Aurobindo’s poem and of Ashwapathy’s vision couldn’t be more in contrast with the preceding ones:

‘I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude,
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them across the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal’s glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the spirit’s light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty’s sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love’s laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture’s golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature’s face.’

Thus we come to know, together with Ashwapathy, that ‘All shall be done for which our pain was borne’.
This is already quite a comforting revelation, which can give us the courage to go through the ‘tearing of the past’ that in our time is possibly still not over.
And some of the parents who have read the lines above may have recognized with awe some of the amazing children that have been born to them in the recent years.
Children being born more conscious than was usually the case before have been noticed also by the Mother among the new-born babies from Auroville who were brought to her as early as 1965, and in the next few years. As the Mother left her own body in the end of 1973, after that date we don’t have her testimony any more to tell us whether this phenomenon continued, but if I myself can judge just from some of the few more recently born Auroville children I happen to have met, my answer will be a resounding ‘Yes’.

I remember also how stunned I have been in my early years of life in Auroville, as I discovered in some documents retrieved from the hasty oblivion of most other human beings,  that the Mother, speaking about Auroville, had made the casual but startling remark that in the future, there would be snow here.
This was said in the late Sixties, at a time when no one had heard yet of Climate Change; and even now what is talked about mostly is the global warming that comes first, but only a few scientists are aware that it is all a cyclical, recurrent change, in which the initial warming is followed later by some form of short Ice Age.

Did Sri Aurobindo or the Mother ever give any date for the major changes they too foresaw in the future of the Earth?

I remember another passing remark by the Mother, in a volume of her ‘Agenda’; she was chuckling while talking about the year 2000: that year, she was saying, would be ‘the beginning of the real changes’…!

As for Sri Aurobindo, as far as I know (but I may be mistaken) he didn’t give a definite date as the beginning or the end of that critical period we seem to be in. But the way he described the final Major Change seems to indicate at least quite clearly that it will happen very abruptly; here are some other lines from ‘Savitri’, on page 55 already, where it is all revealed in advance:

UNIQUE PICTURE: Earth as seen from the outer Solar System (Photo credit: Icarus Kuwait)

‘Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.
When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast
And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thief’s in the night will be the covert tread
Of one who steps unseen into his house.
A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,
A Power into mind’s inner chamber steal,
A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss,
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.
(…)
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.’

Wow.
I don’t know about you, but I hope we are very near the moment when all this will happen and we find ourselves all of a sudden in an inexplicably but wonderfully changed world.
Does the darkness need to deepen yet more? Do we have yet to reach the stage when our corporeal mind is the only lamp? Really, I hope not, for things are already difficult enough, I would say, I certainly don’t want that they get still worse, if that can be at all avoided.
But even if it cannot be helped… Wow.  What incredibly magnificent Future is awaiting us. It was truly all worth it…

Ecology & our Evolving Human Consciousness

Because of my young friend Apoorva and the topics she and her boyfriend are specializing on, my latest posts have been touching upon Ecology and the environmental concerns that are its corollaries, very important in our life here as Aurovilians.
Human beings usually don’t realize it because it is all happening so naturally, so smoothly, but many new, contemporary concepts, such as Ecology itself, precisely, and the very perception of our interdependence with our Environment, are concepts born of our ongoing evolution: such all-embracing concepts are so vast they could be born only in this last century, from the new consciousness growing in us, vaster than the ordinary human mind we had before.
Conversely, those new concepts have spread rapidly to practically the whole of Humanity, thanks to the technical means most recently invented by this mind of ours, ever vaster now because it is evolving rapidly, under the constant influence of the higher Consciousness, beyond the Mind Power, that is gradually taking its place as the new leader of Terrestrial Evolution.
The Mind Power’s characteristic way of working was analytic, that is, differentiating everything – hence its divisive effect on our religions and whatever else our minds would consider; we would always see the differences, what was dividing us, rather than the elements in common that could unify us.
The New Consciousness presiding now to the further evolution of this planet doesn’t belong to the Mind any more, it is the Supramental Consciousness, and it is based on the contrary on the perception of Unity, because it has the utter Vastness necessary to see the Whole in its all-inclusiveness.
This is how we have this perception, which seems so natural and obvious nowadays, of our being one Human Family; but it is something new, that very few human beings were capable of feeling before.
I still remember the sense of awe and inner recognition of Truth when long ago, in school, during the Latin class, we were given one day that quote from Terentius, which said (I still know the exact Latin words):

‘Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto’.

‘I am a human; of whatever is human nothing I consider as alien to me.” – my free, but accurate translation of the beautiful meaning expressed by Terentius, exceptional in the ancient time when he expressed it, but already reaching far into the future and our time, when humans would be more evolved and many more human minds would be able to think in the same universal way as this wonderful precursor, Terentius.

Another great precursor, and much closer to us in time, was J.R.R. Tolkien: he saw even beyond humanity, and was one of the very first ‘ecologists’ before the term was invented, expressing throughout his writings, with great intensity, our oneness with all nature, and the dangers of indiscriminate industrial development. In his adult age he had had the utter sadness of seeing the destruction of the beautiful English countryside that he had been so happy in during his early childhood, and that he immortalized in the area of his ‘Middle-earth’ that he named ‘The Shire’, cherished home of the Hobbits in their comfortable ‘holes’,

Bag End, as used in the Lord of the Rings films. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

and secretly protected by Gandalf himself and by his princely friend, Aragorn the Dunadan, so that this charming little paradise and its mostly unspoiled and happy population would have a chance to go on prospering and evolving into a nicer, simpler and gentler kind of humanity than most of the Big Folk tended to be…

The Elves too, the Fair Folk, were living in communion with Nature, in an even deeper and more refined manner, to the point of obtaining results from it that other races would see as Magic: in ‘The Lord of the Rings’, when the Fellowship is leaving the Galadhrim of Lothlorien, they are given first some ‘lembas’, simple but wonderful food to be kept for times of need; and then:

‘The Elves next unwrapped and gave to each of the Company the clothes they had brought. For each they had provided a hood and cloak, made according to his size, of the light but warm silken stuff that the Galadhrim wove. It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as shallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars. Each cloak was fastened about the neck with a brooch like a green  leaf veined with silver.

‘Are these magic cloaks? asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder.

‘I do not know what you mean by that’, answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land.

Galadriel, the Lady of the Galadhrim in Lothlorien (photo from ‘The Hobbit’ on Facebook)

They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. Yet they are garments, not armour, and they will not turn shaft or blade. But they should serve you well: they are light to wear, and warm enough or cool enough at need. And you will find them a great aid in keeping you out of the sight of unfriendly eyes, whether you walk among the stones or the trees. You are indeed high in the favour of the Lady! For she herself and her maidens wove this stuff; and never before have we clad strangers in the garb of our own people.’

Not only do the Elves care about the tall woods in which they live, they are also the friends of the Ents, whom they call ‘Onodrim”, a very ancient, remarkable treelike species of Tree-Herders, whose way of experiencing life is, as described by Tolkien, the closest I have ever found to the actual consciousness and feelings a tree may truly be having. All the passages in the story that include the Ents are worth reading, for anyone who loves trees; and in their entirety both ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ are a veritable and most enjoyable ode to Nature, in spite of the scary aspects it may have as well as the delightful ones.

This deep connection with Nature, that Tolkien himself had all his life, he bestowed on the species he valued most among all those with whom he populated his ‘Middle-earth’, that is, his vision of the central area of the Earth itself, at a much earlier time of its evolution; but, after the necessary period of eclipse while we, the descendants of the ‘Mortal Men’ who when the Elves left at the end of  that era, took the lead of terrestrial evolution and explored to the full the possibilities given by Mental Power, this deep connection with Nature is destined to grow back into our hearts as we keep evolving and the Elvish qualities re-emerge, to blend harmoniously with the Human ones.

Perhaps it is this Elvish re-emergence that we see starting to happen, with the appearance of Ecology and care for the Environment in our present world!…

Kaliveli Tank: ‘The World of the Winged’

Auroville is mostly known until now for the tremendous work that has been done here to reclaim the vast desert of sand and laterite that was all that was left of that land when the first settlers arrived on the barren plateau in the early seventies.
Well, I was among them.
Not that I had ever dreamed of becoming a pioneer of that kind – on the contrary, all this hard work was a far cry from what I had thought at first would be my initial contribution to the collective life being started here. But digging holes and carrying buckets of water and running, stick in hand, after emaciated goats and cows, were the needs of the hour at that time, so it is what I did like everybody else, lost with a unique companion in some arid vasts we had courageously planted with seedlings. Once a week, a bullock-cart would bring two barrels of water that would have to do for everything: to drink, cook, wash ourselves, wash our dishes and clothes, and water the seedlings during the full week. After a few weeks like that, I had become an expert in the art of washing my teeth with only one cup and having a full shower with only a half bucket of that so precious water…
Perhaps two years later, I had the opportunity to take the bus that was bringing from the Ashram in Pondicherry the visitors interested in seeing the first settlements of Auroville. We had very few and very bad roads linking those settlements separated by long distances; on our cycles, going from one place to another represented a long and difficult journey. I realised one day that the bus would be a very pleasant alternative way to discover the other already starting Auroville places I had only heard of.
At some point the bus arrived in a place that was nestled nicely along the big road to what was still then ‘Madras’.
That place wasn’t just starting: its cement buildings that had served as customs offices or something like that, were in the shade of large trees that had stood there obviously since long. When we all got down from the bus, the tourists and I, I stopped in my tracks: I had suddenly heard a sound, a marvelous sound I had almost forgotten existed: birds singing in the trees.
Elsewhere in Auroville, there were no trees. No old trees left, and no new trees yet either.
No trees meant no birds, and so, no birdsong.
My heart sank. I realized for the first time that it had been two long, hard years since I had heard a bird sing.

If some of you have read the self-introducing note written by my young friend Apoorva (see my previous post), you will have seen that she mentions the Kaliveli Tank, a great bird sanctuary that old-timers like me in Auroville all remember with fondness, as it is an important element in that bio-region around Auroville that we greatly contributed in the early years to save and develop into the beautiful example of biodiversity it is now.
In Auroville we have all kinds of people, also some biologists. One of them, Boris, is from Russia. For years his simple and deliciously imaginative way of writing some small pieces about Nature owed him a regular place in our internal weekly newsletter, the ‘News & Notes’. Here is one such short piece, written in March 2004, that I am posting here because it is precisely speaking, in Boris’ inimitable way, of that Kaliveli Tank:

News & Notes 6 March 2004

The World of the Winged – by Boris

“A bird has been described as a feathered biped. This description is apt and can apply to no other animal.” (Salim Ali).

‘When the Almighty created the birds, He jumped in joy: “It is very well done!” Maybe at the same time the Lord decided to create the Kaliveli tank too. So many birds gather in this place during the winter season! In February the larks sing in the sky beautifully, like music of the spheres. Their songs are gentle and sweet, they fly like beautiful singing flowers. Everyone who sees and hears these marvellous musicians wants to jump in joy as the Great Creator did at one time.

Eric and Iyanar (from Pitchandikulam) together with me (from Aspiration) visited Kaliveli tank in the morning of February 17th. It is a paradise for bird watching. There were numerous pelicans, egrets, storks, lapwings, herons etc. etc. One by one the predatory pied harriers slowly flew in search of available prey. The females are brown in colour, but the males are very bright – ashy grey body with black tipped wings.

Kaliveli tank is close to Auroville. Now it has a lot of water but in summer the tank becomes totally dry. The Uppukally Creek and Yedanthittu Estuary which tie it with the Bay of Bengal, have a special regime: water at full moon time moves to Kaliveli and in the period of the new moon they have an opposite current. There aren’t so many mosquitoes and frogs in the creek and estuary: its water is salty – of course the saltiness is less in comparison with the ocean.’

Whenever from my house on the seashore I see a few white egrets – my favorite ones…- or a whole magnificent flock of them, flying silently away towards their far migrating other home somewhere else on the planet, I smile at them with gratitude for being so graceful, filling my eyes and heart with the beauty I need absolutely in my life, and I think of this dear Kaliveli tank where they probably stayed while living here, and took off from when beginning this long journey in the sky …

Now if you feel inspired and want to study some more the subject of Birds, but not in a too heavily serious manner, I would recommend you read ‘Evolution of Bird, the Fun Way’ .

English: Bird-Watching at Dawlish In the middle of this park that leads to the sea there is a leat with several small weirs. On both sides of the water are seats where tourists and locals sit. When the bandstand is empty the entertainment comes from birds. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is an early post of mine, of 22 May 2011, which includes a hilarious whole passage from a book by American humorist Dave Barry, where he tells in his usual crazy fashion how birds came to evolve into being… He ends with a few additional paragraphs, a description of Bird Watching, that puts this activity into such a funny light it will be impossible for you after that to go on considering it seriously any more!… You have been warned!

Yet Repos Is So Beautiful… A Paradise To Be Saved

English: Young women looking at the Bay of Bengal at Puducherry, India Français : Jeunes femmes regardant le golfe du Bengale à Pondichéry, Inde (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It pains me to have now on my blog (see my previous post) those terrible pictures of imminent destruction on the seashore side, without having at the same time some pictures showing also the beauty and charm of the main part of Repos, still so captivating to most of the guests that they call this place ‘a paradise’ and keep coming back.
A young Indian couple, Apoorva and Deelipan, does just that, arriving again and again, just whenever they can, to spend some time here in the naturally restful setting and atmosphere of this place. Over the year that this has been going on, we have become good friends, and I have discovered that both of them, although she is from Mumbai, are students in Ecology and Environmental Sciences, right at the Pondicherry University situated only a few kilometers North of Repos along the same Coromandel Coast on the Bay of Bengal.
They have known Repos before the cyclone and after, and now also after the hard sea erosion of last June. They are very concerned, for the place in itself and for me particularly, with my house so dangerously close these days from the approaching ocean.
The  young woman did tell me once some months ago that she had been selected to be part of an International Youth Forum dealing with environmental issues, and that she wanted to mention Auroville and specifically Repos about the coastal erosion problem, but only three days ago did I start realizing the potential importance of that possible show-casing of Repos, its present condition and the various remedies being envisaged, that may need some kind of support also from this International Youth Forum to be realized.
I felt at once it was necessary that they come again as soon as possible, so that they would meet those Aurovilians who have recently started helping Repos, a team this young couple might then decide to join in their own way.
The problem was, I didn’t have their phone number or email address. How to contact them???
So strong was my feeling that they should come, I sensed very clearly a sort of beam of energy suddenly shooting out of my heart and going out into the universe, calling them!!! Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and it happened on its own without any warning, so I was quite astonished, and chuckled to myself. So many strange things these days, this one was just one more to add to the growing list…
That was three nights ago.
Well, yesterday, the bell rang, and there they were, all smiles, at my doorstep.
I stared at them for a split second, and then exclaimed with joy: ‘Great!… You have come!…’
After I explained to them how I had actually ‘called’ them, they laughed with me at how well it had worked: one can indeed sense such things, they said, and I was glad to see they didn’t consider me nuts because of the unusual way I functioned. I pointed out that in our ongoing evolution as a species, it was this kind of capacities, among other things, that we had to deliberately train and develop in ourselves, especially we the people having chosen to live in Auroville.
During the ‘Early Breakfast’ at the Kitchen, they met indeed the new friends of Repos I had also alerted… through a normal phone call, in that case!…
We all had a very good talk, and then later on back in my house I talked again more personally with them, sharing my views of the way mentioning Auroville at that Forum could be a great idea, beneficial also to all the young delegates who would be there from so many countries, this time precisely here in India, and on the specific theme of Coastal Erosion.
It all starts on October 6th in a special place shared by India and Bengladesh, then from the 16th it will go on more centrally in Hyderabad.

You can see the website at this address:
http://go4biodiv.org/india-2012/
You will find the name of my young friend, Apoorva Usha Kulkarni, among those of the 35 ‘Messengers’, she is the one from India, Union Territory of Pondicherry.

C.L.E.A.N.I.N.G.

CLEANING.
CLEANING, CLEANING, CLEANING, CLEANING…
Some other persons, Aurovilians or not, may have problems so obvious I notice them and get some idea of what they may have to make progress on. But that always sends me back to myself, and to what I myself have to make progress on as well… and that’s plenty of things!!!
The two main problems I had to deal with before (over years and years of patient uprooting of the wrong reactions in me to certain circumstances, or whenever possible, of slow transformation of those wrong reactions into the spiritually correct ones, so much more pleasant to experience…) are by now nearly over; but there is a third one, which “circumstances” have of course caused to invade my life more and more in the last few years: the problem of keeping things clean all around my house.
Two aggravating factors have to be mentioned here:
!/ My house is so near the sea (even in normal conditions) that the salty damp air flows all the time into everywhere, leaving a sticky film on everything, that soon will attract and keep dust on it, making everything dirty much faster than it would be in a house elsewhere….
2/ The things in my house are so many in each category (books and files, clothes, hats, sunglasses, sun tan creams, swimsuits, shopping bags, DVDs, skin care products, empty small bottles, empty big bottles, etc, etc) that although within each room each thing is strictly and carefully kept in the place where it belongs, still each category overflows and gets dusty, simply because there are just too many things there…!

So during the last two weeks, especially as the internet connection was most often not there, I have been cleaning a lot, if not always with a result visible to others.
But  I have to keep the right balance, for it is impossible for me to spend my days being only the home-keeper: although I like very much cleaning things, there are other activities I like to do too and am good at too and am supposed to do too, particularly this blog as my beloved ‘Laboratory of Evolution’ outer work for Auroville, for which I am getting a monthly “maintenance” amount from Auroville, covering the regular basic expenses I have for my daily life here.

So as you can see my life too, like my house, is too full.
There are too many activities I find myself having to take up here, because each activity is truly needed for Repos to keep existing, but there is no one else at the moment to take up those various necessary activities.
And yet I also must keep some time for washing myself, for resting during the day, and for getting proper sleep at night (and that means, for dreaming too…!).
Having that many things to do is pretty much like trying to juggle with more balls than you can realistically handle: you keep losing them and seeing them fall and you keep getting them back going, but then another one starts falling, etc, etc.
The one activity that nearly always gets relegated to the end of the priority list is the cleaning.
Result: my poor house is more and more invaded with piles of stuff waiting to be sorted out and cleaned, for the time being tucked away as invisibly as possible in every still empty available corner.
It’s not all my stuff, mind you: you wouldn’t imagine how many friendly guests, intending to come again soon, leave under my care ‘just that small parcel’, ‘just that little bag’, ‘just that small size metal box’… and then for some reason never come back.
For quite a long while you still expect them to indeed come back, so you faithfully keep as promised the ‘small’ whatever you accepted to keep for them.
It all accumulates nicely over the years.
Until one day you look at your house, at your guest-room in it, and even also at the big store-room outside, and you realize it’s all full of stuff abandoned there by all those good-intentioned people. 
Add to all that a lively lady cat, very nice and all, but loving irresistibly like all cats to go after any edible living thing that disappears under any pile of any stuff anywhere, and you are in for catastrophic landslides at anytime, the cat-attacked pile exposing then suddenly for all to see its variegated contents until then neatly contained at least.
Well, the good thing about this kind of cat-caused landslide is that it at once transforms the sorting out and clean up of the concerned pile from low priority to absolute top priority, so in a way it is beneficial. I have at times highly suspected the Divine Wisdom as well as Playfulness of the One Being inside Whom all this is happening, to have secretly guided the creature chased by my cat, to disappear right under the pile that really needed urgent attention from my part. I have to admit this trick works, and I do take immediate care all right of the cat-ruined pile, but still I find it a totally unfair, if clever, strategy for the One to do that to me when I am already overworked with so many other urgent things to do!…
The December cyclone of course has been another totally unfair catastrophe that made things only much worse than before: speak of cleanliness anywhere after rain, wind and fragments of keet (dry coconut palms made into highly biodegradable roof material), plus some sea-water and sand on the floor, including under every piece of furniture, have soaked everything up for three days and nights before some rays of sun started at last to reappear…
After that horrendous cyclone (and I know it could have been still much more horrendous…), the only way I found to cope with the immensity of the cleaning work to be done, both outside in the whole of Repos, and inside my own house, was to pretend there would be all the time in the world to deal little by little with all that mess.
The problem was, the very sight of all that mess was making me sick inside: it was such a sad and ugly sight, my eyes didn’t know any more where to look for some tiny bit of beauty left. It hurt so much I was screaming inside, but it was no use screaming aloud, or letting my sobs come out. The only way to keep the inner strength and courage and endurance that would be necessary for how many months to come, was to keep the pain well locked up inside of me for as long as it would be impossible yet to let it out.
Last Friday, I was able at last to address the mess that my desk had become since those days and nights end of December. Only the later, upper layers had a semblance of order and cleanliness to them; under were still the deeper, more ancient layers of papers and bills and Guest-registration forms blocks and everything else, all caked and glued together by the water and dirt that had managed to filter through the closed windows, onto everything I had been unconscious enough to leave in their usual place, outside on my desk, instead of better protected inside the metal almirah next to the desk.
I never expected that cyclone to hit us so hard in Auroville. It could have been much harder still, but even that much has been for me too much, and I have yet to recover from the deep trauma of it all.
While sorting out finally the mess still underlying everything on that desk, some tears did come out, briefly. I was half-living again those horrible moments at night when nothing seemed to be able to stop this elemental violence from happening and from ruining so much of the work we had done here for forty years.
Auroville as a whole has recovered, I believe.
But here, after we had recovered a bit too, there was a tsunami alert a few weeks later, which luckily was a false alert, but still was scary enough for one more of us to decide to go live elsewhere in Auroville; as for the month of June,  as you know, with the massive erosion it did to our beach and to the very land of Repos itself, it has been a hard blow again.
It is not easy for me to understand why that too was necessary.
The fact is that only on the night of July 5th, when the situation had suddenly become really bad for the biggest house, and quite alarming for my one (the waves were so strong, Aurovilian and local friends, and even unknown passers-by were already advising me to leave), only then did I call for collective help from you all.
It would seem I needed that extreme degree of urgency in the situation, for finally calling for help in the inner action immediately needed.
And, lo and behold, the situation immediately (from the next morning on) started to change for the better, a better that since then has unexpectedly stabilized and has given the few of us who still live here an almost entire month of July, free of any erosion or even threat of it by the ocean.

Is it in order that we learn to truly trust and fully use this inner means of self-protection for ourselves and for Auroville, that this threatening situation has been allowed to take its toll until we did the right thing? Was that all part of our inner training?…
It would seem to be the case. That’s the only thing that makes some sense, I would say.

And what about today, and what happened just now?! This afternoon I intended very much to go to a second meeting of our re-activated ‘Beach Group”, in order particularly to follow-up on certain very urgent financial matters concerning Repos; but I got so engrossed in the writing, in this new post for my blog, of all those events and emotions and questions, the meeting at 3 pm got totally forgotten and it is only now, at 4.30 pm, that I suddenly remembered it, with the jolt you can imagine.
I was of course totally expected to go there, everyone must have wondered why I wasn’t showing up; nobody phoned me to find out, though; that would certainly have stopped me from writing and sent me like a rocket to the forgotten but so important meeting, but it so happened that no one phoned me to check why I wasn’t coming, so I just kept writing, completely oblivious of anything else. No guest came to disturb me either, as is usually the case all the time for one reason or the other. I have been allowed to remain in this complete deep concentration and absorbing expression of my feelings and my thoughts over the past seven months. Amazing.
This is the much anticipated year 2012.
Quite intense indeed.
But we are learning and growing, yes we are…
At the moment, as far as I am concerned, very much by way of CLEANING, which was indeed much needed!…
I guess this post is part of the inner cleansing as well – and that, too, was much needed.
 

The Secret Spirituality of Every Moment

I am very glad ‘A Precious Friend’, my little poem dedicated to my lady cat with the Egyptian eyes, has been liked by quite a few people, to the point that they clicked that ‘like’ button and the end of my post became all lit up by the nice, colorful tiny pictures of those happy people!
Thank you!
It is particularly important to me because it shows some of you do appreciate the simple joys of life that can be told in small but moving ways like that: simple joys that usually no one would call ‘spiritual’, and yet I challenge that, precisely, for too often we are told and we come to believe indeed that Spirituality is only with a big ‘S’, happening through Experiences that also are only with a big ‘E’, away from daily life and all its tiny supposedly insignificant moments. It is not so at all: as long as we will remain able to feel in each moment the hidden – or obvious – beauty that is there, just waiting to be seen, we will remain alive and well inside.
This is why I’m so grateful to Nina for having posted again and again photos of the flowers of her garden in their exquisite May blooming; and once, the pictures she was sharing were of flowers made even more beautiful by the drops of rain that were on them! I loved it!…
Looking at those flowers with the raindrops on them immediately reminded me of the second very sharp memory I have of a moment in my childhood that was actually a spiritual experience; the first such moment I already told about in that post a few months back about Lord Shiva and the full moon on his sacred Hill of Arunachala, not very far away in the city of Thiruvanamalai: it was thanks to a full moon night that I had for the first time united spontaneously with the bright, ethereal, silent vastness of the Infinite, suddenly felt in that strangely lit nocturnal unlimited darkness.
The second spiritual experience I got happened in fact during the same period of my childhood, when we were still living in that house on top of the hill of Koulouba, overlooking the Niger plain and the city of Bamako.
It happened this time in full day light, and with other people around; as every school day of the week, early in the morning my elder sister and I were waiting in front of our house, waiting for the car that would take us down the hill to the French Lycee in the city, capital of the then French Sudan (‘Soudan’) now called Mali.
In the almost desertic landscape around us, our mother had succeeded, like everywhere we had lived, in growing roses, in this case two great rosebushes, in barils full of rich soil, on each side of the large entrance to the house.
As we waited, my eyes wandered towards the rosebush close by; it so happened that there was a gorgeous velvety dark red bloom that had just opened that morning on that rosebush; on the top petal of it there happened to be a single drop of dew still left from the dawn; and it so happened that, just at the precise moment when I looked, a single ray of sun hit like a flash of lightning that dewdrop alone on that gorgeous red rose. And in the miracle of that moment I was hit too, as if by an arrow, right through my heart, by the instant of absolute beauty I had just witnessed. Time and my heart stopped, I stood there transfixed, not anymore a little girl in front of her family’s house, about to go to school, but all of a sudden a nameless, unidentified but eternal Being, fully aware, in the inner intimacy of my heart, of the Secret Reality of Beauty and Absoluteness that lies behind the reality we normally see.
And then the car arrived, and I had to turn again into the little girl going to school, but in the car I kept silent, holding that Moment like a Treasure I never wanted to forget.
And as you can see, I didn’t. Decades have gone by, the special, exquisite pain of this Absolute Beauty I experienced in that instant is still there in  the depths of me, like a Gem… but totally alive. It was, it is a Soul Moment, for ever part of the true I that I am, and am becoming again consciously in this process of Evolution.  

A Precious Friend

A precious friend she is,
Looking into my eyes
With still, silent adoration…
A precious friend she is
When she jumps on my bed
First thing in the morning
And keeps following me
Wherever I go next:
Just settling down there,
Out of nowhere,
Within a few moments
Of my own change of place
All along the day…

A precious friend she is,
Trusting me so fully
She relies upon me
To save her from danger…
When there are strong noises,
Like firecrackers, fireworks,
Quick she comes to my feet
A scared kitten again
Under table or bed she hides,
Wherever I happen to be;
The whole world can then crumble down
All around us, she doesn’t care,
As long as she is hiding there with me…
Often I didn’t even know
And suddenly my feet
Feel her fur under them,
So soft and so mellow
As she lies calm and limp
Her world back together
Because I’m there…

A precious friend she is
When she just comes
For no reason at all
But to see me:
While I’m eating,
And then suddenly
I’ll feel her
Sitting on my foot
Under the table,
Or her tail curled
Round my ankle
Like a friend’s arm
Round my shoulder;
She’ll also come
While I’m working,
All focused on my screen
And staying there too long;
She just comes and sits there,
Waiting for me to look
And if I don’t notice
After a while she places
A front paw on my leg,
Just like that, silently,
And looking up at me
With her Egyptian eyes,
She sends up some sweet love
For me… so irresistible
My heart totally melts,
I too send her my love,
And thank her again for being
My precious friend…