DThe contrast could hardly be stronger: Auroville is flat, hot, near the coast; it wants to be a city, based on the teachings of Mirra Alfassa and Sri Aurobindo. At the core of their visions is the idea of bringing a divine consciousness down to earth, a “download” of the Supramental. Some seem to claim access to it. And sometimes I feel I understand what they are speaking of. The experience of a deep spirituality in meditation, in work, in being; an awakening of all seven levels of our existence: the material, the life-energy, the spirit, the vision that understands the cosmos, bliss or the rapture from Self to soul, pure consciousness and pure existence. There are many forces there: gods and demons, stories and worlds through which the spirit can travel, in which it can unfold, realize itself, and mirror itself.
And then there is Bodhi Zendo. Many Aurovilians spend the summer there. It is a meditation center in the mountains at an altitude of 1,700 meters, cool and green; the birds are joyful, the clouds temperamental, the stars clear. Zen is practiced there: concentration on emptiness, that is, on the ground of all existence, which we cannot know, of which we cannot speak, from which all concepts rebound. An level of being, then, that we can faintly sense, that we can allow to enter our empty mind, but that shows itself to us precisely by remaining empty before language, by refusing to be grasped. We can say that there is something there that precedes us, that contains everything, that is incomprehensible and shows itself only as what is and cannot be described. Emptiness: a word that tries to describe something that exists by containing no being. A paradox, a contradiction, a word that drives the power of language to its limits.
Sri Aurobindo tries to grasp the Divine in language. His Savitri wanders through the worlds and, in doing so, makes them experienceable and brings them into our existence. Buddha sits on a lotus flower whose stem is anchored in the roots of the mud at the bottom of clear water. We can see clearly through the waters of consciousness, but the silt and the driving force of life remain beyond our recognition.
I oscillate between Auroville and Bodhi Zendo, between the mapping of the Divine and the silence before emptiness — that emptiness which is different from nothingness. Emptiness can hold being and nothingness both; it can enclose them, carry them. Emptiness is between being; it is that in which nothingness is held. Emptiness is within being when being becomes conscious of itself.
„Non-existent, truly, does one become, if he knows Brahman
as non-being. If one knows that Brahman Is such a people
known as existent. This is, indeed, the embodied soul of the
former.“ (Taittiriya Upanishad II.6.1)
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