Auroville, India: 25th March - 14th April

After a few days "in between," travelling from Erraid to Glasgow, down to London, then flying to Mumbai, Chennai, and finally taking a taxi we arrived at Auroville..

To me, Auroville is somewhat a contradiction in many ways. It is the second Ecovillage, if it should be called that, that I have visited; situated as it is in east India, there is a large contrast between it and the other Ecovillage I have visited, the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland.

With a long term goal of being a "universal city" for some 50,000 residents from all over the planet, it has a way to go - currently 2,000 people call Auroville home. It has a large number of guest houses of varying levels of comfort and facilities, town hall, visitors centre, supermarket, farms, a bakery, a number of places to eat including the Solar Kitchen - built to cook up to 1,000 lunches a day just using the power of the sun.

We chose to stay at one of the more basic guest lodgings - in Evergreen forest, in the green belt surrounding the city-to-be. In fact we are living in a wooden house on stilts, which is fantastic. The only electricity is captured solar; water is pumped up using solar pumps, and some days there isn't quite enough water, and on others the lights go out rather early in the evening. There is a community kitchen, and the other people staying here are very friendly and helpful. They are a reforestation project as well as being a guest house, planting and sustaining TDEF - Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest, which was cleared away in the past.

At the center of Auroville is the Matrimandir, a place to meditate and attempt to achieve a higher state of being. It is a large globe coated in golden discs (as we found out, each disc is coated in about 2,000 small golden tiles, made by sandwiching gold leaf between two plates of glass and then heating the glass to melt it into a single piece. In total they made about 2 million gold tiles over 5 years). Inside the globe is a pair of spiral walkways, arranged almost as a double helix, ascending to the inner chamber.

The inner chamber can seat about 80 people, around a large crystal sphere that continuously has a beam of sunlight directed onto it from above. Concentration feels heightened in the chamber, and I felt very focussed during my time inside.
The whole golden globe is actually raised above the ground; below, the ray of sunlight that passes through the crystal sphere in the inner chamber shines on a much smaller crystal sphere at the center of a beautiful fountain; surrounding the globe are twelve smaller meditation chambers called petals, each dedicated to an attribute (courage, aspiration, etc).