I write from New York – having just roared up the east coast in an aluminium snake of a train from Washington to stay here with some old friends from another hemisphere. The summer is well and truly Indian in the big apple, and the smell downtown is not unlike Delhi either. Despite the sticky subways, I’ve been enjoying vegan cuisine, Brooklyn community life and scintillating conversation. My friends, like me, have been recently introduced into the wonderful world of parenting and, naturally much conversation blossomed around this topic.

My friend quizzed me about what the difference between having one and two children was, my reply – its the same, just more. I think the hardest thing about parenting is the initial surrender of your old singleton values. Shifting your values to be centred around someone else other than yourself is not an easy or insignificant shimmy – however, I think it represents a great evolutionary jump in a person’s life journey. Why?

Let me explain a little. There is something unique that defines human beings- makes them what they are. This is their search for happiness! And not just ANY happiness, the nature of that happiness needs to be unbounded, ongoing, eternal. Anything less leaves one wanting more…….. The question is, how can humans fulfill this basic desire, in the form of a limited self-centred entity? The sad truth is that the small self we see in the mirror each morning is an inappropriate vehicle to try to hold all that happiness in and trying to do so causes us more suffering than happiness. All around me I see people trying to accumulate wealth, power, fame for themselves but do they succeed in fulfilling that original desire for infinite happiness?

America is, no doubt, at the heart of the capitalistic story that has dominated the last century. And capitalism, I have come to believe, is itself based on a self-centred philosophy – how much can I personally accumulate in order to be happy. The hierarchical systems of employment, government and social structure are all constructs to facilitate this style of self-centred accumulation. In fact, the whole nature of capitalist society seems to set its inhabitants up for ultimate frustration, because the successes it promises to many and grants to few, are ultimately self-centred and thus limited to the sphere of the limited individual self. And this is why I say that we are in a dangerous place in history, where the dominant socio-economic philosophy sets humans up to be frustrated and unfulfilled.

So, what do we do about all this? Well perhaps having more babies younger is a start. It would certainly shift society away from the anguish of self-centred accumulation. There has been an interesting debate happening in Britain recently over whether babies have become the new religion. It seems that the middle classes have taken obsessively to wearing the sling of progressive baby bearing and holistic child rearing. As I have said earlier, I see this as a step forward from career-centric or self-centric accumalists, because family oriented parents seem to focus on something greater than just themselves. I believe that the amount of happiness that a family can hold or bring is greater than the individual capacity of any one vessel in the family. Happy families… But even the family unit is somewhat limited.
So lets extrapolate this idea out? What if we become more community focussed? Will our fulfilment not increase still further as our cup of happiness becomes a water butt in a rainforest? How about if we work towards the common good of our one global human family? And then let your mind drift out towards those saints who serve the entire universe tirelessly with every breath – perhaps you can begin to grasp why they always seem to be smiling.

I think its time we told the man – self service ain’t no service at all.

Auroville is an experimental city, under development in south India. It is intended to be a model township – an international and universal place for personal, spiritual growth and social advancement.

Auroville exists for nothing less than to hasten the evolution of the human species – to develop the mind from its animal instincts to sublime intuition, and to manifest the inspiration of the Divine in the material world.

Origins

The idea for the town was inspired by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo – an Indian philosopher, freedom fighter and futurist who lived from 1872 to 1950. His greatest disciple, a Frenchwoman known simply as ‘The Mother’, came to India to be by his side and to realise his ideas. She proposed the creation of Auroville, which was finally founded in 1968. Representatives came from all over India and the world, bringing with them a handful of soil from their native lands, to be mixed in an urn at the centre of the city.

The current population is currently around 1800 ‘Aurovilians’. The aim is to have a thriving city of 50,000. The largest country represented so far is India, followed by French and German citizens.

The Matrimandir Temple

The building in the photograph is the Matrimandir – the ‘Temple of the Mother‘. Here, ‘Mother’ refers to the supreme Creative Force, the energy that binds Consciousness into the myriad forms of the universe. Compare with goddess Durga from Hindu mythology:

The Matrimandir is to be a place of concentration, for finding the source of one’s consciousness in the stillness of meditation. The red brick ‘lotus petals‘ each contain a room for meditation. Inside the golden dome is the ‘Inner Chamber‘ – a large, white, circular hall containing a huge glass crystal – the largest in the world – which focusses a beam of white light into the centre of the building.

The gold discs are actually made of gold — gold leaf, sandwiched in between two layers of glass and tiled like a mosaic around huge discs. This sphere of gold, around a place of great concentration upon human consciousness, is intended to have an electromagnetic influence on the state of consciousness for the rest of the planet…

In the following photographs, I use quotes from Sri Aurobindo and The Mother to illustrate the vision for Auroville.

Links:
• Auroville: In Quotes Photoset
• Auroville website
• Wikipedia: Sri Aurobindo
• Wikipedia: The Mother
• Wikipedia: Auroville

It’s election time in south India and the propaganda is overspilling onto the streets.

Is it just coincidence that so many members of the Gandhi/Nehru family have been in power in this country?

Or that George Bush Junior followed in the footsteps of his father?
Could there be another reason?

Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar commented that democracy – so often deified as the one true path – amounts to nothing more than mob rule. Since politicians are required to win as many votes as possible, their policies are naturally watered down and thoroughly conservative.

What percentage of the average electorate can be considered to be politically educated or, dare I say, wise? When the population of a country votes according to the views of mass media and political broadcasting, what hope is there of truly progressive leadership? In our society, we find the lowest common denominator being the guiding principle…

Could we imagine our nations being governed by the wise? And what if these sages had absolute power… Would their benevolent dictatorship improve on our flawed democracy?

Would the moralist revolutionaries please step forward! You time is coming now…

VEGETARIANISM & CONSCIOUSNESS
I consider the degree to which vegetarianism has been embraced by a culture to be an excellent indicator of the extent of its evolution. Refusing to kill animals for food demonstrates the ethical progress and humanity of a civilisation.

In India, vegetarian food is widely considered to be the best – a mark of the great advance of consciousness that took place here many centuries ago.

(Of course, we also see contradictions: social injustice, exploitation, corruption and environmental damage – but we shall deal with these another time)…

The concept "Pure Vegetarian" is common here. It generally means no meat, fish or eggs, though it sometimes also excludes onions, garlic and mushrooms – foods that are considered to create imbalance in the body and cloud the mind.

It is interesting that the term "Non-Vegetarian" is usually used to convey that a particular food or restaurant uses meat. Such terminology puts the emphasis on vegetarian being the norm, rather than the other way around.

Green spots are used on packaging and menus as an indication of "Pure Veg" foods and red spots for "Non-Veg" foods:

CONSUMED BY THE WEST
However, out of hunger for the material development of the West, India seems to be short-sightedly abandoning many of its finer qualities. These days, meat is being promoted as a glamourous and prestigious food for the up-and-coming generation. Wildly inaccurate campaigns are used to push the "non-vegetarian diet" on a population that has lived as vegetarians for literally thousands of years.

The fallout from this move has started to appear – obesity, heart disease and cancers were previously unknown, but are now taking root in the big cities.

INTO THE FUTURE
Let us hope that India’s age-old tradition of vegetarianism can resist the pressure to conform to an increasingly homogenous global pseudo-culture. The world needs great moral leadership, not more of the same.

The Taj Mahal was built 350 years ago by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a place to bury his deceased wife. In Agra, India, it is proudly hailed as a great monument to the power of love. However, my personal reaction was a little mixed…

I experienced genuine awe and appreciation of the monument’s great beauty – the solid marble archways and bulbous domes are really an incredible feat of architecture. The walls are lavishly sculpted with flowers and semi-precious gemstones. It is a great pleasure to view the building and to rest in its grounds… But I couldn’t help thinking what an extraordinarily gross misutilistation of resources it must have been, in an area that was and still is incredibly poor.

It took more than 20,000 men more than two decades to build, at a cost of around $500 million (in today’s terms). Some of the main craftsmen were rewarded by having their thumbs or hands amputated to prevent them from ever repeating such excellence and perfection in architecture.

So, was Shah Jahan only motivated by love?

- Did a dead body and a memory really require such opulence and grandeur?
- Was it an expression of guilt for the deceased, or an outward display for those still living?
- Could the expense even have been justified if the building had served society – say, as a parliament, law court, college or temple?

India is a land of contradictions.

Walking through a back alley in Delhi, on one side the wall is decorated with tiles bearing images of Gods, Goddesses and Deities. Turn my head the other way and I see children sorting through waste and shovelling it with their hands onto an enormous pile of rubbish.

This vast country, famous for its rich spiritual heritage, with its huge population, has an enormous waste problem.

Not so long ago, the cups for chai were all made from unfired clay and people only ate from banana leaf plates, so throwing these onto the street presented no problem.

Now, the chai mostly comes in plastic cups and everything else comes wrapped in a plastic too, but it still gets chucked on the ground, meaning that the streets of India are littered with waste that won’t bio-degrade for several thousand years.
At best, it will be burned in piles on the street, filling the air with acrid smoke that has people breathing in toxic fumes and constantly coughing while undoubtedly tearing holes in the Earth’s atmosphere.

It is ironic that people in India take so much care over their own appearance – the women dress in exquisite sarees and men comb and oil their hair to perfection – yet noone bats an eyelid at the mounds of rubbish by the roadside that are slowly turning this beautiful country into a wasteground.

I have come to India for spiritual inspiration, and it can still be found. But it causes me great pain in my heart to see the way the people here treat their own country of which they are so proud.

The pure, unquestioning devotional psychology that comes so naturally to the Indian mind needs to be coupled with education and environmental awareness very soon, before this mystical land gets lost in a gigantic pile of plastic waste.