
Welcome to Auroville - maremmano
https://www.auroville.org/
======
vr46
This is literally the last thing I expected on the front page!

My family are all based in Pondicherry and have very strong historical links
with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Mother. And are also involved in the
Auroville administration and management. I've been there a lot, I've stayed
there, met many people who live there and work there.

And it's an unusual place. Some of the folks in Pondy call it "Horrorvile"
because of the reputation of seediness that some residents are alleged to have
(sex abuse of local children, if you want to know). There is also a unusual
"un-Indian" feeling about the place because of the nationality of its
residents (global).

However, I have met only nice people there, doing wonderful projects (solar
bike sheds, environmentally-suitable architecture) and it is well worth a few
visits.

On the other hand, there is quite a difference between the mission statement
and the practice of its values. Money isn't really supposed to change hands
for work and housing. This is bullshit; many people have commercial sidelines
and housing does get bought and sold. Rules are there to be bent and of
course, they are.

Some of the security staff can be real jobsworths and exceedingly officious,
which can irritate people. And it feels a bit lawless in some regards,
hovering uneasily between spirituality, cultishness and the Indian democracy.

It's a peculiar place. But you probably got that already.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
J. Krishnamurti said it the best: "Belief has no place where truth is
concerned."

I always view these types of movements with a lot of suspicion. Mainly because
of the falsehoods they present. Self-realization is not something that can be
taught by following someone else. You can spend your entire life looking for
it in other people. But you have to experience it, to truly understand. You
shouldn't even listen to what I'm writing here, as this entire comment could
be a similar falsehood that detracts you in your search.

~~~
hutzlibu
"You shouldn't even listen to what I'm writing here"

If you believe that, why are you writing it then?

I think, because you do believe, that text can help others understand
something. Not always, though.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
It doesn't matter what I believe. For all you know, I could be a finite state
machine. Or a similar automaton.

~~~
CivBase
Allow me to reiterate for hutzlibu...

If you believe that, why are you writing it then?

~~~
mirimir
The point is to think for yourself, I think.

"Question reality", as they say.

~~~
hutzlibu
Sure. And writing it down, can help others reach that conclusion ..

~~~
0x8BADF00D
Language itself is a distortion of your thoughts.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Well at least your thoughts seem very distorted because you seem to claim that
using the tool of language is useless and no one should do it, and then still
keep using it and even try to defend using it.

"Language itself is a distortion of your thoughts" is just one of those
truths, one of the first things any growing human being sees when they start
on a journey of spiritual growth. The point of it is not to stop using or stop
trusting the language, stop communicating. The point is to see how it works
and how it relates to the rest of the self, so that it can fulfill its great
potential as a tool for spiritual growth and learning.

------
Barrin92
> _" Auroville was born on 28 February 1968. Its founder, the Mother, created
> the Auroville Charter consisting of four main ideas which underpinned her
> vision for Auroville. When Auroville came into being, All India Radio (AIR)
> broadcast the Charter, live, in 16 languages. Aurovilians apply the ideas of
> the Auroville Charter in their daily life, in policy-development, and
> decisions, big and small. The Charter thus forms an omnipresent referent
> that silently guides the people who choose to live and work for Auroville.

The Auroville Charter Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville
belongs to humanity as a whole. But, to live in Auroville, one must be a
willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness. Auroville will be the place of
an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking
advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will
boldly spring towards future realisations. Auroville will be a site of
material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human
unity."_

Well that sounds completely normal /s

I've seen Midsommar, no thanks

~~~
aerovistae
Thought the same thing. The second I saw a reference to someone titled "The
Mother", all my "cult!" alarms went off.

~~~
mirimir
I was blessed by The Mother, during one of her US tours. She seemed to be a
very sweet old woman.

------
ethagnawl
I stayed at the compound in Pondicherry.

I remember there being some slightly strange rules you had to agree to in
order to stay there (e.g. no sex) but the "staff" (don't know if they were
employees or devotees?) were welcoming and the accommodations were great. The
compound is right on the Bay of Bengal and sleeping in that room with the
windows open and the waves crashing was an experience I'll never forget.

~~~
algesten
When I was there, I learnt that Auroville share a lot with Sri Aurobindo and
the Holy Mother, but the ashram/compounds in Pondicherry doesn't have as much
to do with Auroville itself these days as it did back in the 60s-70s.

------
renewiltord
You'd think there was some seedy truth to the place but an ex of mine had
family involved in the administration of the place and I've been there (both
before I knew her and after). Quite a charming place in reality.

Though I'm told everything almost fell apart after a founder or big leader
died and the government had to step in. It's the Indian government so usually
that's a disaster but this one seems to have turned out okay.

Anyway, it's unlikely the website can handle an average company let alone HN
so mirrors:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200427170816/https://www.aurov...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200427170816/https://www.auroville.org/)

[http://archive.is/BjdIk](http://archive.is/BjdIk)

------
Ritsuko_akagi
Funny I read about this place in r/india a few times and they seem to regard
it as a racist hippie colony.

~~~
d3nj4l
I've been there twice. I'd say it is very hippy, and there's a lot of bunk
floating around - I saw a water cooler that dispensed "smart water enhanced
with classical music" \- but that's a given for any place that has to do with
spiritual enlightenment. I wouldn't say it was racist, though, but from
personal experience most of the foreigners I saw were white and seemed well
off. IMO it's neither as bad as /r/india makes it out to be nor as good as
some of the commenters here are saying it is.

~~~
mapcars
> but that's a given for any place that has to do with spiritual
> enlightenment.

Please don't say it unless you visited all of them. I've been to places where
this is not true.

~~~
vekker
Agreed. There are plenty of places where the people engage in spiritual
inquiry & meditation while still having a very solid base rooted in reality.

------
mysticmode
I have met many people from Auroville (or maybe Aurovillians as some would
say).

I have a mixed feeling about Auroville too like some other comments here. I
have visited couple times. But never actually got what they are trying to do.
This is another part.

But I want to mention, TBH: It is like ANY OTHER ASHRAMS or communal living, I
would say. Even to the one I visit often. People are different, sometimes they
are nice and sometimes they behave downright silly and rude.

That said, it could be a practice if you take it that way :)

They are much more precious for you in the long run if you are into spiritual
practice.

It's like Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo puts it "Instead of seeing other people as an
obstacle to our path, we recognize that they are the path. That learning on
how to deal skillfully especially with unskilfuled people is how we learn, how
we grow and how to begin to mature."

------
msound
I grew up in Pondicherry, went to Pondicherry Engineering College (class of
99). I used to bike up from college to Matrimandir a lot of weekends for
meditation. There are several communities within Auroville and they each
operate kind of independently. Some of them welcome guests to stay with them,
and I have stayed with a number of communities. So, what accusation may be
true for one community may not be true for other communities.

In the middle of all of that, I found Sadhana forest to be a wonderful
community in Auroville that is far away from the madness of Matrimandir both
physically and spiritually. Aviram and his family, along with volunteers, are
doing a fantastic job of reforesting the area west of the Tindivanam highway.
If you are going, once we are past this global Covid19 pandemic that is, I
would highly recommend a volunteering stay at Sadhana forest.

------
andy_ppp
I went there, it’s pretty weird if I’m honest. I felt as if I was living in an
Indian Hitchcock film. It felt as though there were people who were tourists
and people who lived there and they were very separate. I have this feeling
the whole place is a riddle, I’d like to go back and try to understand it
again...

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _I’d like to go back and try to understand it again_

There's a book called "Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness" by a
guy named Satprem, which pretty much gives you the founding story of the
place.

Caveat - Satprem was a disciple, so this is not a view from the outside.

~~~
andy_ppp
Seems the PDF is available freely here:
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9DdtF_uMk05NUhyM09MOXdTS1U...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9DdtF_uMk05NUhyM09MOXdTS1U/edit)

------
fxtentacle
Is it just me or does their icon look like the Death Star?

BTW, their course offering looks very good:
[https://edu.auroville.org/courses](https://edu.auroville.org/courses)

\- Construction & application of Ferrocement

\- Production of & construction using CSEB

\- Arches, Vaults & Domes - Masonry

I kind of would have expected Yoga and spiritual things, but it appears they
are genuinely interested in the technical skills required for hands-on self-
sufficiency.

------
bdsa
In a case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (or frequency illusion), I've been
learning Elixir/Phoenix and started off with
[https://github.com/shankardevy/mango](https://github.com/shankardevy/mango)
which explicitly mentions Auroville and is the first I had heard of it. It
gave me a strange vibe.

------
wincy
Looks like the page is down, here’s the Wikipedia page. Apparently it’s an
experimental city created in the 1960s in India.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville)

------
mothsonasloth
Went to Auroville, really nice place along with Pondicherry.

There is an element of cult to the place but their message is good

~~~
oriettaxx
I went there, too. A lot, and only, black people working for 'illuminated'
white (rich) ones: I was pretty shocked.

Nothing new, really: and this is pretty sad.

~~~
lopmotr
If you have a principle of nondiscrimination and people self-select into
different roles, what can you do? Discriminate or accept their differences?

~~~
jariel
Rich people coming in and living easy, and other, very poor people moving in
because maybe they need a job is not 'self-selection' it's 'a priori
selection' based upon the economic systems they are coming in from, not the
one they are in.

These places make great sets for fun movies though ...

~~~
lopmotr
Whatever you call it, people are choosing their roles. Should they work
against that, such as by denying employment to darker skinned people and
denying membership to lighter skinned people? Or not.

~~~
jariel
... perhaps the most false choice ever presented in a social argument.

'Kids born it poverty can't go to University so factory work is their
'choice', why should we deny them work at the factory?'

Seriously?

If it were just 'some place' then it would be more of a rhetorical question,
but the _entire point_ of the villages is to create a place where people are
equal irrespective of clour or creed, so the hypocrisy looms large. Maybe they
can take their free time to ponder such questions because though answers are
never obvious, there are opportunities for improvement.

------
conqrr
Tbh this may sound cultist to others, but it's really not. You'll need to
understand the philosophies of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo first for it to
make sense. It's sets the example of a Utopian society. One shouldnt simply
look at it from that angle and discard it without understanding the history
and vision behind it.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
I agree - as far as spiritual movements go, this is one of the least cult-ish
I've ever seen.

Even the stuff they say - I can at least sit down and consider it without
freaking out instantly.

In some ways they resemble the very modern panpsychist school of thought
(Giulio Tononi, Sam Harris). Consciousness is a basic ingredient of matter.
Both matter and consciousness are real. Evolution is real. There is no
biblical god. Cosmology - they defer to science when it comes to that, but
having consciousness as a major ingredient does shift the perspective a bit
(everything becomes "evolutionary" in a sense).

The way they think of the future reminds you of the Singularity theories. If
Ray Kurzweil and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote a book together, it wouldn't
be far from this.

The one thing that's a bit far out is the claim that consciousness could, in
theory, interact with matter directly, not just through regular mechanisms
(brain, nerves, muscles, etc). They do insist it's super-hard to do in
practice. They do shun the miraculous stuff, they insist that the change of
consciousness is all that really matters here and now in a spiritual endeavor.
In this regard they're not very far from, say, your run of the mill buddhist
school of meditation.

As long as Aurobindo and Mirra were alive, they kept the place as non-cult-ish
as humanly possible. I would say they even had a remarkable amount of
skepticism, aside from the claims mentioned above. I'd like to visit Auroville
one day, to see how things have changed in the decades since Mirra's passing.

Hard to explain. I've seen plenty of crazy places (adventurous youth +
interest for spirituality, yadda-yadda), but the stuff that Aurobindo + Mirra
started strikes me as remarkably... rational, I guess?

Read and draw your own conclusions.

~~~
hutzlibu
"The one thing that's a bit far out is the claim that consciousness could, in
theory, interact with matter directly"

I think that claim like this alone, is not so far stretched, when you assume
consciousness comes from brain activity, ~ electricity - and with classical
physics, magnetic/electric fields or even quantum physics, everything is
connected and interacts - consciousness do influences matter. So when you have
a different thought, a different magnetic field is the result, etc. that does
influence matter directly.

The far stretch claim is, that conscious can have a directed, focused effect
and not just be random.

Anyway, the idea that mind can influence matter directly(magic thinking), is a
very old one and I think the majority of the world population is still holding
to it. Allmost every religious person does (in a different way). And in
nonreligious, educated, western people I have seen it quite a lot, too. Most
are not really conscious about it, though.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
The thing is, once you accept the premise of panpsychism, you sort of have to
at least sit and think about whether a direct action might be possible
somehow.

------
kr1m
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville)

------
csomar
So it seems that they do handle the Visa situation for you (it appears that
you enter India on an Entry Visa; which I understand you don't have the right
to stay in India just the right of passage). There are still two other things:
Taxes and Healthcare. Are you supposed to be paying taxes on your activities
(if you are doing Online/Offshore work since there are no private companies in
Auroville). How is healthcare handled since it can get very expensive for old
people.

------
adamretter
As I was staying in Pondicherry for a month so I a visited Auroville a few
times in 2018. It's hard to describe. On the one hand it seems like a cause
for good, on the other you occasionally discover some out-of-place clearly
expensive and wealthy buildings for residents dotted around the jungle which
forms the site. Seems to have some strange contradictions.

------
gourabmi
I'm pleasantly surprised to see Auroville on the front page of HN. This brings
back memories from 2 decades ago. Cheers!

------
crixlet
I lived at Auroville for 3 months for a college study aborad. Wild experience.
The Matramandir (the big gold dome) was a very remarkable and weird building.
Definitely cult-ish, but also so truly different and innovative.

------
sevencolors
Was reading about the "galaxy" concept
[https://www.auroville.org/contents/691](https://www.auroville.org/contents/691)

> Radiating out beyond the Matrimandir Gardens are four Zones, each focusing
> on an important aspect of the township’s life:

> Industrial (north). Cultural (north east), Residential (south/south west)
> and. International (west).

Feels so weird and dystopian when places try to enforce some sort of
segregation

------
dharma1
[https://auroville.com](https://auroville.com) works if .org is down. I've
come across it in the past because they build and sell pretty nice (just
intonation) musical instruments. The instruments are cool but the place comes
across a bit cultish

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG9QfEMd_GU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG9QfEMd_GU)

------
billfruit
Are atheists welcome there?

~~~
ordiman85
Auroville is open to everyone, but there are rules. In the visitor centre you
can read that they claim to be religion-less. For example, religious cult
(e.g. monotheist prayer) is forbidden in the Matrimandir, the central monument
dedicated for the practice of yoga and meditation. However, the spiritual
movement behind Auroville is a kind of cult of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
But I found Auroville habitants much less proselyte than religious communities
in general. Actually it is easier to be kicked out of the community than to
become one of them.

------
zokier
[https://i.imgur.com/BPioTnL.png](https://i.imgur.com/BPioTnL.png)

this picture is bit aspirational compared to satellite pictures of the area:
[https://goo.gl/maps/4xqCoBVwbbqy51Z29](https://goo.gl/maps/4xqCoBVwbbqy51Z29)

------
peterclary
Auroville is mentioned in the Apple TV+ series “Home”, episode 6 “India”.
Anupama Kundoo's Wall House is just outside the Auroville city limits, in an
area designated for experimentation. I saw the episode recently so was
surprised to see Auroville pop up here.

------
sbmthakur
Somewhat related: Sri Aurobindo studied in England and also contributed to
India's freedom struggle.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Aurobindo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Aurobindo)

------
weeksie
So wild. I was there with some friends back in 2006. We didn’t go into the big
orb because they were charging and we were cheap.

What a random memory to relive. Lovely :)

------
Mediterraneo10
I visited Auroville in 2008, stayed two weeks, and found it an odd place
indeed. Tourists could read about the huge expansion plans for the site which
were set down back in the 1960s and 1970s, but all that growth seems to have
stalled many years ago already. There was definitely a feeling of decay around
the place, like an old socialist-era concrete monument that was supposed to
represent the future but is now a sad cracked and stained relic.

Many of the younger people I met were only living in Auroville because they
were born there, and they had little to no interest in spirituality, the
Mother, Sri Aurobindo, etc.

------
lostmsu
How's the Internet access there?

~~~
new2628
Please don't go there to turn it into another "digital nomad" place.

~~~
blast
Please don't gatekeep.

~~~
new2628
What's wrong with that?

~~~
lostmsu
For starters, if you don't live there, why do you want to decide for them? So
that you personally could travel there and check it out without nomads?

P.S. not a nomad.

------
metacritic12
"Money is not meant to generate money." \- Central banks across the world,
moments before lowering interest rates below zero.

~~~
dang
Submitted title was "Money is not meant to generate money. Welcome to
Auroville". Submitters: please don't do that - see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

------
smartinspereira
Down for me..

~~~
brendanmcd
same :( rough thing to happen on launch day

~~~
vinay427
It's not being launched, and it's not a product to begin with. The Wikipedia
pages that another commenter posted are helpful, in any case.

------
filmgirlcw
So it’s Jonestown?

