EWS #46: Narad’s early days in Auroville (1)
Sept 28, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:00):
Namaste. Welcome everyone to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste Sraddhalu.
Sraddhalu (0:00:35):
Today we have a surprise and we will switch roles. Narad, as you all know, is one of the, among the first Aurovilians. And Mother specially asked him to come, to join Auroville. He was present for the inauguration.
Sraddhalu (0:00:43):
With Mother's special permission, he was photographing the inauguration. And subsequently, she asked him to prepare his knowledge and experience in specific fields specially for the development of Auroville, for the Matrimandir and in particular the gardens of Matrimandir. And recently, while going through his notes and his old documents, he discovered a series of notes that he had made from his earliest days in Auroville and this is a precious documentation of the mood of those days. We have all heard so much, we see so many photographs, but to capture what it was like to work for the Mother, for the new world in what was a barren desert and feel the experience of the new world while starting from zero. That's a very special experience, which those notes will help us to fully enter. And so today, we will listen to Narad.
Narad (0:02:11):
An interesting thing today, I did another interview this morning with an Aurovillian and he said something very unique. He said, you know in those days we were all going to be supermentalized. We all felt that that was inevitable. We don't feel it anymore. <laughs> But it was a wonderful feeling, because Mother was there and her presence was there. I'll begin with a statement from Mother on Auroville. 'This central point of the city is a park which I saw when I was very young, perhaps the most beautiful thing in the world from the point of view of physical material nature. A park with water and trees like all parks and flowers but not many. Flowers in the form of creepers, palms, and ferns, all varieties of palms, water, if possible, running water, and possibly a small cascade”. So I had met Mother so many times in the early 60s before Auroville was founded or even thought about. Mother speaks of the dream, but that was basically more for the ashram, I believe. We've conscripted it for Auroville, which is fine. And so Mother asked me, "you wouldn't like to come to Auroville in a few years? I feel you can do something there." And I said, 'Mother, whatever is your will'. And then when I brought Annie, and it was the most extraordinary moment with Mother other than when I met her in 1961 and had her darshan for one hour. She looked at Annie and she said, “This is not the first time we have met. You have been with me many times before, many, many times”. And then she turned to me and asked me the question about Auroville. Well, I went back, this was in '68, after I photographed the inauguration, and I went back and Udar sends me a letter and he says, “Mother has asked me to tell you that she wants you to prepare and come to build the gardens of the Matrimandir”. Wow. Well, you know, I realise now in hindsight that she had been preparing me from a small child who had this deep contact with the flowers, grew up with his father learning temperate climate species, moved to California to learn subtropical species when I helped Jyoti Priya, and finally ready for the tropical climate. So we came back, and Mother said the following to me, which has not yet been realised. And I wrote to Mother at one point, “Mother, my mind is empty, I cannot catch your vision of the gardens”. For 37 years I carried a feeling of guilt in me. One day I spoke to Aurobindo Basu and he said get rid of the guilt. He said the gardens are not yet ready to descend. This was Mother's response to me, "It must be a thing of great beauty, of such a beauty that when men enter the gardens, they will say, 'ah this is it' and experience physically, concretely the significance of each garden. In the garden of youth, they will know youth. In the garden of felicity, bliss, they will know felicity. In the garden of perfection, they will know perfection, and so on". And then Mother raised her hand, and she went like this, "one must know how to move from consciousness to consciousness". Oh, that was my first extraordinary moment on the gardens.
Narad (0:07:32):
When I was in the States, I wrote back to Udar and I said, ‘Does Mother want me to work in a landscape firm and continue my learning’? Because they were great landscapers in California. You could go into someone's house, this was in Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and see a normal front and look into the backyard and it was a paradise. It might have been desert, it might have been a jungle setting, landscape architects could do all they wanted. So I wrote that to Udar, and he said, no, Mother wants you to do both, work during the day and learn, and then go to college at night, which I did. There are two very important statements of the Mother written to Mary Helen and one to me. The first one Mary Helen was working with a greenhouse, sort of a shade house that I built, and I had water flowing down the stones and Mary Helen wrote to Mother that she felt the garden should be in the Japanese way. Mother spoke to Shyamsundar in response to this question and she said, "Of course, it must be in the Japanese way". And then at another point, when we were being very, I would tend to use the word almost abused by many of the workers on the structure, 'what are you people doing fooling around with plants when we are building the Matrimandir here?', and we wrote to the Mother and then Mother wrote, "The gardens are as important as the Matrimandir itself". Now when I came in 1969 to begin the gardens, I found a place in this total desert, obviously Matrimandir wasn't started then. And I saw a little ways away a grove of mango trees, and I thought at least the new seedlings will have some shade. And I wrote to Mother, and I asked her to bless that spot. And another fellow who worked with me for years also saw it, and Mother blessed it. This was the place. But then she says to me in another meeting, I would like you to begin with the garden of unity. And they wouldn't do it. No, they wouldn't do it. We weren't ready for that unity in Auroville.
[Sraddhalu] It's interesting, she foresaw the situation of tensions and conflicts.
[Narad] Exactly, yes. And tried to pre-empt that. And it's not finished today. So many years later.
[Sraddhalu] In a sense, the focus on building the garden of unity is symbolic of our effort collectively to discover the unity. In the spiritual approach, it is not the unity we create, it is already there at the level of the self and our love for the Divine Mother. We have to discover it and allow it to emerge. So in the act of focusing on the garden of unity, we would discover our unity, but on the other hand, not being able to work on the garden of unity becomes symbolic of the disunity. So it's a kind of a two-way connection. And even if we are in disunity, the fact that we choose to work on it will work the other way to help to bring it about.
Narad (0:12:01):
Yes. Mother writes so much about the movement of love, not limited to human beings, especially being active in the plants. And so I wrote, "the work of building the Matrimandir gardens will also proceed in this way. And in time we will see that the whole creation will become more conscious. Thus the vegetal kingdom will participate in this progress in accordance with its own nature”. Mother wrote this part: "The initial participation can be felt even now", because in the nursery, you see, there was nothing happening in Auroville. There was one small settlement with Bob and Deborah, I believe it was, when they tried to dam up the ravines that were created by the water rushing away and the dam broke. The water was so powerful, these huge granite blocks, I watched them tumble like little pebbles. It was a sight that was incredible because that water was building up from all over and the village people were very much against our bund-ing. They said, no, this is our water. But the chief conservatives of forest, with whom I was very close, and they would take me on trips into the ghats, and we would collect seeds. And a little bit more on this later on, because it is a very important aspect of what we were trying to do in bringing the whole world into the harmony with Auroville's aspiration. So I say, "I have personally experienced the calm and protectiveness of a certain tree and its vibrations of healing, the service tree. I have heard the call of another tree directing me to look at its first flower, a single blossom of ethereal blue. I have seen a species coming to flower within a year when every reference work in our library stated that it would take about eight years or more to flower. Certainly, the vibrations of the flowers often penetrate through to our inner selves, awakening joy and aspiration, deepening peace and calm".
[Sraddhalu] This is what you had written at that time?
[Narad] Yes. "Possibly greater in importance than all the technical research will be the study of the messages of the flowers and the ways in which they are helping us to rise beyond the narrow limits of self. In the words of the Mother, ‘Perhaps the beauty of flowers, too, is a means used by Nature to awaken in human beings the attraction for the psychic’. The reports that follow are the record of the birth of a garden and its infancy. There are numerous lists of scientific names and data detailing the research completed to date. There is however another aspect, one that bears a mostly unspoken testimony to the collective growth and aspirations of Aurovilians from all parts of the world, whether they live with us permanently or have come to offer their energies for a few weeks or a few months. And that is the love and the will they bring to build the Matrimandir, the soul of Auroville”. Now, this experience was repeated again and again. A man would come from England, a fine gardener from Dover, and he would teach me one little thing that would carry me through for years. For example, if we wanted to increase the trunk of a tree, which most people don't do, and the trees grow very lanky and are blown over by the wind. He said, those lower branches, don't cut them off. Just cut them about a foot from the trunk. And the tree will understand that it has to feed those. And as it does, the trunk increases. And then there were others who came like Paolo Soleri, and the man who has built Arcosanti or is continuing to build Arcosanti, who saw in the Matrimandir area, the beauty of vertical construction and horizontal parks and gardens. And that's what he wants to do at Arcosanti. In other words, give everyone they want all the facilities in a building, but don't let sprawl, urban sprawl, take over the landscape. It's an interesting theory.
[Sraddhalu] That he was present in Auroville in those years?
[Narad] He would come regularly to meet me and so now let me tell you a bit about some of the gardeners in India.
Sraddhalu (0:18:40):
I'd like you to share something about Arcosanti because most people who are listening to this won't know about it.
Narad (0:18:46):
It's in Arizona and its founder, Paolo Soleri, different from Paolo Tomasi, who we'll talk about him later. Paolo Soleri had the vision of building a city that would be vertical. Everything one could want. And then on the ground would be vegetable gardens, flower gardens, parks, lakes, and he would have the students from the University of Arizona come every year during their break and build it, keep working on it. Incredible vision, you see. And today we look around and we see so much destruction of the natural landscape. For example, concrete over everything. Where can the rainwater go? But we face this constantly now. We don't have cisterns and we don't have catchment areas where the water can percolate. Because we built too much concrete.
Sraddhalu (0:19:59)
Yes. This concept of Arcosanti is an attempt to define a new urbanism. And what is interesting is that a lot of the initial inspiration comes from Auroville. And something which people don't recognize, at the time when Auroville started, something like this was inconceivable. Quite a large number of people saw Auroville, took that insight or got something of that inspiration and developed a specialised aspect of it and sometimes even more dramatically, more rapidly than Auroville itself. But what Mother planted as a seed in Auroville, actually sprouted all over the world in many small such efforts. One such was Walt Disney, he is the famous, the master cartoonist macronist, who caught this idea, he knew of Auroville and he created what was called EPCOT and the name EPCOT itself, Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. What is that but Auroville? Except he has created an acronym. There in EPCOT, he has four big buildings representing the four elements. So earth, air, water, I don't know if they have fire. And around it, within each of these, there are special technologies being developed for this future, tomorrow. And in the earth space, for example, they take desert land, again Auroville, and train plants to grow in desert and give enormous beautiful flowers, fruits, vegetables, etc. out of desert soil and these are technologies being developed and then at the end of it all, in the centre of EPCOT is a huge lake and very similar to the Matrimandir, at the centre of the lake there is this huge form of the earth, globe, map and the globe itself expands and is lit up and every evening there's a show around that with fireworks and all around the lake are exactly the same concept of Auroville. The various pavilions of different cultures including of course the American pavilion because it's in Orlando, but there's the Chinese pavilion and there's the Morocco and every significant major culture that he could somehow get to represent except India is not yet there but many elements from the East are there and so the pavilions, each pavilion has shows every evening demonstrating their best of culture, their restaurants with their best foods, dress, shops and the works.
Everything which Auroville is supposed to have has already been created in EPCOT on a scale which is dramatic although not as big as Auroville, but it is dramatic and it is financially self-sustaining and then at the centre of it all as you enter Epcot it is this giant dome which is just like the Matrimandir and again interestingly as you enter the dome you go up in a spiral movement and as you go up you are shown images of the history of humanity, except it's not spiritual history, it's a scientific history. And you culminate at the top in an opening to the universe, where the whole space is lit up with stars and planets and it's opening to the cosmos. It is as if you are opening to the cosmic consciousness. All the significant elements of the design of Auroville have been captured and somehow represented. And that's just one example. Arcosanti is one of the other important ones, which was directly influenced from Auroville, although it took its own special focus. There's another which is in, Crestone, Colorado, where the couple who owned the land, the husband was Mr. Strong, he was at that time the United Nations and his wife Hanna Strong, who was invited to be on the Auroville International Board at that time early on and coming to Auroville and seeing this she said, wow this is possible, I have always dreamt that someday it should be, but here it is possible and seeing this, she was inspired to donate the land which they owned at Crestone to create a kind of a mini Auroville and particularly inviting all the different religious traditions to create their own spaces and to have many sub communities from different cultures and traditions into Crestone. So I'm just interrupting you, but to highlight this fact that Auroville was not just what we see today as this space. All these are Auroville in a sense because they represent special aspects of what Auroville already represents and even if you don't see it fully developed in Auroville, it's developed in the world and as far as Mother's work is concerned, it's Auroville and it's a new consciousness, the new world and something of the coming together of humanity which is being done through all this.
Narad (0:25:15):
As an example of the horticultural advances, you mentioned growing things in the desert. The Israelis are growing the finest oranges, Jaffa oranges, in pure sand of the desert. And how they do it is they trickle irrigate a little bit of water at the root system and when it, when it's seawater and when the salt goes up they bring in bulldozers and just throws it away and they start again with this and those you've tasted, they are the most delicious in the world. So Mother said there is only one Auroville, the others would have to have different names, but her consciousness has spread far and wide in these areas. And I'd like to share with you some of my experiences with the great horticulturists in India. Because they were very interested in us. The first time we started in Auroville at the Matrimandir gardens nursery, we had brought many, many seeds from California. I had a group of people, we would go out every weekend and collect different seeds, and grew many many new plants. And I said, 'well, let me take a van to Lalbaug Gardens in Bangalore and donate all of these to them', because it's a much easier climate than ours. Well, Dr. Marigowda, who was the head of it, who just welcomed us, and he gave us 12 of the great Hawaiian hibiscus that Mother named for Auroville and for the new world, 'the new creation'. So there are only about 13 plants that have two significances. 12 of them are hibiscus. So Mother said, 'the charm of Auroville', 'beauty of Auroville', 'realisation of Auroville'. And then she said to Tara one day, we need a little bit wider significance, so we'll call it 'Beauty of the New Creation'. And Auroville is the new creation. And there's one other flower that she gave two names, and that is Miracle. And she named it the 'Air of Auroville'. Air of Auroville is a miracle. As we've said, we cannot but breathe wherever we go, the super mental.
Sraddhalu (0:28:04):
I want to ask you to share something of this perspective. You see when we are reading, when Narad is reading from this text, the kind of introspection about the future and the sense of the plants and the vision, the glimpses, the experiences with the plants themselves, as if the plant calling you to reveal its first flower, the flower coming up within a year instead of after eight years. All of these experiences which he has noted down, you wrote them by hand initially? Yes. You should remember the context in which this was being written. You were living at the time in the desert of Auroville and there was no television, there was no radio. And if at all, you had a few books. And this is the diary notes of somebody who after a day of hard work stops and pauses and then communes with his deeper aspiration and documents the special experiences of that time. That mood I want you to share. What made people come? What was their experience when they came to a desert land where there was only the promise of one day a new city.
Narad (0:29:17):
We all came from the hippie generation pretty much. <laughs> And we were, you know, all had long, long hair and a long, long beard. Most of us were a bit ragged, but we had all met Mother. And that changed everything. Just one, one glimpse of Her transformed our lives. And she was with us in every moment. There were times in May and June, most of the time we didn't have any electricity, only occasionally at night for a few hours, when we could fill the ponds that we made with water to irrigate the next day. We would wring out a sheet in water and put it over us and be able to sleep for a couple of hours. The snakes were all over the place and Mother said, don't kill any of them. We never killed a snake. The Tamil men were said to be totally in fear of snakes. And yet one day they brought me a Russell's viper that big and showed me where it could strike, how far it could go, and then they put him back in the can and then they put him back in the wadai, so he would be free. And another time, I was with my, we called him maystry[1], a young man, Sunder Murti, who passed away recently and we were walking at night and I have no night vision and suddenly he throws me to the ground on top of me, and of course you know white people were respected in a different way then. He got up and he apologised to me and he said you were about to step on the head of a krait and it would have killed me in a few minutes. We had a young calf and he killed it in five minutes, a krait. So he saved my life. And the connection with the village boys, young ones, 10 or 11 years old, who worked with me. The love of nature never left them. Some of them formed a nursery, others built the gardens, many of them are still working in the Matrimandir, cutting the grass and doing whatever is necessary. We felt her presence, I would almost say at every moment it was like it was in the air, it was in us. We inhaled that presence and through all the difficulties we faced, we never once gave up, we never once had any fear that the thing would fail. It was just total confidence in Mother that has stayed with me till today. It will never go, will never leave me. So I'll continue with an article by one of the workers, because it explains the desert that Auroville was at that time. You can see old pictures where you'll see one palm tree and nothing else, and a small little banyan tree under which an old lady would sleep every night to protect it and to keep the young village boys from cutting the aerial roots and feeding them to the goats. And Mother knew about this lady, just as she knew when someone threw a machete, we call it a kathi, into the tree and the tree called her. She immediately sent out a secretary to pull that out of the tree!
“The area of the gardens will eventually encompass approximately 125 acres in a wide circular belt”. Now, Roger had his ideas of the gardens being little matchbox size and so we couldn't do anything because the group there was very strong behind him. So I said, well, we'll do the outer gardens, which they call a park today. So this fellow who is writing this says, “the surface is raw red clay which becomes hard in dry weather and becomes a quagmire in the rainy season”. Now he speaks about how we planted the plants. “Whenever a plant is put into the ground, whether a tree or an annual, a large pit or bed must must first be dug, the red clay removed and replaced with a mixture of topsoil hauled in by bullock cart, and compost made by the slow accumulation and breaking down of leaves and other cuttings. Eventually, we had to build a huge composting operation as the gardens grew”. And the man, Selvam, who was always my right hand and has now become the right hand in Auroville, worked with me and I brought a trailer, a huge trailer load of conveyor belts, equipment for shifting the different types of soils, machines to mix the soil because they were doing it with mumpties,[2] you could never get a homogenous mix. And all these things were at the Matrimandir for the past 40 years. Now they're moving it to another area to supply the whole city. But I studied Sir Albert Howard's composting techniques, organic aerobic composting. Later on, we also started with vermicompost, worms, and the work went on so smoothly because the trees were so happy to be in these large pits and they grew so rapidly, so beautifully. So he continues to write, 'The dense and always hungry populations of insects and rodents quickly developed a taste for the new foreign species of plants being introduced, as did the domestic but equally hungry herds of cows and goats which roamed freely from the villages. In an effort to avoid adding chemicals to the already damaged ecological balance, we try to control insects either by hand or by other natural means'. I wrote to Mother and I said, 'Mother, are there entities actually hostile to the worlds of plants, these insects, we were being devastated. We can grow things for a month and it would be wiped out in one day by insects'. And mother wrote, 'no, it is actually a mixture. Insects do good and they do bad'. Obviously, bees give us honey, other insects pollinate fruits. I had to see it from that perspective. I learned the most important lesson of my life in horticulture, control but not extermination of a species. Insects could have what they wanted, we got what we wanted, the plants got what they wanted, and we achieved a balance. This is in the early days when the young boys would send 50 goats in and destroy our work of many months. Finally, one day I captured a goat and the whole village came to me pleading, “please give it back, we have no money, we need this goat” and I gave it back. Next day the boy sent them again and I kept the goat and they came back again, father, mother, uncles, aunts and I said, 'no I'm not giving it back, it will cost you 25 rupees'. 25 rupees in those days was very costly. The next day they brought the 25 rupees and we didn't see any more goats after that. It was a little harsh perhaps but we had to do it.
Sraddhalu (0:38:58):
I want to put this in context for people who have not seen Auroville at that time. Imagine a barren desert. You can see from one end to the other and you can see that when it rains, the mud literally flows with the water and the ocean becomes red. And that's all you have and then there is a group of people standing there, sitting there, digging, preparing this mulch which is going to be the base for all the plants which are going to grow after 10 or 20 years and they are preparing this and they managed to create in the middle of this desert a little patch of greenery. What's the first thing that will happen in nature? Well, all the beings who are hungry are going to come there. Not only the human beings, but the goats and insects. And they are going to eat. And that's the level at which you cannot prevent them. You cannot put a barrier to stop insects coming in. And so that's the first lesson in a sense, very symbolically of cohabitation with nature, with the insects of nature. And later of course the goats come and the human beings come and everywhere it is harmonising and harmonising. But you can also imagine the frustration. After working hard and this is from morning till night continuous labour in the hot sun. You do not have air conditioning, you do not have electricity, you don't even have fans and if you have to rest there is no shade except some little kids' roofs that you have built temporarily and they are all very unstable rickety structures. And after a few months of work, overnight when it's wiped out, you can imagine the level of frustration involved. But what is interesting is that while the frustration was there, the strength was also there. Maybe if you can share something of that, how you were helped through
Narad (0:40:51):
The chief conservators of forests noted that not two bags of groundnuts per acre were possible any longer, and Auroville would be a desert that was inhabitable in 50 years. I said, there is no other way. What we had to do was do more and more and more. I worked 12-hour days almost constantly. And I got my share of sunstroke again and again. But Mother just put such energy into us. She poured energy into us and we would grow 10,000 seedlings every year in little plastic bags and distribute them to the whole greenbelt and that's what Mother wanted. She wanted this greenbelt around Auroville, which she said would change the climate, the rain would come, everything would change. In addition to that we had people like my friend Kirit at Gaya's Garden and many others who would bund from the top to catch the rainfall, but then they would work in these huge canyons and start damming up in a small area at first and then dammed the next area so it couldn't break everything down. Today, 95% of the rainwater is caught. Very little goes into the sea anymore. You don't see a red sea anymore. It's amazing.
Sraddhalu (0:42:42):
In fact, many of the ravines are also gone. They've just been flattened out. They're gone
Narad (0:42:46):
Yes. They are filled in.
Sraddhalu (0:42:48):
So when you go to Auroville today and you see all the greenery, you should know that all of this has been planted meticulously by people and it's the result of the effort of the first Aurovillians. I remember at that time, this must have been about 10 years later, it was 78-79 when I was going to Auroville, I would still see large spaces, all empty, flat desert and there will be one man bare-bodied because you can't afford to wear a shirt you will just perspire to death literally, so bare-bodied, dragging this little tanker, water tanker filled with water and a little pipe and putting a little bit of water onto these saplings which have been put on the side of the road and looking at that you would say, okay, what is he working for? Maybe 10 years later, maybe 20 years later. You're looking at a future which is not in your immediate access of vision. But the level of commitment was so extraordinary.
Narad (0:43:48):
When we went to Japan to see the gardens that Mother had visited, I went to this one garden and I've told this story before but it's worth telling again after what you've just said. And this monk showed us each of the different buildings in the area and gave us the entire history of it in the most perfect English I've ever heard. So I asked him, may I come back tomorrow? 'Yes, come back, 8 o'clock'. So I arrived at 8 o'clock, knocked on the door, and he opens it immediately. And I said, 'sir, I have a few questions for you'. He said, slow, no English. I said, no English? And he takes me to the first thing, the first house, and he shows me this huge bronze plaque and the Englishman had taught him to memorise everything on that plaque and then the next place and the next place. So I reduced my questions to one. Outside the monastery, there was a pine tree almost 100 feet tall. For the first 50 feet, it was covered in bundles of straw. I'd never seen that before. I said, Sir, tell me about tree. He said, 'tree sick. Give medicine. 200 years more'. <laughs> I think that's the sense we had in Auroville. Time didn't matter. It was going to be because it was her vision. We had to build a pipeline from a well 1,000 feet away to get water into the ponds we built. And we had large storage tanks containing about 10,000 gallons of water. And we had our watering needs in the house from a big tank, so we would have gravity when there was no electricity and we could have some water. But the important thing here is that this sense of water and its importance to the life of all of us and to our plants. I had to write Mother once when we needed a new well. And there was a fellow who was, what do you call that fellow who goes with a stick and finds the water? dowsing.. A dowser! And I wrote Mother about him and I knew that Mother had written about dowsers and you know sometimes it's in the mind. But he located a spot and Mother gave her blessings and we had a great well. Still there today.
Narad (0:47:21):
I wanted to talk a little bit more about our work in the world. I started a seed exchange program with more than 50 botanical gardens worldwide. Even from Russia, they would send certain seeds, which we couldn't grow, but they wanted seeds from us, so we sent the seeds to them. And there's a place in Australia, Queensland and Townsville, which is very tropical and very close to our climate, except that they get rains. And they had magnificent seeds of flowering plants. My interest was very much in creating as much beauty as we could. I studied all that Mother had written on beauty and Sri Aurobindo also. I think that was foremost in my consciousness, that expression of the creation, the manifestation of beauty. And when I read finally that Nature had agreed to collaborate with Mother, although she resisted for many years, then one day Mother said to her, you will become so much more beautiful, Nature agreed. And today I was asked a question the other day, has anything new happened in the flowers as a result of the supermental? I cannot say exactly as a result of the supermental, but I can tell you that the world is experiencing so many new species, so many new hybrids of flowers and I can only believe that it's because of the supermental on earth. Mother said to us that the plants would be the first to be transformed, because their whole life is an aspiration for light. We had people coming from all kinds of countries, South America, Brazil, Colombia, and they would bring seeds of the plants that they loved the most. This was a wonderful experiment for us because we built a glass house, a small little modest glasshouse, and we could raise the seedlings there. And there's a special experience in the connection with the seed when it's beginning to sprout. It's such a miraculous moment to see, to feel that, to see the two cotyledons, which are not leaves, but they're called seed leaves that feed the roots and sustain the plant until it can develop a strong root system. And to look at that plant and to see it begin to blossom out. Well, we built a library and people donated money and books and we had thousands of books in that library, which was again destroyed, disbanded. One fellow said, no library here anymore. I won't tell you the negatives. There are too many because the positives overcome all of them. They overwhelm the negatives. You see a different city today, a township, there was a man in charge of 100 acres of the Greenbelt. And he had vanilla orchids in bloom. And I had seen these seeds, the actual vanilla seeds. And he had this beautiful bird, it's a white bird, you must know it. It has a long, long tail and they dance in the wind. I'll try to remember it later. He had three pair of them and they would just come out of the woods and dance in front of us. He finally got an eagle to come and he built for 50 metres all around thorns that high so no human could go there and disturb the eagle and the eagle would come out at night and fly above his head as he walked along the road. I mean, these moments of such intense beauty. I asked Mother in the early days, I said, 'many people are coming and wanting to work in the nursery. May we have your blessings." Mother wrote back an interesting letter. She said, 'for those who want to come to work in harmony and goodwill, my blessings are not needed'. Wow! So the whole reason of Auroville is harmony and goodwill for all mankind. And it will be replicated all over the world.
Sraddhalu (0:53:09):
Namaste.
[1] Tamil word for construction mason.
[2] A type of shovel used in Tamil nadu.