Exile.

Don’t let us be misled, there are multiple ways which can be taken by the exile, many of various tastes and specificities to the infinite of our beings’ nature, of our pasts and our evolutions, of His creation. They even sometimes engrave themselves maliciously with aptness or humour, or even with the quasi-punitive or humiliating irony inside the physical geographies of a soil of “étrangèreté” which we tread on during this way of earth as in the “interine” abysses separating us from the Divine. In any case, to look at it closer, it comes to the same thing, it only hangs on the amplitude of the regard or the vision that we bring on ourselves and the world, and as it is the most often limited we still see so little of it ! According a lot of multiple aspects, the road may sometimes appear very long, monotonous and maybe even painful, however, we are sometimes granted of being able to take a short cut of a more or less well-intentioned chance — in any case very certainly well-intentional, we don’t doubt about it anymore — , “grace” which can finally turn out a tiny bit paradoxal indeed ambiguous according to our moods and our soul states (or Conscience states) of the moment and which forces us to wait for the biggest of the not always particularly “listening” and receptive troops as we would like them to be, under the watchword of the change and of the luminous promise. Exhausted troops, unaccomplished parts of our beings, worn out with heavy legs numbed by forced march — Thanks to Yoga ! — Troops that we had left forgotten behind rather enough cheerfully, let us recognize it, in the joy of our so sudden and paradoxically enlightened (“lumine”) guide’s advance. We had forgotten how our mental and our imagination (among others, dissident companions or mutineers of the journey) have well fast created bridges of virtuality and trompe l’œil ; however the fact remains that the battle is most often very painfully won as it is on the front of a trench warfare by the tenacity and pugnacity set against the opposite adverse force, adverse force which is just by chance the quasi exact and symmetrical replica of the one that we set against it. Hum !
All the (Integral) Yoga of Sri Aurobindo lies in this reality of the Being to become again who we are not yet, or maybe so shyly, and yet who We are very certainly, at the very origin of our primordial Cell. We re-mumble the first numbers of this fabulous equation to solve, we are still so separated of the formula of this Ourselves, of this just “HIM” ! Then we wander on those pretty and truant pathes of this as so pretty planet of more or less sparkling sceneries, looking forward and hypothetically in what a hope can still be filled with — uncertainty and equivocation — , an intimate fusion of levels still apparently not so easely reconcilable and really reconciled, however for weaving on this dotted thread line (“fil trait tillé”) of our lives the web of a new DNA of a Substance-conscience of a new original Matter to come.
We had thought, as many others very certainly, that this Auroville created by Mother could have been and should have been the ideal and favoured Place which was offered or proposed to every one of us to establish this Recognition with Himself, to encourage this return of the One, that the axis of each of us present there was orientated to This, like fascinated by the “ numinous” number of the lighthouse so watched for, by the doubtful and lost navigators on the moving waters of an as so well moving world, but we have to admit rarely and frequently moving, at least maybe in the still insufficiently immense and huge regard which is commonly granted to us to look at this day of humanity, enough well troubled humanity to make a choice which could be real. We mind as well put our cards on the table now and stop going on anymore, that was not the case of our experimentation.
It appears to us very quickly that the Auroville that we had then contacted was far too much worried of delighting itself too often in the Narcissus reflection of its own image and unfortunately was becoming partly from then on, one more sacred geography on the already well saturated map of India. And that the Auroville in which we dreamed of and aspired to then did not have any other elsewhere than the secret and intimate desire of soul and being, recognition of the “psychic being” to go back to the Sri Aurobindo terminology. It is well from there that its manifeste reality comes out from the roots of our exile, in such a difference of a nature of being and aspiration, there where the word fraternity is not so easy to apply or to really formulate for the one who is a touch sincer in his relations and carried away by God gesture.
In any case, it is not evidently something that we conquer by opportunism neither that we inherit.

We were able to discover and experiment how the Power in this place was able to be present, powerful, predatory and ingratiating and take over insidiously * — *at the worst we dare to hope it at least — the twisted part of certain human beings, and infect or inflame this secret wound which the human beings don’t stop titillate most often unconsciously or carelessly. We then had this image which spread frequently across our mind, this image that it was becoming urgent to Auroville to have a gigantic mirror for allowing this city to see in its global nature the state of its own individual and personal misery, its own default of a commun Ideal. A super-barometer of the soul state, well ! But there it is, the guides are gone, leaving the place somehow in fallow to its own fallowing destiny with little too wide directives and from then on apparently contradictory for the individual receptive narrowness, it was really them who were until then the mirror-conscience of this humanity in quest. We dreamt of the healing power of what the vision of this fabulous anamorphosis in its monstrous and grotesque aspect would be able to reveal to the astounded eyes of the inhabitants of this so well heiress-city of a so hardly tolerable and bearable Meaning from then on. We could not bear anymore the well thinking and mostly accommodating “overworked-parrot” of the “Mother has said…” in brief we were already somebody else and somewhere else, sent by the same occasion in the world, and unfortunately there is so little to say of this one, maybe do we lack simplicity, we shall then not be able despite everything to always say too much, although we however already know it so well and that it doesn’t have many real surprises in store for us, in any case really gifted of the Meaning of what we imagine the spirit of the Integral Yoga to be !

We know what this inevitable “re-connection” with this world (moreover occidental !) means as well as the confrontation and the forced immersion with this other language, with this “unacceptable” after those stays in India and how much energy and inner tolerance is necessary, to take on very empirically and approximately the consequences of those fracture and “séparativité” in the therefore inevitably dual nature of the unaccomplished being that we still are, to readjust with the so restrictive rules of the “social survival” without for all that, having to deny, to gnaw, to compromise ourselves ; to rediscover also what the word resistance wants to signify and really takes shape of meaning, to engender and impose, for going more and more through the opaque layers and aspects of those “lacks” of ourselves (for not having to talk about the one of the others !) that we certainly had also put aside — our troops, we should maybe rather say our herd — to find again in this world of quasi total ontological and psychic* wandering (we shall avoid the word “spiritual” in what it could evoke of such a difference and equivocation for every one of us) one particle of this so specific Meaning of this Yoga which could re-contact us, re-center us, re-formulate us, re-energize us and allow us to look into the individual and personal possibility of confirming the possible creative space of some testimony and recognition.
Meanwhile, are we still able of doing it really?
*Still according Sri Aurobindo terminology

About…
The purpose ?
To reduce the chasms of the exile. At least, to try.
Although the Work can only be evidently done first alone and with ourselves, to establish a link with the other, and by the other well evidently to ourselves, there where it is still possible, there where there are still beings who have this Something which burns intimately and secretely deep inside, this Something which aspires to the revival, to take the sun and to blossom, even just a little, to a more real and genuine life different than this misery and this latent on credit death that we go through with the submitted spine from our narrownesses and our real self — abnegations in this space of world, and this, in so little hope and true and creative Life, Life which should not be a survival nor yet an under-life !
The purpose ?
To meet in openness and secret and compatible empathy of what could be a little of fraternity without being just a too easily empty, pronounced and overworked word to be rich of the Meaning.
The purpose ?
To allow each one of us who is animated by this desire, to reveal the nature of his exile or the Recognition with Himself and to gather on this struggling earth the scattered but real and sincer places of a more subtle and intimate Auroville, this “imprint vacuity” of the sensibility to the Feminine, this so delicate part of the being and yet still so weakly recognized by the oppressive and ignorant exteriority, even and well evidently ignorant of a reality different than the one it knows and recognizes as truth.
Maybe also, that it becomes a little bit by sudden revival a more striking and revealing silvering of a mirror in which Auroville — or at least certain of his inhabitants, because we cannot give offence to the ones who work at it truly and most often in silence and there are nevertheless some (unfortunately not always at the “key positions”!) — could have the possibility of “reflecting” itself to become again this for what it was created for and not having to pretend spreading magic powder and fine words and ideals and from that moment already corrupted on the blandly astounded eyes of a marveled public (it could be that the earth has some navel which is rather unnecessary to refer to or to prefer too often !), but this is no more a prime importance because there is this “Something” going on and that it belongs to every one first of all to position Himself consciously in this Adventure and there is no space left for a pointless, specious, fallacious or justifying language which could counter this Reality.
Sri Aurobindo, Mother, Satprem and some others, very certainly more anonymous but sincer, have bored and cleared the Path, are boring or clearing the Path. The jungle is quick to take back its innate jungle rights, the sharp cut is short and not without risk or danger — just the fact of trying will show it — it is urgent not to leave the path fading and to shore up as well as it can be the clearing and decoding acquisitions as far as it is given or proposed to us to do it. We propose on our side the reading of certain writings born during this experience lived in Auroville and at the Samadhi of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry (“DHANUSHMAT, letters to one Auroville” & “very certainly, a story of fraternity”). We shall wish that it won’t stay a far too individual act and that it may be followed by contacts or own thoughts or writings which testify a similar or different adventure, weaving from then on the threads of a soul impregnated with more opened fraternity beyond the limits of a classified and confined geography.

Fraternally
28th of November 2006

Translated by Annick PETITDEMANGE
With the participation of the author