Night watch at the soul of the new creation...

- Ruud Lohman

The black expanse above continues to be black, but a play of lightness and delight transforms at every moment this monument under construction into a mind-blowing centre of the three worlds. A single spotlight guides our workers who are from the neighbouring Tamil village and are on a night-duty to keep the recently concreted portion of the north pillar moist. Hundreds of insects of all shapes and colours and levels of evolution are attracted by the light and they fly, jump and bump without any visible pattern against the lens of the spotlight.

That's how I, too, came to Auroville - an insect from somewhere in the dark world, attracted by the one spotlight in the huge night, jumping and bumping around without any as yet visible pattern. The insect does not seek out the light, it is the light that draws the insect. After one and a half year in Auroville I still don't know why or how I came. I did not choose to come here; rather I feel I was chosen. When I broke away from my previous life I told my confreres of the religious order at which I was a member, "As soon as I know why I am going, I may feel ready to come back." Well, I still don't know. But the more I discover something of this reason, the surer I am that I won't go back.

The possibility to feel proud of being an Aurovilian seldom arises when one knows that we are not here on account of personal merits but rather because of the difficulties each one of us represents. So that these can be integrated and transformed in the evolutionary experiment of Auroville.

We all bring with us a particular set of problem, forces, idiosyncrasies as fuel for the cosmic fire. We also represent, each one of us, a particular aspect of the old world that has to be new-made.

I may have been chosen because I represented a strong force in the past age religion. I spent my first night at the beautiful Ashram

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guest house Golconde; the next morning I took the bus to Auroville and it "happened" to be the very day when the excavation of Matrimandir started. I joined the thirty or so people who carried red earth away from the excavation in baskets on their heads and from that first moment I know a lot of things.

I was a theologian. Theologically, I have not come anywhere near 'solving' many of the mental problems involved in my transition from Rome to Auroville, from religion to "no religion", from Jesus and St. Francis of Assisi to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But my little victory over theology is that I hardly care any more.

And the amazing thing for me is this; the more I discover Sri Aurobindo, the Integral Yoga and Matrimandir, the more I feel that I have not really broken with my past life as a member of a religious order and an official representative of a religion, but that only now I am slowly becoming what I then spiritually, and occultly was supposed to be.

Courtesy : Sri Aurobindo's action, Puducherry

(Ruud Lohman came to Auroville in 1971 and joined the work of excavation for building Matrimandir. He continued to work on Matrimandir construction till his passing away in July, 1986.)

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