Sri Aurobindo acknowledged at his death in
1950 that he had not yet achieved the “descent of
the Supramental” and indicated that this would
occur through the efforts of the Mother. In 1956
Mother indeed announced that the descent had
occurred. In 1968 she inaugurated AUROVILLE, a
new utopian city in southern India dedicated to
the realization of her goals. It was intended as an
international city, belonging to “nobody in par-
ticular.” Along with the ashram in Pondicherry,
this city flourishes to this day and is still develop-
ing according to the Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s
principles and philosophy.
Significantly, Sri Aurobindo and Mother never
desired to create a new cult or religion. Their goal
was nothing less than the transformation of the
conditions of existence for all of humanity. As
a result, no successor was appointed to follow
Mother. A loose-knit but devoted group of admir-
ers have continued to practice the yoga in creative
and ever changing ways. Perhaps the best known
admirer of Sri Aurobindo in America was Dr. Hari-
das CHAUDHURI, who in 1968 founded the Califor-
nia Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco,
a graduate school dedicated to the development of
“mind, body and spirit.”
Ashrams devoted to Sri Aurobindo have been
established at several sites in the United States.
The first such ashram was the Cultural Integra-
tion Fellowship in San Francisco, founded by
Chaudhuri in 1951. Another important ashram
is Matagiri, founded by Sam Spanier and Eric
Hughes in 1968 in the Catskill mountains of New
York State. The name Matagiri means “Mother’s
mountain” in Sanskrit. A third developing ash-
ram in America dedicated to the teachings of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother is the Lodi, Califor-
nia, ashram founded in the 1990s, with its well-
known Auromere book outlet (books@auromere.
com), the main American source for books writ-
ten by and about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
Further reading: Peter Hees, Sri Aurobindo: A Brief
Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
Robert McDermott, ed., The Essential Aurobindo (New
York: Lindisfarne Press, 1987); Satprem, Sri Aurobindo
or the Adventure of Consciousness. Translated from the
French by Tehmi (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram,
1970).Auroville
Planned as an international experimental town-
ship, Auroville was inspired by the evolution-
ary vision of SRI AUROBINDO and founded by
Mirra Alfassa, known as the MOTHER. The name
Auroville has the two meanings: “city of dawn,”
from the French aurore (dawn), and “city of
Aurobindo,” for the theorist who inspired its
foundation.
Auroville was inaugurated on February 28,
1968, in a ceremony attended by representatives
from 124 nations and all the states of India. In
a gesture symbolic of human unity, a boy and a
girl from each nation and state poured a handful
of soil from their homeland into a lotus-shaped
marble urn near the center of the city-to-be. Auro-
ville has been endorsed by three resolutions of the
UNESCO general assembly and recognized as an
international trust by a unique parliamentary act
of the Indian government. Auroville welcomes
people from all parts of the world to live together
and explore cultural, educational, scientific, spiri-
tual, and other pursuits in accordance with the
Auroville Charter.
The idea for Auroville began in the Mother’s
thinking as early as 1952, when she called for
an international center of education. She wrote:
“A synthetic organization of all nations, each
one occupying its own place in accordance with
its own genius and the role it has to play in the
whole, can alone effect a comprehensive and
progressive unification which may have some
chance of enduring.” She continued, “The first
aim then will be to help individuals to become
conscious of the fundamental genius of the
nation to which they belong and at the same
time to put them in contact with the modes ofK 54 Auroville