Dennis Bailey
(Shyam Sunder on a meeting with Mother, 2 July 1972:) “Dennis wanted to know from Mother whether he could build his hut near a grove of banyan trees with which he wished to be in harmony. He feels a silence when he goes to the grove.
Mother said, “It shouldn't be very near, otherwise it will disturb the trees.” ”[1]
(Dennis Bailey, 1978:) “Auroville is not virgin land. It has been used, overused, misused, abused, neglected, wasted. For thousands of years. Too many people are trying to live off it, few are concerned with its restoration and development.
In more ways than the financial, the potential here for human symbiosis and exchange is exciting. People from all over the world are living in close daily contact with Asian villagers, sharing – even despite themselves – energy, work, feelings, ideas, nourishment. With ‘westerners’ in loin-cloths driving bullock-carts, ‘peasants’ overhauling and re-designing wind machines, ordinary ideas about human karma and capability are seen to be needlessly limiting. This in itself makes possible, even inevitable, rather powerful human mutations, and quieter, more immediate, fruitful syntheses.
Traditional Tamil methods of food preparation, such as the rendering of coarse grains more digestible by fermentation, are evolving with techniques from elsewhere such as malting and sprouting into a diet making better use than ever of locally adapted plants. Village building materials and crafts mesh beautifully with new ideas about space, light, permanency, total impact of housing.
Sometimes the mesh is not so beautiful, which is also exciting. Extremes of both exploitative and nurturing consciousness are here amply represented. There have been dramas, even fist fights, over green branches cut for fuel and goats in the young trees. There are farmers who sell organic compost to Auroville, then use the cash to buy chemicals for their own fields. Guavas produced with total care and attention, eaten ripe off the tree a food beyond price, disappear green at 5 in the morning, reappear at evening in the market town, a bargain for someone at four for a rupee.
We're learning that a regenerative approach to the earth involves much more than socially-disengaged ‘self-sufficiency’ or caring – however lovingly or intensely – for a few scraps of salvaged land. It's becoming clear that human beings are not only part of but have somehow actually invented the ‘problem of the environment’: our old, old game of seeking always outside ourselves for something to blame, study, work on, change. But somehow problems which seem purely ‘physical’, and which we are accustomed to express and think about in entirely physical and quantitative terms (too many people, too few resources, not enough space, too much space) cannot any more be simply ‘fought’ or ‘attacked’ in the old satisfying physical way (chemical agriculture, strip mines, labour camps, genocide). They are in essence and origin not problems of the earth or the land or the whole environment but of human distribution and use, and ownership and greed, and fear and desire: problems of human psychology and quality of life, which can be dealt with nowhere if not within and among ourselves.
This awareness that humanity is the problem implies such strategies here as subsidized afforestation and erosion control on village land, simultaneous amelioration and depopulation of cattle and goat herds, a guava tree for every family and a return to demonetized local economies, other things we can see and recognize but have no idea yet how to actually implement, much more we can't yet even see.
Nothing is more important at the moment than watering the garden, keeping ourselves and each other as much as possible alive and growing. And trying to see.”[2]