The Matrimandir

Auroville is a village near Pondicherry where people from all over the world live. It was a vision of the Mother, a place she wanted people to be able to come to where they would be free from the pains of life, no matter who they were, where they came from, or how much money they had. Auroville is an inspiration, but it is also flawed. There are many people with beautiful intentions trying to realize the Mother’s dream and succeeding in small ways every day. However, I don’t believe a utopia like this is achievable as long as human beings are involved, and Auroville illustrates this. I’ve experienced Auroville in small pockets, so I don’t claim to be an expert at all about it. I was very intrigued by it.

When I first came to Auroville, I stayed at a guesthouse run by an Aurovillian family. I had a deep wound on my leg from a fall and a young girl named Mirabelle who wanted to be a vet fixed me up with iodine and gauze. We became friends, and she was the daughter of the man who ran the guesthouse. She was half German, half French, and had lived in Auroville her whole life. For a pre-teen, I was impressed by her maturity and worldly sophistication. I asked her, “So, I don’t know much about Auroville, and I’d like to learn. What should I be sure to check out? What are your favorite places here?” She replied, “Well, you have to go to the Matrimandir. That is a must. It is the real center of Auroville, every feeling about this place comes from there.”

I went to the Matrimandir time and time again over this past year. The realizations I had there during times of personal reflection were intense, unexpected and extremely meaningful. They were visions that appeared as if out of nowhere, like the Mother was blowing them in through my ears. They are quite personal, so I won’t share them, but I was always filled with a sense of joy, love and a deep peace whenever I went there.

The Matrimandir was a vision of the Mother, and to her it was a dream from “The Divine Conciousness.” (She and Aurobindo preferred this to the term “God”, as they felt it more properly described their spiritual beliefs.) She described the vision of the Matrimandir in detail to architects, and they drew up blueprints. The Matrimandir in the flesh is said to be exactly as the Mother had described it. This place is not a temple, it is not a place of worship. It is a place enveloped by extreme silence, and meant to be a place for personal concentration.

From a distance, the Matrimandir looks like a huge golden golfball emerging from the earth like a mushroom. Its surface is made up of hundreds of gold-plated discs, not unlike satellite dishes. Up close they look like mosaics, as the gold leaf is pressed in-between two small pieces of glass, and hundreds of these make up one disk. The whole structure is propped up by 12 huge brick “petals”, that represent the twelve qualities of the Mother, and each of these also has a small meditation chamber inside. The entrance to the main chamber, the golfball, looks a lot like the drop-down stairs of a spaceship in the movies. You leave your shoes outside, and when you enter you put on a pair of fresh white socks, meant to keep their white carpet pristine.

Despite the new-agey, garish pomp of the exterior, in my opinion the inside of the Matrimandir is very beautiful. It is dimly lit and extremely quiet; you could not hear a pin drop (because of the plush white carpet). There is a ramp that wraps around the interior in an upwards spiral, and it is like being inside a gigantic snail shell as you glide up. Along the concave walls are four vertical streams of water, also lined with gold tiles, gold-plated veins streaming down and keeping a pulse of the four cardinal directions.

At the top of the spiraling ramp is the inner chamber for concentration. It is a circular room, with twelve pillars spacing out separate meditation areas, with white cushions radially placed to face the center. It is lit by a spotlight of sun coming from a hole in the center of the domed ceiling. There is actually a computer that tracks the sun throughout the day so there is a steady stream all day long. The hole in the ceiling is definitely remeniscient of a belly button in the center of the bulbous ceiling. This makes the dark, silent interior feel like a womb, the light streaming down in a beam an umbilical cord. The light strikes a huge spherical crystal on the ground, totally a crystal ball, and it diffracts into rainbow rings on the ceiling in two places: one small ring right around the belly button, and another about 7 meters away. All the people in personal reflection around the crystal pall are reflected around its equator. Meditating people sitting cross-legged while reflected upside down look like the continents of Africa or South America. They are strange, shadowed calligraphy around the belt of this universe.

The silence sinks inside all the openings of your face: eyes, ears, nose, mouth. It is like being submerged under the surface of the ocean and there is that same hollow echo inside your brain as when you are under water. I could actually feel a light, gentle force weighing down my eyelids. Quieting the chatter inside my skull was much easier in this place compared to others.

Underneath the Matrimandir, once you exit and are in the outdoors cherishing the golden bright light in a new way, you go underneath the golf ball via ramps going down (it is indeed suspended above the earth) to a covered terrace area. In the center of this slight depression is a lotus fountain made up of 12 rows of 24 milky white marble petals radiating from the edge, points of the petals facing the center unlike a normal flower. This is an introspective lotus, all petals pointing in, and the rows get smaller as they get to the center where another crystal ball is located, but it is much smaller than the one inside. The brick around is red, the sky showing through the exits of the 6 ramps leading out is very blue, and it is amazingly spacious and open down there. This place is also an active wind tunnel, and the breeze channeling down these ramps is strong and cool. It’s nice to watch the water move like milk down these smooth petals and hear the birds chatter.
There is one more special place at the Matrimandir, and that is the banyan tree. Auroville was an open wasteland of red clay when it first began. There were no trees, save for a few banyan trees, and you could see straight to the ocean. The place was a parched wasteland full of dreamers pioneering the Mother’s dream. Since then, the place has become a dense, lush jungle. But one of the original trees of Auroville is this gorgeous banyan tree outside of the Matrimandir. The Mother found this tree and she said, “Here. Here is the center, the heart. Build from here and build outward.”

I always felt that the Mother manifested herself in the tiny chipmunks with long tails that scampered and chirped in the tree above her Samadhi (grave) at the ashram in Pondy. But after meeting this tree, I feel that more than ever this humongous banyan is the embodiment of the Mother. There is the one main trunk with many smaller trunks dropping down back to the ground from the horizontal, roof-like branches stretching outwards. This is the cool thing about banyans, branches can also decide to grow down and become roots. This tree is all wrinkles folding into wrinkles, thick pocked skin, braided limbs like veins streaming back down into the earth. This is the Mother. The best thing about this banyan tree is that it has an open heart; there is a hole in its trunk, a window full of glaring white light. A few stray dogs sleep in the lap of the tree and when you come close to touch her scaly skin, her open heart is buzzing with tiny flies. Life is everywhere. Things are dying and being born again. Walter Pater was writing about the Mona Lisa when he wrote this, Satprem quoted this beloved bit when he was describing the Mother, and I would also like to quote it while writing about this banyan tree:

“She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the vampire she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep blue seas, and keeps their fallen days about her...
The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one....”