Space Odyssey

The day after yoga school let out, we went to see the spaceship.

Nelly, Caroline and I made the trip to Auroville, about 160 kilometers south of Chennai, in a large white SUV that belongs to a South Indian government official. (I can’t go into it. Let’s just say Nelly knows a guy who knows a guy.) The SUV had a flagpole on its hood and a siren that the driver used liberally. Above the passenger seat were three lamps to illuminate an on-the-go VIP.

We drove past an amusement park named Dizzee World, past Mamallapuram, past fishing villages and salt flats. We held our breath as we zoomed past buses and bullock carts, playing chicken with oncoming traffic, swerving so violently that a stop at Dizzee World would have been redundant.

salt flats

self-portrait in salt

Waiting for us in Auroville were my old friends Alex and Chitra, who’d driven from Bangalore. The three of us met in Jersey back in ’01. Then Alex moved to Los Angeles, Chitty moved to New York, I moved to Los Angeles, Chitty moved back to her native Bangalore, Alex moved to London, and I moved to Chennai.

Alex is visiting us in India for three weeks. I thought he’d get a kick out of Auroville. It’s India’s pocket of New Ageism, an experiment in communal living that began 40 years ago. Alex buys organic and free-range. He eschews paper plates and plastic utensils. His mother turned bohemian around the time he turned 12, and they spent weekends at an upstate New York commune called The Land. He knows from hippies.

But Auroville is something else. It’s Sedona on steroids. More than 1,800 people from about 35 countries live in settlements with names such as Miracle, Sincerity and Surrender. We stayed at a guesthouse in Certitude, though I would have preferred an address in Bliss. There’s a spirulina farm, a “Unity Pavilion,” and restaurants called Solar Kitchen and New Creation Corner.

Becoming an Aurovilian is harder than gaining admission to an Upper East Side co-op. Newcomers, as they’re called, must prove they’re healthy (an AIDS test is mandatory) and have enough cash to support themselves for at least a year. They’re required to contribute to the town fund. Any home built in Auroville belongs to the community.

The “soul” of Auroville is a space-age meditation center called Matrimandir. It’s a giant golden golf ball, slightly squashed. Started in 1971 and still under construction, the Matrimandir houses a crystal globe that’s 70 centimeters in diameter. It sits under a shaft of light in the all-white Inner Chamber, which looks like a collaboration between aliens and Ikea.

We weren’t allowed to take photos inside. That’s one of the many rules governing access to and conduct in the Inner Chamber. Getting in took Alex, Caroline, Nelly and me two days and some amount of sneakiness. We had to prove our worth -- and be primed for contact with the crystal -- by meditating in one of the “petals” on the golden orb’s perimeter. That didn’t go so well. (See previous entry.)

We kept our composure in the imposing Inner Chamber. Caroline and Nelly even experienced the crystal’s power, which they described as a pressure on their chests. Alex and I noted that an hour in the spaceship passed at warp speed. Mother would have been pleased.

Auroville is the brainchild of “The Mother,” a.k.a. Mirra Alfassa, a Parisian mystic and disciple of Indian philosopher-yogi Sri Aurobindo. Her portrait hangs in most rooms and decorates the dashboards of cabs that ply Auroville’s red-dirt roads. “Auroville is meant to hasten the advent of the supramental reality upon earth,” she said in 1972, a year before her death. “The help of all those who find that the world is not what it ought to be is welcome.”

I’m pretty sure “supramental” isn’t a word, but I get Mother’s drift. She envisioned a utopian society where money wouldn’t change hands and service would serve as currency. The town would eventually accommodate 50,000 like-minded people, i.e., the sort of people who put “Mean People Suck” stickers on their bumpers. Bumpers that aren’t attached to SUVs.

I’ll be back. I liked tooling around town on a beat-up scooter and lying in a beachside hammock. I liked drinking wine on the patio at Needam Guesthouse, watching geckos dart and caterpillars creep. I liked the spinach crepes at New Creation Corner. I liked hearing French and Hebrew and Farsi and wearing tank tops without fear of offending.

But I’ll leave the spaceship to other explorers. I won’t find serenity in a blue-lit, air-conditioned pod. A crystal cast in Germany can’t bring me closer to divinity. I prefer a gnarled tree. A tangerine and pomegranate sunset. A mountaintop. Such things make me believe, if only for a moment, that the world is exactly what it ought to be.