Self-Supporting Township

In the universe, there is an inexhaustible source of energy that asks only to be replenished; if you know how to go about it, it is replenished. Instead of draining life and the energies of our earth and making of it something parch and inert, we must know the practical exercise for replenishing the energy constantly. And there are not just words; I know how it’s to be done, and science is in the process of thoroughly finding out – it has found out most admirably. But instead of using it to satisfy human passions, instead of using what science has found so that men may destroy each other more effectively than they are presently doing, it must be used to enrich the earth, to make the earth richer and richer, more active, generous, productive and to make all life grow towards its maximum efficiency. This is the true use of money. And if it’s not used like that, it’s a vice – a “short circuit” and a vice. 

But how many people know how to use it in this way? Very few, which is why they have to be taught. What I call “teach” is to show, to give the example.

We want to be an example of true living in the world. It’s a challenge I am placing before the whole financial world: I am telling them that they are in the process of withering and ruining the earth with their idiotic system; and with even less than they are now spending for useless things – merely for inflating something that has no inherent life, that should be only an instrument at the service of life, that has no reality in itself, that is only a means and not an end (they make an end of something that is only a means) - well then, instead of making of it an end, they should make it the means. With what is at their disposal they could...oh transform the earth so quickly! Transform it, put it into contact, truly into contact with the supramental forces that would make life bountiful and indeed, constantly renewed – instead of becoming withered, stagnant, shrivelled up: a future dead moon... The movement should be the opposite: the earth should become more and more a resplendent sun, but a sun of life. Not a sun that burns but a sun that illumines – a radiant glory.

--The Mother, Agenda V1, 4 October 1958

I want to insist on the fact that it will be an experiment, it is for making experiments―experiments, research, study. Auroville will be a city that will try to be, or will tend to become, or attempt to be “self-supporting”, that is to say…

Autonomous?

“Autonomous” is understood to mean some kind of independence which breaks off relations with others, and that is not what I mean.

For example, those who produce food, like Aurofood―of course, when we are 50,000 it will be difficult to provide for all the needs, but for the moment we are only a few thousand at most―well, a factory always produces far too much, so it will sell outside and receive money. Aurofood for example wants to have a special relationship with the workers―not at all the old system, something which would be an improvement on the communist system, a more balanced organisation than sovietism, that is, something which does not err too much on one side at the expense of the other.

There is one thing I wanted to say: the participation in the well-being and life of the town as a whole is not something calculated on an individual basis; that is, this individual should give so much, it is not like that. It is calculated according to the means, the activity, the capacity for production; it is not the democratic idea which cuts everything up into equal pieces, which is an absurd machinery. It is calculated according to one’s means: one who has much gives much, one who has little gives little; one who is strong works hard, one who is not strong does something else. You see, it is something truer, deeper. That is why I make no attempt to explain now, because people will start to make all kinds of complaints. All this must come about automatically, so to speak, with the growth of the city, in the true spirit. That is why this note is extremely concise.

- The Mother, CWM XIII, 30 December 1967