Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.The Auroville Charter

An Evolutionary Imperative

In a world of accelerating technological evolution individuals and collectives are increasingly under pressure to evolve and adapt. Education is no more limited to children and youth but has become a lifelong process for everyone to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world. Such learning, naturally, must be self-driven. For an individual to become self-driven the first condition is to come in touch with one’s own deepest self and its inspired vision and force. This too is not sufficient, one must learn to give it expression in life through work that serves the evolution of the whole of which the individual is an integral part. Thus one becomes a part of a larger collective evolution driven from within in tune with the forces of Nature. It is at once an evolution of the individual, society and Nature. This demands a radical re-imagination of the educational process and its objectives. Auroville is a response to this call of our time, a living laboratory of educational research and evolutionary progress. Here all of life is an opportunity to learn and progress and every individual has a unique contribution to make in the overall human progress.

A Learning Society

As education has become a life long process it is necessary to re-imagine all activities and institutions of life as contexts for learning. This demands us to re-imagine the very notion of the university if it is to embrace all contexts of human life from birth to death. It has to be a learning society that is at once a university as well as a city where the full complexity of human life is experimented upon in live-in laboratories. All social institutions and process, from science to technology, from arts to culture, from governance to economy, from families to workplaces, from birth to death, are to be reimagined into living laboratories to give birth to a new society, new humanity, new world.

Auroville is a bold experiment in this direction.

10 Fundamentals of Auroville Campus

The following are a collection of quotes from the founder of Auroville, The Mother, grouped into ten fundamentals for easy reference. This does not cover the rich diversity and complexity of Auroville but can give you a good starting point.

1. Unending Education
   • Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
   • The education of a human being should begin at birth and continue throughout his life.
2. Inner Discovery
   • The first necessity is the inner discovery in order to know what one truly is behind social, moral, cultural, racial and hereditary appearances.
   • At the centre there is a being free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the active centre of our being and our life in Auroville.
   • … to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
   • In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls.
3. A Place for Karmayoga
   • Work, even manual work, is something indispensable for the inner discovery. If one does not work, if one does not put his consciousness into matter, the latter will never develop. To let the consciousness organise a bit of matter by means of one’s body is very good. To establish order around oneself helps to bring order within oneself.
   • Auroville is created to realise the ideal of Sri Aurobindo who taught us the Karma Yoga. Auroville is for those who want to do the Yoga of work.
   • It is in work done as an offering to the Divine that consciousness develops best.
4. Material and Spiritual Researches
   • Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of actual human unity.
   • The opposition between spirituality and material life, the division between the two has no sense […] as, in truth, life and the spirit are one and it is in and by the physical work that the highest Spirit must be manifested.
   • Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
5. No Certificates, Titles or Positions
   • Education would be given not for passing examinations or obtaining certificates and posts but to enrich existing faculties and bring forth new ones.
   • In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organise.
   • Intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but by increased duties and responsibilities.
6. No Personal Possessions
   • Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But, to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
   • Auroville is the ideal place for those who want to know the joy and liberation of no longer having any personal possessions.
   • The Aurovilian should lose the sense of personal possession. For our passage in the material world, what is indispensable to our life and to our action is put at our disposal according to the place we must occupy. The more we are consciously in contact with our inner being, the more are the exact means given to us.
7. Collaboration, not Competition
   • The true spirit of Auroville is collaboration and must be more and more so. True collaboration paves the way to divinity.
   • It would be a place where human relationships, which are normally based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in doing well, of collaboration and real brotherhood.
8. Human Unity
   • Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity.
   • Auroville wants to be the first realisation of human unity based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo, where men of all countries would be at home.
9. Beauty
   • Beauty in all its artistic forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, would be equally accessible to all; the ability to share in the joy it brings would be limited only by the capacities of each one and not by social or financial position.
   • In the physical, the Divine manifests as Beauty.
   • The tapasya or discipline of beauty will lead us, through austerity in physical life, to freedom in action. Its basic programme will be to build a body that is beautiful in form, harmonious in posture, supple and agile in its movements, powerful in its activities and robust in its health and organic functioning.
10. Role of Money
    • For in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social standing.
    • There, work would not be a way to earn one’s living but a way to express oneself and to develop one’s capacities and possibilities while being of service to the community as a whole, which, for its own part, would provide for each individual’s subsistence and sphere of action.
    • Money is not meant to generate money; money should generate an increase in production, an improvement in the conditions of life and a progress in human consciousness. This is its true use.

For more information, visit https://edu.auroville.org/