Bill Leon on 30 Years with AVI USA’s Board
In 1982, Ron Jorgensen told me he was offering a course called “Building a City of Consciousness” to explore how people could design buildings, spaces, cities, and societies where human consciousness can grow and flourish. Since I was a Ph.D. candidate in human geography with deep interests in environmentalism, urban geography, and community studies, I eagerly enrolled. We explored way out ways that people were and could live in greater harmony with nature and with each other. Since Ron had lived in The Sri Aurobindo Ashram and taught t’ai chi in Auroville (AV) in the early 1970’s, and established Integral Yoga (IY) study groups in Seattle and Enumclaw, Washington, he brought a lot of depth to our discussions. I was just beginning to explore spirituality, yoga, and IY, and I was amazed to hear about the pioneering efforts of AV and determined to see it for myself.
I was delayed in my goal by work, family, and finishing my Ph.D. with a dissertation on how urban-to-rural migrants use images of places to guide them in their decisions. Finding “community” was a big motivator them for them, and I realized that it was very important to me, but missing in some key ways. Upon graduation, I moved from Seattle to Colorado to direct the Center for Community Development & Design and to teach geography and community development at the University of Colorado there. There I learned the “community” is not to be found but to be built by people working together toward a common goal. Their actions and interactions are what build community. While completing 300 projects over 15 years, I kept in touch with Ron, studied IY on my own, worked with Ron on The ONE Book (1,000+ expressions of oneness – see www.theonebook.world), and attended AUM gatherings where I met people who had lived or did live in Auroville.
Ten years on, I planned a sabbatical visit to AV in 1991. A six-month plan with my wife, Cyndi, was shortened to a one-month solo journey, because we then had a child on the way. By then I had read all I could find on AV and met a few young Aurovilians (Selva, Aurora, Rathinam, and Rajaveni) at the 1990 AUM (organized by Ron) near Mt. Ranier. So, I booked a ticket from Seattle to San Francisco to Chennai for early August 1991.
But there was a problem. I had nowhere to stay. I contacted Madav Pandit at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (who I met through Ron) but he said since I was arriving just before Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, there was no place to stay in Pondicherry. About a week before departure, someone suggested I call Jack Alexander, former Aurovilian and then President of AVI-USA to ask for advice. I did. Jack asked me where I was flying from and when. Then he asked me for my flight number. “Not to worry”, he said, “It just so happens that I am on the same flight.” Then he arranged for me to travel with him from Chennai to AV and helped me set up lodging at Aspiration, where my young friends just happened to live. Ever since then, I have recognized that when I set a worthwhile intention, Mother will smooth the way to the goal.
Also, since Jack knew so many people in AV, when I would meet people there, they often said, “Oh, I heard you came with Jack, great to meet you.” I had many wonderful experiences working a day at Matrimandir, visiting different units, playing basketball in the 95-degree sun, finding large scorpions in my bathroom, and meditating at the Samadhi on August 15 or under the Banyan. I made many friends, and through them, many more. In my journal, I noted that, for me, Auroville seemed like a karma yoga ashram where conscious, outward action was the means for inner change.
The following year, I came to an AVI-USA meeting in California and joined the board soon after. That was 30 years ago this year, and I am still hanging around this crowd and enjoy assisting many big and small ventures in AV.
One of the most engaging and enduring was one I had tried to start in Colorado, but could find no traction for until I moved back to Seattle in 1999 to work at the University of Washington promoting service learning. I also plugged back into the Seattle Sri Aurobindo Circle, a small sangha started by Ron and Diane Thome. Diane told me another sadhak and UW political science professor, Karen Litfin, was then on sabbatical in AV. I wrote to her and proposed my idea of bringing university students to AV to study and to work with local projects there. She was thinking similar thoughts, and we decided to discuss it seriously upon her return.
When Karen returned in March 2000, we met and quickly decided to pursue it, with Karen taking the first group to AV in January 2001, and with me assisting with organizing the project and joining them in AV. We would then recruit other faculty to take a group each winter quarter (when the weather differential between Seattle and Auroville is most favorable). We also wanted to create ways for young Aurovilians to come and study at UW, thus creating a greater exchange. We had very limited success with that.
When we discussed our idea with university administrators, they said it was impossible to do this without 12 months planning, just to get the approvals from the departments involved, much less recruit students, prepare them, and plan all the work in AV to host them and engage them effectively with units that could mentor them and use their services. Undaunted and confident, since we felt a spiritual force was with us, we developed a program, a flyer to recruit students, and started advertising and networking—just when students were leaving for the summer. But, by fall, we had permissions to go, a dozen students committed and enrolled in a preparatory class, and Shankar from AV in Seattle to teach the students about Tamil language and culture and about how AV worked. The students were excited and also a bit worried as they packed summer clothes and hand sanitizer.
Karen and I were worried mostly about logistics and money until a bigger worry appeared—one of the students was pregnant, but still wanted to go. Since we had not power to exclude her (nor any desire) she came. The goal then was for her to return pregnant in March, which she did.
There is a funny story about her trip. Karen, not wanting to appear to be proselytizing, decided not to tell the students much about IY or the Ashram, and mostly they were too busy with seminars with Karen and Aurovilians and with volunteering on farms, in village schools, and at environmental units. But, by early March, as the heat grew, the then more pregnant student found the pace to be too much, so she would go off on her own to explore. Later, back in Seattle, I asked her where she went. She said, one peaceful and cool place where she liked to hang in Pondi was in a walled courtyard where people came and went and where there were flowers and incense around a big marble table under a tree. Even then, she did not realize he had been resting (and gestating) at the Samadhi. Again, Mother does the needful!
Another synchronicity in the project was Veraj, a Tamil student at UW who was studying film and who offered to make a documentary on the project as his senior thesis. He interviewed the students in Seattle before they left about their aspirations, inhibitions, fears, and expectations. Then her met them in AV after they had been there a couple or months. The differences in them were striking. In one scene, shot on the beach near Pondi, one of the students reflected: “This is so different than what we expected. I remember thinking that that big bottle of hand sanitizer was going to save us. It was our Jesus! And now, here we are cleaning our butts with our hands and thinking nothing of it.”
I almost missed the whole event. In the fall of 2000, I had a major conflict with my boss over disagreements on other innovative projects I was developing. It looked like I might even be fired. On the day I was going to meet with her to try to resolve things, I prepared by re-reading the Magic of Conflict: An Aikido Approach to Conflict Resolution and by meditating beneath a large picture of Mother in Diane’s office. I walked into the meeting, in peace, and with sincerity, told my boss that I had come to completely concede to her plans and goals and to work with her in any way she saw fit. She was shocked and speechless. The person she was attacking had disappeared. Instead of an adversary in front of her, there was empty space. After a long pause, she said weakly, “Well, my intention today was to let you go.” I thought about this for half a second, feeling no pain, remorse, or doubt, and then said, “Fine. Let’s talk about my exit. I want six months pay, a transfer to work that time in the Geography Department, and airfare for my trip to India with the students.” She agreed, and I floated to AV again on my golden parachute. When I came back, I started organizing the next group.
The next year, AVI-USA wanted to build a dormitory in the Americas Zone in AV to host volunteers. Jill from AV helped me recruit some UW architecture and landscape architecture professors and students to help. They came in 2002 and designed and built (with local, Tamil craftsmen) an environmentally innovative building with rammed earth and pressed brick walls, a large, convex, aluminum super-roof to reflect light and gather monsoon rains, a below-grade cistern to store water, and solar panels to pump the water to a tower storage unit (built by Fredrick, an AV architect) to provide water pressure for the building. The shower water and urine from the composting toilets are filtered through reed beds used to grow fruit trees and flowers. One spinoff came nearly 20 years later. I am on the board of a sanctioned camp for unhoused people in Seattle, and one of the architects who came to AV/, Steve Bedanes, helped me recruit a Seattle architecture firm to design an innovative shelter for the residents. And the twenty-year-old dorm in AV is still working well. A larger dorm next to it houses even more people. It is built mostly from recycled materials.
From 2001 to 2013, we had 12 differ groups of students go from UW to AV, with Karen Litfin and Jean Eisele, a UW Education professor and sadhak taking most groups. But other faculty with no interest in the yoga also brought groups. Several people in AV and AVI-USA board members helped place students in roles that would benefit AV and the students. One of the students who came ended up joining AV and helping us as a host. She lives there now. Others came back and/or have raised funds for AV projects.
When I reflect on these and other things AVI-USA and others have undertaken, I see that when the intention for a bold, new approach to some problem is taken with heart-felt guidance and diminished ego focus, amazing things can happen. The experiment that is Auroville is really a place for unending education, a youth that never ages, and a place where human unity can flourish to create new and better ways for people to line in harmony with Nature and with each other—just as Mother envisioned. I love being part of this grand adventure in consciousness and I invite all with the right intention to join in the joy. Satchel Paige warned: “Don’t look back. Somethin’ may be gaining on you.” But looking back, what I see gaining on me is a flowering of consciousness in the multi-colored bouquet that is Auroville.