On Matrimandir – from “A House for the Third Millenium”
by Ruud Lohman
On Matrimandir – from « A House for the Third Millenium » by Ruud Lohman.pdf
“A House for the Third Millenium” published in 1986, is a series of essays by Aurovilian Ruud Lohman who left his body just before its publication. Hailing from Holland, for 15 years Ruud was a member of the Franciscan religious order and for eight years a Roman Catholic priest. In 1968 he was sent as a sociologist and missionary to India, where he sought out learning about the different forms of Yoga. This led him to come to Pondicherry, and the next morning, in Auroville on 21st February 1971. Ruud spent 15 and a half years of his dedicated life to the work of building the Matrimandir.
from pages 28 – 31 :
“Matrimandir is me, us, the Matrimandir workers, the Aurovilians, the world; and its process is slow because my, our, the world’s processes of growth are slow.
One can’t skip steps, one can’t leave out ramps, one can’t take a short cut; one has to fully traverse all the intermediate spaces. One has to go fully through the process which is Matrimandir: for Matrimandir is the ladder to the new world, and one has to discover how to climb that ladder….
One should not talk about Matrimandir, words are of no use : one has to live it, to be it. I am now talking about it, so take it as a love letter wherein one is never able to express the beauty of the beloved, one stumbles and stutters but still one wants to express at least something, one wants to open one’s heart and does not claim or intend to express the final truth, the last word, the total picture. I am in love with Matrimandir, that’s all, and therefore like all true lovers I am blind. I see only Matrimandir, and I see everything through the eyes of Matrimandir ….
I see it as an enormous privilege to be allowed to work at Matrimandir and I fully realise that it is not I who have chosen to be here but Mother who has called me from far-off countries to be here and work and discover. From the series of events at the time of my coming here it is all too clear that more than coincidence was at work. On a certain day I could not see myself staying in Holland any longer, I just had to come to Auroville. That was 21st February 1971, the Mother’s birthday, and it was also the day the first stone was laid at Matrimandir.
But I didn’t know that, had no idea of the great work which was going to commence that very day.
But Auroville did not own the land on which Matrimandir was to be built, and so it took about three weeks to make a deal with the local farmer who owned it before digging could begin. It took me three weeks to cross twelve countries to reach here and immediately join the thirty or so diggers who were just starting the work.
One week later I asked Mother for permission to become an Aurovilian. Upon reading my application form which stated my work of preference as Matrimandir, she said ‘très bien’, and it has always been très bien for me.
Of course, I tried to escape several times and tried to take up other work, but very soon I had to come back to Matrimandir, as if something in me was suffering and suffocating when I was absent. One day in 1972 I asked Mother’s permission to go to Delhi to attend some international conference. Everything had been arranged and at the last minute I just put it before Her. She asked the secretary who read out the letter, ‘Is he not useful at Matrimandir?’ That has become my sort of mantra whenever something tries to interfere with the work at Matrimandir : ‘Are you not useful at Matrimandir?’ …
For me, it is Mother’s body that we are building …
Matrimandir is not only a physical construction site, it is also a process, it is the whole of Auroville and it is quite clear that Auroville in its growth, with its crises and leaps, its manifestations and confusion, is always an exact replica of where Matrimandir is at, physically in its construction. Things at Matrimandir never happen by chance, there is a definite design, a time-frame a clock, a calendar, and if we had the right psychic eyes, we would see from the state of Matrimandir where Auroville is at each moment. »
from pages 3 – 6 :
” … we are not here on account of personal merits but rather because of the difficulties each of us represents so that these can be integrated and transformed in the evolutionary experiment of Auroville. We all bring with us a particular set of problems, forces, idiosyncracies as fire for the cosmic fire. We all represent, each one of us, a particular aspect of the old world that has to be new-made…
I was a theologian … The dialogue between the Great cannot be understood mentally but only by a plunge into identification. Carrying earth of Matrimandir promised to be a shortcut towards that…. And the amazing thing for me is this : the more I discover Sri Aurobindo, the Integral Yoga and Matrimandir, the more I feel that I have not really broken with my past life as a member of a religious order and an official representative of religion, but I experience that I am only now slowly becoming what I then, spiritually and occultly, was supposed to be.”
https://aviusa.org/ruud-lohman/
https://auroville.org/page/a-house-for-the-third-millennium
