SAS-Auroville conflict
(Amrit:) “[The disciples in the Ashram] were the ones to be our experienced guides and exemplars, demonstrating by their actions and attitudes the spiritual goal to which we all aspired.
After the Mother's passing, the opposite happened. Squabbling and fighting, all became involved in division, disunity, and petty internal dissension. Even Satprem, particularly close to the Mother as confidante and custodian of the Agenda – the remarkable record of the Mother's continuing work of Transformation – became involved in a dispute regarding a new appointment to the Ashram Board of Trustees. His own favored candidate rejected, Satprem revolted, adding to the already poisoned atmosphere by his seizure of the Agenda records, considered unauthorized by the Ashram authorities. This, in turn, precipitated the termination of his status as Ashramite – an exceedingly unfortunate move only exacerbating an already difficult situation.
One regrettable step leading fatefully to the next, we were hurled into a maelstrom from which no one would emerge unscathed, all at the behest of the three main protagonists of the drama, Navajata, Shyam Sunder, and Satprem – the Aurovilians themselves unwitting yet often willing participants.”[1]
(Amrit:) “Perhaps in retrospect, the least blame, if any is to be assigned, would accrue to the Auroville residents. Young, naive, idealistic and spiritually inexperienced and immature, with almost no basis in the long and arduous askesis required in yoga, we appeared to be easily moved and manipulated by forces much greater than the limited consciousness in which we mostly lived. It was as if an immense wave passed through Auroville, carrying all in its momentous movement, shattering, breaking and consuming everything in its path.
Some seemed lost and bewildered by its intensity, often ending in leaving Auroville. Others using the force of the wave to destroy everything and everyone resisting their egoistic individual and collective will, ultimately self-destructed in a kamikaze-like blaze of glory, fanatically believing themselves to be the harbingers of the New Race. Like that darkened and perverted prophet of the Superman foreshadowing Sri Aurobindo's more luminous reality – that dark ictus almost annihilating civilization and and the upward reach of the human spirit – the movement in Auroville was twisted from its original idealistic inspiration and turned into a fanatical collective monstrosity.”[2]
See also