Guiding Light of The Month

O Lord, how ardently do I call and implore Thy love! Grant that my aspiration may be intense enough to awaken the same aspiration everywhere: oh, may good- ness, justice and peace reign as supreme masters, may ignorant egoism be overcome, darkness be suddenly illu- minated by Thy pure Light; may the blind see, the deaf hear, may Thy law be proclaimed in every place and, in a constantly progressive union, in an ever more perfect harmony, may all, like one single being, stretch out their arms towards Thee to identify themselves with Thee and manifest Thee upon earth. - The Mother

The Banyan Talks

Pre-dawn bonfire, a special moment of meditation and communion

The bonfire burned bright in the wee hours of Sunday as Aurovillians celebrated the 48th anniversary of the founding of the universal township by The Mother.


By custom, the Auroville fraternity which now has members from across 53 countries, gathers for the pre-dawn bonfire ceremony on two special days of the year — February 28 to commemorate the founding of the City of Dawn by Mirra Alfassa, spiritual associate of Sri Aurobindo, on the day in 1968 and Sri Aurobindo’s birth anniversary on August 15.


This year saw an extraordinary turnout for Auroville’s dawn bonfire, which has always attracted non-Aurovillians, from casual visitors to school children. For participants, the bonfire offers a special moment of meditation and communion.

The celebration is marked by playing a music score, the audio recording of The Mother’s address about Auroville’s founding principles, her vision of the experimental township being a place upon earth that no nation could claim as its sole property, a place where all human beings of goodwill, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world.

The crux of the Auroville charter is also disseminated in French, English, Sanskrit and Tamil (the four official languages of the “City of Dawn”), which is essentially of being a place of an unending education and constant progress and representing a bridge between the past and the future.

A special team at Matrimandir is in charge of the arrangements of the bonfire ceremony which takes place in the amphitheatre. Floral decorations deck the floor in front of the bud-shaped urn here that contains a handful of soil from the countries across the world that shared The Mother’s vision for a universal township, where in her own words, “men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities” and strive to achieve the higher purpose of human unity.

(Article written by M. Dinesh Varma and sourced from The Hindu)

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