To Her, the fire that calls forever in the heartAnd to Him, the One that it calls,The One that it is Authors NoteAll of the documents, correspondence, transcripts of meetings and conversations that appear either verbatim, in excerpts or paraphrased through the text that follows are drawn from authentic material and records. None of these original references have in any way been revised to alter their explicit meaning and intent.First Indian Edition, 1980 the author and the Community of AurovilleThe quotations and photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram are protected fu the Ashram Trust. Auroville has received acknowledgement to use those quotations and photographs which appear in the text.AcknowledgementsThough the experience of this writing represented a very personal and intense labour, it could not have materialized without the support and participation of others others not really other to whom I am very grateful.Rakhal, who provided me the place where I could write the first manuscript; Patricia, who deciphered my hand-written script, typed the first draft and underlined the YES in this venture; Barbara, who bore with the revisions and typed the second manuscript, despite herself, my family in America, who through all the distances, stood behind, always there when needed to help sustain the Quest; Francoise, who helped me find the beginning of this story through the mask of resistance; and the Aurovilians, who in nameless and numberless ways offered themselves and their trust.contentsA Passage Between Two StoriesPART ONE: KINDLING1. The Traveller in the Mists2. The Fundamental Revolution3. The Ultimate Subversion4. A Breach in the Blind5. Found in a Face6. He7. ShePART TWO: THE QUEST-A FIRE TO BE1. India2. The Dream of Someone Who Was3. Auroville. . .Because It Has Never Been4. Aspiration5. A Child of Humanity as a Whole6. Magis of the Old World7. Endorsing the Secret8. Parting Comments and Inescapable Conclusions9. Compost10. Collective Awakenings11. The Labour of Being12. Babes in the Woods13. Identity Papers14. In the Wings15. Hills and Valleys and the Roses of a Little Prince16. The Worm and the Fire17. Through the Be-Wilderness18. Partners19. The Lost Bouquet20. Long Nights Journey into DayPART THREE: SUN-WORD RISING1. The Exile2. Two Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest3. The City Through the Trees4. The Paradox of Power and the Politics of Oneness5. The Lotus and the Mud6. The Interregnum of Consciousness and the Economics of Oneness7. By the Law of a New World8. A Self-Defining Laugh9. The Transformation of the Cells10. Light and Shadow11. Swadharma12. A Story for the FutureA SIMPLE PROPOSAL.A Trust for the EarthEPILOGUEBIBLIOGRAPHYa passage between two storiesThis is not an easy story. Love stones never are. They are a birth in themselves.This is the story about the intersection of a personal life with a collective experience, a Community called Auroville. But at a certain point in this story these words personal and collective myself and others which we think we know so well begin to blur, begin to become something else, begin to merge and re-emerge as something completely other. That is why I call it a love story. An evolutionary love story which lies at the heart of each relationship, which repeats its pattern in all of the languages of this universe: molecular, cellular, ecological and psychological, in the stars and in the eyes of another. And all of the characters in this story begin to become interchangeably you and I, to act out in their lives, their gestures, their habits and their fears, their hopes, their dreams and their struggles the process of this love story imprinted in the heart of the earth, this most fundamental of genetic codes.It is the simple story of self-giving, of the incomplete forever giving itself up to become the whole that it is. But the simplest of stories, the most simple of stories, are never easy. For all the scenarios of this story till now have worn the mask of the ego, the Great Complicator. The spoiler, the one who resists a larger and greater becoming for fear of losing himself, the one who clings to the small and petty frame he calls his own whether singular or plural, refusing to let go like the vulture glued to his carcass. An ultimately simple story, confounded, lost, hidden, but always there. Always there like a sudden twinkling of sunlight on an endless sea even amidst the long, laborious prologue of struggle which till now has been the dominant theme of our earthly journey.A story of the earth. A long-forgotten, ever-present love story concealed, deformed, obscured, censored by the ego, edited into his melodrama of resistance and conflict, division and death in chapters that only repeat the same futile episodes