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UHU 1-Year Anniversary Address by Rudy 25/11/07

Special address shared by Rudy on the one-year anniversary session of the UHU seminar sessions on 25/11/07

Excerpt of the presentation:

"Arriving in Auroville in January 2006 it dawned on me that Auroville is a blessed environment for something like a university. And I enquired… and found there was a workshop in the SAWCHU building…”All Life is Yoga.”

I was just sitting there and felt, this is a very special place - Auroville. I asked if there was a university and the answer was “no, but this idea has always been in the air”.

My quest made its way and I found out for myself, what is evident for you, that the Mother wanted AV to be a place of unending learning and that as early as 1969 she had addressed her attention to UNESCO, asking Roger Anger to go to UNESCO and to plead for the creation of a université de l'unité humaine, the University of Human Unity . She added, “the permanent university will be the key to the raison d’etre of Auroville. It has to be a leap forward to hasten the advent of the future – a world of harmony, beauty and union.” My experience was that whenever I mentioned the idea of the University of Human Unity to Aurovilians, it was as if I was just adding some fuel to an already existing flame and that a special quality of light manifested in their eyes. There is a deep rooted desire and consciousness that this university is meant to come into existence.

…After many intensive meetings with Vladimir and Rod at the Solar Kitchen after lunch, - we were sort of brainstorming and trying to imagine the whole thing - our initiative took shape to reach out to Aurovilians and explore this project collectively. We felt we had to gather because we need your help, advice, suggestions, intuitive intelligence. I am happy to see among us,.. well today Ananda Reddy cannot be here, he has gone out of station, and Matthias Cornelison is here, who both succeeded in founding institutions of higher learning in Pondicherry…

I would like to share some concerns of mine. I have been teaching in universities in Europe in the fields of philosophy and religious studies and later practiced as a trained psychotherapist. As a student I was fortunate to have experienced a university with some professors who were like gurus, real persons that you would meet and dialogue with and who literally made you feel you could move on in a direction where somehow you had already been moving to unwittingly, it was an atmosphere of experiential knowledge where learning becomes a personalized, living process, family like, natural, a chance to seek one’s true identity, almost like breathing a self nurturing spiritual air…

One has to feel at large, in a free space, - to breathe deeply – I think that the university can grant exactly this kind of space, where the personal experience meets with the collective, inter-subjective experience and the endeavor of humanity as a whole. There is something fascinating and in a sense sacred about the university. Ideally it is totally dedicated to see the truth of things and of human beings as they are in themselves. It surpasses any limited point of view, it expands to reality as a whole, universitas means universal, all encompassing, turning or opening to all directions, katolitos… In the sense that Sri Aurobindo used the word “catholicity” of thought, meaning seeing all points of view at the same time. University is about unbiased universal openness.

When we were a baby we were smiling at the world happy to discover places and things, to touch, to love, to see them and somehow utter “wow”. That’s what a university may be for adults. This sacred space where we reach out to reality and reconnect with the sum precious knowledge we already carry in us, that for some or many reasons got blurred and temporarily seemed unavailable... Sri Aurobindo got it right: man may be, as he has been defined, a reasoning animal, but he is for the most part a very badly reasoning animal. So man needs to focus on what constitutes him most intimately; on that which makes a human being be a soul, a self. And that’s what the university is about. …" - Rudy

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