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Seyril's Life and Legacy

Seyril's legacy was not only in founding the Sri Aurobindo Learning Center, a non-profit educational foundation in Crestone, but that she devotedly worked in association with Auroville, the City of Human Unity, in South India. It was in India that as a devotee she did backbreaking construction to help manifest the Matrimandir.

In the first part of her life, Seyril had been a playwright of considerable reputation, a college teacher, and an advisor to the International Yoga College. Her life changed when she saw a picture of Sri Aurobindo. Later she went to India where she met the Mother. She stayed for nearly eight years, working on the Matrimandir and being on her spiritual path. When she returned she set up SALC. Seyril passed peacefully while listening to Pavita reading Mother's "Prayers and Meditations." Some of her ashes been brought to Auroviller, but part are buried in Crestone underneath the large grandmother tree which overlooks the main house at SALC.

 

Seyril wanted SALC to be a community with close ties to Auroville, offering education about the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and providing activities to help realise human unity and facilitate human evoultion; we are committed to sustaining the vision to which she devoted her life.

The Matrimandir which she worked on is so named because it means Temple of The Mother in Sanskrit. It is situated in a large open area in the center of Auroville called 'Peace', and symbolizes union with the Divine, manifesting in a progressive human unity. The Matrimandir was seen by the Mother as the "symbol of the Divine's answer to man's aspiration for perfection" and as "the central cohesive force" for the growth of Auroville. The Matrimandir emerges as a large golden sphere sprinkled with the petals of gold shields which seems to be rising out of the earth.



The spacious Inner Chamber in the upper hemisphere of the structure is completely white, with white marble walls and white carpeting. In the centre a pure crystal-glass globe suffuses a ray of electronically guided sunlight which falls on it through an opening at the apex of the sphere. This crystal for the Matrimandir's inner chamber is the largest man made pure crystal in the world.


 

The Matrimandir is there for "those who want to learn to concentrate." "No fixed meditations, none of all that, but they should stay there in silence, in silence and concentration. A place for trying to find one's consciousness."

The Matrimandir is a symbol of the Universal Mother. representing the birth of a new consciousness seeking to manifest.

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