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We know what Ruud Lohman thought of such matters and we can quote the same text when he describes his friend William’s conflict, after he ‘fell into the hands of an astrologer, also living in the Ashram’ (ibid): 

     ‘…After the visions of the Mater Divina [the Mother] and the niggling humana, a third element entered: the cosmos, the planets, the interpretations of the great rhythms of creation. And what did the inspirations say? It was wrong with the Matrimandir, wrong, wrong, wrong! Stop, stop! The builders, according to the stars, did not follow the measurements given by the Mother, and all the calculations couldn’t stand up any more. Or rather, the calculations stood, but Matrimandir didn’t. One ‘mistake’ especially was stressed a lot: the twenty-four meters from wall to wall. On the original drawing, the Mother had drawn just one little line for the thickness of the wall. The execution was left to the engineers, and when the calculations for the Matrimandir were fed into a computer in Madras in 1970, the walls became forty centimetres thick, and the twenty-four meters ran from the outside of the wall to the outside of the opposite wall. So the Chamber is twenty-four minus the twice-forty centimetres of the walls.

     ‘Well, that was for the astrologer the reason for all the crises, wars, disasters of the world today, for when one cosmic clock is off it throws everything else off, too. And she fulminated and wrote books and pamphlets and tried desperately to stop the work, but it went on and the Room is there, twenty-four meters minus the thickness of the walls.’ (Ibid.)

It is at this point in his story that Lohman introduces his theories of the fourth dimension and the Mother’s real intention which the Matrimandir architect and builders faithfully carried out: Inside is outside and outside in when you are ‘measuring in the fourth dimension’. Therefore, everything is all right with the Chamber. ‘The great Plan’, will always ‘fall ultimately square on its feet’, regardless of any mistakes Auroville might make.
          But the Mother’s Vision is not to be trampled upon so lightly and so amateurishly. There are indeed ‘cosmic laws’ involved, which these Chronicles will establish. And it is a fact that every attempt was made to stop the construction before it reached the point of no return so that this critical diameter measurement would be incorporated, just as the Mother wanted. But the Lohmans of this world have proven to have the stronger voice, even in India, a civilisation that should know better.
          But we do not have to retreat to the 1970s to discover the consciousness that rules Auroville. We have the words of a prominent Auroville researcher, Paulette, in her recent document to MAC, when it was pointed out that the Mother was then nearing 92 and her eyesight was poor: ‘…Who do you think the Mother is? Handing over wrong plans with wrong measures because her eyes could not detect the mistakes, as you pretend?’
          Again, the implication is that Auroville is always right: if the Mother gave the builders a plan with ‘mistakes’, that too was right and it was correct for them to incorporate those mistakes, because, as we had been told then, ‘she blessed that plan’ so it must be right, poor eyesight not withstanding.
          But there were other mistakes in Udar Pinto’s drawing. Yet these were all corrected. No such argument was proffered to justify guarding them zealously, unlike the incorrect floor diameter.

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