Roy Lawrence Chvat came to Auroville from the USA in 1971. He had learned about Auroville when seeing an image of the Galaxy in a bookshop in New York, on the back cover of a book on modern utopias. He was in search of a spiritual community after experiencing a higher, non-mental state. A yoga teacher who knew about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother guided him. Through the Lama Foundation community in New Mexico he met Ram Dass, among others. There he also met someone who had been to Pondicherry and visited the Ashram. “While he was telling me about it, I suddenly had a vision of an ugly green building with green shutters. I had no idea what that was”, he recalled. Roy first arrived at the Ashram gate and was directed to a lodge in Pondy. There he happened to meet a lady from the UK, Margaret, who later on changed her name to Shraddhavan. The lodge turned out to be the green building he had seen in his vision earlier.

Roy would have liked to stay in the Ashram, where he had met the Mother, but having been advised to go to Auroville, he arrived in the Silence community, where he met Constance, Iris, Jocelyn, Daniel, Jaap, Diane and others who were creating a community near Kottakarai village.  

Patron of Village Pottery

Together with Constance, Roy started Auroville’s first pottery in that area. Constance, who had been living in Kottakarai village, had noticed that plastic buckets and kujas were beginning to show up in the local villages, and he foresaw that the village potters would disappear unless they could start producing more durable products. The idea was to hire a village potter and teach him how to do glazing. This attempt, however, did not succeed, but the pottery did manifest in the end, and a simple building was built by 1976. When Patrick and Angad, both experienced potters, arrived, it took off. Roy had designed the all-wood building, inspired by a book on Japanese tea houses, and built it with Daniel, who had studied architecture with Christopher Alexander. Constance added the experimental bamboo-clay-and-fiberglass panels in the wooden framing at the front of the building and made a beautiful teak potter’s wheel, which is still in use. 

Strong Psychic Being

Roy soon started working at the Matrimandir construction, and stayed in the “Matrimandir Workers Camp”. From there he moved to Aurodam, where he stayed for many years with his partner, Gillian. He was involved with the H.E.R.S. store in Kottakarai, and took over as editor of the News&Notes in July 2021, until recently when he withdrew for health reasons.

From the beginning, Roy had premonitions and dreams that turned out to become reality later on. He recalls, in an issue of the News&Notes (1001-16 November 2023), having a vivid dream of Mother’s passing. “It was 1972 and I was living in the [Matrimandir] Worker's Camp and I had a dream, a profound dream. In this dream I approached the Ashram, the main gate was closed but a seldom used side door was open. There was a long line of disciples winding its way slowly inside and there on the Samadhi lay the Mother's body. I approached and kissed her feet, they were blue in color, but a force surged through them and I knew she was not dead but in a deep state.” The following year, 1973, in November, Roy found himself in Pondicherry when the Mother left her body. As he often did, he was playing “Go” with his friend Hsu, when their game stalled for some reason. It turned out to be the moment of Mother’s passing.

Roy was not outgoing, not easy to get to know, more of a quiet presence. He describes himself modestly as “a short, a bit overweight, Jewish guy from New Jersey who plays guitar and builds Tube amplifiers.”  

Roy was a good writer, with sharp insights into the various Auroville affairs. In one post on Auronet, he observed: 

“Getting Aurovilians to agree on any subject let alone a detailed description longer than a paragraph remains a kind of insolvable enigma and may be so for some time to come. Perhaps we may have to wait till the details of our policies are tackled by those Gnostic Beings."*

*In the Gnostic consciousness difference would not lead to discord but to a spontaneous natural adaptation, a sense of complementary plenitude, a rich many-sided execution of the thing to be collectively known, done, worked out in life. (The Life Divine , ch. XXVII: The Gnostic Being)

At Roy’s funeral, on Sunday 9th of November at the Auroville Cremation Ground, one of his friends recalled having asked Roy about his psychic being. Roy's answer: "For the last 60 years or so, my life has been Sri Aurobindo. Now I hope to be near him."