CIRHU

A Founding Reflection

What is Research Within CIRHU?

The recent exchanges surrounding the development of CIRHU have invited us to reflect more deeply on a fundamental question. We are deeply grateful to all those who are dedicating their energy, intelligence and commitment to bringing CIRHU into being. The different initiatives now emerging all express the same aspiration: to help CIRHU become a living reality in service of Auroville and, beyond it, of humanity.

These exchanges have also revealed something essential: CIRHU cannot be reduced to a single form of research, a single methodology, a single structure or a single way of working. It is called to be something larger.

Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.

— The Mother, Fourth Charter of Auroville

Roger Anger envisioned CIRHU as a forum where researchers from all over the world could work together towards the realization of human unity, developing knowledge and education centred on the future evolution of humanity.

Together, these two inspirations invite us to recognise the plurality of paths through which research may unfold.

Each of these approaches has its own legitimacy.

None of them, by itself, can define what CIRHU is.

Together, they may reveal its richness.

Perhaps the vocation of CIRHU is not to choose between these different forms of research, but to create the conditions through which they may encounter one another, enter into dialogue and become mutually enriching.

Seen in this light, CIRHU appears as a living organism. Like every living organism, it consists of different organs, each carrying a specific responsibility: executives, researchers, operational teams, facilitators, participants and the many spaces where research unfolds. The diversity of these functions is not a weakness but a source of life. Yet no organ can flourish in isolation from the whole.

Trust, transparency and the free circulation of understanding are essential conditions for genuine collective intelligence.

We fully recognise the importance of international ethical standards concerning the protection of participants, personal data and research integrity. These principles are indispensable to any serious research. At the same time, we distinguish clearly between protecting personal data and separating the life of research itself from the shared life of CIRHU.

Research belongs to those who carry it. The vision belongs to CIRHU. Its future belongs to all those who are helping it emerge.

Over the past years, alongside other valuable initiatives, another movement of research has gradually emerged within CIRHU. It explores consciousness, presence, the collective body, living governance and the living questions that inhabit researchers themselves.

Perhaps the first research that CIRHU is being called to undertake is about itself. How can different forms of research learn not merely to coexist, but to recognise one another, relate to one another and grow together? This may well be one of the first living expressions of human unity.