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          Yes, this error, along with several others, crept into the hastily prepared drawing by the Ashram engineer. But to safeguard the design and wishes of the Mother, Providence made sure that the Mother’s own words would correct this mistake in the subsequent recorded discussions. That should have sufficed.
          It did not. Here is an example of those mental acrobatics to justify the architect and Matrimandir workers’ refusal to honour the Mother’s wishes: 

     ‘Matrimandir – and here may lie the key – is not being built in the third dimension but in the fourth. There one has to enter, there one must understand, there one should measure, and then all the measurements are inverted. Everything flips inside out…

     ‘…How could one indicate symbolically, but still very concretely, this turning inside out of a ball? Well, for instance, by measuring from outside to outside. Now, who ever measures the inside of a hall from the outside of the walls? She! [the Mother] For those reversed measurements are in fact a precise symbol of the reversed, inside-out consciousness. They clearly indicate that here one enters a space which has been planned and – by means of our human clumsiness and mistakes – executed in the fourth dimension. Unwilling cooperators, we, of the great Plan, which is always certain to fall ultimately square on its feet…. So…that twenty-four meter measurement is correct, exact, most precise. Only – your tape measure must be able to span the fourth dimension.’    

These are excerpts from a book entitled, ‘A House for the Third Millennium’, by Ruud Lohman, a Roman Catholic priest who established himself at the site of the construction from the day of the Matrimandir’s inauguration in 1971 and never left until his death in the 1980s. We would not bother reproducing this gibberish if it were not for the fact that Lohman was a key influential figure in everything that transpired regarding the measurements and implementation of the Mother’s plan. He opposed any idea of measurements and ‘astrology’ as having any significance other than what his own limited consciousness could grasp; and was, from the beginning a staunch opponent of the tradition in these matters.
          Coming from the West, and conditioned heavily by his Catholic upbringing and priesthood, it is not surprising that he should have adopted the attitude that he did. But what is extraordinary is that such people were able to rule the day and convince every Indian involved in those early moments of the Chamber’s life, that his vision, his conclusions (see above specimen) were right. This was surely the ‘sense’ the Mother intended of the outside measurement, a flip-flop consciousness! With this sort of flippant attitude, is it any wonder that the crystal in the Auroville Matrimandir reflects the surroundings upside-down! For isn’t that topsy-turvy display just what Lohman would need to justify his theory of inside-outside/upside-down? Isn’t it the exact symbol of this sort of twaddle? Indeed, everything is ‘perfect’ in the Auroville Matrimandir.
          The disheartening part was that no one listened to the Mother herself. When she asked for precision and specific measurements, was she talking gibberish? And what would the Lohmans of this world say when confronted with the sacred Mahamaya that states, ‘…If the measurement of the temple is in every way perfect, there is perfection in the universe as well’ (XXII, 92.)?

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