I was now fully enrolled and a fully committed member of what might be termed Satprem’s faction. Everywhere I went, I carried my little inner bible, which included the obligatory chapter whereby Satprem was part and parcel of Sri Aurobindo’s work — was in fact an essential, and even indispensable, constituent of his work. His open rebellion, his established dissent had to be the signs of a more profound, more inward difference, from which a new way of living on earth would eventually emerge: indeed, an example of the New Being Sri Aurobindo had hoped and prayed for.
I took it for granted that that an attitude of enlightened yet uncompromising critique towards the world was the key, or at least an essential condition, to personal transformation. For me, Satprem’s consciousness was the perfect crucible for that future birth, for it combined to the highest degree refined critical intelligence and implacability. In him, the endeavor of being human appeared to have found its accomplishment; the circle was complete — and now the slightest effort would enable him to achieve personal transformation…
I had probably not meditated enough, or even understood, what Mother was trying to tell him in an Agenda conversation of October 21, 1963:
“Except for Sri Aurobindo, I always met or was always around dissatisfied people… rebels, or people extremely bitter towards life as it is… I have seen that this attitude, this way of feeling is like a fortress for everything that stands against the transformation. This morning, I had noted two observations with the idea of reading them to you. I was clearly told that this very keen sense of discernment, which perceives everything contrary to the divine Truth, is a very good thing to have — not to be disappointed or deceived (and of course not to deceive oneself). But every time one stresses this side of things, one also gives it a POWER OF BEING, a sort of power that augments and perpetuates its existence… I feel something is trying to suppress this keen, imperative discernment from my active consciousness… so that, constantly and almost exclusively, the active consciousness perceives WHAT MUST BECOME instead.”
Throughout the Agenda, Satprem complained about this intractable “fortress” in him: “I feel it is like a self-contained power, which will listen to nothing, and is completely outside one’s control, something which is purely negative and whose only aim is destruction…” Endlessly, patiently Mother brought him back to the straight consciousness: “That cannot come out of the world. It has to be in the place where it will HAVE to be transformed, necessarily transformed… If we could be like a beacon of the Divine, constantly shining, dimmed by nothing — that is the only solution… Only the extreme Divine will transform the extreme darkness.” (17/3/71) “It must be expelled from one’s nature. Indeed, it is something that must evolve from life to life — it must be driven out of your personality. It is that part of the past which must disappear, but which desperately hangs on.” (2/6/71) “I had seen that, I saw it — I tried to remove it, but I couldn’t.” (9/6/71)
This rebellious fortress, this “self-contained power which will listen to nothing” is worth going into a bit further because it may well constitute one of the foremost attractions of Satprem’s character in his relations to others. Through his talent with words and the French language, he has succeeded in turning a weighty and harmful trait of his character into an object of fascination and seduction. Even outside the small circle of the faithful, there is no shortage of praise and expressions of admiration lavished upon him in the form of: “Satprem, the Admirable Rebel,” “Satprem and the Poetry of Dissent,” etc. And one can only recall how he himself has titled a recent book of personal letters — Lettres d’un insoumis [Letters of a Rebel] — to appreciate the extent to which he played up to that game. A game which is foremost a never-ending source of fascination to others — but remains rather incompatible with what Mother was trying to tell him in that 1971 conversation. Ham acting is not too exaggerated a phrase under the circumstances.
Satprem’s see-saw movement of consciousness between the two tragic poles of “the Irreducible Rebel” and “the Lover of God” was no doubt a great source of inner difficulties over the years — a sort of agonizing struggle between two irreconcilable positions: “My only strength is not to revolt; my only strength is to believe in the Grace in spite of everything. I think I have too much grief in my heart to revolt against anything. I seem to have a great feeling of pity towards the world.” (10/7/59)
This is the deep-seated ambiguity Mother tried to cure in Satprem for more than ten years: “… sometimes it takes great courage, sometimes great staying power, sometimes… genuine love is enough, sometimes, oh, when faith is there, a very small thing is enough to… sweep everything away. I’ve done it often; other times I failed… But because it is a karma, one MUST do something oneself. Karma is the ego’s creation; the ego MUST do something. It cannot all be done from the outside… That’s what I saw for you, the crystallization of that karma, which took place during a life in India in which you were put in touch with the possibility of liberation and… “(22/11/58)
Indeed, the tragedy of Patrice’s suicide, as previously referred to, as well as more recent events of the same nature convey a feeling that the pole of “the Lover of God” has not permanently supplanted “the irreducible Rebel” in Satprem.
And paradoxically, this ambiguousness served him well in his relations with others, for nothing is more fascinating to human consciousness than the revelation and exploration of conflicts and personal struggles. As the French playwright Jean Anouilh put it: “Tragedy is refreshing, because we know there is no more hope… and the only thing left is to scream — to shout at the top of one’s lungs what was never uttered before.” Rebellion is a fonds de commerce like any other, without which anonymity or solitary inner struggle are among the only alternatives. And yet, in the end, even the exemplary model of the Rebel wears thin and falls into obsolescence before the imperative need for each human being to be self-transcendent in a world where everything is increasingly leveled down. Even the old dinosaurs wear themselves out as they shout their demands for attention in a world that has already ceased to be theirs.
It is quite possible that this sense of tragedy was also a powerful lever of creation in Satprem’s life. Confronting impossibility is often the trigger to finding the means of conquering the obstacle. This is the way of Yoga. But a perilous line is crossed when a systematic seeking of tragic circumstances — or their total invention — attempts to substitute our dark, momentary impulses to the divine unfolding of our destiny. The terrible sentence of Antonin Artaud — “Tragedy on the stage is not enough; I want to bring it into my life” — is a sinister reminder of the extremes in which the human spirit can sometimes indulge. And the same tone is perceptible in Arthur Rimbaud’s well-known sentence: “Rapture is in the breakdown of all the senses.”
I do not claim here to supply explanations and answers to the innermost traits of Satprem’s character. I am only trying to express what I felt when I was with him and how I see him today. Only the Divine can comprehend the true reason for this bipolarity in him, the need for this double attraction for the Light on the one hand, and darkness or absolute negativity on the other — and why, today, his life is still suspended by the twin poles of the Rebel and the Lover. There lies a mystery, which no doubt Mother would understand, but of which she was unable to cure him. “It may be an ingrained habit of revolt — are you not a rebel by nature?” she asked him in 1963.
I would like to close this topic by quoting Sri Aurobindo: “The work I have to do for myself or for the world or for you or others can only be achieved if I have love for all and faith for all and go firmly on till it is done.” This little sentence, which is hardly noticeable among letters dating from 1934 and addressed to his disciple Dilip Kumar Roy, throws a contrasting light on the gulf of consciousness between Sri Aurobindo and Satprem.
Here is a man (Satprem) who spent the greater part of his life in close touch with Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts. He wrote books about him, thousands of words to explore, analyze, expound, and praise a whole body of work, a way to bring a different consciousness to the world, the seedbed of a different Future. During almost twenty years, he sat twice weekly with Mother, as the private confidant of her Agenda, immersed in the absolute Positiveness which she brought into the thirty square meters of her room. He saw her battles to restore the straight Vibration everywhere, in everything — and yet in none of Satprem’s thousands of words, at no single moment of that life absorbed and concentrated and devoted to a unique personal aspiration, does one feel the simplicity of Sri Aurobindo’s “love for all and faith for all.” The prevailing note is again and again: “The Revolt of the Earth” and “The tragedy of the Earth.”
This is Satprem’s tragedy.