We had, of course, rallied all the disciples of Mother and Sri Aurobindo in America, and many had offered invaluable help to prepare the manuscripts, for instance, or to facilitate the distribution in their area. Yet, we remained curiously aloof, as if some unwritten law compelled us to isolation and to feel ourselves “different.” I know today that this vague feeling of a difference between ourselves and the other disciples stemmed from the same feeling of isolation felt by Satprem among his peers in India, as if, once again, we unwittingly took on his experience involving anything related to the Ashram of Pondicherry.
He had stood apart his entire life, from the time of his flights to the Amazon jungle or the Himalayas, to the Ashram in Pondicherry, where he was unable to strike a single friendship outside of Sujata, who became his companion. In Mother, he had found universal Revolt and had quieted his own revolt in the shadow of hers. But Mother’s revolt embraced the “love for all and faith for all” without any contradiction, while Satprem’s circled feverishly and endlessly about itself. This is the insurmountable obstacle that Mother had tried in vain to cure, which immediately resurfaced in him after her departure, ultimately to get the better of him.
The circumstances of Mother’s passing as well as his own expulsion from the Ashram (which incidentally he feigned to ignore) had driven a last nail into his already hardened convictions of rejection. It was evidently this inner feeling of utter isolation that had led him to form a little group of “brothers” around him, to try to fill his isolation and drive back the walls of his confinement and loneliness. There was this marvelous instrument of the Agenda and a High Mission to undertake, behind which he would be able to dissimulate his own inherent incertitude and failings. “Truth is always schismatic,” he told me one day, as if to reassure himself.
And this is how it came about that a little band of “brothers” followed to the letter the “Satpremian Schism,” and roam the world giving vent to a delectable mood of paranoia toward anything or anyone that did not belong to the Magic Circle. The only sure ground beyond dry land was the one represented by the “fraternity” as encapsulated by Satprem; the rest of the world was suspect and fraught with dangers. The Jihadists have not invented anything. Maybe this was also a way to strengthen the group about him by maintaining cohesion and preventing its dilution into the environment of soppy spiritual routines. One feels all the more determined and united when all outside seems hostile and laden with menaces. My own difficulties with Satprem would in fact be considerably worsened when a real liking for America began to emerge in me and I mingled without restraint with “ordinary” Americans, and in particular with Sri Aurobindo’s American disciples. Although this natural movement of expansion and empathy seems self-evident when one’s life seeks to be founded on Sri Aurobindo’s universality, it was evidently felt by Satprem as an act of betrayal against his private dogma of entrenchment.
For a while, our house in Long Island was also home to the unfortunate Keya, who Satprem had sent from the Nilgiris to help us in setting up the manuscripts in English. With mind-boggling speed and precision, she had single-handedly typeset the 6,000 pages of the Agenda in French. Torn from her routine beside Satprem, she never got used to life in America and began to plunge into depression. But carried away in our bustling activity, we did not understand her distress signals, and when we did finally realize her condition, it was too late. Urgently repatriated to India, definitively cut off from Satprem, she lived a few years in Auroville, ultimately refusing to feed herself and passing away in June 1995, at the age of fifty-one.
This was a first grim warning of what was to come, but we were so busy in otherwise worthy accomplishments that paying attention to Keya was out of the question. It was easier to brand her as “too infatuated with Satprem,” and to dismiss her case along with those of daydreamers who confuse their wishes with reality. But of course, we were ALL in this same boat of delusion, except we still did not know it. Keya was merely the first traumatic incident in a long list.
At the end of 1981, all thirteen volumes of the Agenda in French were published and available in bookstores. In less than four years, in a virtual race against the clock, Satprem had revised and prepared some 6,000 pages of manuscript. In the thirteenth and last volume he had described at length the circumstances of Mother’s passing, as he had lived them, mentioning in particular the use of psychotropic substances to sedate her.
It was with great relief that Satprem saw the end of his self-imposed mission and the fulfillment of his inner promise. But he also had to confront a pressing question: what now? What to do with the 24 hours of a day when the tension that had kept him going for so long has disappeared. The translations of the Agenda in other languages, of which some were under way, would follow their course almost automatically and would take years to come out. Another activity, another goal, had to be found.
Actually, the difficulty he was confronting had to do with being face to face with himself. Mother was no longer there to show the way, neither physically by giving a tangible indication, nor even beyond death by the suggestion of some pressing task remaining to be accomplished, such as originally must have been the publication of the Agenda. In fact, a brand-new future had to be invented, but one that must be coherent with Mother’s path.
A first hint came to him when a vision flashed before his eyes of an “island,” adequately removed from the world, on which a very small group of human beings would attempt to concentrate their aspiration with the aim of following more concretely in Mother’s footsteps — a sort of tiny evolutionary kernel. Hence, in February 1982, Satprem and Sujata left India to tour Pacific islands in search of “Mother’s Island.” More than a month later, exhausted and disappointed, they had to face the facts. No island could be found for such a project, no island for accelerated evolution — as perhaps Sri Aurobindo had concluded seventy years earlier when he settled in Pondicherry and subsequently declined, on more than one occasion, to move anywhere else.
The next attempt may also appear somewhat strange. It had to do with finding a Mantra which Satprem had known many years earlier, as he was walking the roads of India in the orange robe of a Sannyasi, and which at the time had seemed capable of penetrating into the consciousness of the body and breaking down the carapace of our bodily habits. In this way, he hoped to draw closer to Mother’s corporeal experience. He went in search of that mantra, which he eventually found in the Himalayas. But there also, he had to face the facts: the mantra he had now found opened the doors to the world of the Indian occult tradition, but that had nothing to do with Mother and her process of descent into the body consciousness. It is strange that a man who was so aware of Mother’s experience for having followed it more than anyone else, studied and described it, would then drift in these two distinct directions so foreign to Mother’s course. Be that as it may, he was back to square one, back in India, and back face to face with himself.
And this is when something started happening in him which made him so radically different, so foreign to what he was before, that everything exploded around him — and continues to explode to this day.
It is not easy, and perhaps even impossible, to describe what happened in Satprem at that point. And yet I believe I was the one to whom he wrote the first letters attempting to describe what he was experiencing. I must say I was very touched to read those letters. They spoke of a new, more intense kind of concentration taking over his body, of a new, more powerful force descending into him (like a “sledge hammer”), and then of a kind of “ascent” of the body toward a “heaven above” like a great blue Sun, where everything merged into that pure reality, which perhaps is best known as “That.”
Day after day, he immersed himself in this experience. Soon he began naming that force the Supramental Force, to follow Sri Aurobindo’s terminology. It was obvious he was entering into a new consciousness, a new way to see and comprehend the world.
For my part, having read the few remarks that Sri Aurobindo had left concerning the Supramental process, I was unable to “match” what he said, in letters to certain disciples, with Satprem’s own descriptions, which always seemed to emphasize the Force, the “sledge hammer” nature of the process, while Sri Aurobindo spoke of the Supramental as a “Truth-Consciousness” which hardly needs to struggle or confront the ignorant nature of the world to impose itself. For its very presence is also the dawn of a new determinism — a realization free from efforts because “opposites” have ceased to be necessary.
At the time, not only did I not question for a moment Satprem’s conclusions about his new condition, but I marveled at the idea that this Supramental condition could actually dawn in this way, so simply and naturally, in another being after Sri Aurobindo and Mother. This was a dream come true, here and now, on two legs and in the flesh; the little nod from evolution for which Sri Aurobindo and Mother had so much hoped and prayed. And thus the logical conclusion to the long preparation Satprem had lived near Mother, a kind of justification after the fact of all the idiosyncrasies that made him an ideal and predestined candidate for that “Truth-Consciousness” — a perfect outcome.
We all wanted so much to believe in the Miracle through Satprem!
But soon Satprem no longer wished to have any relations with the world. He no longer wanted to receive or answer mail, write more books (he later changed his mind), intending instead to explore this new state he lived in. From America, I was in charge of channeling his mail and drawing his attention to anything important or imperative. The fictitious explanation of his departure from the Nilgiris for an “unknown destination” was supposed to justify the abrupt break in his communications with the older members of our group, who had to swallow a rather obvious pill without protest, and accept to write to him through me. Naturally, no one was fooled for a minute, but all grinned and bore it, playing the game of the “secrecy” out of respect for Satprem and what he stood for. I willingly played the fool, yielding like everyone else to “higher” reason. Satprem was no doubt aware of the discomfort felt by everyone but did not seem to care in the least, giving absolute priority to his new experience.
It is impossible to know the exact nature of this new force Satprem felt within him, which so manifestly transformed his being and his life. But one can certainly wonder about the immediate, visible results of the emergence of this force in him. As time went by, he seemed to become increasingly impatient, almost annoyed and irritated, with anything that was not what he experienced himself (that is, practically the whole world!) This growing impatience tended to make him more distant from us. It seemed as if he had difficulty holding this new life within while accepting a minimum of contact with life here below, its imperfections, its stumbling and inborn dissatisfactions. In a very short time, he had become a very perfect (and very sharp!) sword in a very imperfect world. He had swapped his former human hesitations for an ardent faith, intolerant of the humanity we still represented. While until the very last Mother’s arms had remained open to humanity around her, Satprem’s seemed to close only onto his own experience and himself, as his exasperation kept growing.
Was the “sledge hammer” going to break the vessel?
However, none of this put the least dent in my faith in Satprem, and in the hope he had fostered. In fact, until the last moment in 1993, I would continue to keep him in my heart, and it is he and he alone who finally managed to convince me of the depth of the illusion I had entertained all these years.
Yet another detail had surprised me. It concerned the “Fourteenth Agenda.” Satprem had planned to collect his entire personal correspondence prior to the Agenda publication (when he wrote to certain people likely to help, of the value and meaning of the still-unknown Agenda) into one or more volumes, which would form a continuation of the Agenda proper: Agenda 14, Agenda 15, etc. I admit I was shocked, deep down, that he could put on equal footing Mother’s words — especially Agenda 13, which represents a breathless entreaty to the Light — and his own battle (however brave it was) to publish the Agenda. But he later changed his mind, for these letters are published today under yet another title.
It was also around that time that a rather surprising and unexpected dream came to me.
It was night and guests were gathered around a long table. Sitting in the middle was Sri Aurobindo, looking majestic but without any affectation. Mother was to his right, smiling, and Satprem to his left. Several other guests, whom I did not recognize, occupied other seats around the table. I was sitting near the end of the table, looking intently toward the center, toward Sri Aurobindo. On the table right in front of Sri Aurobindo was an imposing dish filled with an enormous cut of red meat, like sirloin steak. This meat, barely cooked, was even lying in its own blood, according to the way quality meat is cooked in the West. To my utter surprise, I saw Satprem pointing a finger toward the dish and inviting Sri Aurobindo to taste the meat. He had to insist several times, because Sri Aurobindo did not seem keen to accept the invitation. But Satprem’s insistence finally paid, for Sri Aurobindo made a gesture and took a small morsel of rare steak.
When I told my dream to Satprem he did not seem unduly surprised. But what was he attempting to push onto Sri Aurobindo in the symbol of this rare meat? His own Western ways of looking and analyzing life’s processes? The rebellious, schismatic nature of his personality? Or something else?