For me, too, destiny was irremediably advancing. I was about to enter the true reality of my situation. At the end of 1983, Susie and I had decided to move south, to Virginia, partly to escape the massive population growth of the New York area. A big, somewhat ramshackle farmhouse among the green rolling hills around Charlottesville would now give us shelter, with our 50,000 books… This new place was also better suited to our publishing activities. It is there that, during the next eight years, we published most of the Agenda volumes and other titles by Satprem in English. We were in frequent communication with him through letters and often through telegrams. From time to time, we would even make short trips to India, which were opportunities to visit the Nilgiris and touch base with Satprem. I was also in weekly telephone contact with my close friend Micheline, who supervised the activities of the French Institut de Recherches Evolutives in Paris.
At this point, everything, then, seemed to run as smoothly as possible and the future looked as bright as could be. A small, motivated group, united around material tasks and a tested underlying spiritual ideology: Satprem, sitting in India, true to the image we had formed of him, which our childlike superstition had molded out of the rather fearsome mystery surrounding his new condition of “Pioneer of the New World.” Were we the creator of that image? Or was he? Did he perhaps unwittingly comply with what was expected of him? These questions will remain unanswered forever, but in fact that image was unable to prevail against the test of time and reality. Today, no one remains of that small group of people, not a single soul to testify to the durability and substantiality of an experience which was supposed to provide answers for an indefinite future. But in reality, some, like me, were excluded under one pretext or another; others died before their time — Keya, Micheline, Patrice — still others turned away without a word but with a heavy heart.
I was thus the first of a long list to live with the frozen knot of disillusionment in my heart. This cold spell lasted for years, without giving its name, while everything appeared to be normal on the surface. This is the long-drawn-out ordeal when everything is felt, but nothing is known — when the inside has yet to meet with the outside to form a coherent and comprehensible whole.
That peculiar period must have started in the middle of the 1980’s, perhaps on the occasion of the writing and publication of “our” book. During one of my visits in India, Satprem had suggested that I record him while he talked about his new experience in the body. We had taken a walk in the surrounding countryside, and there, amidst the tall trees of the Shola, I turned on the tape recorder…
Back in the United States, still following his suggestion, I had written an introduction to this taped conversation with a view to putting his words in the context of Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s yoga. The resulting text, including the interview of Satprem, was later published in Paris by Robert Laffont under the title La vie sans mort [Life without death] under the dual authorship of Satprem and myself.
To my great surprise, writing this book had turned out to be amazingly easy. I who had never formally written anything could see the words form themselves on the paper without any effort or prior planning. Sentences followed one another as if automatically, and I literally discovered the details of the ideas as they appeared on the page. The only “effort” on my part was to maintain a state of peace and inner receptivity.
To be on the safe side, Satprem had decided to reread my text before giving his assent and sending it to the French Publisher. And this is when I felt the first tear between us. The book ended with these words: “To be continued…”. Of course, I was speaking of the continuation of that wonderful yogic bodily experience he was undergoing, which held out the promise of canceling death itself while rendering it unnecessary. Given my faith, I saw no reason why this condition could not assert and amplify itself, eventually replacing the old terrestrial life and making a clean sweep of all our mortal habits. But, oddly, Satprem took this term merely as a claim on my part for more interviews with him and for more books to come. While I saw the sublime in his condition (and tried to describe it), he only saw the bottom line and personal calculations. We could not have been on two more different planets! To make sure I had taken the hint, he even sent me a curt little note confirming that I was not to expect any more conversations with him.
What had taken hold of him? What had he sensed in me that I was not perceiving myself? I had neither asked to record his words nor to write that book. Yet, in a moment’s notice, I was clearly brought down to the role of a schemer. One more turn of the screw and I would turn out to be a fraud and even a profiteer… A strange mechanism indeed. At this point, we may well be near the heart of the problem.
If I had had the courage and, especially, confidence in myself, I would have packed my bags and taken my leave right there and then. But this is where the spell works admirably — Patrice, are you listening? Not only had I wretchedly and piteously accepted the insinuations directed against my integrity, but I began the high acrobatics of actually turning the tables against myself and accusing myself of faults I could not have committed. I used my best Yogic knowledge to try and find in my ego the cause of all this trouble. But since the ego is evanescent and elusive, naturally I found nothing. It would, of course, never have occurred to me to look for the cause in Satprem himself. He was forever beyond suspicion, uninvolved in terrestrial pettiness, and to question the sublime in him would be simply unthinkable — an act of sacrilege.
So there we were; the fatal “mechanism” had kicked in and would not stop. Whatever happened, we would now have to go to the end of the dramatic course — there had to be drama to conclude and put a final stop to what had begun under such apparently insignificant appearances. This was in fact a process with an uncompromising, devouring logic to it — one that would only subside with its pound of fresh innocence.
While he could easily have cleared with one word or one gesture the inane and abusive interpretation he had formulated against me, he chose to do nothing and to keep inside him this spark of suspicion and umbrage. Then, with implacable logic, time saw to it to amass more material causes of misunderstanding, which would swell the spark into an irresistible volcano. I spent several years with this weird sensation of an unspoken malaise and growing uneasiness, without ever being able to pinpoint or stop it. My few awkward attempts to seek explanations or “put the cards on the table” only met with Yogic admonitions or a wall of silence. I had therefore to resolve myself to live with this odd contradiction between a still bustling (and still attractive) daily activity and a growing, silent question, which would not divulge its meaning.
At any point in time, Satprem consciously could have put a stop to this malaise, to this ambivalence invisibly taking hold between us. Was he not supposed to stand “above” these emotional whirls, to be capable of viewing things within a larger, more embracing spirit and light, beyond the human-bound heaviness that forever hold us down? Perhaps he did not do it because he himself was caught in that “devouring logic,” or else because he did not see fit to come down to this level of human conflict after his recent breakthrough into such an utterly different dimension? Yet if Mother had never “come down” to Satprem’s level, what would have happened to him? And where would he be today? There are circumstances when one ought to “return the favor,” as it were, even (and perhaps especially) when that appears to involve a diminution of consciousness. Here we are back with the great difficulty of the “love for all and faith for all.”
All the same, it is worth stopping a few moments to dwell on this state of profound ambivalence, almost schizophrenic, in which one part of me desperately sought to salvage something from the wreckage, while the other — deeper and freer from surface illusions — already knew there was nothing to salvage. The truth was right in front of me, blindingly, and the only thing to do was to welcome it with all due respect and gratitude. Failing to know what was happening to me, this state – which I called earlier “the cage of illusions” – became my dwelling place for years, and thus I know all its nooks and crannies. The cost of renting this dwelling is PAIN: the unspeakable pain of not being true to oneself, the pain of choosing appearances over being, the pain of nourishing cherished habits and sweet intoxications which are supposed to make up for the utter destitution of the slack periods.
In the extreme, this pain can become so intense, so unbearable, that any means will seem appropriate in order to evade it – including that to put an end to a life that merges with it. I am thinking about Micheline, who according to credible witnesses was suddenly stricken with a strange condition which gave her a staggering gait and a slurring voice, in her sixties, after devoting some 20 years of her life to help Satprem. I am thinking about Patrice, whose grief was already smoldering in India, and who breathed his last while calling Satprem and Sujata for help. I am thinking about Keya, one of the first to go, misunderstood and abandoned by all with her “infantile obsessions.” I am thinking of others, too, who even today are there in the shadows, with the weight of their silent questions and restless eyes.
Is Satprem morally, humanly responsible for all those personal dramas, big or small, which we did our best to hide out of fear, out of shame or simply not to “make waves”? He was by far the most conscious among us, the one whose many years spent beside Mother should have endowed him with patience and compassion. And it is futile, or absurd, to deny the facts, which are staring us in the face. So where, in the presence of so many broken lives and abused hearts, is justice?
Let me provide a personal answer. I believe that these events involving Satprem cannot be understood solely by the means of the human legal system. What I am trying to say is that each person must determine his own responsibilities for his actions. And that the essential freedom given to us from the start, though it may sometimes appear to play against us, must be accepted with all its concomitant uncertainties as the price to pay in order to guarantee that a real process of evolution is rooted in human soil.