My story is coming to an end. There only remains to deliver the litany of various misunderstandings (or perhaps absolutely “understood” elsewhere, who knows?) which peppered the years from 1985 onward, increasing the malaise between Satprem and me until the final explosion of 1993.
The first serious warning shot came in 1990, during my last visit in the Nilgiris. Susie and I had been invited for a few days of “rest.” There was such a build-up of unspoken resentment between us that it would have been wise to have some simple, heart-to-heart explanation. But this was not the style of the house. On the contrary, silence and wordless “understanding” were the only means of communication. But the tension between us was so palpable – he behind his wall of Yogic silence; I within my repressed pain – that none of us would take the first step toward the other. That is when he went so far as to speak of my needing some kind of exorcism, which probably meant that he considered me as lost forever, beyond any chance of recovery. Destiny was sealed. With great, shared relief Susie and I left the Nilgiris a few days later and flew back to the United States.
And that’s when the dreams began, as if the daytime atmosphere had to extend also into the nights and complete the picture, so to speak. In these dreams, I saw myself begging Satprem for a little love and affection. Generally, I had to pass through a “welcoming committee,” composed of young people who surrounded and protected him, and who did not spare any effort to make me feel the abjectness of my condition. Once admitted to see him, things took a radical turn for the worse, for he usually indicated through a curt gesture or word that I still was not ready for the “realization,” because my rigidity, my lack of inner suppleness, and especially my refusal to give myself fully and entirely were still blocking the way to the “enlightenment” I was hoping for.
These nightmares occurred at fairly regular intervals, and then more and more frequently as the months went by, ending up by overrunning my entire nights as well as my daytime life. I tried to reassure myself and clear up the pernicious atmosphere poisoning my days by telling myself that I was seeing a “false Satprem,” just as Mother had once seen a “false Sri Aurobindo” at night – and this was a “phase” of yoga to go through, and one had to be strong, remain quiet, and so on. In other words, I kept spinning my fable.
Later, I had to face the fact that daytime reality agreed with the images I glimpsed at night and, against my will, I had to open my eyes to the true actuality of my situation and of my relationship with Satprem. This traumatic turn of events, administered drop by drop to ease the pain, finally left me without any explanation, yogic or others, in a situation I had to face alone with the sole recourse of a life bare of purpose or future.
Then came the episode of our “move,” which, as I see it today, was primarily a last test of allegiance. As Susie or I may have mentioned the existence of a particularly irascible neighbor as well as the growing drug traffic in the Washington area, Satprem took the opportunity to suggest moving out of Virginia altogether, on the pretext that our environment had become negative and potentially dangerous.
It could not have come at a worse time. There still remained several Agenda volumes to publish, I was probably in the middle of translating the next title, and our boxes of books were being dispatched daily to the four corners of the United States. But Satprem’s “suggestions” could not be dismissed or ignored, especially at a time when our relations were already so tense. The solution which Satprem and Sujata favored most was for us to leave the United States immediately and to retire to Canada, near X, an obscure correspondent of Sujata’s, endowed with psychic powers, who had elected to await the “end of the world” on a semi-deserted Canadian coast south of Alaska.
In order to make this incredible suggestion more palatable, Satprem had to present our departure as a new conquest, even as its very conditions and geographical intention did not lend themselves to such a description. To that end, he introduced X to us as “a very evolved being, very advanced on Mother’s path.” But there was no mention of the books and the work we had begun in the United States, which demanded a follow-up. Forgotten were the contacts, the friends, the bookstores. Gone were the “Laboratories of Evolution.” I could not believe it! In Satprem’s mind nothing of the last ten years seemed to have existed! Or was it we who had not really existed? Without explanation, with an air of detachment verging on indifference, all the work accomplished was to come to a stop and we had to park ourselves — I was about to say in “Siberia,” but that’s another story… — in Alaska. I experienced the shock, the depth of disappointment, but not yet the self-examination: as in the case of my unfortunate “to be continued,” I still could not come to terms with the implications of my own behavior.
So Susie and I traveled to Canada. For a while we played the game and went along with X’s hospitality, finally to agree that we could not possibly adhere to the Canadian project. Susie was later harshly reprimanded for having voiced her reservations about X herself. We had completely failed our test of allegiance.
After several weeks of exploration in the Western United States, we eventually found a new home in a lovely little island of the Pacific Northwest, not far from Seattle and… the Canadian border. This was followed by the long ordeal of moving our 50,000 books from coast to coast by special truck and train. The peace and quiet we felt in our new-found home overlooking the Pacific Ocean was well deserved… But the peace was short-lived, for the volcano was rumbling in the distance, claiming its debt. There were eighteen months left before the explosion.