The one question that every sensible person may ask on hearing the account of this relentless effort to throw me out concerns the motives of such a persistence, such a fury on Satprem’s part. After all, there’s no smoke without fire. Would he have expended so much energy, even through third parties, to get rid of a complete innocent? Was there not something very corrupt (as well as blind) in me to justify such a stubborn determination?
This is precisely the question that haunted me for months.
If there was one person capable of seeing clear through things and people, it had to be Satprem. His entire past experience with Mother gave credence to this — all those years of training when, day after day, she had instilled another comprehension, another approach to life into him. Could someone like him err so grievously? Misread the simplest and obvious facts?
Now that I can review all these events with leisure, calm and some distance, I think I can better understand what may have happened, and try to express what led to such extremities of blindness. While we were engaged in a considerable amount of work in common, there must have occurred some “mishaps,” some blunders or momentary lapses of behavior, as is possible every day when people build something together. But while my youth and inexperience led me to live each action, each event, day by day, as a self-contained whole ushering in the next one; Satprem’s perception took each moment of the present as part of a continuum of existence, which had a past and a future forming a comprehensive and inevitable whole. Where I might see gaffe or clumsiness, he saw a slippage foreshadowing other aberrations — which would further slip in a never-ending, inescapable logic of corruption. While my very youth permitted me to envision a favorable outcome to things (simply because I did not think about the worst), his “experience” doomed him to perceive a disastrous course for the same reality, which ended up by obliging him to take on the colors he had conjured up with such energy.
This kind of catastrophe-prone habit may be the very trait in his character that Mother spent so many years trying to cure. Once triggered, this “habit”, which would eventually precipitate the rest of the fatal avalanche, could never stop and allow him to return to a more measured, more positive perception of reality.
I had understood the existence of this “habit” in my case, precisely when I had perceived that my “condemnation” was played out in advance, by a sort of “machine” whose gears had already turned compulsively well before the facts had been assembled. But it’s only when I saw the same process occurring with other people that I finally understood how this whole catastrophic ritual had nothing to do with me — at which point I began to see the end of my tunnel.
I received the first clue with a shock. It was the news that Micheline had been stricken with a strange condition necessitating drug treatment. Micheline, whom I had known so full of life and cheerful health, had under Satprem’s orders completely turned her back on me. How could my memories of her be reconciled with the wobbliness that seemed to have taken hold of her lately? Then, in 2001, came the real shock: Micheline was dead, probably of cirrhosis of the liver. Later, it was learned that she had removed Satprem from her will before dying. Did she have a last-minute reversal? Had she seen or understood something on the threshold of death, when all pretenses vanish to leave the place for the truth? I knew nothing of the circumstances that impelled her, but that end reverberated so strangely in the midst of what should have been the plenitude and harmony of a life she had chosen of her free will.
Then, in 2003, came the event that threw a complete light on the process I had undergone ten years earlier. The whole trauma was being repeated, down to the last details, with another couple, another “Luc” — but with the same accusations and the same insults (only worse), the same demonization (only worse), the same frenzied violence of having to leave everything and get out. It involved Michel and Nicole, who had lived with Satprem and Sujata in the Nilgiris for twenty years, and had widely contributed to the publishing activities in India. Recently however, they too had begun to engage in an independent intellectual activity within a cultural Indian organization. They too had struck up a friendship with Indians outside the group formed by Satprem. Without forgetting the work accomplished with Satprem, they nonetheless meant to live their own life. An ill-chosen decision.
The barely-contained tide of spiteful anger that engulfed them only subsided with their precipitate withdrawal from the house they had occupied for twenty years — a departure that Sujata, in her inimitable style, saluted by informing Michel’s parents that a new supply of books (by a wink of fate, these came straight from the stock of Agendas we still distributed in America!) would replace Michel and Nicole in the house and would, she said, “Drive away all the darkness Michel-Nicole have left in the house.” As for Satprem, probably to add his two cents worth, he snarled at them: “Let them be forgotten forever in the dustbin of History!”
Unfortunately, the great problem was not so much the liberation of Michel and Nicole as the fact that the executioner, the individual supervising Michel’s and Nicole’s eviction under direct order from Satprem, was none other than… poor Patrice. The drama was far from over.
Now Patrice is dead. Subject to depression — “This tormented being…,” as Sujata would later write — left India around 2005 without fuss (the recent Michel-Nicole episode having compelled discretion) to try and reintegrate himself into French society, after serving more than twenty years in India. And how could a person I had known to be so full of enthusiasm and appetite for life, one who loved India as the land of his heart, end up “tormented” after all this time? This is what I wanted to know. An enigma as staggering — and as appalling — as Micheline’s sudden affliction.
* * *
Now I would like to distance myself from my personal story and try, as much as is feasible, to seek the wider significance of what was felt, at the time, as a destruction in my very flesh. First, my case is not unique. On retrospect, it became obvious that all those who approached Satprem for the purpose of a sustained work left disturbed. I have cited a few names in this text, but there are other, perhaps less-known individuals, whose experience may not be as immediately striking, who all, to varying degrees, went through the throws of disillusionment and inner torment — and sometimes worse.
So what was the significance of this experience, which presented itself under such attractive, such “spiritual” exterior only for it to end up on the edge of a precipice? Is there a hidden meaning to this trial beyond personal lesson, personal progress, and personal “karma”? Why was this little group (symbolic as human specimens undergoing an interior change, but nevertheless real) around Satprem decimated, crushed to a pulp in this way? Why all these hearts in a sling at the conclusion of an experience that had started under the auspices of Sri Aurobindo’s marvelous teaching? Does Sri Aurobindo’s teaching need such shock treatment to blossom and spread on the earth?
From an external point of view, so many controversies aflame over public forums can but adversely affect Sri Aurobindo’s teaching by throwing people into confusion. And there may be irreparable damage. Despite Sujata’s angry denials, it is hard to see how Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts can be served by associating his name with the ruin of the West, as was so awkwardly done on the cover of India’s Rebirth. Similarly, an inspiring, informative and beneficial reading of the Agenda seems hardly compatible with all the commotion and human disturbances affecting the group involved in its publication.
But from a larger, more profound perspective, what was the MEANING of that “cage of illusions” where a number of us entered and lived for years —where some are still living? To speak of “karma” or personal destiny is far too easy or simplistic. On the contrary, everything seems to indicate that the “cage” is significantly associated with the work of Sri Aurobindo and Mother on earth — as indispensable appendage or foil?
Let us be clear that the cage never ceases praising Sri Aurobindo. This is its central theme, the renunciation of which would bring instant dissolution. In its way, the cage can show a great force of conviction when it comes to Sri Aurobindo. For the unstinting praise or dithyramb in its irreproachable discourse concerning Sri Aurobindo is its coinage and the foundation of the illusion by which it exists. After all, is it not what the Catholic Church has been doing with Christ’s teaching in the last two thousand years?
In the final analysis, however, irreproachable appearances must be measured against the yardstick of hard facts: the often indelible traumas caused in people’s lives which in the end corrupt and sidetrack their aspirations to follow the path of light. Is that cage and all its seductive trappings, then, a menace to all the Little Red Riding Hoods of the Creation?
And if this sounds like a gratuitous dramatization or exaggeration, let us remember Keya and her stubborn refusal to feed herself, Micheline’s premature collapse, Patrice and his suicidal lure of the abyss…
Popular wisdom often claims that what does not kill you will make you stronger — a maxim I could easily apply to my own case. Yet, today, I am convinced that it is not necessary to come to the brink of the abyss in order to walk Sri Aurobindo’s “sunlit path” — nor is it necessary to rely on any human intermediary or attractively gilded cage. It is just necessary to be oneself, strong (or weak) in one’s own truth of being.
Before closing, I have one last thought for all those friends and comrades whom I sense are still asking the obligatory questions about Satprem: Was he good or evil? Was he right or wrong? All those who await or beg for a sign, a gesture, a letter that will assuage their fear, reassure them about their destiny, give them self-confidence. I have known this sad and sorrowful condition well enough not to cast the first stone. So I just want to say: Get out of the cage; get out of the thoughts that go round and round in circle, which feed on you and cannot find an answer; throw yourself, instead, in the one worthy conquest, without thinking, without intermediary : Sri Aurobindo.
[It must be said that the preceding text was written between November 2006 and February 2007, well before Satprem’s demise in April 2007. I found it useful — and still relevant today — to reveal this story, not so much because of the context in which it took place, but perhaps more because of the human experiences of a broader nature it entails.]
—Luc Venet