My experience of Satprem

This was my first meeting with Satprem and I do not recall the words that passed between us – they must have been benign and sparing. When a little later, with the Mother’s blessings (“I hope you will see many interesting things!”), Fabienne and I embarked on our pilgrimage to the temples of the South, we carried a copy of “The Adventure of Consciousness” which we would read together at night wherever we would sleep. I believe I saw Satprem again not long afterwards, for I do recall his asking whether I now worked “up there”, thus designating Auroville’ bare plateau of red earth about 60 meters above sea-level, just a little North of the Ashram. And his tone was that of unreserved encouragement. (I had reached a few weeks after the “first caravan”, arrived from Paris by road – almost the same itinerary I had myself travelled more than a year earlier, to end up sick and miserable in Delhi. About twenty French people, aged between 20 and 30, volunteers to join the first attempt at collective experience of Auroville, for whom Mother had had a cluster of improved thatch huts built up, at the edge of the laterite plateau overlooking the sea. And many of them also found a great support in the flame of solidarity and aspiration Satprem offered.) And when at last I understood Who Mother was and was able to choose to stay and to serve Her, I could open to the atmosphere which reigned both in Auroville and in the Ashram – in a sovereign, positive calm, an intensity of meaning and of possibility, the air itself charged with a Gaze and a Love for Whom none of our dreams was crazy, if only we would invite Truth in our hearts and our beings and everyone of our movements. In this atmosphere, at once inward and physical, there was no longer any “chance”, nor any “coincidence”, or else everything was a continual and constant coincidence within this Consciousness which worked, worked, vast and exact at once, without effort or tension yet ceaselessly – in this atmosphere, then, to pass Satprem at a street corner or near the Samadhi, gave expression to a sharing of the Way, a commonalty and a fraternity or a solidarity at the feet of the Shakti, each of us bearing one’s lot of obscurities to offer to Her transforming Action.

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