My experience of Satprem

These instants were as if directly inscribed in a present that ever lasts, integral part of a truer Rhythm. For instance, in April 1970 Colette, my physical mother, had come to join me in the Ashram for two weeks time, so as to know a little and try to comprehend what had taken hold of me, so far from our shared history - Colette had thus the occasion to see Mother on my birthday, the day on which She gave me my name, and to receive from Her hands Her Blessings. I see again, then, as a scene engraved in diamond, this instant when Colette and I, seated in a cycle-rickshaw, suddenly saw Satprem walking towards us almost in the middle of the road, concentrated and tranquil, and his eyes lift up to ours – an instant that told the depth of these psychic bonds which gather beings together at each new stage, whatever may be the apparent circumstances and the determinisms at play. (Colette would see Satprem again, years later, at Carmen’s in Paris, for an interview which would be for her decisive.) Satprem was of average height and slight build, slim and finely boned, with a very fair skin, chestnut hair and eyes intensely luminous of a keen and deep blue, inhabited with a new inner birth – the living awareness of That which we had so missed… He was always dressed with marine blue shorts and a white short sleeved shirt and his concentration seemed constant and even. In Mother’s physical atmosphere there were thus a number of individuals whose very bodies were tangibly receptive to this new Consciousness – of which the incomparable presence expressed itself as well in the eyes of those few children who were born n Auroville in those first years. We knew nothing at the time of the Mother’s “Agenda”. We only knew that Mother had entrusted Satprem with the task of translating many of Sri Aurobindo’s texts, as well as collecting and assembling those messages and writings which would compose the quarterly Bulletin of the Ashram, in which also appeared the “Notes on the Way”, which were in fact extracts chosen by Mother Herself of the recordings made weekly by Satprem of Her experiences in the body-consciousness – those very recordings which would in their integrality later constitute the 13 volumes of the Agenda. But it was as the author of “The Adventure of Consciousness”, a work that played

11