My experience of Satprem

Commitments and differences

It had also at that time become necessary for most of us to take a stand for Auroville’s independence and the freedom to seek our own directions and our own path. The Sri Aurobindo Society, or SAS, the organization created by Mother to, on the one hand, help disseminate Sri Aurobindo’s works and, on the other, to serve as the legal channel for the purchase and use of the land meant for the Auroville experiment, this organization of which She had been the President and the guarantor, rested now in the charge of persons who had neither the vision nor the stature necessary to address all the questions that were already rising and were instead mostly trying to exert a moral and economic control and to obtain some obedience and subservience from the Aurovilians. But on our part, faced with this necessity of autonomy and integrity – according to the Charter, no individual and no organization could claim to be the owner -, we soon had to confront diverging cultural responses and patterns. And the French took then a more central role, simply by being the loudest: their arrogance, but also their humor and their sense of solidarity, adventure, liberty and uncalculating commitment – but also the vitality of their judgment and of their tribal discrimination. And since the regiments in support of Satprem were mainly composed of French people, the two causes naturally joined and bonded, to the detriment of a wider association and of a more durable collaboration between the various inhabitants of Auroville. Many found themselves excluded, scorned or misunderstood, if not belittled by what they felt were excesses and misbehaviors. However the overall situation became so concrete, translating into physical actions on Auroville territory, that a sort of unanimity prevailed.

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