My experience of Satprem

No Aurovilian wished to live and work on Auroville’s path as per the dictates of the SAS people, who only stayed in Pondicherry in the comfort, the habits and traditions of devotion and obeisance which often seemed a little hypocritical. There presented itself as if another face of the same old division between Spirit and Matter, this time between the “spiritual life” and a true incarnation such as Mother had cleaved the way to. And Satprem better than anyone knew to evoke and invoke this one path, in his letters to all those who turned to him in the hope he would help clearing the confusion. As the work of transcribing the Agenda went on and the first volumes one by one came to light and as, simultaneously, Auroville matters were taking a critical turn, Satprem wished to share at once some of Mother’s words not yet published with those Aurovilians who would be “able to understand”. And thus was formed a sort of sacred chain – or initiating affiliation – of which a few became the officiates. On this occasion, I experienced an episode a little burlesque that nonetheless illustrated a kind of drift which would cause deep chasms between us all in the years to come, where fraternity ought to have developed. Satprem had thus written a letter to those Aurovilians worthy of receiving the Mantra, in which he also transmitted the significance of each of its terms such as Mother had indicated it to him. Why this stagecraft and rigmarole, when all of this would soon be made openly accessible to all with the publication of the corresponding volume of the Agenda? Was the inflation of the “new ego” an indispensable step of the way? Be that as it may, this letter was being kept by L.V, who then lived in one of the Auromodel houses built by Roger A, of which the sculpted interior resembled the capsule of a spaceship. Those who were designated as the elect There were “those who were clear” and the others… According to this assessment, the Mother’s Mantra was introduced with all the dramatic density of an episode out of the Round Table.

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