My experience of Satprem

A new status

During this period, we had as a collective discipline the habit of meeting at least once a week so as to assess the situation together, inform one another, communicate and relate and share the questions of the day and try and take together - consensually - the necessary practical decisions. These gatherings, the “Pour Tous meetings”, took place here and there, according to need and availability. It was thus in Myrtle’s house, “Tapoloka” in “Certitude” (previously “Auroson’s home”), that we received and welcomed Sujata’s visit, when she was sent by Satprem to try and persuade us all to accept the Central Government’s formal intervention. Many of us worried that this might cause a considerable weighing and leveling down, or might even prevent the free progress indispensable to the Auroville experience – or worse, that it might one day, through its enormous, half-blind machinery, seek to control Auroville’s “development” and the Aurovilians’ behavior. Some even considered that we should rather try and find a compromise with the members of the SAs, so as to preserve the immediate future of Auroville from any institutionalization – and to remain “in the family”… But the French group particularly and, more generally, all those who were in one way or another associated with Satprem’s work, were sufficiently convinced that such was the way to go. Kireet Joshi, CPM Singh and other disciples of Mother who had taken position in favor of Auroville and of Satprem were strategically in positions to establish the needed links with the Government. On November 13 th , 1980, Auroville was legally and officially “liberated” and the SAS was ordered to transfer all its assets, lands, buildings and monies related to Auroville to the Central Government of India. There was an unease.

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