My experience of Satprem

tolerated and, as a consequence, she must be banished and outcast. She was even barred from seeing her children. While neither her origins and upbringing, nor her personal past had predisposed her to the clannish mentality, she had yet been quite impressed and molded by her years of community life with the French group and she wanted very much to remain welcome, considered and recognized as one of theirs. Thus was this rejection very painful and its emotional cost very high, for which she naturally held me responsible. It was then that she was told these terrible words: “if you are not with us, you are against us…!” She was pregnant with our child. She was living through a difficult experience and was distressed and disoriented. I enjoined her insistently to write directly to Satprem… just so she would know for sure one way or another! According to his answer she could then choose whether to continue or to separate. I assured her that I would accept Satprem’s words and that I had full confidence in his discernment; that it was indispensable she addressed herself directly to him, rather than having to bear the torment of being judged and condemned by those who claimed to follow him. At last she made the step and wrote to him. I did not ask her what she had written, nor did she offer to tell me. (It was not so simple, for the intermediary she had gone to, someone she had considered a good friend, had returned the letter to her and refused to help: it was clear to her, said she, that D. must part from me, since I was a dangerous being who would never change. And so we finally had to go and post it ourselves, somehow trusting that whoever would receive it would be good-willed enough to hand it over to Satprem.)

Days passed, we always had a lot of work.

One afternoon at the Matrimandir I saw her arrive, her face was at peace and in her eyes I could discern a kind of plenitude, calm and trusting: the ordeal was over.

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