A Misadventure of Consciousness —The Story of Satprem by R.Y. Deshpande

Here is a significantly telling entry in the Mother’s Agenda dated 27 August 1969:

“They’ve found a paper I wrote soon after Sri Aurobindo’s departure,” says the Mother. The paper bears the date 26 January 1951. Then she hands it over to Satprem and adds: “But it’s very private.” Satprem reads out the text to her:

“This note is about a person physically close to Sri Aurobindo, who tried to destroy Mother and separate her from Sri Aurobindo. In fact, it is clear and understandable that the darkest shadow is right under the light, and that he or she who comes to do the divine work must take on himself or herself the whole burden of the Opposer. Thus, is it near Sri Aurobindo and Mother that the greatest adversaries will be found. That also explains Mother’s departure and the ensuing murky situation in Auroville and in the Ashram. For obvious reasons we will not publish Mother’s note or the long conversation that followed in its integrality, but only a few brief extracts, insofar as they illustrate the “problem,” or perhaps the mystery, of Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s departures, for they have one and the same reason.Naturally, this mustn’t be published, but it’s to be kept.” [https://incarnateword.in/agenda/10/august-27-1969/]

The Mother was extremely particular that, the note should not be published at all, just to be kept and not published at all. And here is Satprem who ignored her instructions, disregarded them, and entirely for his own personal reasons threw the paper open to the public. It may be argued that he, to the point of fault, wanted to publish every word she had spoken or written. If it is one kind of fidelity it also lands him into a peculiar avoidable infidelity. In any case, it can never be his concern if the written note by the Mother should have remained unknown forever. Certainly, the Ashram would preserve every bit of hers in complete faithfulness to her, with the least doubt concerning it. It would remain for reference in the Ashram Archives.

For Satprem everything the Mother said was fascinating, everything was revealingly important and edifying. But there are degrees of importance and relevance and of bright commonsense robust in its expression. He thought it alright to publish these Agenda conversations in their original form, in their absolute totality, without editing anything anywhere. But perhaps he was doing “to excess” of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. That was the Ethics of the Agenda of Beatitudes for him. However, there is also a condition, of utmost “purity of the heart”, of utmost sincerity and complete obedience to the Teacher. Without it there cannot be “glory to God” anywhere. Not only that; smuggling out the papers and tapes of the Mother from her room, this thievery is not only an ethical sin, it is far greater than that, it is a spiritual crime. But who are we to judge anything about it? It cannot be our concern; it is entirely between him and the Mother, and they will resolve it amongst themselves. She had endeared to him close to herself, because she found a certain utility, a certain merit in him, perhaps more than all that a profound occult necessity, a compulsion, and began the free unrolling of the Conversations, for years, embracing everything upon the aspiring earth and in the responding heaven, and far beyond the enthusiastic known and the keen unknown, beyond, into the farthest unknowable. That is all completely beyond human comprehension.

But this is not the only instance of Satprem’s sense of debatable faithfulness to the Mother; it is an act of spiritual perfidy. Let us see some examples we have in the following:

Nirodbaran, Amal Kiran and Udar Pinto on the Mother’s Agenda

Nirodbaran: “Incidentally, going through the Agenda volumes is like entering into a domain of sudden unpleasant surprises whenever the Editor intrudes. One cannot but be pained to notice many indiscretions and inaccuracies committed by his bringing in his own judgments and prejudices and dislikes which have no place in a book of the Mother’s talks. … First of all, the Mother asked him not to publish some talks, but he has done it, giving at one place the reason, “we considered it right…” Could it be alleged that, because the Mother was no longer in her body, matter forbidden by her can be published? … Secondly, the Mother has talked freely to Satprem about people, countries, nations, institutions, politics, etc., which any sensible person would regard as said in confidence. To others also she has expressed certain views which were unmistakably meant to be kept private as well as to be understood only in a particular context. … Lastly, one most deplorable indiscretion is the publication of the Mother’s talk about one C (Chinmayee?) in her relation with Sri Aurobindo. The Mother pointedly told Satprem that it was private and to be kept aside. Yet he publishes it saying that it was a long talk and that he was giving just a summary of it! The summary is incriminating enough and does not exonerate him in the least from the gravity of his disobedience. … One cannot help regretting that irresponsibility and private grudges have smirched so illuminating a document as the Agenda which the Mother had intended … to be handled with reverence and obedience by those whom she considered her children.”

Udar: “The Ashram Trustees have unanimously and distinctly written to the editor of the Agenda that all the words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are the sole copyright of the Ashram Trust and so he has no right to publish the Agenda without permission from the Trust. He has ignored this, as he knows that the Ashram will not, of itself, initiate legal proceedings.”

Amal Kiran is sharply forthright in his observations: “Before I published Udar’s article in Mother IndiaI sent for all the relevant documents—the Trustees’ letter to Satprem and the letter sent to him by the Mother’s son André telling him that the Mother had explicitly asked André to edit the Agenda. Evidently, she had confidence in André and not in Satprem. … The basic negative side is that he has not attended to the Mother’s wish that André should read and judge things…. I have observed that people who are not steeped in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother turn against the Ashram on reading the Agenda. Even an old-time Swiss sadhika stopped coming to the Ashram for years because of the propagandist spirit which has moulded the Agenda. … I am sure the Mother has given him some genuine spiritual experiences. But I am afraid they have gone to his head and have failed to touch with refining fire the outer being. And the Agenda has been turned by him into a powerful means of self-aggrandisement and self-advertisement: he uses it to make himself out to be the one and only apostle of the Mother. … It is high time a halt was called to the anti-Ashram propaganda whose agitated centre is Satprem — propaganda which can also be termed anti-Mother in the sense that it goes not only against her principal field of work but also against the spirit of Truth, the Truth-Consciousness, which she represented on earth.”

These are considered and serious observations coming from responsible individuals who had decades-long personal contacts with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, they being close to them in various capacities; which means, these do not stem from personal biases against Satprem.

Satprem may be a wonderful writer and, surely, he must have received something of great spiritual value from the Mother; but there is present in him too much of small human also, too much, human not of a very gratifying kind, he having a double personality, the shadow thicker than the radiance if any. Against him there are grave allegations, that he deleted matter which would add up to another full volume to the Agenda, that there were drastic cuts in the taped records and transcriptions, these tapes themselves having been completely destroyed.

It must be understood that the tapes on which the Mother’s Conversations were recorded had been clandestinely smuggled out from her Room, Abhay Singh-Satprem-Tata-Paris. In that disreputable or illicit act there was devilish speed and perfection, even as with every political zest and manipulation the whole thing was speeded through. The clinical operation was perfect. The tapes were transported out of India in order that these go completely out of the reach of the Ashram authorities.

Why? Satprem wanted to publish the Conversations in their complete raw form, as recorded, without any editing anywhere. But he did not go by the Mother herself, that these could be made public only after her son André Morisset went through them. She withdrew from the “earthly scene” on 17 November evening of 1973, and soon André from the administration of the Ashram. But he got involved in the struggle to prevent the publication of the Mother’s Agenda edited by Satprem. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Sri Aurobindo Society, Auroville, and their printing and publication houses refused to print out what was given to them by Satprem. That enraged him and he started finding his own ways to have them published. A stark and sharp point of conflict got created, thanks to the Agenda, as even before that Satprem turned violent against the Ashram, saying that it “killed” the Mother, that she was buried alive, that the Samadhi be opened, and the Mother released from that gloomy captivity.

That itself makes the whole business of the publication of the Agenda doubtful and fraudulent, lacking moral integrity. Satprem had thieved, pilfered, misappropriated the original papers and tapes; this was imprudence, this was offence, this was malfeasance, this was wrongdoing, transgression, indiscretion, whatever one might like to call it, quite a reproachable action. But for all that, in the occult working of the unbreakable law, he will have to pay proportionately, suffer harsh reprisal, pay back as the consequence of his karma. But that need not concern us.

That is entirely for him and the Mother to resolve, and we have no place in it, no place at all. Elsewhere also there are unacceptable cases, even calling Sri Aurobindo having forgotten his own spiritual philosophy, and he making slips in his Savitri when we fail to understand him. We really need not be troubled about these queer stuffs. The dark occult is everywhere, and the hand of Falsehood exploits every occasion to promote its own agenda. It takes every human frailty and foible to stop the greater work. It attacks fiercely, and causes the greatest impairment to the functioning of the manifesting divine light and knowledge and power.

For us, however, this Agenda delivered by Satprem is now a fait accompli, something with which we are completely and helplessly stuck, being the only thing available. Nothing can be done about it, absolutely nothing, and there is no point in ruing over it or deploring it, or even cursing it, particularly when we don’t have our own objectives clear in our minds. Yet with our deepest sincerity we have to find a way out to move on in the best manner possible.

The Mother’s revelations in the truest form of Agenda are absolutely marvellous, absolutely, most precious, a pearl of rarest splendour and preciousness; it is that which we have to discern and decipher, open the code, the cipher, we have to perceptively read and understand it.

It is a golden record of work in luminous wake of Sri Aurobindo’s most momentous withdrawal from the physical, on 5 December 1950, that by which he fixed the Supermind inescapably in the material-physical, a supreme triumphant action in oneness with the will of the highest. In the annals of glorious spirituality that is excellently enduring, is of the highest dynamic value.

The Mother worked in it. She was constantly in contact with Sri Aurobindo in the subtle-physical and it is only from her we learn how much he worked after his withdrawal from this physical earth. His presence in the subtle-physical also means he becoming universal, and later of course she too, if we can enter into that world.

It is that Agenda, that golden record along with the Mother’s own amazing Yoga of Cellular Transformation which should be of interest to a futuristic spiritual seeker. It is that which, very naturally, also becomes an intense and active focus for the strong but grim dark agents of Opposition and Denial, their action to thwart the coming of the willed Future. One cannot ignore the reality of this Denial in the occult working, and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother came in direct contact with them, the greatest Asuras physically present in their closest proximity. But it is not for us to name any of those Asuras, though that relevance cannot be ignored.

Surely, this is what we witness in the conundrum of, say Auroville. The problems of Auroville have their genesis in the Mother’s Agenda itself. That may sound mischievously too bold; but there is a deeper occult content in it. There is the fiercest attack, of do or die, after thephysical withdrawal of the Mother, by the most powerful anti-Divine to thwart her work. If so, then, all these human characters have simply let themselves be its instruments.

This is the thick forbidding Shadow that took its birth in the birth of the Agenda itself, from the stern dark Inconscience to the descending Truth and Consciousness and Power and Bliss. Let us therefore be more seriously and gainfully concerned about the Light, the Illumination, the divine Wonder it has brought to us, to the soul of the evolutionary earth.

One of the things one could do with what is, is to decant the Agenda that is now in the public domain, take out from it all that appears disturbingly inelegant and worthless and irrelevant. One can prepare one’s own subject-wise texts based on it.

Without a doubt, all that she has said about the work of physical transformation, all that she has said about Savitri, all that she has said about Sri Aurobindo himself, his work and his passing away, about the coming of the future race governed by the Mind of Light, the surhomme consciousness, and the materialisation of the psychic being have to stay. It is that Essential Agenda which will put itself in the line of Rig Veda, the Gita, Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, the eternal scriptures shaping the destiny of this terrestrial manifestation. Obviously, then, all that is contextually incidental, very personal or departmental in the day-today organisation of the work, has no place in the Essential Agenda; that can, if at all, be a part of another publication or else just kept in the Archival Library for an individual’s research and study.

Here is Satprem given to us by Georges van Vrekhem, courtesy of “Auroville Today” magazine, June 2015, https://auroville.org/page/satprem-593

“Satprem (born Bernard Enginger) passed away on April 9^th, 2007, at the age of 84. Through his books, and particularly through his role in the publication of the 13 volumes of Mother’s Agenda, Satprem played a key role not only in introducing many people to the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, but also in explaining the scope and significance of the great endeavour They had undertaken. His writings have inspired, and will continue to inspire, people worldwide with their incandescent call to take up the great work of physical transformation begun by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, a work which he and his spiritual collaborator, Sujata, attempted to continue after Mother’s passing.He was also a figure of considerable influence in Auroville during the early years and during the conflict with the Sri Aurobindo Society, a struggle which he saw as crucial for Auroville’s integrity and for the furtherance of Mother’s work. Satprem was a charismatic figure who, in his uncompromising stances, attracted great loyalty from some and criticism from others. … Satprem’s first years in the Ashram were a period of dissatisfaction, restlessness, doubts, and sometimes loudly voiced revolt. … However violently Satprem might express himself emotionally, he was a cultured man and possessed a very keen intellect, widely varied interests, and as a writer a passionate, colourful style. … After the passing of the Mother, a gap has come about between the Ashram and Satprem, with regrettable consequences. Under the Mother’s direction he had written Sri Aurobindo, ou l’Aventure de la conscience (Sri Aurobindo, or the Adventure of Consciousness), a book that has led so many to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. … In a letter from 1983 one reads: “I had to take the decision to withdraw because I was no longer progressing in my [inner] work, I kept turning around in a circle. There must be at least one human being to prove, to show to the world that the way of the new species is practicable for humans. Otherwise, what is the use of what Mother and Sri Aurobindo have done for humankind?”

And here is Kireet Joshi, “closest friend of Satprem and Sujata”, writing beautiful tributes to them:

“Satprem was a thorough scientist in his methods of experimentation and in testing the results of his experiments. He was meticulous in his positivism and in the recording of his experiments and experiences. One has only to read seven volumes of his Carnets d’une Apocalypse in which he has recorded day to day experiences dating from 1981. These seven volumes give us an account up to the year 1986. But the records he has kept of his experiences, when published, will give the full account running to year 2006 or 2007, and we shall be able to learn more about the nature of his experiments and results […]If we now ask the question as to the point at which he had reached in the subsequent years, it may be mentioned that I had personally received a note from Satprem in the year 2006, in which he had written: ‘Je suis arrivé au bout’ (‘I have reached the goal’).” [19.07.2008]

https://www.arianuova.org/fr/en-pleine-bataille?id=46

Satprem’s Notebooks of an Apocalypse (Carnets d’une Apocalypse), seven volumes out of 24 published under his direct supervision, seem to be more a creation of a literary man than an accomplished spiritual figure. Let us just look at the following from the first Notebook:

मा

Introduction

From age to age, the “avatar” comes to “change the law.”

We do not realize what this “law” means because we are in it and it seems to us that it can be nothing but an improvement of our habit of being or, on the contrary, the age-old destruction of one civilization after another, only to start again a little better or take up the same old worst, with a few modifications of borders or vocabulary; and what we think “differently” is still a difference within the same animal and human law with perhaps a greater “intelligence” — but it is still the intelligence of a certain law we are confined in or limited to, as were the ichtoids under the waters. And it seems now that with the demoniac means at our disposal, the “difference” will doubtless be catastrophic and pulverizing or asphyxiating — and one starts all over again, perhaps on another planet, with means that will be those of the old law. The crab’s pincers will have acquired intelligent thumbs and forefingers to pinch the same old world.

But we have perhaps had enough of it and could feel inclined to dream of some definitive Nirvana on some plateau of no Tibet, which would no longer be the possession of this or that race, unrepentant and cruel.

But someone came to “change the law,” and this is prodigious and incomprehensible, for we only understand our old walls and pincers or additional ones as the case may be. This “someone” was called Sri Aurobindo-Mother. …

Then came that tragic 1973. Mother left, as did Sri Aurobindo before her; the last link of the Mystery shut itself in a tomb, after so many thousands of earlier tombs. On that first evening, a child of man, standing in front of this tomb yet to be cemented and sealed, cried out in his heart: “WE ARE GOING TO PULL HER OUT OF THERE.”

It sounded like a cry breaking through the walls — our Walls — and touching something that is very high or very deep at the bottom of all tombs, like an all-there and all-beating Future, an Impossible exploding and piercing all the old possibles.

*

Immediately, the old denial, the old Forces that rule the world, the old law, savagely rushed on this child of man, all claws out. Instantly, it was the NO that every time had seized upon the grain of Truth to turn it into a new solemn and sacred Falsehood, blessed by the very blood of the one who strove to change the law.

For that rebellious heretic knew that that handful of managers, those impeccable and white-dressed high priests, were mere assassins — well-mannered assassins, of course, family almost, without daggers, but armed with a whispering and perfidious poison, when it was not openly brutal: “I am hanging from a slender thread in an absolutely rotten atmosphere,” Mother told me. “They keep repeating: She is old, she is old …” Mother said with that poignant pain. “They don’t want you anymore.”

Some ten years before, Mother had with a strange smile recounted to me what she had already told Pavitra in the presence of Sujata, at the end of 1950, just after Sri Aurobindo’s departure: she had received a letter from Mrs Alexandra David-Neel, an “old friend” of hers she had known well in Paris, who in her letter had predicted that Mother would be “murdered by her own disciples.”

That letter must still exist in the Ashram archives.

The plateaux of Tibet may prefer Buddhist Nirvana, but Mother, just like the little man who writes these words, wanted things to change and Earth to be freed forever from this reign of Falsehood and of Death.

*

Then, I wrote letters upon letters to friends, to the Government of India and even to the President of the French Senate, so as to make them understand what was at Stake — dozens of desperate letters like a call and a cry coming from my soul. No one knew of that Treasure, I was all alone, it was a crushing responsibility amidst all those daily, perfidious, underground assassinations — I understood then Mother’s moans amidst the people around her: “I feel like screaming,” she would tell me. Then I understood so many things, without knowing that I was “digging a tunnel” like her in that Fortress of Falsehood through my own body. That is when I understood what praying with one’s body meant, and calling for that Divine Future through a thousand and a million “human” Negations: the Gestapo was charming and visible compared to those countless, perfidious, hypocritical and invisible cruelties — “cosmic,” as it were, as if it were the very world that was called into question, and so too the hideous Forces that rule this world. Then, yes, you see everything laid bare, without seeing anything except through the wounds of your body and your soul. …

So, I unleashed the whole pack by stating that I would no longer oversee the Bulletin of the Ashram, which I had published with Mother for so many years, and by announcing to the “managers” of the Ashram my intention of publishing this Agenda.

It was the opening round of the “battle of the Agenda.”

Immediately they asked to see my papers and tape recordings so as to “consider” what would be “desirable” to say and release to the general public. Censorship was there, obviously (but it had been there since 1973, as my letters were spirited away by the post office, while I was being rather indiscreetly shadowed and my house kept under surveillance). This time, they were shamelessly shouting; even Mother’s family actively interfered to cover up their trickery and slanders with its authority and respectability. I had “stolen” Mother’s papers, I was an Ashram “employee” who had betrayed “their” trust. All the Indian authorities were warned, from the printers to the booksellers to policemen and magistrates, and above all the Home Ministry in charge of foreigners — for I was a FOREIGNER, don’t forget it! — they tried to take away my visa, to expel me from India; I was prosecuted for theft and “forgery” because, of course, my manuscripts were forged and my tape-recordings “fake.” They even printed a false Agenda to nullify in advance my attempts at publishing it, and — it was the most serious thing that happened to me, even worse than the attempted murders — they went to see my publisher in Paris — this dear Robert Laffont — with the family up in front led by Mother’s son, an honorable septuagenarian, in order to have their “false Agenda” accepted, to tell him of my “betrayal of Mother” and to make him understand that they could take him to court, because they were the “owners” of Mother andof all my books originally published by the Ashram… I was being strangled on all sides.

There is truly a sublime grace that made Robert Laffont feel what I really was, the same grace that sent Mr JRD Tata, the Director of Air India, to help me ensure the safety of all the tape-recordings of my conversations with Mother and all my precious papers by sending them to France. And finally, Sir CRN Singh, an emissary of Indira Gandhi, who instilled some fear into their cowardice.

Yet, after many hesitations, we decided to publish, in this first volume of my Notebooks, some of the countless letters I wrote, like a cry to “make people understand” who Mother was, what She was doing and what She wished for the earth, along with my brief, succinct and elliptical notes on the then ongoing events.

*

The next volumes of the Notebooks will tell of this long journey of which we do not know whether it is death or the beginning of a new Life for the Earth and for man. A non-path, dark and unknown, on which you tread step by step unknowingly, with from time to time visions of the New Consciousness that so concretely and graciously show you what step you have to take, or the meaning of the step, the danger ahead and the “situation” in the world or around you, people’s intentions and faces in all their reality, with an unthinkable, if enigmatic at times, sense of humor and material exactness, and a Divine Smile, as if to tell you: “Look, I am here, I walk with you….”A marvelous, impossible path, supremely Possible thanks to this Love that carries us and carries everything.

I will slowly open out into these Notebooks, but in fact the step-by-step in the Dark and that crying breaking through the cells of a body had begun as early as that fateful 1973, and perhaps some centuries before.

From age to age, the same story repeats itself, but this time…

And in Mother’s hands!

Satprem

December 20, 1998

“From age to age, the same story repeats itself, but this time… is an echo the Gita’s

यदायदाहिधर्मस्यग्लानिर्भवतिभारत।

अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्यतदात्मानंसृजाम्यहम्॥४-७॥

परित्राणायसाधूनांविनाशायचदुष्कृताम्।

धर्मसंस्थापनार्थायसम्भवामियुगेयुगे॥४-८॥

‘For whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right I am born from age to age.’

And Sri Aurobindo writes:

‘The Avatar is necessary when a special work is to be done and in crises of the evolution. The Avatar is a special manifestation … .’

Yugé yugé may be used in a general sense, as in English “from age to age” … . But the bahūni has an air of referring to very numerous lives especially when coupled with tava ca. [Letters on Yoga]

In Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita there is the double purpose of Avatarhood which does not immediately become obvious in the Gita verses:

‘The outward action of the Avatar is described in the Gita as the restoration of the Dharma; when from age to age the Dharma fades, languishes, loses force and its opposite arises, strong and oppressive, then the Avatar comes and raises it again to power; … The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man … .

‘The work for which the Avatar descends has like his birth a double sense and a double form. It has an outward side of the divine force acting upon the external world in order to maintain there and to reshape the divine law by which the Godward effort of humanity is kept from decisive retrogression and instead decisively carried forward in spite of the rule of action and reaction, the rhythm of advance and relapse by which Nature proceeds. It has an inward side of the divine force of the Godward consciousness acting upon the soul of the individual and the soul of the race, so that it may receive new forms of revelation of the Divine in man and may be sustained, renewed and enriched in its power of upward self-unfolding. The Avatar does not descend merely for a great outward action, as the pragmatic sense in humanity is too often tempted to suppose. Action and event have no value in themselves, but only take their value from the force which they represent and the idea which they symbolise and which the force is there to serve.’

All this is missed in Satprem’s “From age to age, the same story repeats itself, but this time… .” Instead, there is the modern cleverness in swiftly exploiting what is sublime and fundamental for self-projection and aggrandisement.

This valuable exposé of “the third Avatar” sounds more like a golden calf bellowing from its affected throat. Let us be aware of what the Mother had told André. To quote from Down Memory Lane by Shyam Sunder Jhunjhunwala “André was sad over Auroville happenings and just repeated to me more than once what Mother had told him. ‘For God’s sake, keep Satprem out of Auroville.’ ” [p. 26]

“For God’s sake, keep Satprem out of Auroville.” It says everything. And for his own glorious wonderful reasons Kireet Joshi made intimate friendship with Satprem, became his ally. Certainly, behind it are powerful occult forces bent upon destroying the Mother’s dream.

Here is something on the Overman Foundation webpage:

On Satprem and Sujata Nahar: An Interview with Nirmal Singh Nahar

Georges Van Vrekhem in his book The Mother: The Story of Her Life writes about Satprem:

‘Satprem, whose other name was Bernard Enginger, was born in 1923 on the coast of Brittany, a place he would always remember with nostalgia. When twenty and a member of the French Resistance he was arrested by the Gestapo and spent one-and-a-half years in German concentration camps. The war, the concentration camps, the post-war upheavals and the Existentialist spirit of revolt and nihilism then pervading France left a deep imprint on him. He passed away on 9 April 2007 at the age of 84. By that time, he had acquired the reputation of someone who could be gainfully adored and followed in one’s spiritual pursuit; in fact, there are enthusiasts who consider him as the third Avatar after Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

‘He was also a figure of considerable influence in Auroville during the early years and during the conflict with the Sri Aurobindo Society, a struggle which he saw as crucial for Auroville’s integrity and for the furtherance of Mother’s work. Satprem was a charismatic figure who, in his uncompromising stances, attracted great loyalty from some and criticism from others. A survivor of the concentration camps, he stood against all forms of tyranny. Yet some blamed him for his fierce criticism of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and for his attacks upon those who did not follow the path which he favoured.” He was of course extremely fortunate that he had the darshan of Sri Aurobindo, even as it is said that hisSri Aurobindo, ou l’Aventure de la conscience [Sri Aurobindo, orAdventure of Consciousness] a  biography, is what Sri Aurobindo himself wrote through him.

‘But the Satprem one would like to approach is one who was chosen by the Mother to reveal the divine Knowledge and the modus operandi she had received from the unknowable source of everything in the unfolding manifestation of the supreme Will in its will and in its delight. Thanks to him we have now thirteen volumes of year-wise conversations tape recorded and transcribed by him and his team.

‘They are an indispensable source of information not only about the Mother’s yoga in the years 1960-73 but also about her and Sri Aurobindo’s lives and their yoga in general.”One may even go a step farther and maintain that the Mother’s Essential Agenda is the unwritten part of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri itself, that which during his time had received the seal of “incomplete completion”. The Rig Veda, the Gita, Savitri, and now this Essential Agenda are the most luminous gifts to the aspiring spirit and soul of mankind towards the divine Future.

‘But that “Thy will be done” was thwarted. Satprem wanted Agenda to be published as was recorded, verbatim, with no editing.  Ashram as a responsible institution refused even as there were things which could not be published, ‘against’ itself.

‘After the passing of the Mother, a gap had come about between the Ashram and Satprem, with regrettable consequences.’ There was a lot of ‘chit-chatting’ in those sessions and naturally that had to be dropped. Some admirers of his may deem that to be “very inspiring”.  True, the chit-chat is not only rich; there is the glow and there is the honey in it. Yet, finally, it remains only a chit-chat. To a part of our being it may be titillating; it may have the flavour of happy creative literature; it may reveal with nuances certain minutiæ of the participants; it may be educative in several respects, it may be in the human context. But we do not go to Agenda for that, that which maybe too incidental. All that becomes secondary if not tertiary, holding no far consequences, that which may serve a kind of common objective, particularly the occult-yogic of the Mother was to take the evolution of man beyond man, to work out things that will bring about a new race preparing for the great supramental manifestation of Sri Aurobindo. Eventually Satprem was expelled from the Ashram. His publications like The Notebooks of an Apocalypse did not present the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in a proper light. It is known that “threats” were being leveled at Satprem by certain Ashram authorities concerning the original manuscripts of Mother’s Agenda which he kept in his house in Nandanam.

In July 1977 steps were being taken to register the “Institut de Recherches Evolutives,” whose purpose was to publish and distribute Mother’s Agenda worldwide. From then on, the work of the Agenda would be in the hands of four associates of Satprem. The first volume of The Agenda came out in February 1978. Understandably there was a constant threat of an “imminent court case” the Ashram Trustees would launch against this publication.

The Mother never wanted everything to be published as was spoken. In fact, in those 36 entries we have In Notes on the Way [CWM Vol. 11], 1965-73, it was Satprem himself who had edited for the Bulletin of Physical Education published on the occasions of February-April-August-November Darshans. She wanted André to go through the transcriptions before these were published. But Satprem in his own way went ahead with those recordings in their raw form. Oh! Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. [Sermon on the Mount, St Matthew Chapter 5, KJV].  But the issue is far greater and deeper than all this. It is: Let “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”

For a fairly detailed discussion about these matters from various viewpoints please also check comments at the following link:

The Passing of Dr. Kireet Joshi

These actions of Satprem have severely impacted the work and progress of Auroville. A thick shadow of his is upsetting the Glory that is to be. The Mother very prophetically had told that he should be kept away from Auroville. The occult is too deep and forbidding. This has to go.

To quote from Record of Yoga: “A greater completeness is always superior to a lesser completeness; but also an extreme power of one can do miracles..Be wise as a serpent and mild as a dove.” [p. 1446]

The occult has a greater luminous weight than the mere rational, the creature kind, and truest wisdom lies in recognsing it, in living in it. The human of us has to grow into it. There is the little chapel, petite chapelle, l’oratoire, ready for it, the divine Matrimandir.

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About the Author: Born on 17 April 1931 Dr. R.Y. Deshpande is a professor, philosopher, author, poet and inmate of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. After graduating from Osmania University, Hyderabad, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai as a research physicist in 1955 and worked in this organization till 1957. In 1957 he joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai where he worked till 1981 and headed several Atomic Energy and Space Projects in Advance Technology with Dr. Raja Ramanna. Having received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics in 1964, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, California USA from 1964 to 1965. He has some fifty research papers published in national and international scientific journals. He was also an examiner for a number of Ph.D. theses in the field of Solid State Physics. In 1981 Deshpande joined Sri Aurobindo Ashram of Pondicherry. For thirty years, he taught physics and a few other subjects such as Astrophysics, Savitri, The Future Poetry, Science and Society at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. For eight years he was the associate Editor of Mother India, a Monthly Review of Culture, published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. During 2007-2008 Deshpande was the editor of a web-magazine titled Science-Culture-Integral Yoga founded in Los Angeles. His published works in prose and poetry include titles like Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, Vyasa’s Savitri, The Ancient Tale of Savitri, “Satyavan Must Die”, All Life is Yoga, Nagin-bhai Tells Me, The Rhododendron Valley, All is Dream-Blaze, Under the Raintree, Paging the Unknown, The Wager of Ambrosia, Savitri: Notes and Comments, Elements and Evolution, Sri Aurobindo’s Narad, The Birth of the Sun-God, Hymns to Becoming, These Mountains, The Secret Knowledge, Savitri Talks: The Symbol Dawn, Islam’s Contribution to Science, Big Science and India, Running Through Savitri, A Look at the Symbol Dawn: Observations-Comments-Discussions, Savitri: The Poetry of Immortality,  and Sanatana Dharma: An Aurobindonian Perspective to name a few. He has also edited the following books: Nirodbaran: Poet and Sadhak, Amal Kiran: Poet and Critic and Perspectives of Savitri. 

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