Visual Impressions by Sujata

Introduction

(Translated into English [using Claude AI] from a Russian translation of the original in French)

We would like to tell here the beautiful and mysterious story of one Bengali child — my dear Sujata — who never even "learned" to draw, yet always lived in the world of Beauty, from the time of Rabindranath Tagore, the remarkable Indian poet. He was a contemporary of Sri Aurobindo, the great revolutionary of India, sentenced by those English gentlemen to be hanged, until he decided to take refuge in Pondicherry — which was at that time "French territory" — in order to begin an even wider, earthly Revolution: the revolution of our own Evolution, called "human."

I recall myself visiting Sri Aurobindo's first prison cell in Chandernagore, having just emerged from the Nazi concentration camps at the age of 22: a very small prison cell, as if surrounded by a great white silence that made me tremble. At the time I was a trainee administrator at the Colonial School in Paris (!), though I longed to flee to the ends of the earth — both from myself and from this wretched planet.

My dear Sujata lost her mother at the age of seven, while living with her family in Shantiniketan, in the outskirts of Calcutta. She still remembers the house where she lived, the avenue of hibiscus in the orange sand.

And little Sujata used to climb the hibiscus bushes as though they were trees! Then, at the age of nine, always accompanied by her father, my dear Sujata entered the Pondicherry Ashram to be near the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. It was February 21, 1935, the Mother's birthday — she was turning 57 — and my dear one lived there until the Mother's centenary, until 1978, when we left together to go into hiding, in accordance with the Mother's urgent and repeated instruction: "One must hide oneself." She knew that we were targets for those whom I have already called "those gentlemen falsifiers," who feared and wished to remove all the unwelcome passages from this dangerous Agenda, in which all our personal conversations with the Mother were recorded, along with all her experiences of the mysterious post-human Future.

And so, during our conversations with the Mother, when the Mother would again hold our hands, Sujata would often take a pencil and draw in silence what she felt "in the atmosphere": lines and facial features or contours, all in color — what seemed to descend from above and mysteriously reflected or expressed the Experience taking place. Many of these treasures have since disappeared.

But later, alone with me in the evening, in a corner by the fire, her child's fingers would draw what she felt around us — and it seems to me they expressed the work or experience I myself was going through, without quite understanding what I was living. And suddenly I would say to myself: "Yes! That's it!" — seen through the eyes of a simple child. Later, having grown more resilient, I would see or perceive living experiences of "something" that did not yet exist, but was slowly preparing itself in the atmosphere or in the human body. Until our evening silences, as this mysterious "something" weighed on me ever more heavily, were filled more and more, alas, only with my own groans.

Yet always, Music would seize or fill our time and my own body, as the Supreme healing from this "world of the terrible dominion of the Lie," as the Mother would say. And we did not know to what degree this "horror" could be horrifying.

One must "hide" oneself, the Mother told me, and we did not know how much we could serve as targets for those demonic forces that wished to dominate and destroy the earth.

Until Sri Aurobindo said to me and made me understand: "You are in the Battle of the Earth."

This Battle must be won, and "everything is against it" — how well Sri Aurobindo knew this.

And with the help of the Mother!

We would like the reader to be able to penetrate to the heart of all of this, and to attempt to live through for themselves the first stirrings of the Future and the inevitable, inexorable transformation of the truly human Being into the Divine Life on Earth.

Satprem
14 April 2004

With the love of the Mother and my beloved dear one, our earthly Hope.

State upon state is born,
covering upon covering has become conscious and aware,
in the lap of the mother he sees.
- Rig-Veda V.19.1

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