Satprem

Satprem (30 October 1923 – 9 April 2007) was a French author and a disciple of The Mother.

Satprem was born Bernard Enginger in Paris and had a seafaring childhood and youth in Brittany.

During World War II he was a member of the French Resistance (in the "Turma-Vengeance" network). He was arrested by the Gestapo in late 1943 and spent one and a half years in German concentration camps. Scarred by the experience, after the war he became interested in the existentialism of André Gide and André Malraux.

He travelled to Egypt and then India, where he worked briefly as a civil servant in the French colonial administration of Pondicherry, on the Bay of Bengal. There he discovered Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and their "new evolution". He resigned from the civil service, and went in search of adventure in French Guiana, where he spent a year in the Amazon (the setting for his first novel L'Orpailleur (The Gold Washer), with his copy of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, then Brazil, and after that Africa.

In 1953, aged 30, he returned to India and Pondicherry to put himself at the service of The Mother and settle in the Ashram. He taught a little at the Ashram school, and was in charge of the French copy for the quarterly Bulletin of the Department of Physical Education which was The Mother's publication, and is still printed in English and French. During this time he met his companion Sujata Nahar.

Enginger then travelled once more throughout the Congo, Brasília, Afghanistan, the Himalayas, New Zealand, and sailed around the world, before once again returning.

On 3 March 1957, The Mother gave him the name Satprem ("the one who loves truly").

Satprem remained restless and dissatisfied for some years, torn between his devotion to The Mother along with Sri Aurobindo's teachings, and his wanderlust, and in 1959 he again left the ashram. He became the disciple of a Tantric lama, a priest of temple at Rameswaram. Then as the disciple of another Yogi he spent six months wandering around India as a mendicant sanyasi practicing Tantra, which formed the basis of his second novel, Par le Corps de la Terre, ou le Sanyassin (By the Body of the Earth or, The Sanyasi).

After this he returned again (as he put it, "the bird flew back once more"), to the Pondicherry Ashram and the Mother, who started inviting him from time to time to her room, originally for work in connection with the Bulletin. As their relationship developed, he asked more questions, and eventually decided to record their conversations, taking a tape-recorder to her room. The result of this collaboration was The Agenda, the first volume of which (which covers 1951 to 1960) also contains Satprem's letters to The Mother during his wandering days.

Also, under The Mother's guidance he wrote Sri Aurobindo, ou l'Aventure de la Conscience (Sri Aurobindo, or the Adventure of Consciousness), which became the most popular introductory book to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother (published 1964). In 1972 and 1973 he also wrote under the Mother's guidance the essay La Genèse du Surhomme (On the Way to Supermanhood), which she regarded very highly. This was published in 1974.

In 1980 Satprem wrote Le Mental des Cellules (The Mind of the Cells), a synopsis and introduction of the whole Agenda, with many important excerpts, and written with great passion, even if his frequent Darwinian metaphors hardly bear resemblance to the actual scientific theory of Darwinism. He also refers to personal experiences, including the 1976 attempt upon his life, which he only survived by going into a state of complete non-resistance.

In 1982 all 13 volumes of the Agenda were published in French, and Satprem felt he had completed all his external work. The following year, he and Sujata decided to withdraw completely from public life to devote themselves exclusively to Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's work of the transformation of the cellular consciousness of the body and realisation of the new evolution, and the search for the "great passage" in the evolution beyond Man. The 1985 book La Vie sans Mort (Life without Death) is a follow-up to Mind of the Cells, co-written with Luc Venet, and provides a glimpse of Satprem in his post-Ashram life in this period.

After seven years, Satprem emerged and began producing a steady stream of books on his experiences, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's teachings, and the future evolution of Man. In 1989, he wrote La Révolte de la Terre (The Revolt of the Earth), in which he describes his years "digging" in the body. This was followed in 1992 by Evolution II, where he asks "After Man, who? But the question is: After Man, how?"

In 1994 came his Lettres d'un Insoumis (Letters of a Rebel), two volumes of autobiographical correspondence. In 1995 he wrote La Tragédie de la Terre - de Sophocle à Sri Aurobindo (The Tragedy of the Earth - from Sophocles to Sri Aurobindo), an urgent message for mankind to take action against the cycle of death. This was followed in 1998 by La Clef des Contes (The Key of Tales), and in 1999 by 'Néanderthal Regarde (Neanderthal Looks On), an essay on the betrayal of Man in India as in the West. In 2000 followed La Légende de l'Avenir (The Legend of the Future) and in 2002 Mémoires d'un Patagonien - Conte Préhistorique et Posthistorique (Memoires of a Patagonian - Prehistoric and Posthistoric Tale) and La Philosophie de l'Amour (The Philosophy of Love). In 2008, the IRE published his last book, L'Oiseau Doël (The Doël Bird).
In 1999, Satprem also started the publication of his Carnets d'un Apocalypse (Notebooks of an Apocalypse) (in French, seven volumes published to date, in English only vol.1, 1973-1978, dealing with the years and his experiences immediately after the passing of the Mother), which records his work in the depths of the body consciousness.

Satprem died on April 9, 2007 at the age of 83.