A Luminous Life

Medhanand: a teacher from afar

Among my many teachers in the Ashram, one of the most unusual was Medhanand — a former junior judge in Nazi Germany who had fled, with his French wife, to a small island near Tahiti after his outspoken opposition to the Nazi regime put his life in danger. During the war, when Britain and then America entered the conflict, he — being German — was interned by the French on a still smaller island, while his wife alone raised their children and ran their plantation. It was in the isolation of those islands that his own spiritual and occult development quietly began; he ventured, alone among the foreigners there, into a forest the islanders themselves avoided as haunted, and returned unharmed — a test, as they saw it, that made him one of their own. He came to know their old animist and shamanic knowledge of the subtle-physical world in a way almost no one else at the Ashram ever learned from him directly.

When Medhanand arrived at the Ashram in 1951, I recognised him at once — as, he told me later, he had recognised me — from some earlier existence we had shared, though I never made much of such things, feeling our whole focus must be on the present sadhana. He took it upon himself, in his own quiet way, to educate me: he would simply set a book down beside me at my little worktable and vanish without a word, leaving me to open it and find what I was meant to find — the sculpture and painting of ancient Egypt, of Sumeria, of Greece and Rome. He taught me German, and Latin too, so that I might understand the roots of the English words I dealt with constantly in my work. When we came to Rome, I found myself overtaken by violent, unaccountable memories — of having been a young Christian girl, a slave, hiding in the catacombs while Christians were pursued and Christ was crucified; I understood, then, why the Roman period in my school history lessons had always filled me with an unease I could never explain as a child. These were not things important to our Yoga, and that movement in me settled as quickly as it had risen — but I believe Medhanand wished simply to make me a citizen of the world, and not only of India.