Egypt
- (Ambu:) “Ma,
Who was Hermes?
(Mother:) Hermes Trismegistus is the name given by the Greeks to a great initiate who founded in Egypt the occult science and was deified under the name of Thoth thousands of years ago.
Love and blessings to my dear faithful Baby”[1]
(Mother to Satprem after a meditation on his birthday, 1960:) “As soon as the meditation began, I started seeing quite familiar scenes from ancient Egypt. And you, you looked a little different, but quite similar all the same ... The first thing I saw was their god with a head like this (gesture of a muzzle), with a sun above his head. A dark animal head with ... I know it VERY WELL, but I don't remember exactly which animal it is. One is a hawk, but the other has a head like ... (Mother makes the same gesture)
- (Satprem:) Like a jackal?
Yes, like a jackal, that's it. Yes, that's what it was. With a kind of lyre above its head, and then a sun.
And this god was very intimately related to you, as if you were melted together; you were like a sacrificial priest and at the same time he was entering into you.
And this lasted quite long (it's what I saw most clearly and what I best remember). But there were many, many things – old things that I know – and certainly a VERY INTIMATE relationship which we had in the days of Egypt, at Thebes.
It's the first time I saw this for you.”[2]
(Satprem to interviewer:) “The first time I went to Egypt, it was right after the war. I knew nothing; I was really a good little boy from the West. For me, Asia was simply geography. And I knew absolutely nothing, zero, about the religions, the spiritual traditions of the East. I was a complete layman (by layman I mean that I had read a lot of things on the subject; I was full of Western culture). But I went and spent three weeks near Luxor.
And that's when, inexplicably, I was transported into a sort of state of elation. I couldn't walk through these temples – yet they seemed completely dead, falling to pieces – I couldn't walk through them, or touch those stones, without being overwhelmed with an emotion beyond any understanding, thought or feeling. It was inexplicable. I couldn't understand.... But it had an incredible PHYSICAL impact on me.
You see, for us Westerners, everything is sort of clearly delimited: this is a rock, this is a chair, this is a gentleman, this is a lady. Everything is sort of confined in a precise, well-defined, limited frame. Each thing is defined.
Now that I look back at the West from... another perspective, I have the feeling that the whole intellectuality – the Western intellectual formation – is something extraordinarily juridical and military. Everything is rigid. Everything is in a box. And even humans, even humans are ‘defined’.
And in that first contact with Egypt (and even more so in India), that little definition was suddenly thrust into a huge dimension that lay behind the little object I thought I had defined. All of a sudden, everything was plunged in depth after depth after depth.... And those depths VIBRATE. They vibrate.
And that vibration is what awoke something in me which.... I couldn't define, for which I had no words. But things were no longer confined in a definition; they were suddenly embraced in an immensity that seemed to extend far back in time. And that immensity was not an abstraction; it felt like a ‘sound’, a vibration.
As if those walls, for example, had retained centuries and centuries of gongs and rituals, and they kept on vibrating. Vibrating with what? With a call.
And in the midst of all that, I recognized my own call.
A call that was not from this time. A call that perhaps was from many times before. As if that cry, that need, was not born today, or even with this life, even with my childhood in Britrany. As if, suddenly, this whole life extended back, and this little call of today or this little fellow I was today was only a ‘projection’ of something that went far, far, far into the past, and which vibrated and vibrated. Something that had called and called – and had been a call since... long, long ago.
- (Interviewer:) Something that went far, far into the future?
Maybe into the future! Maybe.
Because... when you were there, in that very ancient dimension, it felt like ‘eternity’.
It isn't... PAST (I describe it, so it seems to be something very, very, very far back in time); it's eternal.... It's ETERNAL.
But it's an ‘eternity’ without any projection into the future.
It's an eternity that IS.... I don't know.
- A Christian could feel the same things in a cathedral or a church?
Oh, absolutely!
Absolutely. He certainly can.
You see, EVERYTHING is actually a means, a pretext, to lead us to discover ANOTHER depth of ourselves.”[3]
(Shyam Sunder on a meeting with Mother, 23 July 1972:) “Constance has been engaged since ten years in research into the ancient Egyptian civilisation. He is able to find neither the nature of his connection with it nor the door to that civilisation. He asks for Mother's help.
Mother's reply:
Ancient Egypt belongs to the past,
we are here to prepare the future.”[4]
- ↑ New Correspondences of the Mother, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2020, p.257
- ↑ Mother's Agenda 1951-1960, 30 October 1960
- ↑ Satprem, My Burning Heart: Interview by Frédéric de Towarnicky, p.61
- ↑ Shyam Sunder Jhunjhunwala, Down Memory Lane, p.202
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