Vaun McPheeters
(Amal Kiran:) “The first American name to fly about in the Ashram's air was one that significantly had a plural ring: McPheeters. It was two Americans who jointly started the flow of the New World to the Newer World which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had begun to build in the Old. They were husband and wife: Vaun and Janet McPheeters.
They were here already before I stepped into Pondicherry on December 16, 1927. The Mother had given them the upper floor of a two-storey house, a comfortable apartment with a good open veranda and a big terrace above. Both of them must have been past fifty. Vaun was a huge hulk of a man with practically no hair on his big impressive head. Janet was a smallish person and fairly thin. I came to know them very well and they were always kind to me, especially as I was comparatively a very young man – just turned twenty-three. We used to meet often on their veranda and have long talks. A.B. Purani was another of their intimate friends.
They had undergone the discipline of meditation in the States with a spiritual teacher named Debbitt. I was told he had quite a following. I remember seeing not only a photograph of him in the McPheeters' album but also a book of his lessons or instructions in typescript. He had a strong handsome dean-shaven face with powerful eyes. The McPheeters thought very highly of him, believing he had a cosmic consciousness in which he must have contacted Sri Aurobindo. I was not very much struck by what I had heard about his philosophy, and even made to Purani a rather irreverent joke comparing this teacher to Sri Aurobindo as ‘Debit’ to ‘Credit’.
Janet at some point of her stay here, got from Sri Aurobindo an Ashram name: ‘Shantimayi’ (‘one who is full of peace’). She never went out of Pondicherry after her arrival. Vaun, after a year's stay, travelled in India and was absent from the Ashram for a fairly long period. When he returned he was not quite the same person, either psychologically or physically. His health had suffered a good deal and he lacked the old concentration on Yoga.
In the early days, whenever I asked him about his sadhana he would mostly say with a broad smile and an expressive movement of his hand at head-level, “Coming and going, going and coming!” Now it appeared there was less ‘coming’ and more ‘going’.
But during the time he had been in the Ashram, he along with Janet had lived in close touch with the Mother. In his absence, Shantimayi became a part of the group of about twenty people who used to sit with the Mother every evening in the ‘Prosperity’ Store-room for an hour or so before the Soup Distribution downstairs. She entered fully into the spiritof the happy illuminative talks and intuition-developing games held there. She made one of three Westerners who were present in that group – the two others being Pavitra (Philippe Barbier St. Hilaire) and Datta (Dorothy Hodgson).
When Vaun decided to leave the Ashram for good, Janet appeared very unwilling but left out of a sense of duty. She kept corresponding with the Mother for a year or two from the States. Much more than Vaun she may be considered the first American to have become a sadhak of the Integral Yoga – though at the start both of them were equally sincere and ardent in their aspirations.”[1]
- ↑ Amal Kiran, The Sun and the Rainbow, p.50
See also