By The Body of The Earth or The Sannyasi (A Perpetual Story)

The Sannyasi.. A Book of the voyage of the soul, with others call reincarnation, a "perpetual story" which unfolds itself in three cycles (after many others) or three "islands" which are situated in "this land here or any other", apparently in India, but Egypt is there too and the frozen lakes of Norways. And the character, Nil, always in quest of "something else" – a new state upon earth for man from "Mechanism" and the laws of the mind-who had cast away all for this, given up the garb of the world for that of a mendicant Sannyasi, and who discovers a vaster, cosmic consciousness, new perceptions, to realise finally that he had perhaps gained the freedom of the heights, but lost the earth. And each time, from life to life, he meets again with the same circumstances, but aggravated as it were, the same actors, and an eternal beloved, Mohini, Natcha, his companion of all the cycles, whom he destroys each time to seize the unseizable other thing: "Trois fois, tu es venu; trios fois, tu as tue" ("Three times you have come, three times you have killed"); as though this long cyclic voyage led him towards an impossible central point, a same knit of Destiny where man is forced to choose between a catastrophe once again or his emergence onto another level of consciousness. Until the day when, in the depths of night, in front of the pyre of his beloved, nil discovers the "something else", the "puissant light" of the next cycle, having at last understood that freedom was not necessarily to be found on the heights out of the world and that we were the sons of heaven "by the body of the earth".

A sailor and a Breton, though born in Paris. A member of the French Resistance, Satprem was arrested by the Gestapo when twenty and spent a year and a half in concentration camps. Devasted, he journeyed first to Upper Egypt, them to India, where he served in the French colonial government of Pondicherry. There he discovered Sri Aurobindo and Mother. Their Message-"Man is a transitional being"- struck a deep chord. He resigned his post and left for Guiana, where he spent an adventurous year in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, then wandered on to Brazil, Africa..

In 1953, at thirty, Satprem returned to India for good to India for good to be near Her who was searching for the secret of the passage to the "next species" –Mother, whose confidant and witness he became for some years. His first essay was entitled Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness and was followed a few years later by On the Way to Super manhood. At the age of fifty, he edited and published the fabulous logbook of Mother's exploration, Mother's Agenda, in 13 volumes, while at the same time writing a trilogy-The Divine Materialism, The New Species. The Mutation of Death-followed by an essay, The Mind of the Cells.

In 1982, with his companion Sujata, Satprem withdrew completely to embark on the last adventure: the search for the "great passage" in the evolution beyond Man. In 1989, after seven spent "digging in the body," he wrote a brief autobiographical account, The Revolt of the Earth, in which he took stock of man's present situation. Evolution II followed three year later, a pithy record of Satprem's journey through our human and terrestrial grave: "After Man, who? But the question is: After Man, how?"

In 1994, Satprem published Letters d'un Insoumis, two volume of autobiographical correspondence. The next year, he wrote The Tragedy of the Earth – From Sophocles t Sri Aurobindo, which traces a curve from the Vedic and pre-Socratic era to out Iron Age and to Sri Aurobindo. La Clef des Contes appeared in 1998, followed by La Legende de I' Avenir (2000), Memoires d'um Patagonien and The Philosophy of Love (2002). In 1999, Satprem also started publishing his multi-volume Notebooks of an Apocalypse, the record of his work in the depths of the body consciousness, in which he was brutally plunged after Mother's departure in 1973. L'Oiseau Doel (1999) was published in 2008.