> The Mother writes to Jyotipriya: “You who have realised your soul…

Cute. She must have experienced a non-dual assimilation of the ontology and epistemology that define the ontotheological abstractions of Sri Aurobindo’s normative phenomenology.

She has been valorized in this biographical sketch
http://www.sriaurobindocenter-la.org/jyoti.html

Jyotipriya was born Judith Tyberg on May 17, 1902, in California, to Danish parents who were Theosophists. Throughout the nine months of her gestation, her mother, a serious student of Oriental philosophy, chanted a Vedic hymn to the newly embodied soul. At an early age, Judy could recite section of the Gita by heart.

Educated at the Theosophical Society's Point Loma Raja Yoga School and The Theosophical University, Judith learnt from a young age about karma, reincarnation and meditation. She received her M.A. in Religion and Philosophy from the Theosophical University, with a specialization in Oriental Thought. Here she also obtained another graduate degree in Sacred Scriptures and Ancient Civilizations and her doctorate in Sanskrit Studies.

From very early on, Judith knew that her destiny was to teach and help others. While still a teenager, she began to formally teach in the Raja Yoga School. Later she taught in the High School and the Theosophical University. She was Assistant Principal of the Raja Yoga School from 1932 - 1935 and held the post of Dean of Studies at the Theosophical University from 1935 - 1945. To all her teaching, she brought a breadth of erudition and an intellectual brilliance that matched the intensity of her soul's call to serve.

Together with Gottfried de Purucker, Judith and a select group of Theosophical scholars committed to print the meanings of all the Sanskrit, Greek, Hebrew, Tibetan, Zoroastrian and technical terms used in Theosophy. Then she began an intensive study of the Bible and the Kabbalah in the original. But it was Sanskrit that became her passion and her life's work.

In 1940, Judith was appointed Head of the Sanskrit and Oriental Division of the Theosophical University. She became a member of the American Oriental Society and in 1941, her first Sanskrit textbook, Sanskrit Keys to the Wisdom Religion, was published, climaxing eleven years of concentrated study.

"Sanskrit Keys" presented the meanings of over 500 Sanskrit terms used in religious and occult literature, and was a practical pronounciation guide. Set in Devanagari, it was the first occasion for the script to be typed by linotype. By adapting a modern Indian Sanskrit keyboard, Judith and Geoffrey Barborka of Point Loma designed a special Sanskrit linotype, composed of dozens of matrices. It is worth noting that Judith's "Sanskrit Keys" and "First Lessons in Sanskrit Grammar and Reading" were the only books on Sanskrit to be found in the Central Research Library in 1940's Los Angeles.

In 1947, at the age of 45, Judith left for India to work towards an M.A. in Indian Religion and Philosophy at the Benares Hindu University. But Judith had a deeper purpose - she had come on a spiritual quest. As she explained at her first meeting with her departmental Chair, she had come seeking the lost secret of the Veda. Indeed, she said, if all of India's unfathomable spiritual culture acknowledged the authority of the Veda, there must be illimitably more to it than what she had been given to understand in America. The prevailing view of the time, promoted by Max Meuller and other "Orientalists", was that the hymns of the Veda were at best glorified Nature poetry, or more commonly, "an interesting remnant of barbarism". She was told that she had come to the wrong place, that the secret was still lost.

Disappointed, she turned to leave; but a young Philosophy lecturer by the name of Arabinda Basu had overheard her conversation, and brought to her a copy of Sri Aurobindo's "Bases of Yoga" and a typescript of his not-yet-published "Secret of the Veda". Judith stayed awake reading all night for in her hands, she discovered, were the answers she had been seeking for so long.

In October 1947, Judith arrived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry. She reached on the evening of Lakshmipuja - just as the Mother was about to give Pranams. At the touch of the Mother's hands on her head, "electric forces" went right through her being. At her first private meeting with the Mother, Judith expressed her longing to give her life to all that was Beauty and Truth. "You chose long ago to serve", was Mother's reply. She then told Judith that she and Sri Aurobindo had been waiting for Judith to arrive. Judith asked the Mother for a spiritual name. Next morning, the Mother handed her a chit written in Sri Aurobindo's hand - "Jyotipriya, the Lover of Light", it read.

Jyotipriya accepted Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as her gurus. She finished her studies at BHU and spent many hours with many of India's illustrious spiritual personalities - Anandamoyee ma, Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, Yogi Krishna Prem, Ramana Maharshi and others. But the Sri Aurobindo Ashram became her "spiritual home". Here, she found the answer to her "deepest heart's longings since childhood", and in the Ashram residents and close friends like Nolini Kanta Gupta, A.B. Purani, Indra Sen, Sisir Mitra and Prithvi Singh, she found the "cream of Hindu culture".

Jyotipriya left the Ashram in 1950, to return to America and become Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's premier pioneer in the United States. On May 1, she founded the East-West Cultural Center in a small room in the home of a friend in Los Angeles. In 1955, the Center moved to a home of its own, with a 125-person capacity auditorium. Revered friends and eminent personages from India such as Swami Chidananda, Swami Ramdas, Mother Krishnabai, Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Puri, V.K. Gokak, Madhusudhan Reddy, Dilip Roy and Indira Devi, brought their light to shine. Swamis Muktananda, Satchidananda, and Visnudevananda were all early East-West Cultural Center guests.

"Judith Tyberg is at home in the library sharing the wisdom and yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother" - was the heading for her Thursday night satsangs on the East-West Cultural Center Bulletin of Events. Those evenings she would sit in the library before Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's photographs and read with golden glow about the Master's Yoga which encompassed all life, and his vision of a glorious future for humanity, ot the Mother's expert instructions for voyaging to Tomorrow.

She spoke out of the realization of her soul, for as one sadhika observed, Jyoti "did not interpret or ever become vague, or indulge in cliches, but seemed able to identify so completely with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that one continually felt their presence."

Anyone who stayed long enough in the company of Jyotipriya developed a deep and sincere love for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and grew in that silent comradeship understood by devotees in this collective yoga for world-transformation.

Jyotipriya left her body on October 3, 1980. For countless seekers, through the history of the East-West Cultural Center, she was truly "a golden bridge".

Wonderful to see this article on our old friend and devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. She was an inspiration to everyone who knew and met her.

Thank you.

Joan Price

The Mother describes the great Event that took place on Wednesday, 29 February 1956 in the Ashram Playground during the evening meditation. It is as follows:

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.

As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that the time has come, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.

Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.

Later the Mother told that perhaps just half a dozen persons in the world felt something significant had happened at that moment. The Mother counted Jyotipriya in Los Angeles as one of them. What greatness of her soul!

~ RYD