About my name

1/ Its meaning:

 ‘Not result is the purpose of action, but God’s eternal delight in becoming, seeing and doing.’

Delight of Being as ‘Ananda’, one of the essential and inalterable  components of God’s nature, is something the very existence of which I discovered with awe and wonder long ago, soon after arriving in India, I’ll tell how in a longer post some day. But ‘Ananda’ is the divine Delight of Being as such, in itself; to experience it while in a state of interiorization was already a great beginning, but it went too much into my own natural tendency to withdraw from the outside world and from outer action, and to live too entirely within. It didn’t help me to appreciate and enjoy also being alive in this physical world and body, nor to be more active outwardly.

Then I discovered there is also another form of ‘Ananda’, the one that the Divine experiences in the process of Self-Manifestation that results in this created world and all the other created worlds. It is the one described by Sri Aurobindo in his Aphorism 330 quoted above: in the Rig Veda this specific form of divine Delight is called ‘Bhaga’.

That kind of Delight in the created world itself was what I personally lacked most in my external nature, so I resolved to learn how to experience it too, and gave myself that name, ‘Bhaga’, as a constant reminder of what I wanted to become able to live all the time right here in this world.

So in 1977 I quietly announced to the other Aurovilians and everyone else I knew, that henceforth my name would be ‘Bhaga’.

Since then that name has been indeed a great help for my gradual identification with that aspect of our forgotten divine nature that was the most important for me to re-discover as soon as possible, in order to be able to fully play my individual role in this Great Adventure of Evolution we are all playing together here…

2/ The way to pronounce it:

It seems you wanted to know how to pronounce my name?… Difficult to explain in writing, but I’ll try:

It’s the same root as in ‘Bhagavan’ or ‘Bhagavad Gita’, so you breathe out the initial B with a little extra power because it is actually BH (in Sanskrit that’s one special letter), and then the first A really is fully audible, while the second and last A is hardly audible. All together it sounds’ almost like ‘Bhaague’… but most non-Indian people say a plain, flat ‘Baga’ and for me that’s acceptable too!!! 🙂 Any other question?… 😀