Sakra / Prem Sato

(9 March 1937 – 19 September 2022)

The most emancipated, joyful, positive woman

by Shruti Gordon

I first met Sakra in 1981 when we shared a house in Bristol. She was to me the most emancipated, joyful, positive woman and mother I have ever met.

Sakra, then Prem Sato, started a Meditation Centre in Bristol, in an attic on Newfoundland Road. Previously there was just a small place, Udgatri, where Anand Manan lived. We planned all sorts of things there, as it was central and spacious, but the building was going to be pulled down.

Later the Centre got more established in another part of Bristol, Kamala and Paragit were instrumental for that project. By that time I had already left Bristol and we met again later in Totnes, in 1990. Sakra bought some land and we meditated by a fire in Devon’s nature

Sakra/Sato was in a relationship with Sw. Satyo for few years.

Like many of us, she was looking for a living Guru; we all gathered around John De Ruiter and Chris and Emma who mesmerized Totnes in their own way.

Not sure what happened from 1992-2000. But soon afterwards we met again, as she lived at Ashwood, at the end of my road. Many meetings and parties later we heard she had to give up driving as well as many other activities.

She was born in 1937 and died on 19.9.22.

Prem means love, sato means being – love being. And they are aspects of the same energy, two sides of the same coin. If one is loving, one becomes truthful; it is impossible to be loving and not to be truthful. Truth is necessarily created by the energy called love, and vice versa: when one lives the truth, one becomes loving; it is impossible to be true and unloving. If you find somebody who is loving and untruthful then know well that his love is just a facade, a camouflage, it is phony; because the criterion is truth. And if somebody is truthful and unloving then know well that truthfulness is just an imposed character. It is not growing in his being, it is not his own flower. It is something borrowed, something synthetic, not natural.

Whenever love grows naturally it brings truth in its wake and vice versa. They are always together, they cannot be separated. There is no way to separate them, they are inseparable. In fact they are one, two faces of one reality.

The real seeker has to work from both sides, then growth is fast. Be truthful so that you can be more loving; be more loving so more truth happens to you. And there comes a moment when they are one. That is the moment of illumination – when truth is love and love is truth. That’s what Jesus means when he says ‘God is love.’ God is his word for truth.

Turn On, Tune In and Drop the Lot, Ch 6