My husband Rajiv and I have a long relationship with Andre Vaillancourt, and his late wife, Jessica that dates back several Kumbhs, where we met frequently. We met at yagyas in different parts of India, at the Himalayan ashrams of revered yogis, at the Kumbh camps of many yogis we all knew. We would be staying in different areas of the sanyas kshetra earmarked for Shaivite renunciates. And sometimes, rarely, we would find ourselves in the cities at the same time, and met in the unlikely sophistication of fine dining spaces, where another aspect of our lives revealed itself. Through the years we stayed in touch on email. During the worst months of Covid, we participated in online satsanghs, and supported each other through those times. We stayed connected, followed the trends in each other's lives and shared meaningful learnings, while living in parallel spaces that intersected at different crossroads.
One day, Andre requested me to look at an initial draft of his magnum opus a trilogy he was working on. This spiritual fiction was based on his years of experience, immersed in a deep spiritual search, while completing karmic cycles, literally all over the world. Having worked on different aspects of film-making for many years, he is a natural story-teller who enjoys both drama and the nuanced emotions of relationships. No doubt, his own life, at the cross-section of different cultures and experiences, deeply immersed and yet detached, became a fertile ground in which this fiction grew.
More recently, when he had completed the manuscript of the first volume of his trilogy, he requested me to write the foreword for the book. I do not usually comment on fiction, because it is so far removed from the genres of my own writing. While this is certainly a fictional narrative, the characters are not just believable, they are often based on Andre's own unique experiences, and the unusual situations of his own life with its many cross-cultural influences, and his lived understanding of the paradoxical limitless boundaries of his own life. So here we meet again between the pages of this book.
In 1981, Andre met his guru, Count Andrew Da Passano, an Italian mystic, in Los Angeles. He stayed with him until his passing in 1993, studying meditation and esotericism based on Tibetan tantra, psycho-cybernetics and quantum physics. Later Andre delved into Eastern mysticism, coming to India every year. A true global citizen, he still found a deep inexplicable connection with India and his sanskars were apparent to those who knew him. Andre has dedicated his life to exploring different aspects of knowledge and human existence. Through his master, he met his late wife Jessica in 1984, and she was his muse until her departure in 2024. She was his partner in every sense, and they shared an incredible closeness. while allowing their lives to unfold without undue restrictions, in many ways, she was his undistorted mirror, in which he could see himself with clarity, while he allowed the experiences of life to mould him, as he reined the mind and senses, and reflected on the profound questions of life.
His artistic journey has also been like the many a river. His career began as a musician in France, and continued to tributaries of develop for a decade. It was followed by a shift to film and television in Hollywood, California as a writer, cameraman, editor, director and producer. His familiarity and love of story-telling runs deep.
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