for him to attend the Cours Simon, at the time the
most reputed drama school in France. He eventu-
ally studied law and political science, but his heart
was with the Cours Simon, which opened a whole
new world for him. There, he met young men and
women, many of whom were to become famous
actors, who lived in a different, more relaxed and
open world than the one in which he had grown
up. His ambition was to join the Comédie Fran-
çaise as an actor, yet, when he passed the first
part of the exams at the national drama school,
the Conservatoire, his parents put tremendous
emotional pressure on him to renounce the the-
ater. The young man finally gave in but became
depressed.
The future seemed grim when he joined a
bank but became bright when he fell in love
with a young Protestant woman, to whom he
was soon engaged. That beautiful dream came to
an abrupt end when Arnaud, age 24, was struck
with tuberculosis. His prospective father-in-law
broke the engagement and Arnaud was sent to a
sanatorium, never to see his fiancée again. Feel-
ing abandoned and betrayed, he read voraciously
and discovered the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff
and P. D. Ouspensky and learned about Hindu
gurus through Jean Herbert’s Spiritualité Hindoue,
in which the author recounted his meetings
with ANANDAMAYI MA, Sri AUROBINDO, RAMANA
MAHARSHI, and Swami RAMDAS.
After his recovery from tuberculosis, Desjar-
dins returned to Paris, where he joined a Gurdjieff
group in the early 1950s and started working as
an assistant for the embryonic French television
system. In the Gurdjieff group, he met Denise, an
impressive young woman a few years his senior
who was an artist of growing reputation. They
were married in 1957.
In 1959, having become a television director
and filmmaker, Arnaud went through a difficult
time in his professional life. His projects were
refused one after the other, and he then decided
to travel to India by car, to see for himself whether
those masters he had read about lived up to Jean
Herbert’s description; he planned to film them
with a 16-millimeter camera.
In 1959 he traveled to India, where he met
and filmed Swami SHIVANANDA SARASWATI of
Rishikesh, Swami Ramdas, and Anandamayi
Ma. Back in France, his finished documentary
was shown on national television and very well
received by the public as well as critics. He then
specialized in documentaries on living spiri-
tual traditions, filming with his 16-millimeter
camera, assisted only by his wife. They traveled
for extensive periods, taking their two children
with them. In 1965, Desjardins produced several
documentaries on the Tibetans, became close to
the Dalaï Lama, and went on to produce films on
Zen Buddhism in Japan and Sufi brotherhoods
in Afghanistan. Those films, available today
on DVD and videotapes, are considered unique
documents. The expeditions enabled Desjardins
to spend a lot of time in close contact with
some of the greatest teachers of the East and
to pursue his spiritual quest while developing
a growing reputation in France as a filmmaker
and lecturer.
In 1965, feeling that despite his devotion to
Anandamayi Ma, he could not really consider
himself as her student, he went, with her blessing,
to meet a swami he had only heard about, who
lived a reclusive life, away from spiritual curiosity
seekers, in the heart of Bengal. Sri Swami Praj-
napad, while immersed in Hindu tradition, was
a very unorthodox teacher. He advocated a path
rooted in non-duality (advaïta) that takes modern
psychology into account. Swami Prajnapad was
an ardent admirer of Freud, whose works he had
studied as early as the 1920s, and had developed
an approach through which students could open
to their unconscious through private interviews,
which he offered every day to one or two students.
In that remote ashram, where the teacher was
very accessible, spoke fluent English, and had an
understanding of Western culture, Desjardins felt
he had found his spiritual path. He then embarked
on a very intense process with Swami Prajnapad,K 126 Desjardins, Arnaud