Mother of the Unseen World Read online

  At three o’clock exactly, the door opened and Mother came in with Andrew and Adilakshmi close behind her. Without being instructed to do so, the attendees rose to their feet all at once, and Mother made her way to the front of the room, settled into a chair, and tucked a tissue into her sleeve. She was wearing a cream-colored sari trimmed with iridescent green, with four gold bangles on either wrist, and looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her, closer to sixteen than twenty-nine. Andrew delivered a glowing introduction, during which Mother avoided eye contact with the audience and Adilakshmi grinned at the people in the front row. As Andrew offered the highlights of Mother Meera’s life and the basics of darshan, I sensed the crowd beginning to listen. The teacher next to me took a notebook out of her bag. After Andrew finished speaking, Mother closed her eyes and that eerie quiet fell on the room. We sat together in pin-drop silence for a full three minutes. Then Mother opened her eyes, nodded at Andrew, and the interview began.

  Andrew asked the first question: “Mother, I’d like to start by asking if you always knew you were an avatar?”

  “Before coming here, I knew who I was,” she said in her deep, incongruous voice.

  “You have said that you are not a human being, Mother, although you are in a physical body. What do you mean?”

  “Although there is a human form, I have never been born a human being,” she replied. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “There has never been any separation between me and my divine identity.”

  The woman next to me scribbled “incarnation?” in her notebook. Andrew invited questions from the audience, and an elderly gentleman wearing a bow tie raised his hand. “Mother Meera, I am a practicing Christian and also a professor of religion,” he said. “In my faith, we are taught that there has only been one divine incarnation, Jesus Christ. And he was a man.”

  “That is false,” Mother said.

  The professor looked unconvinced. “There are many intellectuals who have no faith,” he went on. “They claim that God is dead or never existed. I work with several of them at this school.”

  “They may think that they have no faith,” Mother Meera answered. “But everybody believes in something.” The old man looked delighted at this, as if she’d confirmed what he, too, believed. The professor smiled, and she smiled back.

  A student in a bright yellow peasant dress raised her hand. “Why do you give darshan in silence?” she asked.

  “When people have a silent mind, they will receive more. For the mind to flower, it has to go beyond what it knows.”

  Now it was my turn to ask a question. “Don’t we need the mind for discernment?” I asked, confused by the role of the mind in spiritual life.

  “Both the mind and the heart must accept God,” Mother told me. “First you must accept with your mind. Then belief grows in the heart.”

  “I thought it was the other way around.”

  “First the mind must be pulled down,” she explained. “Then the heart can open completely to God. If the mind does not accept, there is always doubt. The mind creates every problem. Not the heart.”

  Several people raised their hands at once, and over the course of the next half hour, Mother responded to a range of questions, from why she lives in a German village (“To show the world that the transformation is normal and can be done anywhere in daily life”), to the special focus of her work (“To bring the Light to human beings”), to her attitude toward human resistance (“Let people receive whatever they can. There is no desire to give”), to the difference between the Mother’s way and the patriarchal approach to God as taught in Western religions. “The Father is stricter,” Mother Meera said. “The Mother is more loving, patient, and accepting. I have come to say that all paths are as good as each other and all lead to the divine. Believers should respect each other’s ways.”

  A punked-out kid in skateboarding shorts asked how Mother Meera could give darshan to everybody, including people who’d done bad things. Mother told him that, meeting someone in darshan, she sees “not one person there but many persons behind.” “The whole picture must be considered,” she said. “My love is for all.”

  This prompted my neighbor to raise her hand. “I’m curious about the soul, Mother Meera. Are you able to see a person’s soul?”

  She looked at the teacher and said, “Yes.”

  “What does it look like?” the woman asked.

  Mother gazed at her for a moment. “It is a combination of light and shadow, resting inside your body like another body.”

  A palpable buzz went through the room. My neighbor’s companion spoke up then. “Can you really help people become enlightened?”

  “Yes,” Mother replied with a smile. “But first you must be ripe.”

  After that, Mother Meera seemed to withdraw her attention. The questioning came to a natural stop. Mother gazed down at the floor in front of her as late afternoon light streamed through the library windows. Nobody moved for several minutes. Eventually, Mother Meera looked up, removed the tissue from her sleeve, and rose to her feet. We stood up once again as a group and watched her make her way to the door, followed by Adilakshmi and Andrew.

  The next night, Mother gave darshan at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In attendance were James Parks Morton, the Episcopal dean of the cathedral, and a number of religious leaders, including a Muslim imam, a Tibetan rinpoche, and a well-known Reform Jewish rabbi. I found it comforting to watch Mother give darshan to representatives of different faiths in that institutional setting, surrounded by stained glass windows and Christian iconography. In the lobby afterward, I overheard a conversation between two young men who were meeting Mother for the first time. They were talking about how shy she seemed, “like she didn’t want to be noticed at all.” “I felt like she knew me,” the first one said. The second boy had a different take. “When I looked into her eyes,” he told his friend, “all I could see was sky.”

  On her last day in Manhattan, Mother visited the Statue of Liberty, which seemed to delight her (she enjoys sightseeing). That night, she offered darshan to a private group of a hundred New Yorkers at an opulent apartment on Fifth Avenue filled with enormous golden Buddhas and beveled mirrors as tall as trees. I brought two dear friends along to meet Mother, both of whom experienced dramatic healings after having darshan. One of my guests, a chain-smoker who’d been unable to kick the habit in thirty-plus years, spontaneously lost the desire to smoke and didn’t pick up another cigarette for a full three months. My second friend, who was fighting a terminal illness, received an even greater blessing. For the past few months, she’d been suffering from debilitating migraines that no doctor had been able to medicate away. After placing her head in Mother Meera’s hands, my friend felt her pain abate almost immediately. She returned to her seat, looking flushed and dazed, and instantly fell asleep. Ten minutes later, she opened her eyes, and the headache was almost gone. For the next four months, she remained virtually pain-free, and the day my beloved friend died, peacefully in her own bed and clutching her small wooden rosary, she told me that Mother Meera was with her and that she was not afraid.

  5

  THE WAY OF THE MOTHER

  Drive five hours south from Thalheim on the A3 motorway, across the Rhineland and into Bavaria, and you’ll come to the ancient city of Augsburg, founded by the Romans in 15 B.C. and home to the Catholic church of St. Peter am Perlach, an elaborately spired cathedral located in the center of town. In the church’s dark interior, near the transverse arch, hangs an eighteenth-century canvas, Mary, Untier of Knots, painted by Johann G. M. Schmidtner. In the baroque painting, the Virgin Mother is pictured standing on a crescent moon surrounded by angels. Above her halo of stars floats the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. Mary is dressed in a scarlet robe with a purple stole, her eyes are downcast, and she’s crushing a serpent beneath one bare foot. In her hands, she holds a length of knotted pale ribbon held up at each end by cherubs, their tiny wings the color of fire.r />
  Mary, Untier of Knots, is the archetype of a cult from the Catholic Church dating back to the early Middle Ages. As one facet of the Divine Mother, she combines patience with ferocity, the delicacy of her healing hands matched by the force of her snake-crushing foot. The parallels between Mary, Untier of Knots, and Mother Meera’s approach to darshan are fascinating and obvious. Night after night, year after year, Mother sits on her chair untangling the energetic knots she finds in people who come to see her, beginning with the white lines that run up our bodies in the front and back, and freeing the light to flow upward within us. In the Catholic tradition, Mary’s task is to loosen the bonds of ignorance and selfishness that bind us to the sins of our fall from grace. Mother Meera uses different terminology to describe a similar process of removing obstacles that stand between human beings and our awareness of the divine nature we share with God.

  Of course, the worship of the Divine Mother dates back to traditions far older than Christianity. She has been revered as the feminine face of God, “the fertile womb which gave birth to everything, the great cave of being from which she brought forth the living and into which she took the dead for rebirth,” as Anne Baring, a renowned Jungian analyst, puts it. She is honored in songs that were sung by the first peoples of Alaska, Africa, North America, and Polynesia. The Divine Mother appears in Homer’s hymn to Gaia, in Sumerian poems to Inanna and Ishtar, in Apuleius’s vision of Isis as recorded in The Golden Ass, and in ancient Tibetan prayers to Tara, as Baring points out. She is the Hindu Shakti, the energetic driver of the universe, who brings to the world what Hildegard of Bingen termed viriditas, the verdant, electric force that animates the whole of creation.

  To our great impoverishment, the Sacred Feminine has been excluded from our image of God in Western culture. For the past three thousand years, the Abrahamic traditions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—have offered no image of the Divine Mother as an equal counterpart to God the Father, no union of masculine and feminine principles into a wise and balanced whole. Among many of today’s spiritual leaders, there is strong belief that an integration of the divine feminine into our worldview is urgently needed if we are to heal our planet’s woes, eradicate fundamentalist terror, and restore a unifying, feminine vision to our worldly affairs. Until we reintroduce the wisdom of embodiment as symbolized by the Divine Mother into our global conversation—a wisdom deeply rooted in the earth, while God the father looks down from the sky—our future is thought to be perilous indeed. As Aurobindo himself put it, “The future, if it is to exist, will wear a crown of feminine design.” This would seem to be a foregone conclusion in our aggressive, polarized era.

  No archetype is more powerful in the human imagination than that of the Divine Mother. Since everyone has a mother, we share the sacred memory of our primal connection to the universal feminine. This collective memory helps to explain the profound effect that representatives of the female divine, including Mother Meera, have on our sense of spiritual connection. A mother alone has the power to bring the light of a soul into the world. Her body contains the eternal mystery, the capacity to create life, and in denying her spiritual importance, we disregard a fundamental aspect of our existence; we sever ourselves from our primordial source, the matrix that nourishes the cosmos and mediates the harshness of God the father.

  As a philosophical path, the way of the Mother is nonjudgmental, inclusive, and free of man-made opposites that appear to divide the world in two—sacred-profane, physical-spiritual, holy-unholy, and so on. Rather, it invites a holistic awareness that welcomes our faults as well as our strengths, promotes an attitude of surrender to life as it is, and marks the first step toward genuine wisdom. Surrender is a sign of strength in the Mother’s way, bowing to forces greater than we are. Vulnerability, in this view, is the doorway to freedom. “Like a child at peace in the womb of the Mother, the realized person knows,” Mother Meera says, “that he is sustained at every moment by the grace and light of the Divine Mother. Being peaceful and being happy are the foundation of spiritual life.”

  How antithetical this is to the notion of human existence as an ongoing, painful effort to redeem ourselves in the eyes of God or battle our weary way back to salvation. Instead of original sin, the Mother’s way focuses on original blessing that is fostered by the act of surrender. Spiritual surrender means leaning into life instead of trying to conquer it, expanding our hearts to embrace contradiction, and remembering that paradox is everything. This approach does away with false separations as well as idealized concepts of God. Everyday activities—emptying the cat box, driving to work, reading to your kids at night—are understood to be just as holy as meditating, fasting, or chanting Aum, since everything, without exception, is recognized as a part of God. No enlightened master embodies this unified vision more radically than Mother Meera. Nowhere on the planet are you likely to encounter a person of her spiritual stature dragging Hefty bags to a dumpster or commandeering a power drill. “I am not interested in founding a movement for people who do not want to work, who want only to sit around and think about what they think is God,” Mother Meera reminds us. “When they are really dedicated to the Divine, there is no difference between action and prayer.”

  —

  Although Mother Meera offers darshan in silence and sets no rules for devotees, this doesn’t mean she provides no verbal guidelines on how to live an awakened life. In fact, two collections of her spoken responses have been published, Answers: Part I and Answers: Part II, covering a wide variety of topics of importance to spiritual seekers. Unfailingly practical and simple, these teachings are mostly lingo-free and accessible to anyone. With their emphasis on the bhakti path of devotion (not to Mother Meera herself but to any faith that appeals to the seeker), and on divine light as a catalyst for spiritual change, her recommendations share aspects of the Integral Yoga invented by Sri Aurobindo while being free of the scriptural references. In spite of the absence of regulations, the Mother’s way is actually quite rigorous in that it places responsibility for our choices squarely on our own shoulders. Each student of this open-door path is called upon, as the Buddha put it, to “be a light unto yourself,” practicing self-reliance in spiritual life.

  Mother Meera’s essential teachings can be distilled into a handful of suggestions.

  1. Japa

  Japa is the repetition of a divine name that resonates with an individual. It is the root practice recommended by Mother Meera for spiritual awakeness and remembering God. Japa is more than just repeating words, she tells us, since each holy name is said to contain divine vibrations. Japa can be done anywhere and at any time. It is best not to focus on any particular goal when doing this practice. Simply repeat the divine name with sincerity and love. Nor does it matter what name you choose to repeat. Whatever comes easily and spontaneously, and brings a strong feeling in the heart, will be effective; nor is it necessary to stick with one divine name if another attracts us on a given day. Some devotees use “Mata Meera” or “Amma Meera” (Mata and Amma both mean “Mother”), but “Ma” is equally powerful. And others use the names of the God they worship in their respective religions.

  2. Devotion

  Devotion is the royal path to enlightenment, according to Mother Meera. She tells us that “if you have devotion, you will get everything.” True devotion in spiritual life is extremely rare, however. As she has said, “[You] weep for lovers, money, worldly things, but rarely weep for the love of God. A tear is a door through which I can come.” Longing for the Divine is essential. Sincerity and devotion are far more important than excessive or showy demonstrations of love.

  3. Surrender

  Surrender means offering everything to the Divine, without exception. Mother instructs us to remember that no matter how great we are, “there is always something greater—the Divine.” Surrender has nothing to do with resignation or weakness. In fact, surrender is a sign of spiritual strength. It is not what we offer but that we offer that is important and changes us. “
The Mother doesn’t look at the gift itself; she is happy that the child thought of her. In the same way, what you offer the Divine is not important, only the love.”

  4. The Ego

  As we learn to surrender, be humble, and connect with the Divine, the ego slowly dissolves. “The ego is strong in the world but weak before God,” Mother Meera tells us. In order to awaken as human beings, and realize our own divinity, we must be willing to die to the ego, knowing that only self-realization can bring lasting happiness. Discipline is key to ego death and spiritual progress. “You have to cut a tree sometimes to make it straight and help it grow,” she reminds us.

  5. Spiritual Experiences

  Like all authentic spiritual masters, Mother Meera warns against the temptation to become attached to otherworldly experiences. However great or small, these experiences should be offered to the Divine. If we allow imagination to construct fantasies around our experiences, we will only become more trapped in illusion. Experiences come and go, Mother reminds us. Only the real—the eternal—remains. What’s more, authentic spiritual experience always humbles rather than inflates the ego. As for mediums, psychics, and oracles, she recommends economy. It is not necessary to go to “all those people,” since each may offer a different solution to the same problem. “They confuse people,” Mother states simply. “It is more important to do japa and pray to God or the Divine.”