Back in the taxi, Raju offered to give us a tour of Mother Meera’s other properties in Madanapalle. We stopped first at the farm site, where a grand retreat house was under construction, then at the Montessori school, where a few dozen well-behaved children waved at us from their classrooms. After that, Raju took us to a second, larger schoolhouse, where we were met by the woman who’d been leading the children in their chants before darshan. Plump and smiling in her peasant dress and sandals, Norina looked every inch the earth mother as she greeted us and led the way into the building, where classes had been canceled for the day. A German citizen of Egyptian heritage, with a girlish voice and infectious good humor, Norina explained that a hornets’ nest in the neighbor’s yard had yet to be removed, making it unsafe for the students. “Nothing happens on time in this country!” she chirped, shooing away a scary-looking monkey crouching on the wall behind us. She walked us up and down the halls and began to tell us about herself. A Coptic Christian who’d trained as a teacher, Norina had moved her life to Madanapalle three years earlier to run the school, at Mother Meera’s request.
“At first, I wasn’t happy!” Norina admitted. “I thought, ‘No! I will be in India and Ma will be in Germany. I will never see her!’ But Ma promised she was coming to India once a month, so I had to trust her.” Norina opened the door to the nap room, the floor lined with mats where the children could sleep. “Now it is nice to see her,” she said, “but I don’t need to be with Ma to be with her, if you know what I mean. I don’t need to live with her all the time in order to be happy.” Norina closed the nap room door. “She brings so much joy into my life, you see. The kind of joy that is inside of myself. It doesn’t depend on anything external. Not even Ma’s physical presence.”
Norina led us up to her private quarters. There were a half dozen photographs of Mother Meera hanging on the walls, unlike any images I’d seen before, taken with Norina’s iPhone in airport lounges and other private spaces. The pictures showed another side of Mother Meera, the jolly, unguarded, gal-pal side. Norina giggled. “Ma and I do FaceTime together. We laugh so much! It is only in India where Ma is so serious. Sometimes, I worry about her.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because she does not care enough for her body,” she told us. “Ma ignores it too much of the time. But the body needs a little bit of attention, too. Even divine personalities suffer physically.” Norina showed us a photo of a dozing Mother Meera. “You know, Ma hardly ever sleeps. Maybe two hours. She is always working, working, working. No human being could do what she does! She doesn’t like to eat much, either. Whenever I prepare special dishes for her, she pretends to enjoy, but I know she is only doing so for me. Ma always says, ‘I’m not an eater.’ The truth is, she forgets that she has a body. But she and I have so much fun! Ma makes very good jokes, you know.”
“What kinds of jokes?”
“Ma loves to tease. But she’s never unkind. For example, I always buy too much of everything,” Norina said. “So when someone asks Ma where they can get something, she tells them, ‘You can go to Norina. She buys one and gets ten free.’ Or when I show her something really practical and cheap, she asks me if I bought a hundred!” Norina rolled her eyes. “Or when devotees ask her what special foods they should eat to be spiritual—special organic things or whatnot—Ma will tell them that people who shop at cheap supermarkets live longer.”
Norina led us back downstairs to her office. “Ma’s so down-to-earth,” she said, plopping into a chair. “Whenever people come to her, all puffed up with spiritual ideas, Ma always goes poomf!” She gestured as if popping a balloon. “That’s what she did with me. Before I came to Ma, I thought I was holy. I thought I was only good. Well, Ma took care of that right away! She showed me the other side of who I was, the arrogance, the vanity, the self-pity. The anger!” Norina admitted. “When these feelings used to come up in me, I really did not know what to do. I went to Ma and asked her. She said, ‘In everyone’s life, there has to be balance. If you have a happy time, then the sad time will soon be coming. If you always want sunshine, then you will not be happy.’ Ma told me this because she knew it was my nature to always want sunshine. I wanted to be closer to God. What I thought of as God. So, of course, Ma brought me rain. How else could I grow? She knew that I needed to accept both.”
Norina walked us back to Raju’s taxi. “The same goes for our relationship to her. Ma wants us to love her also in all aspects. Not only to love her when she’s sweet and nice.”
I felt secretly guilty when Norina made this point.
“That is not love,” she said.
—
Back at the ashram school, I continued to observe Mother Meera from a distance, remembering Norina’s words. As she worked at her daily tasks, I noticed how weary she looked and how slowly she moved from job to job, as if plowing through a muddy field. On the morning of day six, I heard Mother reprimand Hilda for the children’s lack of discipline during recess, prompting the poor woman to rush off in tears. That afternoon, there were mistakes with some project or other, and I watched in amazement as Mother’s temper flared at the precise moment when one of the teachers was kneeling down to kiss her feet.
Among the volunteers, there were whispers about the daunting challenges of running the schools to Mother Meera’s specifications. Her extreme frugality was one of the hurdles. Apparently, a staff member had asked permission to spend ten extra dollars a month on better Internet service and been told no. (“That money could feed two children a month,” Mother had reminded him.) Explaining my clerical duties, Mohan specified that I should type using extra-narrow margins, since Mother doesn’t like to waste paper. Her thrift seemed to be more problematic when it came to important administrative decisions. Hiring a professional full-time principal for the school would save a great many headaches, for instance. But this isn’t how Mother Meera does things. When she wants a new house, she builds it herself. If something needs fixing, she figures it out. She packs her own suitcase, irons her own saris, and even, I was surprised to learn, now does much of her own bookkeeping, having hired and fired a few bad accountants. When devotees who know these jobs better than she does make such suggestions at the school, their ideas often fall on deaf ears.
Mother Meera is equally impervious to the human dramas that proliferate in her presence. As Adilakshmi reminded me, physical proximity to the divine often brings out the worst in people. Spiritual communities are, after all, microcosms of the larger world, populated by all sorts of characters, from the wise, cooperative, and tolerant to the pious, obnoxious, backbiting, and crazy. The community around Mother is especially diverse, with individuals running the gamut of religions, economic classes, professional sectors, sexual orientations, and political affinities.
During our visit, this particular group of volunteers ranged in age from twenty-two to seventy-eight and included a German plumber, an Italian designer, a Danish athlete and his father, two schoolteachers (Belgian and Indian), a dancer from Boston, a Malagasy entrepreneur, a well-dressed therapist from Toulouse, and a couple of English pensioners. The disagreements, gossip, and awkward dynamics were frequently in evidence. One of the volunteers was especially caustic and cornered me in the courtyard one morning before anyone else was awake. “I can’t stand these bigots,” he whispered. “You know, the ones who say Mother Meera is the only one. Or the best one. She never encourages this kind of thing!” The fellow looked around to make sure no one was listening. “I’m not interested in dogma or beliefs,” he said. “That is what I love about Mother. She doesn’t care about that kind of power. She knows she’s not the only one! But the people around her?” He bugged his eyes and twirled a finger next to his temple. “Completely bananas, some of them. And bigots!” He seemed quite unaware of how biased he sounded himself.
Mother Meera doesn’t mind such dissent. “God didn’t make imperfect people. He made normal ones,” she often says. In more than forty years of offering darshan, she has never refused any
one her blessing, explaining that this is the divine way. Asked if she would give darshan to Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein, Mother Meera says she would. To most of us, this extreme lack of prejudice is incomprehensible, yet it appears to be normal in the eyes of the divine. Enlightened individuals harbor no illusions about the abysmal aspects of human nature. To me, this is the most glaring difference between Mother Meera and an ordinary person, the most visible “proof” of her divinity: a preternatural tolerance of human failings and the ability to see behind people’s masks to the souls hiding underneath, no matter how monstrous these masks might be. Meher Baba, who shared this divine perspective, referred to his most troubled followers as “broken furniture.” This capacity for godly love, or agape, appears to be possible only among those rarefied sages who are not themselves broken and require nothing from those around them. Anandamayi Ma (1896–1982), a beloved avatar of the Divine Mother, described this sacred relationship in a photo book called Matri Darshan. “A saint is like a tree,” she once said.
She does not call anyone, neither does she send them away. She gives shelter to whoever cares to come, be it a man, woman, child, or an animal. If you sit under a tree it will protect you from the weather, the scorching sun as well as from the pouring rain, and it will give you flowers and fruit. Whether a human being enjoys them or a bird tastes of them matters little to the tree; its produce is there for anyone who comes and takes it.
Requiring no reciprocity, divine representatives feel no need to divvy up their fruits like the rest of us, trapped in our patterns of tit-for-tat. Their gifts are offered selflessly to whoever might need them, regardless of their failings. “I want you to be completely yourself,” Mother Meera has said. “Come to me exactly as you are. Everyone grows in a different way. Everyone has different needs. And everyone is unique for me. My love is equal for all.”
Mother confirmed this to a devotee who, like me, was having her doubts. “One day, I screwed up my nerve to talk to Mother,” this lady told me. “I had a lot of trauma in my family background and said, ‘Mother, I’m so closed down. I need your help so I can actually feel love. I don’t think anything but divine grace will help me.’ She said, ‘Okay.’ Then I asked, ‘Mother, do you ever hug people?’ She smiled and said, ‘Not so much.’ The truth is that I’d seen her hug people a couple of times over the years, and it made me so mad and upset, even though I knew it was silly and immature. Anyway, the next thing I knew, Mother just gave me this huge hug. Not a little-touch kind of thing but a real hug. I was stunned. When it was over, I said, ‘Mother, I love you so much I don’t even know what to say.’ ‘Do you really think I don’t know that?’ ” she answered.
—
On the day Mother Meera left India to return to Germany, we’d eaten dinner in the town center and made our way back to the school, along the dung-strewn, dusty streets, past Brahma bulls tethered to washing machines, grazing on garbage, past yellow rickshaws swarming the intersections like bees, and shopkeepers chatting in storefront doorways. Beyond the Colony Gate, we walked by the Catholic retreat center, with its glassed-in, dark-skinned Virgin Mary, then on to the Shiva temple, with its twenty-foot, Pepto-Bismol-colored statue of the god flanked by his car-sized bull Nandi, and around the corner to Paramatman Way.
Mother Meera was sitting on the porch, surrounded by a group of ashram kids. These disadvantaged children were her original inspiration for starting the school, a group of orphans without families to support them, whom Mother Meera invited to live in her private home. A brain-damaged boy with a crooked leg was making whooping sounds and laughing, spinning in circles around Mother, while a mob of little girls stroked her hair and her sari, as others sat adoringly at her feet. Mother Meera seemed entirely at ease with the children. Instantly, I was consumed by envy. The ashram kids weren’t prodding her with boring questions or feeble esoteric inquiries. They wanted nothing from Mother but her love, a little attention, a word of kindness. By contrast, I was exploding with questions and overflowing with neediness. What had it been like for her, being an incarnation inside a child’s body? How had she managed her little-girl feelings, and how had these emotional beginnings translated—or not—to Mother Meera? Was Kamala still inside her somewhere, or had she simply disappeared? Perhaps I would never know.
Mother Meera had continued to keep her distance, so all of my questions had gone unanswered. I’d struggled not to take this personally but mostly failed. Whatever lessons she might be sending me with her silence remained unclear. I’d had personal insights since arriving, but had they been intended by her? I was far from certain. When news had reached me in the morning that Mother was leaving that night, I’d been devastated. My window of opportunity was almost closed, and I was the last to know. As one last Hail Mary pass, I’d decided to send her a message, in the hope that she would change her mind. The note was imploring but polite, thanking Mother for letting us stay at the school and regretting very much that we hadn’t spent any time together. I’d given the note to Mohan to pass along to Mother during their morning meeting, and had waited on tenterhooks for her reply. When Mohan returned after lunch, he’d handed me the unopened envelope and told me that Mother would not take it.
“Wouldn’t take it?”
“She handed it back.”
I wanted to pound the desk but didn’t. There was now nothing more that I could do. Hidden in the shadows, watching the children as they played with Mother, I felt like a genuine outcast. I went to our room and moped for an hour. At nine o’clock, Maurice invited the volunteers downstairs to say our goodbyes. We stood in the driveway, the fifteen of us, and after a few minutes, Mother emerged, followed by a helper carrying her suitcase. Maurice opened the car door so that she could slip into the passenger seat. As the car pulled away, Mother turned her face and grinned at us through the window, looking happier than she had all week. I didn’t manage to catch her eye.
The following morning, before David and I left for Pondicherry, I found Adilakshmi to say goodbye. She was back at her desk, reading the paper. Adilakshmi asked how my time at the school had been, and I told her honestly what had happened. “You must learn to trust,” she repeated, folding the paper in half.
I assured Adilakshmi that I was trying.
“Then you will see how the Mother works.”
8
THE DIVINE LIFE
Though Mother Meera has never had a living mentor, she does share a spiritual heritage with the sages of Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo and Sweet Mother. This mystic couple has been a part of her life since Kamala’s first visit to their tomb when she was thirteen. Mr. Reddy believed Mother Meera to be the Mother of the Future Transformation prophesied by Aurobindo, the avatar who would carry on the work of earthly divinization begun by Sweet Mother and himself.
To appreciate Mother Meera’s place in our contemporary landscape, it helps to have an understanding of Aurobindo’s unique spiritual vision. Integral Yoga is a radical synthesis of ancient wisdom and futuristic teachings unlike anything that preceded it. Before Aurobindo came along, religious traditions had concerned themselves almost exclusively with spiritual ascent, portraying the physical body as a barrier to awakening and its transcendence, or mortification, as a necessary step toward liberation. Aurobindo rejected this patriarchal, body-negative version of divinity and focused instead on reopening the door to the feminine principle, balancing the terrestrial (Shakti) and the divine (Shiva) into a blend of material and transcendental reality. Aurobindo countered traditional beliefs dating back three millennia to the Bhagavad Gita and believed the time had come for a new understanding of God. He suggested that spiritual descent could “transform human life into a Divine life on earth without the renunciation of the world.” In other words, the age of the Father God was over.
Integral Yoga is based on three main principles. First, the Divine Mother, in whatever form she is honored, must be returned to her rightful place at the center of global spirituality if we hope to survive as a species. Second, the
human race is a work in progress, an evolving stage on the continuum from material to divine existence. In the words of Aurobindo’s contemporary, the Nobel Prize–winning philosopher Rudolf Eucken, “Man is the meeting-point of various stages of Reality.” Finally, this divinization process depends on the entrance of a new spiritual Light into the material world for the first time in human history, as the quickening agent for this evolution. This last principle is the hardest for most of us to grasp.
In light of what we know today about energy science, the mind-body connection, electromagnetic fields, and the enlightening effects of spiritual practice on the brain, Aurobindo’s vision of this future human does not seem completely implausible. Aurobindo put it this way in his book, The Life Divine: “Our current status of evolution is still an intermediary stage of being on its way to the unfolding of spirit, and the self-revelation of Divinity in all things.” He then explained the crucial role of the Mother in this evolutionary process.
The universe was created by a God that has both masculine and feminine aspects. The masculine divine is beyond all understanding. The feminine divine manifests itself as the physical universe and as the intelligent power that moves the universe. All created things, whether human being or planet earth, span a spectrum of realities from the lowest, the material, to the highest, pure light and spiritual energy. The entire universe is evolving, as the divine introduces progressively more Light into the material world in a way that will lead in the end to its transubstantiation.
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