Mother of the Unseen World

by Mark Matousek

  This Light-powered path to divine connection mirrors with surprising accuracy Mother Meera’s description of how the Light works. Also, her visionary experiences with Aurobindo when she was still Kamala Reddy suggest a kind of passing of the torch. She described this transfer of spiritual power in Adilakshmi’s book, The Mother:

  Once, Sweet Mother gave me a rose. I took the flower to Sri Aurobindo’s samadhi [tomb]. I knew it was not an ordinary flower. It was my soul. I held onto it fiercely. But as I was walking, Sri Aurobindo snatched it from me without my knowing. I was very sad because I had lost my soul. Then Sri Aurobindo called me and asked me why I was so sad. I told him that I had lost my soul. He said, “Your soul is not lost and could never be,” and then he showed me the flower he had stolen. Then he replaced Sweet Mother’s rose with a golden rose and told me that this golden rose was his soul and that it would stay with me always.

  —

  I traveled to Pondicherry to visit Aurobindo’s tomb in the hope of understanding this sacred connection. Pondicherry is a postcard-pretty town with wide, clean streets and whitewashed houses streaming with ribbons of bougainvillea. Before dawn, the beachside promenade is crowded with joggers and exercise buffs doing their calisthenics in the sand. Gabbing women in saris and shalwar kameez power walk in tennis shoes past espresso bars and terraced restaurants and the fourteen-foot statue of Mahatma Gandhi holding his staff. Vendors sell lotus blossoms from tin tubs at roadside stands, purple, white, and pink, and there are tchotchkes and photographs everywhere commemorating the town’s patron saints. Ten minutes from the gate of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is the modest white bungalow at 22 rue St. Honoré where Kamala stayed with Mr. Reddy on her first visit.

  We left our sandals outside the ashram gate and made our way to the shaded courtyard, where two dozen pilgrims had come to pay their respects at the shared tomb. The silence was echoing and profound. We waited on line for our turn to touch the white marble tombstone itself. Beneath the porticoes and the great ash tree at the center of the courtyard, visitors sat with their eyes closed or gazed peacefully into the garden. The tomb was blanketed with flowers—marigolds, lotuses, jasmine, tulasi—a sheath of fragrant, brilliantly hued petals covering its length from head to foot. As we waited our turn, a stooped old Indian woman with vitiligo performed an elaborate ritual in front of us, dipping her fingers in holy water first, then sprinkling it over herself four times, touching flowers with the backs and fronts of her blotchy hands, left then right, and scraping her fingertips through her white hair. A well-coiffed Pakistani businesswoman in a pantsuit and pearls prayed with her palms joined in front of her heart, and a teenage boy knelt beside her, pressing his forehead against the marble, his lips moving fast as he whispered to God.

  We sat in the shade to meditate. I imagined Mother Meera as she must have looked on the day she first visited the tomb, poised and beautiful, dressed in the new silk sari bought by Mr. Reddy for this special occasion. I pictured the scene of her standing there, closing her eyes, and disappearing into an altered state. No one present had any idea of what was going on inside her. The familiar questions rushed into my mind. Does she still have such extreme experiences? What is it like to be free of the body while being inside one? Would the world be divinized as Aurobindo had predicted? These riddles bounced around in my mind like soap bubbles outside a bolted door. I was standing before that door, wanting in, hungering to know the truth, to understand what being an avatar means, to be let in on this divine secret. But the door wouldn’t budge.

  —

  I read Aurobindo’s explanation of how divine incarnation works, and about the nature of the avatar. Strangely, the more I read about avatarhood, the less like science fiction it sounded. Aurobindo acknowledged the challenge posed by the avatar to our consensus reality. “The Avatar is one of the most difficult [concepts for the Western mind] to accept or to understand of all the ideas streaming in from the East upon the rationalized human consciousness,” he admitted.

  It is apt to take it at best for a mere figure for some high manifestation of human power, character, genius, great work done for the world…and at worst to regard it as a superstition. The materialist, necessarily, cannot even look at it, since he does not believe in God…to the thoroughgoing dualist who sees an unbridgeable gulf between the human and the divine nature, it sounds like blasphemy.

  [And yet] the idea of the Avatar…comes in naturally as a perfectly rational and logical conception. For all here is God, is the Spirit or Self-existence….Far from the Infinite being unable to take on finiteness, the whole universe is nothing else but that….Far from the Spirit being incapable of form or matter or mind and assuming a limited nature or a body, all here is nothing but that, the world exists only by that connection, that assumption.

  I stopped reading for a moment, struck by one particular sentence. Far from the Infinite being unable to take on finiteness, the whole universe is nothing else but that. I could not deny how true this rang. Was it possible that the doubt over divine incarnation was founded on a misguided assumption? A false belief in the unbridgeable gulf between the human and the divine? What if this dualistic conjecture was completely false and there was nothing in this world but God, as Aurobindo was saying? The implications of this were revelatory. If it were true that God exists not only within our reach but within us—as the very stuff we are made of—then original sin goes right out the window. All the Puritan propaganda about the sinfulness of the body would suddenly become obsolete.

  Putting the avatar question in plain language dissolved this imaginary divide, making divinity—the potential to embody godliness—more relatable as part of the human condition. Assuming that all of creation is nothing but a spectrum of consciousness, it no longer seemed quite so far-fetched to believe that avatars—higher forms of sentient beings—might be moving among us, just as other forms of genius mutate into human populations. As a Mozart is born hearing music he never learned, self-described divine incarnations like Mother Meera might well be born fully cognizant—if that’s the right word—of the divinity we all share.

  —

  There were references to such spiritual geniuses in every tradition I encountered. Buddhists call them Tathagata. Some Islamic sects describe them as Nur. Members of the Baha’i faith refer to avatars as Manifestations of God, and in Kabbalistic Judaism the term for such holy beings is tzaddik. In Christianity, of course, the avatar not only exists but is the central figure of the religion: Christ’s descent as God’s only Son. Unlike these other faiths, however, Christians believe that there can be only one Messiah and that His name is Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, this divine exclusivity has caused terrible cruelty to be carried out in the name of God. In The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley articulated this crucial point. “Because Christians believed that there had only been one Avatar, Christian history has been disgraced by more and bloodier crusades, interdenominational wars, and proselytizing imperialism than has the history of Hinduism and Buddhism,” Huxley wrote. Fundamentalist aggression of any kind is contrary to the way of the Mother, of course.

  Apparently, a vast difference exists between avatars and even the most accomplished gurus. Gurus perfect themselves over time, working through their human karma. Avatars are believed to be karma-free. When Mother Meera says that she has “never been born as a human being,” I believe that’s what she means. As she has explained in Answers, Part I, “Avatars have no good or bad karma. Karma is only for human beings.” Neither does the term “enlightenment” apply to individuals like her, she tells us. “Enlightenment is only for human beings. Avatars are born with enlightenment.” Human gurus and spiritual masters struggle up toward God through intensive practice, while the avatar works her or his way down from God consciousness in order to serve humanity. That is why the avatar’s ability to help others is so much greater than a guru’s, according to Eastern thought. The nineteenth-century saint Ramakrishna, himself a devotee of the Divine Mother, compared gurus to ferryboats capab
le of carrying a few souls across the sea to liberation, whereas avatars are more like ocean liners, able to deliver millions of souls to the enlightened state.

  Different avatars describe their identity in undeniably similar language. Consider the statements of Anandamayi Ma, Meher Baba, and Mother Meera on the subject of who exactly they are.

  ANANDAMAYI MA:

  Father, there is little to tell. My consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, Father, I was the same. As a little girl, I was the same. I grew into womanhood, but still I was the same. When the family in which I had been born made arrangements to have this body married, I was the same….And, Father, in front of you now, I am the same. Ever afterward, though the dance of creation changes around me in the hall of eternity, I shall be the same.

  MEHER BABA:

  The avatar appears in different forms, under different names, at different times, in different parts of the world. As his appearance always coincides with the spiritual birth of man, so the period immediately preceding his manifestation is always one in which humanity suffers from the pangs of the approaching birth. In this form of flesh and blood, I am that same Ancient One. I am God. I am in you all. I never come and I never go. I am present everywhere.

  MOTHER MEERA:

  Each Avatar can be considered as one facet of a diamond, and at the same time the whole diamond. My body changes and your perception of me changes as you grow in knowledge. I have always been the same and will always be the same. What you see is one facet, but the whole diamond is behind it and around it. I do what Paramatman tells me. If he tells me to come down, I come down.

  Each incarnation is said to be born with a unique spiritual mission. In Mother Meera’s case, this mission is to bring down a particular Light that changes human history. “The Light has never been used before,” she says. “Like electricity, it is everywhere, but one must know how to activate it. I have come for that.” According to her, there are several other incarnations of the Divine Mother alive today, each embodying a different face of the supreme feminine. Mother likens her own personality to that of the goddess Durga, a more patient aspect of the Divine Mother who loves her children more and punishes less.

  Mother Meera also claims to be in contact with her other Divine cohorts. Some of these avatars, including the hugging saint Ammachi, are well known to the public. Others do their divine work in private, apparently. Among these avatars is a mysterious woman whom Mother Meera calls Loka Shakti Shanti (Mother of World Peace). Aside from the fact that she was born in 1978, nothing more is known about Loka Shakti Shanti, whom Mother Meera says she will meet once or twice in her lifetime, but whose identity Mother will not divulge. In fact, Mother is strictly reticent when it comes to commenting on the divinity of other spiritual figures. She seems to understand that such labeling easily becomes a parlor game of who’s an avatar and who is not among devotees of various masters competing for spiritual status. Mother recommends that we judge our teachers by what we feel in our own hearts, leaving divine categorization to those with eyes to perceive such differences.

  Ocean-liner avatars do appear to share one visible distinction from ferryboat gurus, however: preternatural stamina that defies logical explanation. Ammachi, for example, commonly gives darshan to tens of thousands of people at a time, without a break, taking each visitor into her arms and emerging unfatigued and smiling from these marathon gatherings, her white sari sopping wet from those who have wept on her shoulder. Though frail and sick toward the end of his life, Meher Baba offered darshan to thousands of devotees in a day, as well, touching the head of each one without visible signs of weakness. There are similar reports concerning Sai Baba of Shirdi and his modern counterpart, Sathya Sai Baba. Mother Meera confided to me that she could offer darshan to an unlimited number of people at a gathering but keeps her sessions to ninety minutes since “Westerners cannot sit that long.” Asked by a worried devotee about the demands of a relentless schedule that often takes her to three continents in a single month, Mother Meera was typically unfazed. “If the whole world came to me, my work would not be interrupted or deflected for a moment,” she told him. “Nothing can and nothing will interfere with my work. I am working on all planes. Everywhere. How could anything disturb my work?”

  This is not to say that avatars don’t experience the pain of the body; they’re simply not affected by pain the same way as the rest of us are. When Kamala’s foot was punctured through by a giant thistle, she screamed as any little girl would and clung to her father’s neck as he carried her to the next village to see the doctor. When Mother Meera underwent a nose operation in 1986, the pain was so excruciating that she passed out, Adilakshmi reports; still, Mother continued to bless devotees from her hospital bed, explaining that “this is the Divine way…every minute is used.” According to Mother Meera, the pain experienced by avatars “is not felt so deeply” or experienced as suffering. Nevertheless, the divine incarnation “has a dharma [role] like everybody else and must bear the pain of being an Avatar.”

  Mother has a similar response to emotional pain. Though subject to unpleasant feelings, she seems to pay them little attention. When asked if she is ever hurt when devotees treat her badly, Mother replies that she tends to take it lightly, though “on very rare occasions it is painful.” The most challenging period of her life came after Mr. Reddy’s death, when Mother seemed overwhelmed by sorrow. Daniel described finding her in the stairwell one day with tears streaming down her face. Mother touched her heart and said, “Schmerz”—pain. In the book Answers, she points out that while devotees have the opportunity to offer their pain to Mother Meera, she cannot offer her own pain to anybody but God. From a human perspective, this sounds terribly lonely, but for those in direct communication with the divine, loneliness does not seem to exist. This is not to say that Mother is immune to the presence of those around her. “Through the love of those who come to me, I can bear it,” she says of human pain. “If there is love and sincerity and devotion, I will live longer. It is the same for every Avatar.”

  —

  Another paradox of the avatar’s life is the general public’s lack of interest in their very existence. This relative absence of recognition during their lifetime appears to come with the job. As Jesus says in Luke 4:24, “No man is a prophet in his own country.” Meher Baba described this general ambivalence in an interview with an English journalist in 1954. “When I say I am the Avatar,” he spelled out on the alphabet board he used during his decades-long silence, “there are few who feel happy, some who feel shocked, and many who take me for a hypocrite, a fraud, a supreme egoist, or just mad.” This antipathy is more pronounced in the West. According to Mother Meera, Westerners give excessive importance to the materialistic worldview, and it is for this reason that most people have little desire to consider the possibility of divine incarnation. “Even when the Avatar comes, many Westerners are not willing to give the time to meet him or her,” she explains in Answers, Part 1.

  This last point raises a common question: Why do so many saints and sages hail from the East and particularly from India? An obvious explanation would be the Eastern receptivity to the phenomenon of enlightenment itself. For millennia, the cultures of the Orient have cultivated belief systems, rituals, and languages whose main focus is spiritual life. If you thumb through a Sanskrit dictionary, you’ll find many hundreds of terms for describing the different dimensions of human consciousness. Try the same thing with a Western-language dictionary and you’ll come across a paltry handful. “English is impoverished just where Sanskrit is richest: in terms that succinctly describe finely nuanced levels of expanded awareness and the realities such states reveal,” writes the Vedic scholar Alistair Shearer in his translation of the Upanishads.

  In the absence of language for describing metaphysical states, it becomes easier to imagine that they don’t exist. Had Kamala Reddy been born an American child experiencing visions and altered states, she would mos
t likely have been medicated and placed in psychiatric care. There’s a long history in the West of punishing or misdiagnosing people given to nonordinary states of consciousness. In the absence of language or a cultural context for describing these states, we easily miss what’s under our noses. For an article about homelessness, I once traveled around the United States talking with people who lived on the street. In the course of my research, I came across an old man who was clearly in an enlightened state but had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and rejected by society. “God is like the air,” he told me, his wrinkled face radiant and serene. This filthy, unkempt squatter had eyes brimming over with love and a presence that was quite transcendental. In India, he would be revered as a sadhu (renunciant) worthy of alms and respect. In America, he’s just a crazy, homeless beggar.

  With their emphasis on sin and the need for redemption, organized Western religions, for all their strengths, offer very little hope of spiritual liberation as a human possibility (except in heaven, if you’re lucky). This materialistic view runs directly counter to Eastern understanding, where liberation is viewed as the very reason for our existence. In Mother Meera’s case, the good fortune of an Indian childhood permitted her spiritual nature to flower without restraint. As Martin Goodman explains in his memoir about Mother Meera,

  Her upbringing up till age eleven offered nothing to deny her perception of her own divinity. There was no school education designed to mold her into the ways of society, no media to invade her thoughts with its opinions and fantasies, no belief system that suggested gods do not roam the earth in human form and play out their dramas above Indian fields. On the contrary, the belief system in her village assured her that such divine play is the natural condition of the world.