Mother of the Unseen World

by Mark Matousek

  “When I am in Supramental consciousness, I forget about them,” she answered.

  “What do you feel when the Supramental forces descend?” asked another.

  “The body becomes light, instead of heavy. Supermind is full of light, knowledge, peace, power, and bliss.”

  Basu himself chimed in. “By answering are you thinking?” the old man inquired.

  “It is not possible to speak with the mind,” she replied. “I see things and tell about them.”

  Asked if she was able to give knowledge, bliss, and light to others, Mother Meera answered, “If they are ready to receive then I can give to them.”

  “Do you want to be a yogi or great person?”

  “No,” Mother said.

  “And do you want to change particular people or the world?”

  Mother Meera told them, “The world.”

  The interview continued for over an hour. After they were through with her, the elders reported that Mother Meera’s responses seemed to come “from somewhere beyond her education,” that they’d seen “nothing to discredit the claim that Mother Meera is an avatar” and had, in fact, “heard things suggesting that the claim might possibly be true.”

  Following the publication of the UNI story, letters began pouring in, Adilakshmi remembers, “begging Mother’s help with every conceivable problem and difficulty.” Soon the three of them moved into a larger house at 47 rue Manakula Vinayagar Kovil, and Mother began offering public darshan for the first time. She asked that portraits of Jesus and Mary be hung on the wall next to those of Sweet Mother and Sri Aurobindo, as a welcoming gesture for Western visitors. In those early days, Mother sometimes agreed to answer questions after darshan, and in no time these meetings attracted international wisdom seekers traveling the subcontinent. Among the first foreigners to receive darshan was a young Quebecois named Jean-Marc Fréchette, followed shortly thereafter by Andrew Harvey, whose memoir about Mother Meera, Hidden Journey, would play a significant part in her reputation spreading in the West.

  Also among these first visitors were Herbert Bednarz and Daniel Toplak, a pair of European seekers who would later make it possible for Mother Meera and Adilakshmi to settle in Germany. Daniel and Herbert talked to me about those early days in Pondicherry. “What was Mother like?” I asked Daniel. We were kicking back in his messy bedroom on the second floor of the house he still shares with Mother Meera and a handful of other old-time devotees in Thalheim. A sleepy-eyed Slovenian with a wry sense of humor, Daniel spends his days doing artwork and cleaning out roof gutters for a living.

  “It’s not so easy to describe,” he told me in his tentative English. “Sitting there with the darshan, I was feeling somehow—how do you say it? Electricity. Some kind of light. There were only four or five of us there, and Mother was so young. Still, she was the same as she is today,” he said. “Always the same.”

  “Do you see Mother as a divine incarnation?”

  Daniel chuckled. “I didn’t know what the Mother was in the beginning. Only that I was feeling somehow happy when I went away from her. There was a lot of sweetness. I could feel myself falling into a kind of ecstasy. I knew that Mother is the real thing.” Without having answered my question, Daniel communicated what mattered to him.

  I met Herbert in the garden later that day. His experience of those early days was very different from Daniel’s, I wasn’t surprised to learn. “We had to wait two weeks in Pondy before she finally came in a taxi,” he said of that first encounter. Herbert is a fast-talking German with a forceful demeanor, known both as a loner and as the bruiser you want on your side in a fight. “Mother had gone to stay in her village. To be honest, I was not so sure about this Mother Meera. Friends had told me about her, but I’m not really one to believe what I hear.” Herbert winked and raised his eyebrows. “I was becoming interested in spirituality at the time. Whatever that was. I had heard about this Mother Meera and came to Pondy to see for myself. We were standing on the opposite side of the road, waiting for her. She got out of the taxi and turned around and smiled at us. When she looked at me, it hit me. Bam!” His face lit up at the memory. “Whatever it was, I was blissed out. Everyone else was, too. A few days later, we had darshan and Mother answered a few questions afterward. She spoke in Telugu, and Adilakshmi translated. One person asked, ‘Mother, why do you give darshan in silence?’ She told him, ‘Talk you can get anywhere.’ ”

  I asked Herbert how he would describe Mother Meera’s effect on his spiritual life. He puzzled over this for a moment. “The process has always been the same for me. I have a little opening”—Herbert gestured as if unscrewing the top of his head—“then I feel a strong longing in my heart. The tears are coming after that, usually, and bringing a very strong peace, sweetness, and joy. There are no questions and no special lights or anything. Just something clear inside.”

  —

  Eager to bring Mother to the West, Jean-Marc and his fellow Canadians invited her to give darshan in Montreal later that year. Mother Meera left India for the first time in late August 1980 and flew from Chennai to Montreal; she, Mr. Reddy, and Adilakshmi would remain there for the next four months. Darshan was offered in the home where they were staying, and once a week at the Masonic Memorial Temple for as many as three hundred people a night. The Canadians’ reactions to darshan were characteristically varied and subjective. According to Adilakshmi, “Some saw the Mother as the Virgin Mary. Others saw her as Jesus or Buddha. Others experienced the Light in different colors—white, blue, gold, orange, violet—according to their development and need.” The Mother Meera Society was established in Montreal during this visit, with strict instructions that it not become a religious institution.

  The threesome left Canada in January, made a stopover in Switzerland at the request of some new European devotees, and then returned to Pondicherry. As Mother’s popularity increased, so did the intensity of her experience with the Paramatman Light, which appeared to be transforming her physical body in startling ways. As she told Mr. Reddy in The Mother, “The Light entered into my body through my fingernails, like a procession of ants.”

  I saw the Light pass physically through my fingers. When the Light entered my body, it was shaken as if by an earthquake. My sense organs were cut off and I could neither see nor hear. I felt the whole process as one of complete cleansing. It was impossible to control my body. My body also became helpless. I felt as if I had no bones or nerves and I felt my heart going weaker. I could not pick up any objects, they just fell out of my hands. I could not walk and I felt as if my knees and not my feet were standing on the floor. My body was as weak and supple as a snake and I couldn’t stand upright. It seemed to me that it became very light and no longer was on this earth. When the experience ended, the whole body remained painful for two days, although my mind and heart went immediately back to normal.

  There were more dramatic episodes to come. Mother described this continuing illumination: “The Light is bursting out from me as a great tremendous sound like thunder and dazzling, bright sunlight. I am sending Light like this everywhere three times a day. When the Light leaves my body, it leaves with such an enormous sound that I cannot hear for two hours afterward. This process is going on.”

  These attacks left her body feeling like “an empty bottle being shaken with the Light” and like “a liquid rising, falling, moving in all directions.” Her convulsions were nearly unbearable to watch. “It was as if her whole body was being annihilated. She was somewhere—we do not know where,” Mr. Reddy later recalled in The Mother. “If we called her, she did not answer. All the functions of her senses were stopped. The entire body was shaken, legs and arms moving in all directions.”

  Mother Meera stopped eating and sleeping during this period. Afraid for her life, Mr. Reddy and Adilakshmi wanted to call a doctor, but Mother Meera forbade it, telling them that “no one can help.” Her body seemed changed afterward. “It gave the impression of having become as soft as velvet. Shining,” Mr. Reddy
remembered.

  It was during this time that Mr. Reddy’s own body began to fail. He’d been ignoring several chronic ailments for years, and his diabetes had become life-threatening. The European devotees, including Daniel and Herbert, invited Mother Meera to Germany before her second visit to Montreal. By the time the plane landed in Frankfurt, Mr. Reddy was dangerously ill (though he tried playing down his condition). Making their way from the airport to the town of Essen, in Daniel’s car, Mr. Reddy dozed in the front seat while Mother Meera and Adilakshmi sat in the back, enjoying the wintry landscape. At one point, Mother turned to Adilakshmi and said in Telugu, “There is something here.” The portent of these words was unclear for some time.

  Daniel welcomed his guests into his small home, moving his own bed into the cellar to make room for them. Members of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) Society were especially eager to meet this young avatar and flocked to the house in the coming days. The founder of TM, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had been shown Mother Meera’s photograph, apparently, and encouraged his followers to seek her darshan. “The Divine Mother is in Germany and it is a good thing,” the guru assured them, according to Herbert.

  In Essen, Mother Meera and Adilakshmi spent the afternoons exploring the local shops and buying groceries for dinner, to be prepared in Daniel’s makeshift kitchen. “Mother would cook the most delicious simple meals,” Daniel told me. “None of us had any money. Nobody minded chapati and rice. We were just so happy to have Mother here.”

  After three weeks, Mr. Reddy was so sick that they were forced to abort their stay in Germany. It was decided that they’d make a brief visit to Montreal before returning to Chennai. This plan was not to be, however. While they were in Canada, Mr. Reddy’s health collapsed, and when the government failed to offer him urgent treatment, there was no choice but to fly back to India immediately. Scrambling to change planes in Frankfurt, Mr. Reddy went into kidney failure and the German authorities offered to give him free dialysis if he wanted to stay in the country. Despite his protests, Mother Meera insisted that he begin treatment. Mr. Reddy would never set foot in India again.

  —

  Herbert found them a place to stay in Kleinmaischeid, a town on the outskirts of Bonn. Three times a week, Adilakshmi rose at four A.M. to prepare breakfast for Mr. Reddy before the ambulance took him for treatment at a hospital in Bonn. In the afternoons, Mother Meera would help him back up the stairs to his bedroom. On December 26, the day of Mother’s twenty-first birthday, a dozen devotees gathered to celebrate while Mr. Reddy watched from his place on the sofa, each guest receiving darshan. As Daniel remembers it, “Mother held our heads for twenty minutes at a time in those days. She used to say, ‘The first minute is for me and my work. The rest is for you.’ Who knows what she meant? We were very happy.”

  When Mr. Reddy’s dialysis failed, he was moved to the hospital in Bonn, where he remained for the next six months. Day after day, Mother Meera looked after him as his health continued to decline. “The Mother was feeding him with her own hands,” Adilakshmi wrote in her book. “She stayed in the hospital late hours at night caring for him.” It was at that time that Mother Meera declared openly that Mr. Reddy was a “special being who had come for a special purpose.” While the doctors offered no hope, his condition eventually improved enough for him to leave the hospital, though the question of where they could put down roots had not yet been resolved. Mother Meera and Adilakshmi had been forced to vacate their temporary home, but although they were offered free lodging by the TM group, Mother declined. Instead, with Mr. Reddy’s encouragement, she made a down payment on a house with the help of the German devotees. Daniel cosigned on the mortgage. “We just worked and saved, worked and saved, so we could get the house ready in time for people to come for darshan,” Daniel recalled of those penniless days. “We gave up everything that costs money. Beer, television, cigarettes.” Adilakshmi pitched in by selling hand-painted lampshades at the marketplace in nearby Limburg. The shades were decorated with stenciled flowers and tassels made by Mother Meera herself.

  By April, the house was ready for visitors. Though Mr. Reddy was released from the hospital that month, he could no longer leave his bed. While Mother Meera gave darshan in her own home for the first time, he lay upstairs, heartbroken not to be at her side. Withdrawn from the world, Mr. Reddy “went towards the Mother,” according to Adilakshmi. “There was a rapid inner development in him. All the parts of his being were concentrated on the Mother alone.” Mother Meera would call him by his pet name, Gundu, meaning round and complete, and he’d smile like a child and become emotional. Sometimes, she’d tickle him till tears of laughter rolled down his face and he begged her to stop.

  On June 14, Mr. Reddy’s health declined further. He asked to hear his favorite devotional songs of India; afterward Mother fed him and helped him to bed. The next day, he entered the hospital for the last time. Five days later, Mr. Reddy was gone. The death of her closest confidant, the first person to recognize her and be trusted with the details of her spiritual experiences, who’d given up everything to devote himself to her work in the world, prompted a grief in Mother Meera unlike anything she had displayed before. “When he left his body, the Mother felt that some part of her was divided from within her,” Adilakshmi wrote. “This feeling was too painful to put into words. I saw and felt whenever I touched her, that sorrow was flowing from her like a river.”

  To express this sorrow, Mother Meera picked up a paintbrush for the first time and, over the next three months, created a series of portraits depicting Mr. Reddy’s soul voyage after death. She painted directly, without making any kind of a sketch, producing one new picture each day. These extraordinary images, later collected into book form (Bringing Down the Light) offer the only visual testament we have of the world through Mother Meera’s eyes. Mr. Reddy’s soul is depicted as a translucent sheath, flowing and pale, surrounded by towering, multicolored figures representing Divine Mothers, with strange tadpole heads and a single oversized eye, who look down on his diminutive form. In the final painting of the series, Mr. Reddy’s soul—portrayed in a pale shade of purple—is being safeguarded by three Mothers, who are gathered at its side, holding its head and feet with bunches of flowers in their hands. His soul had reached the end of its journey.

  4

  SILENCE SPEAKS

  When Mr. Reddy died, Mother Meera settled into a quiet life in Thalheim for the next six years, rarely venturing out of Germany. The arrival of an Indian holy woman in this sleepy Catholic village was tolerated remarkably well by her neighbors, some of whom sent their children to Mother’s house to receive her private blessing. The mayor of Thalheim came to Mother Meera with a liver complaint and is said to have been cured. The parish priest came for darshan. From her ordinary lifestyle, it was clear to her neighbors that this was no exotic cult. Passing her modest home, neighbors might find Mother Meera hauling bags of cement across the driveway or pounding shingles into the roof, and were greeted with a friendly smile. The influx of visitors from around the world brought revenue to local businesses as well, which didn’t hurt her popularity, either.

  Unlike most Eastern masters coming to the West, Mother Meera refused self-promotion and gave no interviews, preferring the quiet life of a private citizen in her adopted country. In fact, Germany was more to Mother’s taste than India had ever been. The weather was blessedly cool, for starters—Mother Meera dislikes the heat—and with its emphasis on efficiency, cleanliness, and order, the German work ethic pleased her more than the catch-as-catch-can style of India. Here she was free to move around as she pleased without fanfare or unwanted attention. In India, even in those early years, it was hard for Mother to venture out in public without devotees dropping to her feet in pranam or assaulting her with garlands of flowers. In Thalheim, there was no such hoopla. Locals who encountered Mother Meera and Adilakshmi walking to the grocery store or visiting Mr. Reddy’s white marble gravestone greeted the foreign women politely and went on thei
r way without making a fuss.

  This period of reclusion was interrupted in the fall of 1989. After years of Andrew’s pleading with Mother to give darshan in the United States, she agreed to offer three public meetings in New York City and a question-and-answer session at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in upstate New York, where Andrew was on the faculty. I had seen Mother only once since our first meeting and was especially eager to be there for her first interview in the United States, particularly in an academic setting. On the day of her arrival at JFK Airport, I was with the small welcoming party waiting at the terminal. Andrew paced back and forth, watching the information board and holding a bouquet of white roses. The rest of us were scattered around the arrivals lobby, on the lookout lest we miss Adilakshmi and Mother Meera somehow.

  At long last, the customs doors opened, and there they were. Mother Meera looked petite and slightly disheveled, her purple sweater half-buttoned over a navy blue sari, handbag slung over her shoulder, with Adilakshmi at her side, scanning the room for familiar faces. When Mother saw Andrew, her face lit up; he touched the flowers to his chest and offered them to her with tears in his eyes. We followed the three of them to the baggage carousel, and when one of us managed to ask Mother Meera how she was feeling, she simply replied, “I am fine. And you?” That was the extent of the conversation.

  The following afternoon, a few dozen academics and students gathered in the colleges’ wood-paneled library for the interview. The group was diverse, ranging from tweedy professors to undergraduate girls wearing midriff-baring tops and short shorts. To my right, a teacher corrected student papers, turning to her friend at one point to say, “This isn’t really my thing. But Andrew is very persuasive.” I felt protective and apprehensive all of a sudden. Had it been a bad idea to invite Mother Meera into the brain-heavy halls of a highbrow American college, unschooled as she was? The bar of doubt might be too high, I feared, the intellectual rift unbreachable.