—
I was blasted awake at five A.M. by a pandemonium of amplified prayers blaring out of the stadium speakers from the Shiva temple next door. Outside the window, the courtyard was empty except for a single worker bent double over her pail, sweeping the ground with a handful of straw as the school’s canine mascots, Ambika and Puja, lazed nearby. A flock of green parrots perched in the mango tree behind her, and a family of monkeys picked at each other’s fur on the branches near our balcony, eyeing the open box of biscuits on the dining room table.
When eight o’clock rolled around, I found Mohan in the volunteers office and was given my duties: to type English lessons from outdated workbooks and act as a hall monitor when students were moving between classes. Mohan showed me where to station myself at the top of the stairs, opposite the latrine in progress, and how to keep the kids in line when they were in transit. A few minutes before the buses arrived, I took my position on the stairs and waited. Inside the bathroom, a group of workers were already installing the plumbing. I didn’t notice at first that Mother Meera was among them, overseeing the job. Fascinated, I watched as she chatted with the men, who seemed easy and relaxed in her company. Maurice came bounding up the stairs, carrying a length of plastic tubing, which he handed to Mother Meera. She looked at it and said, “This is wrong.” Maurice ran past me and back down to the courtyard, grumbling under his breath.
The buses began to arrive, and then the schoolyard was swarming with hundreds of children of every imaginable shape and size, from toddlers clutching lunch boxes to their chests, smiling with mischievous, curious eyes, to young adolescent boys and girls who separated into cliques and watched one another from a safe distance—most of them decked out in their uniforms. Crowding past me on the stairs, the smallest ones paused to greet me one by one. “Good morning, Uncle! What is your name, Uncle? That is a beautiful name, Uncle! My name is Pupul!”
We’d been warned not to indulge them with conversation, which was hard to resist, and I did my best to keep the children in a single file as poor Hilda marched up and down the halls, clutching a sign that read SILENCE. Two of the volunteers, a Danish kickboxer and his gray-haired father, greeted the kids as they came through the gate, and the eight young teachers (all female but one) began to take their places for the morning assembly, dressed in the school colors. When the children had lined up in front of their teachers and the stragglers had been herded into place, Adilakshmi rang a bell to bring the assembly to order. A pretty young teacher barely out of her teens stepped to the microphone and led the student body in morning prayers. “May He protect both of us,” they recited in Sanskrit, chanting slokas from the Bhagavad Gita. “May He nourish us. May we both acquire the capacity to study and understand the scriptures. May our study be brilliant. May we not argue with each other. Aum, peace, peace, peace.” As the masses of children chanted together, Mother Meera looked down from the landing, her hands covered in plaster dust.
—
Once the children were in their classrooms, I looked for Adilakshmi and found her in the library, reading a newspaper, bifocals slipping down her nose. “Welcome to the Mother’s school!” she said, warmly taking my hand. “How long has it been since I have seen you?”
“Twelve years, Adilakshmi.”
She bobbled her head and offered me a chair. Adilakshmi chatted to me about the school and how hard it was to run, with a thousand students and too few qualified administrators. I asked how she had found the adjustment, settling back in her hometown after so many years in Germany. Mother Meera had asked her to remain at the school, to keep an eye on things when she wasn’t there. For the first time in over three decades, Adilakshmi was living apart from Mother. “How has that been for you? Is it strange to be so far away from Mother?”
She smiled. “The Mother is always with me. She is never far away.”
“Of course,” I said. “But what about the physical distance? She relied on you for everything, didn’t she?”
“Relied on me? Not at all!” Adilakshmi waved away this suggestion, though she’d been Mother’s constant companion, helper, and watchdog for as long as I’d known them. “You can see how strong she is. It has been this way since the first day I met her. Nothing has changed.”
“Really?” I asked. “But a lot has changed, no? Mother is out in the world now. Constantly traveling. All of these projects—”
“But what is that to the Divine?” Adilakshmi interrupted me. “The Mother has always worked twenty hours a day. This is nothing new. India is difficult, of course. She often gets tired. But she is not affected by these things. Not in the same way that we are.”
“It’s hard to understand.”
“For all of us,” Adilakshmi agreed. “But it isn’t for us to understand. The important thing is to open to God. The rest we cannot know.”
“But you knew. Didn’t you?”
Adilakshmi smiled again. “It is true that I recognized her,” she admitted. “From the moment we met, I trusted the Mother. I had seen her in my dreams. It was obvious to me, how great she was. And yet, the Mother remains a mystery. Even to me.”
“In what way?”
“I know her better than anyone else,” she told me. “In an earthly way. But even I am aware of how secretive she is, how hidden from our human knowledge. The Mother is becoming more and more withdrawn, I think. More and more secretive.”
Before I could press her further, a teacher came into the library, complaining about a problem with a student. Adilakshmi turned her attention to the matter at hand. Thinking about what she’d just told me, I wondered about this secretiveness and was struck, as always, by Adilakshmi’s unwavering devotion—her ability to trust in what she did not understand. Spiritual devotion, or bhakti, is an enigma for skeptics like myself who lack the gift for selfless surrender. Fortunately, there are other approaches to God than the bhakti path for people of different temperaments. There’s karma yoga (the path of service), raja yoga (the path of self-purification), and jnana yoga (the path of inquiry), the latter best suited for doubting types whose hearts are opened more by questioning than by faith. It’s hard to imagine bhakti more pure than Adilakshmi’s devotion to Mother Meera. It’s humbling to behold such trust and easy to feel like a spiritual novice in its presence.
Once the teacher had gone, Adilakshmi turned back to me. “We will speak again,” she said, then went back to reading her paper.
—
After two days, Mother had not acknowledged my presence. When I passed her on the stairs, she looked away. The last time I’d seen her, in Connecticut, she’d sent an assistant to bring me to her hotel room, and we’d spent ten pleasant minutes chatting alone. Now I’d come halfway around the world to be with her and Mother Meera had not said so much as hello. The demands on her time were great, I realized. Still, the strangeness of it could not be denied. An army of demons came stampeding in: rejection, confusion, abandonment, sadness, futility, self-doubt, and, of course, anger. My distress reached such a fever pitch by day three that I vowed to make personal contact with Mother the next time our paths crossed.
On day four, I spotted Mother Meera across the courtyard, seated in the shade with a young girl who was brushing her hair. I steeled myself to approach her but was stunned when Mother did not so much as glance in my direction. Baffled and embarrassed, I stood there with my face on fire and finally croaked out a few awkward words about how eager I was to speak to her. Mother Meera grumbled, “Yes, yes,” then went back to chatting to the girl in Telugu. I skittered away, feeling abject and stupid.
I found Adilakshmi in the kitchen. “There is no worry,” Adilakshmi reassured me. “She is like that with everyone! We all want to feel so special.”
“Hello” doesn’t seem like too much to ask for, I wanted to protest. Yet even as the thought popped into my mind, I saw that Adilakshmi was right. I wanted Mother to acknowledge me personally. I wanted her to make allowance for our personal history and the personal effort I’d made to
volunteer at her school, the way any polite person would. Ordinary people care about social graces and about assuring others that everything’s fine. Ordinary people are insecure enough themselves to care about appearances and displays of emotional bonding. But Mother Meera is not an ordinary person. She doesn’t care what others think about her; nor does she have a scintilla of interest in smoothing out our ruffled egos. My expectations were all about me. Also, her relationship to time itself is different from an ordinary individual’s. Mother Meera doesn’t seem to inhabit the same clock-watching, minute-counting, time-running-out dimension most of us live in. She appears to live closer to nunc stans, the timeless present, the eternal now. Nunc stans is closer to nature’s rhythm, the cosmic rotation of planets and stars, than it is to man-made ideas about time, that ever-dwindling commodity. Notions of yesterday, today, and tomorrow are said to be free-flowing—arbitrary, even—in nunc stans, which is why making plans with mystics can be such a challenge. In one of his books, Eckhart Tolle illustrates this point well.
Imagine the earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Would we still speak of time in any meaningful way? What time is it? The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. “What time?” they would ask. “Well, of course, it’s now. The time is now. What else is there?”
Waiting for Mother Meera to plan a meeting was like waiting for the oak tree or eagle to pencil you in on its calendar. Caught up in my ego, I might also be overlooking the possibility that Mother Meera was communicating with me already in ways I might be able to sense if I could get through my emotional tantrum.
Adilakshmi seemed to pick up on my thoughts. “You imagine that the Mother is ignoring you because she is silent. But that is not true. Mother has allowed you to stay in her home. She is giving you the freedom to observe her here and allowing you to write this book,” Adilakshmi said. “She is showing you where you need to grow. Shedding light on problems that cause you suffering. Impatience. Pride. Insecurity. Putting light on the qualities that stand in your way. And teaching you to trust her even when she’s distant. To trust God.”
“You’re probably right. But it feels terrible.”
“Who said the divine was easy?” Adilakshmi asked, chuckling. “People imagine that to be close to the Mother is to live in a state of continual bliss. But that is untrue. Life becomes more difficult around the divine, not easier. The Light reveals every weakness. Every knot that is binding us. All of our darkness comes to the surface.”
“What should I do, Adilakshmi?” I asked.
“Be patient. Try to surrender. Find out what she is trying to teach you.”
—
Describing Mother Meera as “distant” is an existential understatement. She’s a complete outlier, the most enigmatic individual I have ever met. Having been an interviewer for more than thirty years, I’ve come to know a thing or two about drawing out secretive people. But Mother Meera is undrawable. When asked a question, she tends to supply just the facts, generally leaving out a riposte. Standard shortcuts to verbal connection—gossip, seduction, commiseration, breast baring (or beating)—do not work with her. Her lack of interest in small talk is quite unfathomable.
And then there’s the challenge of cognitive meltdown. My mind has disintegrated on more than one occasion while trying to interact with her. I’m not alone in this; it’s a common phenomenon among devotees. One psychiatrist described her personal mind melts with Mother as having her brain turned into “a fondant fancy under a grill.” While sitting with Adilakshmi and Mother in their living room, with snow falling outside the window and a log crackling in the fireplace, I once attempted to interview Mother for a magazine article. In mid-sentence, my mind disappeared—simply blanked out—and I froze in my seat, unable to speak, while Mother gazed at the fireplace and Adilakshmi drifted away. The three of us sat in that deepening silence together for several blissful minutes; and then, as quickly as it had descended, the silence passed, my mind reappeared, and I knew that it was time to go. Once I’d left Mother Meera’s presence, I had the clear impression that she had orchestrated this silence somehow. Rather than spend our time together discussing philosophical questions, she’d given me what I truly wanted: a glimpse into the world she inhabits, a taste of what the divine world feels like: soundless, mysterious, vast, and profound, underscored by a pulsating wonder.
Now, in Madanapalle, I did my best to tune in to her frequency and decode what she might be saying to me with her silence. My confusion reminded me of a story about the Buddha. Near his eightieth year, Siddhartha Gautama was walking through a park in autumn with a group of his loyal monks. The Enlightened One stopped to pick up a handful of dry leaves. “This is what I have said,” the Buddha told his followers. Then he turned to the great expanse of leaves on the ground, stretching as far as the eye could see. “And this is what I have not said.”
Was I waiting for a handful of dry leaves and missing the wisdom of the tree? I wondered. Was I being deceived by my own preconceptions, skipping over something else? I vowed to keep an open mind.
—
On day five, I was given the task of reading to the baby class before the assembly. The toddlers sat cross-legged in a row in the dirt while I read to them from a picture book called The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Each time I turned a page to reveal a new illustration, they squealed and cheered, calling out the animal names in English. “Tiger!” “Rabbit!” “Snake!” “Please, Uncle, read some more!” they begged when I finished the book, so I started in on The Cat in the Hat. With their age-old faces and tiny bodies, they couldn’t have been more adorable. There were only two troublemakers, a pair of rambunctious boys at the rear of the group who were cutting up instead of listening. In the middle of my reading, from overhead, a woman’s voice came booming down: “Boys in the back! Stop! Now!” I looked up and saw Mother Meera standing on the roof, one hand on her hip, a ferocious expression on her face. The boys lowered their heads and quieted down. Later that same day, one of these naughty boys started to misbehave again, during closing prayers. As if on cue, Mother Meera appeared out of nowhere, pinched the little hoodlum’s ear, and led him out back for a talking-to.
—
That afternoon, we hired a driver to take us to the Rishi Valley School, seven miles up the road from Madanapalle. The school was founded in 1926 by Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), a remarkable sage known for his razor-sharp intellect and radical take on the spiritual life. K, as he liked to be called, was a native of Madanapalle and Mother Meera’s opposite in temperament and teaching. Brilliant, vain, and obsessed with reason, K focused on ruthless inquiry and disregard for all forms of tradition. He was the blade to Mother Meera’s chalice, penetrating, pointed, and severe. Yet K also shared qualities with Mother Meera. Like her, he recommended that followers exercise common sense and self-reliance. His famous dictum “The truth is a pathless land” shares with the Mother’s way a rejection of rigid, formulaic practice or adherence to a single creed. Both warned against attachment to the teacher, confusing hero worship with divine connection, and against sacrificing personal freedom when choosing our path to God (a term K avoided). By the time I came to spiritual seeking, K had just died, but his books and video teachings soon became foundation stones of my spiritual life. I was eager to visit Rishi Valley and pay respect to this great teacher.
In the taxi on the way to the school, I noticed a dashboard ornament of the white-bearded, kerchief-headed Sai Baba of Shirdi, one of India’s most popular saints. “Is that your guru?” I asked our driver, Raju.
“All holy people are guru,” he said, meeting my eye in the rearview mirror. “Mother Meera is guru, too.”
“No,” I said. “At least she doesn’t think so.”
“Mother Meera saved my life,” Raju continued, ignoring my objection. Then he proceeded to tell us his story. Raju had grown up on the street as one of those urchins in India who knock on the windows of stopped cars
, begging for a few rupees. “When Mother first came here, I had no prospects. My friend brought me to her ashram for darshan. I sat down in front of her and there was so much love coming from her eyes!” Raju put his hand to his heart. “I began to have confidence after that,” he went on. “Before Mother, no one loved me. She gave me good advice one day. She told me to find a job, any job, and stop this begging. She suggested that I should learn how to drive. That was seven years ago. Today, I have my own fleet of taxis. Other drivers work for me! Next month, I will be married. This is all because of Mother Meera.”
“And your own hard work,” I added. “Do you believe that Mother is divine?”
“The whole world is divine, no?” Raju answered. “The mahatmas like Mother, Sai Baba, K, they come to earth to remind us.”
Raju pulled off the highway and left us at the entrance to the Rishi Valley School. David and I walked around for an hour, touring the bucolic campus, hundreds of acres of farmland dotted with freestanding buildings, groves of eucalyptus trees, vegetable gardens, and rain-fed streams. In the eucalyptus grove where K used to give his talks, we sat down to meditate in the shade. The air filled with the scent of menthol, the stillness interrupted by the occasional magpie screeching on a nearby branch. I imagined K as he would have appeared in those days, with his hooded, half-closed owl eyes, ramrod posture, and white-haired comb-over, speaking in his elegant Oxbridge tones about the “Immensity” (his term for God) and the great silence available to us outside our helmet of mental noise when we fully enter the present moment. Eloquent as K’s spoken teachings were, it was his silence that had impressed me most, as it seemed to stream from his very being. The visceral power of his silent presence reminded me of Mother Meera’s. K’s biographer Mary Lutyens once described him as “the efflorescence of an age,” and sitting there in the eucalyptus grove, I realized that the same could be said of Mother Meera, however different their bloom and hue. Both pointed to a new way of knowing God, beyond tribal religions and dogma. The eighteenth-century philosopher Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin believed that “all mystics speak the same language and come from the same country,” and it was obvious to me as I thought of the two of them that Mother Meera and Krishnamurti did indeed share a longitude and latitude, however different their dialects or divergent the figures they cut in the world.
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