The purpose of the divine appearing in these concentrated, brilliant forms is to remind us of what is possible in a human body. We go to darshan not for some otherworldly experience but to meet the enlightened parts of ourselves. The purpose of a spiritual master is to reflect back the power that we, too, possess, to enkindle the spark of eternal flame burning in us at every moment. That is the meaning of the mystic call, “the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order,” as Evelyn Underhill defines it. “Mysticism” is a misconstrued term too often confused with fantasy, magic, and New Age nonsense. Yet our inbuilt mystic faculty is no more fantastical than the gift for being transported by music, elevated by a gorgeous sunset, or carried beyond ourselves by the startling power of love.
Everyone is a closet mystic, though we’re mostly too preoccupied by everyday life to acknowledge it. Speaking for the majority, the contemporary theologian Frederick Buechner puts it this way:
We are all of us more mystics than we believe or choose to believe. Life is complicated enough as it is, after all. Through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning in our lives, we catch glimmers at least of what the saints are blinded by; only then, unlike the saints, we tend to go on as though nothing has happened. To go on as though something has happened, even though we are not sure what it was or just where we are supposed to go with it, is to enter the dimension of life that religion is a word for.
The least religious among us have glimpses of this mystic state on a regular basis, though we fail to recognize their source. Walking in nature, making love, or gazing up at the naked sky, you suddenly become aware of a window opening up inside you, providing entrée to an unseen dimension beyond the senses. Words like “awe,” “wonder,” “rapture,” and “epiphany” point to this mystic expansion; so do transformational states of profound trauma, loss, or grief. There’s a strange account of a grief-stricken disciple relating a tragic story about her life to Anandamayi Ma. Suddenly the saint began to laugh uncontrollably, until tears rolled down her cheeks. The woman was shocked by this response and asked Anandamayi Ma why she would laugh at her misery. “Because you are being shown the end of misery through the cracks that this misery is opening in your heart,” the holy woman told her. “Through them you can see the sun of the Self shining.”
According to the ancient scriptures, this Self—the source of mystic awareness—is accessible to us at all times through genuine spiritual practice. Since the ultimate reality (God) does not change, we require access to an unchanging awareness in order to perceive it. This is the purpose of meditation, yoga, self-inquiry, and all forms of prayer: they cultivate this unchanging awareness. Four thousand years before Sigmund Freud or the fMRI machine, which can measure the effects of meditation on the brain, the sages of the Upanishads discovered that this awareness is the very foundation of our existence. Our consciousness is made up of four primary levels, according to the ancient teachings, each with its own unique physiological changes that provide a different experience of what we call reality.
The first three levels—waking, sleeping, and dreaming—are well known to everyone. We spend our lives passing among these states without giving it a second thought. Underlying these three states and obscured by them, however, is a hidden substratum of constant awareness, referred to simply as the fourth. This awareness is transcendental—beyond time, space, and causation—and is the essence of who we are. “When the fourth is lived continuously alongside the other three states coming and going as before, there is enlightenment,” according to the Isha Upanishad. This is not just a mood of feeling good in the waking state but an entirely different level of consciousness, with its own physiology and its own reality. It is said that the fourth is as different from waking as waking is from dreaming. “When the conceptual veil through which we ordinarily see the world is lifted, each limited object shines with the boundless Light of the spirit, and each transitory experience is a celebration of eternity.”
Mystic experience tends to happen when we least expect it. I learned this on that first trip to India, a few months after meeting Mother Meera. Andrew and I were staying in a beachside hotel in Mahabalipuram, two hours’ drive north of Pondicherry. Every evening just after sunset we would stroll along the beach into town. One day, we set out as usual along the sand in the direction of the nearby Shiva temple. It was an especially colorful twilight, with an opalescent sky and the largest moon I’d ever seen, the color of yellow pearl, hanging so low it nearly touched the horizon. The moment was too beautiful not to savor, so we sat down to meditate at the water’s edge.
I watched the moon for several minutes, then finally closed my eyes. When I did so, the face of Mother Meera appeared across my inner vision—holographically, in three dimensions, just as if she were there—then seemed to converge with the glow of the moon. I became aware that I was leaning forward as if about to receive her darshan; then I laid my hands on the wet sand, palms down, and at that precise moment a wave broke, sending a shudder through the ground and directly into my body. The wave’s vibration, the sound of the surf, and Mother’s Meera’s glowing face all seemed to coalesce with the moonlight. I felt shaken awake all of a sudden, electrified by the world around me.
When I opened my eyes, I was aware of being in an altered state. It wasn’t hallucinatory, exactly, more an intensification of seeing accompanied by a weird sort of omnipresence. My perceptional field was higher, deeper; the sky, the moon, the tumbling surf, my fingertips touching the sand, all were pulsating softly together. I was seeing more than the surface of objects, which no longer seemed to be separate things. I had the strong impression of knowing them, feeling the scenery inside my skin. I stood and walked up to my knees in the water; Andrew was shouting from somewhere behind me. I felt my body turn slowly in his direction but when Andrew asked me to describe how I felt, a verbal response seemed beside the point. As we strolled together toward the temple, I was conscious of being inside my own skin while watching it from the outside as well.
There was nothing dramatic in any of this; the experience was extremely subtle. I could feel things, viscerally, without using my hands, simply by looking softly enough. I sensed that my breath had changed, too, as if I were being breathed by my surroundings. The palm trees, the ocean, the moon, my friend: we were all being breathed by that same spirit, held in the web that connected our bodies. It felt as though if I moved my arm, I could touch the branch of that tree in the distance. The breeze itself seemed sentient, alive. When we came to the end of the beach, Andrew and I turned toward town, ate our dinner, and made our way back to the hotel.
This altered state lasted until the next morning. Neither talking, eating, washing, nor sleeping interrupted its peaceful flow. When I drifted off to sleep, some part of me remained awake and watched myself as I rested. By sunrise, there was a pleasing afterglow, but the episode had ended. Nothing like this ever happened to me again.
In a poem, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore writes, “Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.” For those few hours in Mahabalipuram, I had seen with the eyes of love, and the view had been extraordinary. Amazing, too, is the little-known fact that our bodies are wired for self-transcendence. Did you know that when you open your eyes after sleeping, the previous day’s top layer of vision receptor cells are scorched away by the entering light, thus giving you, literally, new eyes? Or that the first sound you hear on waking vibrates away the prior day’s auditory cells, meaning that when the cock crows, you hear it with physically new ears? Wonder is part of what makes us human. The body is full of signs and wonders only now being glimpsed through the lens of science.
We’re changed cognitively by the presence of awe, in fact which points us to the eternal dimension. A member of the first American climbing team to scale Mount Everest described his own brush with the timeless present. Returning from the peak, Willi Unsoeld paused on a high pass to admire the transcendent view. As he turned around, he saw a
small blue flower in the snow. “I don’t know how to describe what happened,” he told researchers Alice and Walden Howard. “Everything opened up and flowed together and made some kind of sense, and I was at complete peace. I have no idea how long I stood there. It could have been minutes or hours. Time melted. But when I came down, my life was different.”
These blue-flower moments are passing us by every day but the workaday mind needs a shock or an epiphany to stop it in its habitual tracks. When this happens, our lives are never the same: we’ve glimpsed the world from outside the bubble. We’ve come face-to-face with what Mother Meera and her kind are reflecting back to us: a divine world just beyond our sight. A doorway to our own true nature. An invitation to back where we came from.
9
THE LOVERS
A few months after leaving Madanapalle, I flew to Germany and stayed at Darshan Hall, a manor house acquired by the Mother Meera Foundation in the winter of 1991. Darshan Hall is a vast château situated on a mountainside in the Rhineland below Schloss Schaumburg, a twelfth-century castle straight out of the Brothers Grimm. The ninety-room mansion has the hushed, sterile air of a mystic sanatorium and serves as a retreat center for devotees from around the world. The scale of the building surprised me at first; it’s a far cry from the working-class home in Thalheim where Mother still lives, a few miles down the road. After two days at the manor, I was finally able to find my room without getting lost in the wrong hallway.
I’d come to Germany to interview some of Mother Meera’s closest disciples. I was eager to know how their spiritual lives had been affected over a period of many years by exposure to the Paramatman Light. I hoped that they would be able to tell me how Mother Meera’s presence had changed them, including their relationship to God. What had been the boons and conflicts of spending decades in her proximity? What had they seen in Mother’s most private moments that offered insight into the avatar’s life and its effects on the people around them?
I began by speaking to Terry, a retired IT specialist from Holland who spends more time with Mother Meera these days than anyone else in her inner circle. Affable, low-key, and easy to be with, Terry is Mother’s ideal travel companion and majordomo, an orderly, bright-eyed, unflappable guy whose sunny disposition stands out in her entourage of moody Germans and Slavs.
“She’s been more like a good friend from the very beginning,” Terry began when we met in my kitchen for a cup of tea. At seventy-three, Terry looks twenty years younger, with his youthful smile and full head of blond hair. “Mother has a very good sense of humor,” he told me. “It matches mine very well. So our connection is quite informal. I relate to her very normally.”
“Do you see her as a divine incarnation?”
“Let me put it to you this way,” Terry replied, leaning forward and folding his hands on the table. “I see Mother almost all the time, in her normal, private life. I see how she behaves behind the scenes. How she treats people and acts in different situations. What I can tell you is that Mother is as totally different from a human being as one can possibly be.”
“And yet you call her a friend?” I noted. Tony shrugged as if to say that both things are true. “There is not the lightest trace of ego,” he assured me. “Putting herself first. Placing herself on a pedestal or thinking of herself instead of others. With Mother, there is only helping. Without any thought for herself. Only love.”
“What about the Paramatman Light?”
Terry explained that for reasons unbeknownst to him, it took ten years before he experienced the Light. “I woke up in the middle of the night and had the sense that something was coming,” he told me matter-of-factly. “Then this energy started to enter into me from the soles of my feet. It was colorless and cool and kept me up the whole night. It continued the whole next day, until it finally subsided.” He took a sip of tea. “The next time I saw Mother, I asked her if it was the Paramatman Light. She said, ‘Yes.’ I asked her how she knew, and Mother said, ‘I can see it.’ ”
I admitted to Terry how otherworldly this sounded. “Maybe, but this is what happened,” he said. “Most spiritual teaching is like shoveling snow. But with Mother, it’s like the sun comes up and melts the snow.” I was struck by this lovely analogy. “This process went on for me for a couple of years, more or less frequently, in different events and in different forms. Sometimes it was so powerful, it felt like a storm was raging inside me. Other times, it was like my body was filled with gold dust. For a year or two, it was doing all these different things,” Terry reported, describing kriyas, the physical shivers and shakes that sometimes accompany mystic experience. “I can tell you that it was pure grace,” he assured me. “It was not something you can learn by yourself. It came from a different dimension. Then one week, nothing happened and I got kinda angry. I went to Mother and asked what to do. All she said is ‘Experiences come and go.’ It took some time for me to accept this. I was so attached to those experiences.”
“So the Light didn’t take away your negative feelings?”
“Certainly not,” Terry assured me. “I can still get angry and have an emotional life. This is normal. The idea that you become like an angel after a spiritual awakening, speaking softly and pretending to be perfect…” He made a disgusted face. “It’s not like that at all. But the Light did change me.”
“Can you tell me how? Specifically?”
“It is difficult to say what it did under the surface,” Terry admitted. “But I feel a certain lightness in me. In all the cells. Also, my attitude to spiritual practices has changed. I’ve realized that it is all grace—that you cannot earn it. My experiences have helped me let go of all the fixed rules about spiritual life that you read in books. You know, this is spirit, this is not spirit. That kind of thing. Now I can laugh at all that! It’s all gone. Mother always says that every soul is an individual, and what works for one person may not be right for another. That’s why spiritual rules don’t work.”
Terry checked his watch and prepared to go. “What makes it so special being with her, and working with her, is that when you see her eyes in private, they have that same Light shining all the time like they do in darshan. It’s not like when she gives darshan she goes into some trance. She’s always like that. When she looks at you, or smiles in the course of a day, well, it’s like…” He stood up from his chair.
“Like what, Terry?”
He searched for the right words. “Like a hundred suns shining,” he said.
—
Next I spoke again to Ulrich Reinhold. Ulrich is the loose cannon in Mother’s close circle, the one most likely to say anything to anybody, at any time, without self-consciousness or restraint. Ulrich oversees many of Mother’s construction projects and isn’t shy about letting you know how much he enjoys the sound of his own voice.
“I broke up with the love of my life two years ago,” Ulrich began. “For three months, I was in Mother’s living room every day, crying my eyes out of my head. Mother would be cleaning the toilet and I’d be sitting on her bed, crying. Mother would be doing office work and I’d be sitting there, crying. I’d never experienced anything like this. It was so embarrassing!” he told me. “You know what Mother told me? She said, ‘Ulrich, you have no one else to open your heart to.’ ”
“That sounds like something a friend would say.”
“She’s the best friend you can have in the world,” he agreed. “She just looks in your heart and sees what you need. I was in so much pain back then. I asked Mother if she could please change it. She said, ‘Of course, I can change it easily. But that will not help you in the long term. I can help you go through these experiences. But I can’t take the pain away from you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t learn anything.’ ”
Before meeting Mother Meera, Ulrich had been an unhappy, highly successful private contractor in Frankfurt. “I was a millionaire and owned several companies,” he explained. “But there was no happiness inside me. I was such an angry person. Nothing was workin
g in my life. When things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, I freaked out. I had no compassion for other people. Nothing.”
“And Mother’s power helped to change that?”
“Most definitely. Things have gotten better for me. But very slowly,” Ulrich confessed. “I’m one of these dull idiots, you see. It takes me a long time to change. I once asked Mother, ‘Why are there so many neurotic people around you?’ She said that each of us represents a certain aspect of humanity and she is working on us. When I asked her why so much darkness comes up when we’re around her, she told me, ‘That’s the only way to transform it.’ ”
I thought about my own dark feelings in India, which had hardly transformed since my return. “I think she is saying that if we are not able to live together in this house in harmony and joy,” Ulrich continued, “then how can we expect the world to change?” Ulrich described Mother’s own ability to harmonize with her environment. “When you see her shopping in the city, she is not running around with a beautiful sari. She’s wearing her old jeans and a sweatshirt. But even though Mother is completely down-to-earth, she is also beyond anything.”
“What do you mean by ‘beyond’?” I asked.
“You feel her power, but you know you can’t reach her. None of us can keep up with her pace. Twenty-two hours a day. It’s impossible. And Mother remembers everything! She can tell me the exact measurements of some project or other by the millimeter, and I don’t even have this information in my files.”
Ulrich gave me another example of Mother’s psychic acuity. One day, his special tool kit disappeared from the work site. He was certain that his tools were gone forever and reported the theft to Mother Meera. “She told me to look in the bathroom upstairs. I went there but I couldn’t find them. Mother told me to look inside the washing machine. I opened it, and there they were! I asked Mother how she knew they were there. ‘I just know,’ she told me. ‘When I need to know, I see it.’ ”
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