Mother of the Unseen World

by Mark Matousek

  Like Norina and Terry, Ulrich shares plenty of laughs with Mother Meera. One afternoon, he and Mother were building an armoire together and accidentally got locked inside it. “We were crammed together,” Ulrich remembered. “Face-to-face. I was so uncomfortable! But Mother was just laughing and laughing.” On another occasion, he accidentally touched Mother Meera’s hand while they were working together and had a sort of out-of-body climax. “It was pure bliss, I tell you,” said Ulrich. “An orgasm of ten minutes is nothing compared to this! When I asked Mother if I could do it again, she said no.” Ulrich laughed. “She is an absolutely untouchable person.”

  Then there was the incident with the darshan chair. Working in Darshan Hall, Ulrich inadvertently sat in Mother Meera’s chair. He remembered the protest that ensued: “Everybody started to freak out! But when Mother saw me, all she said was ‘Ulrich, please don’t do it again. This is my chair. I don’t want anyone sitting on it. If you want to do my job, you can apply for it. But I can tell you, it is not nice work!’ ”

  Ulrich and I talked about how it must be for her, touching so much suffering—so intimately—every day of her life. “She is going to the very source of our pain,” he said. “Down to the root. To whatever needs to be purified.” He paused. “Suffering is a lonely experience—no one wants to go there with you. It’s dark and smells down there. Like when I’m cleaning toilets here in the building because the pipes are blocked. No one wants to be there with me. There’s only one person standing there beside me, and that’s Mother. She’s not afraid of anything.”

  —

  Fearlessness has indeed been Mother Meera’s most conspicuous trait since she was a young child. This intrepidness is nowhere more obvious than in Mother’s decision to remain in Germany, even though she was a foreigner in a country so deeply traumatized by the Holocaust. According to Adilakshmi, Mother chose to live in Germany because of the two World Wars. (“The wound is here,” she said.) At Darshan Hall, I spoke to a devotee whose parents had had Nazi affiliations in the Second World War but were deeply healed by Mother Meera’s darshan.

  “My father could be cruel,” Elsa told me. “He was a parole officer in Munich with a drinking problem. Very often, he was totally irrational. My father terrified me. So I ran away as far as I could from my parents’ house. I tried living in Portugal, where I pretended not to be German. I did everything possible to deny my heritage. But you can’t run forever,” Elsa confided.

  “Eventually, when my parents were old and sick, I needed to come home. I stayed with them but got to darshan as often as possible. My father had no interest in spirituality at all. His heart was shut away for most of his life. But even he noticed how happy I was when I returned from Thalheim. He asked me to tell him about Mother Meera, which amazed me. When I talked to my father about the love I felt from Mother, he seemed to change. It was the first time he appeared gentle to me in all his life. When he finally died, my father was different from the man I knew before.”

  Elsa continued. “After that, my mother became very depressed. The doctor said, ‘From now on, your mother will just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.’ I thought to myself, ‘Well, if that is true, then she can do that at Mother Meera’s house in Schaumburg!’ I asked Mother if I could bring my own mother there, and she said yes. When we arrived, my mother looked over the valley and said that it reminded her of France, where she and my father had lived before the war. She’d loved it there. And you know what?” Elsa asked with a smile. “She never stayed in bed, the way the doctors said she would. Never! Even later, after I was forced to put her in an old-age home, the nurses would say to me, ‘Ah, your mother is making jokes again.’ Jokes? My mother? That was a first! Or she would be doing exercises in her bed. I could hardly believe the change in her. Sometimes, I’d come into the room and she would be absolutely bathed in bliss.” Elsa’s face brightened at the memory. “My mother died the following year. Her time near Mother Meera was the happiest I had ever seen her. It was an extraordinary blessing.”

  —

  Some Jewish survivors have also experienced unexpected healings because Mother Meera is in Germany. A friend of mine, the performance artist Nina Wise, has a father who narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo. “I had mixed feelings about Germany, to say the least,” she told me. Nina is a brilliant comedian with a sharp mind and a deadpan delivery. “A friend told me about Mother Meera,” she said. “What I’d heard is that she pulls down light from the center of the universe and sends it into your body.” She smiled as if to say “Really?” “Then she unties your karmic knots, whatever that means. Anyway, I was curious, but when my father found out I was going to Germany, he was very unhappy with me.”

  Nina had been raised to see Germany as verboten, yet despite her father’s anger, she traveled to Thalheim at the invitation of a trusted friend. “Not a lot happened when I met Mother Meera,” she said. “I enjoyed the stillness. It was peaceful but uneventful. It wasn’t until the day after darshan that I had a great epiphany.” Nina’s friend suggested that the two of them visit the nearby town of Hadamar, the location of the Hadamar Euthanasia Center, the psychiatric hospital where the mass sterilization and murders of hundreds of thousands of people with mental and physical disabilities took place, many of them children. “We were standing in the room where the operations had been done,” Nina told me, still shocked by the memory. “There was this slanted table, I’ll never forget it, where vivisections were performed on the brains of psychiatric patients. On the walls were hundreds of photographs of the children who’d been killed. And near them were photos of the nurses who’d worked there. The nurses were all dressed in white peaked caps, and in one of the photos, they were standing around the führer with these beaming smiles.”

  She paused, then continued in disbelief. “Those nurses were so proud. They all looked so innocent. I thought to myself, ‘How could these young, beautiful, robust German women be so proud of murdering children? How was that possible?’ Then something clicked in my mind.” Nina looked me in the eye. “This may sound strange, but as I looked at the nurses in the photograph, I started to see the absence of evil. I actually saw in that moment that everyone who commits an evil act believes they’re doing the right thing. We can all be deluded in this way, under the right circumstances,” she added. “It’s easy to point a finger at someone who is more deluded than we are and think, ‘How can that possibly be?’ But the truth is that delusion exists on a spectrum.”

  “That doesn’t excuse evil.”

  “No. But it helps to understand it. I went into the chapel at Hadamar and sat down. It was as if the nurses were talking to me. They said, ‘We thought we were doing the right thing. Everybody believed it.’ And I knew that they were telling the truth.” Nina appeared to be struggling with this realization. “I was raised to believe that you don’t forget and you don’t forgive. Because if you forgive, you betray your ancestors. I felt like a traitor. Eighty-nine members of my family were killed in the war, that we know of. I had an intergenerational obligation to hate. But something shifted for me in that chapel.”

  Back at the bed-and-breakfast where she was staying, Nina listened to “Laudate Dominum” on her Walkman, an aria from Mozart’s transcendent opera of praise and mercy, and began to weep. “It was as if they weren’t only my tears. They were my father’s unfinished tears and all the tears that were repressed in my family. Not speaking out, because if you started to grieve it would be too much. I felt these intergenerational tears moving through me and taking the hatred with them. Just letting it go. On the one hand, it felt painful, as if I were betraying my family. But on the other hand, it felt like a necessary untying of karmic knots,” said Nina, who is a practicing Buddhist. “I wept for hours. It was a huge, huge release.”

  After Nina returned to the United States, another miracle occurred when she created a theater piece about her experience in Germany. “My father was often not fond of my work, but to my utter surprise, he seemed to enjoy this
performance,” she told me. To Nina’s amazement, a few months later, he booked a flight to Danzig, where he’d grown up, and which was now part of Poland. “My father swore that he would never go back. I couldn’t believe it. He walked the streets of his hometown and went to visit his old high school. A woman stopped him in the hallway and asked who he was. He told her, ‘I’ve come back.’ She told him she was the principal and offered to show him around the school, and when they visited the chemistry lab, my father noticed that their copy of the periodic table was outdated and didn’t include newly discovered elements. He realized how poverty-stricken the school was, and that he himself had not only survived but succeeded in a way that these Poles hadn’t.” Nina paused before continuing. “My father worked for the Stanford Research Institute. The first thing he did when he got back to California was to send an updated periodic table to his alma mater in Danzig. The principal wrote back to him, saying, ‘I hope you know that your visit was as important to me as I imagine it was to you.’ My father asked me what she could have meant by this—but he knew perfectly well. Something changed in my father after his visit. What happened to me in darshan had affected him as well.”

  —

  I told Klaus, an old-timer in Mother Meera’s inner circle, a little of Nina’s story. “Mother shines a light,” he agreed. “That is what she is doing in darshan, and if she sees a way that she can do more, she does.” Serious and unprepossessing, Klaus may be the least starry-eyed of the close devotees, a plainspoken man temperamentally averse to spiritual ego or exaggeration. “I didn’t have the Big Bang when I met Mother,” he said, looking like a midlevel bureaucrat in his button-down shirt with a pen clipped into the breast pocket. “I just look at myself and ask, ‘Is there a change?’ And the answer is yes.”

  “How would you describe that change?”

  “I’ve become more alive,” Klaus said simply. “I’m more happy, more loving, and more sensitive. I feel more in harmony, too. Also stronger and more present. Connected to my inner divine, to the God inside me. That is my experience.” He waited for me to draw him out further. I asked Klaus why he’d been attracted to Mother Meera in the first place. An Indian mystic who hardly speaks and offers no step-by-step formula for spiritual growth seemed an unlikely choice for a no-nonsense man like himself. Yet it was this very absence of cheesy marketing that drew him to Mother Meera, Klaus admitted. “There are gurus who tell you, ‘Pay me eight hundred and fifty dollars a day and you’re enlightened.’ It’s ridiculous. Mother has the cleanest teaching I’ve come across, and also the clearest, biggest connection to the Divine that I have seen. But she is never putting herself on a pedestal. She is empowering us and showing herself as a loving human being. Yet she’s different.”

  “How so?”

  He pondered this for a moment. “There is always a very strong silence around her,” Klaus explained. “Some people can’t handle it and they need to talk. If you are with Mother for a while, in a working situation or whatever, there is no need to speak. If one drives in a car with her, there might be silence for an hour. But it’s beautiful. It’s a different way of being. We are not used to it.

  “Mother is not answering questions in the conceptual mind,” he went on. “She’s not interested in our questions about enlightenment or ‘How many lives do I have left?’ Her answer is always ‘Why not just be happy here?’ Mother is interested in this moment. If I ask her about herself or her experiences, she doesn’t answer. It used to make me angry. But after a while, I realized it was a good thing that she is not answering. What can she answer?” Klaus shrugged and almost managed a smile. “Mother can put some concepts in my head. And then I will run with the concept for I don’t know how long. But this is not helpful. It is more helpful what she is not saying. Instead, Mother points. ‘Just look,’ she tells us. ‘Look who I am.’ She gives the power back. She is much bigger than what is on this plane. And many people are not realizing that.”

  —

  Sarah, an Englishwoman in her sixties, agreed that “such opportunities don’t come along every day”—the chance to meet someone of Mother’s ilk—though it took her “a while to catch on.” A Cambridge-educated psychologist, Sarah met with me on Skype from London. She’s a solid, auntlike personage, with silver hair cupping her ears in a pageboy. “I wasn’t prepared for the impact she had on me when I met her in 1991,” Sarah told me. “Every time I saw Mother, it was so overwhelming. It was difficult to speak, if you know what I mean.”

  “Trust me, I do,” I assured her.

  “It takes courage to overcome the fear of the divine seeing you in your entirety,” Sarah said. “I have found Mother’s presence sometimes so powerful that you can’t think straight. Rational thought leaves you. Or you simply burst into tears. That has been one of my main problems in dealing with Mother. You burst into tears, and she just laughs at you!” Sarah looked at me through the computer screen. “Divinity has a different wavelength, doesn’t it?”

  “How would you describe it?”

  “When I first went to see Mother, I was quite dense,” Sarah replied. “I don’t mean intellectually dim or slow on the uptake. I mean physically dense.” Sarah slumped her shoulders like a sack of potatoes. “Through patient contact with me, on Mother’s part, I have become less dense over the years. Vibrationally less slow, let’s put it that way. But not constantly.”

  “The change has been physiological?”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Most human beings are familiar with the enormous energy that comes with powerful feelings of affection or sexual entrancement. Or the mood-altering qualities of a landscape, or the thrill of a roller coaster, or the extraordinary tenderness you see when you encounter some small, endearing creature. The sight of a baby rabbit produces a different chemical reaction, doesn’t it? And that chemical reaction gives rise to a physical change, an altering of the physiological makeup.”

  “It does.”

  “I’m of the opinion that if we have such a thing as a soul, it is refinable and we are here to learn that.” Sarah met my eyes to make sure I was following. “This energy helps to refine us.”

  “And what about divine incarnation?”

  “For me, a powerful indicator of Mother’s true divinity is that she makes no demands of us, she makes no rules,” Sarah told me. “But what she does do is sensitize us, energetically, so that we get a better understanding of our behavior and how it affects others. It could be described as an awakening of consciousness. I don’t know how else to put it.”

  I asked Sarah if she had seen the Paramatman Light.

  “No, nothing like that! I once had the experience of sitting behind the waiting chair during darshan and being able to feel what everybody who sat in the chair was feeling,” she remembered. “It aroused such a feeling of loving compassion in me, I was astounded. I saw this lovely gold light spring between them and Mother, like an arc of a rainbow.” These fleeting visions are of little importance, however. For Sarah, it is the ongoing, ordinary lessons of the heart, the tiny awakenings, that have the most lasting and powerful impact. “When something in you has truly found Mother, your life will present to you those circumstances for your best learning,” she explained, sounding like the mental health professional she is. “Then you come to see what it is in yourself that you need to pay attention to.”

  —

  I was interested in knowing how a shared devotion to Mother Meera might affect a long-term relationship, so I tracked down Ken and Elizabeth Mellor, an Australian couple who’ve been together for fifty-two years. An attractive, silver-haired pair in their early seventies, the Mellors are popular authors and mindfulness meditation teachers in their native Victoria and were happy to talk to me on Skype about Mother’s influence on their lives.

  “I was working in Switzerland, and someone gave me a book about Mother Meera in 1996,” Ken started. “I had darshan one night and rang up Elizabeth and said, ‘You’ve got to come over straightaway.’ ”

  “From Aus
tralia?”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth. “So I did! I came for one darshan, and when I saw her, I thought, ‘This is absolutely worth it.’ ”

  As connoisseurs of consciousness studies who’ve met and studied with many powerful teachers and gurus, the Mellors have been around the block, spiritually speaking. They have been initiated by a number of well-known meditation masters since the 1960s, yet they insist that Mother Meera’s presence is wholly unique. “They were all masters of divine energy in a variety of ways. And we were familiar with the impact that someone like this can have on us,” Ken told me. “But this was different. When I was sitting there, waiting for Mother to come in, about five minutes before she arrived, the energy ramped up really strongly.”

  “What do you mean by ‘ramped up’?”

  “I started to tingle all over when she was about to arrive. It was physiological,” Ken said, reminding me of Sarah’s story. “I felt this buildup of potential on the inside of me. I don’t really know how else to put it. My body reacted very strongly, and then my consciousness began to expand in her presence.”

  Elizabeth described a similar feeling: “I had the experience of walking into the most incredible field with her. Even before we were inside the house. The closer I got, first of all to the village and then to the house, there was this buildup of energy. I had an intense reaction to that. I didn’t know what was coming, and when she actually walked in, I had a shaking, trembling thing going on through my whole body.”

  “It’s true,” Ken agreed, backing her up.

  “It was intensifying the closer she came to entering the room. When I finally saw her, my first response was ‘Goodness, she’s so tiny!’ ” Elizabeth laughed. “But her power was huge. I felt bathed through to the whole center of my being, just by her presence. There weren’t any bells or whistles, just a deep, deep sense of ease, relaxation, and feeling that I was in the right place with the right person.” Elizabeth paused. “Then afterward, I had intense experiences. I felt like I’d been plugged into some supercharged battery or something. I felt like I was opening up. It was incredibly beautiful.”