Mother of the Unseen World

by Mark Matousek

  It would be many years before the Mellors actually spoke with Mother, however. One night in 2007, they were staying at Darshan Hall, below Schloss Schaumburg, and watched as Mother was leaving for the night after darshan. “We poked our heads out the window to watch her go,” Ken told me. “Elizabeth said, ‘Good night, Mother,’ and she looked up and said, ‘Goodbye.’ I turned to Elizabeth and said, ‘Two words after eleven years. We’re really getting somewhere now!’ ”

  Elizabeth had been glad for the lack of contact. “I was so pleased that she didn’t speak for a long time. It enabled me to be alone and clear in my process with her. The other teachers we’d had were talkers. It was very important for me to have that silent connection with Mother.” As a mindfulness teacher, Elizabeth distrusts spiritual hierarchy of any kind. “I’m always repelled by people who get into high positions and divorce themselves from their humanity. Who present themselves as being not people. Although we didn’t interact personally for a long time, I always saw that she was a woman—a person—as well as being a divine being.”

  “Her human side isn’t always easy to reach, though,” I countered.

  Elizabeth disagreed. “She has an extreme humanness,” she insisted. “That combination is fantastic for me. She’s so warm and nurturing while at the same time being in this state of the divine that is incredible. And there’s no separation. All of that is present for me with her. She has likes and dislikes. All of that is part of her humanity, which is very important. If she didn’t show that, it would be very hard for me to actually connect with her. And because of that profound integration of the human and her divinity, she draws the same out of us.”

  Still, the Mellors have very different relationships to Mother Meera. Since they came to her with different needs, they have felt quite different changes in themselves. “Mother is exactly the same all the time. But her impact is unique,” said Ken. “For instance, Elizabeth was born extremely premature, and like a lot of premature children, she didn’t anchor herself completely in the body or the world. She had this transcendent consciousness right from the beginning. By contrast, I was raised in a very rigid Baptist tradition and was thick as a brick.”

  “He was,” Elizabeth agreed.

  “There wasn’t much fluidity.”

  “No,” she said, looking at me through the camera. “There wasn’t.”

  “So while Elizabeth’s process has been to become more grounded and in her body,” Ken told me, “mine has been to become more refined and aware of the transcendent.”

  “And you manage to meet in the middle?” I asked.

  They smiled at each other. Then at me. “We do our best,” said Elizabeth.

  —

  Finally, I spoke to Kirsty MacGregor via Skype from her home in Edinburgh. A devotee of Mother’s since 1992, Kirsty is a no-nonsense Scot with a wicked laugh, a hard head, and a successful career as an international consultant and speaker.

  “When I first met Mother, twenty-four years ago, she was very separate from those who went to see her,” Kirsty told me. “She was extremely shy, too. The first time she came to the U.K., Mother spoke very little. She was very happy talking to my son, who was fourteen. They had good chats, and she made his porridge one morning. But Mother was very, very private back then, much more enshrined and guarded. There was always a group of people around her. Now she is much more embodied, if that’s the right word. It’s almost like she’s moved towards matter—or the physical realm has entered in her more fully. She’s much more comfortable with it.”

  “When did that begin to change?”

  “When Mother started to travel a lot,” said Kirsty. “Since then, she’s had more physical contact with people outside of darshan. I see her engaging in a more personal way. That has been a really big shift.”

  I told Kirsty what Ulrich had said about Mother Meera being totally untouchable. She didn’t seem surprised. “We all have our own experience, don’t we? A friend of mine tells me that she hugs Mother and is physically affectionate. I have never been able to do that.” Kirsty did have a major breakthrough recently in her relationship with Mother Meera, when she overcame a hurdle of pride and fear. “I do pranam now,” Kirsty told me, citing the practice of kneeling in front of one’s teacher and touching their feet outside of darshan. “I would never have done that in the past.” While Kirsty was working at the school in India, a volunteer suggested to her—after the two of them had had an emotional conflict—that she try doing pranam to Mother. At first, she was extremely resistant. “I told her, ‘I’m not kneeling!’ I’d never knelt in front of anyone in my life! The first time I saw a friend do it, I was horrified! I thought, ‘What the hell is she doing kissing this woman’s feet? Oh my God, that’s really embarrassing!’ It was a million miles away from my tradition. I was brought up Protestant, puritanical. Now this volunteer was telling me how beautiful and freeing it is. So I decided to try it the next day.

  “I went to find Mother. She was cleaning the girls’ toilets. I asked her if I could do pranam. She said, ‘No, I’m too busy.’ Later she came out of the bathroom and said no again. Now I see that she was right, I wasn’t coming from the right place. I was making myself do it because I thought it would be good for me. I wasn’t sincere.

  “By four o’clock that afternoon, I was ready,” Kirsty continued, nodding at me on Skype. “I thought, ‘I’m actually ready to surrender.’ This time when I asked Mother to do pranam, she smiled and said yes. I knelt down in front of her, touching my forehead to the ground between her feet, and found myself filled with a deeply quiet, childlike feeling of complete trust and surrender. The lift was just extraordinary!” Since then, Kirsty has been surprised by the spontaneous impulse arising within her, whenever she has seen Mother privately, to ask if she can do pranam. “Mother lets me because she knows my issues,” Kirsty explained. “When you do it sincerely, Mother is really pleased. It’s extraordinarily pure and beautiful, and it’s probably the edge where I most need to be working now in my life. I would never have believed it before I did it. You go through a profound act of surrender. An act of trust, as well, that she won’t abuse my being vulnerable. It’s also deeply intimate. I’m bowing down to Mother Meera but also to something other, not to her personality, but this energy. It’s both personal and impersonal.”

  Earlier in life, Kirsty had worked at Brockwood Park, Jidda Krishnamurti’s school in England, and received a corresponding lesson from K himself. One day during a discussion with the staff, Kirsty remembered, “Krishnaji said to me, ‘You have to learn to become totally vulnerable.’ That was important for me to hear. Vulnerability means surrender. It’s undefended. You’re surrendering the part of you that is a construct, the egoic thing that’s holding on to its identity for survival. That’s what Krishnaji was saying. Do you know what I mean?” she asked.

  “All too well,” I assured her.

  “Then,” Kirsty said with a knowing smile, “the whole thing begins to shift.”

  10

  LEARNING TO LISTEN

  Those weeks near Schloss Schaumburg were a time out of time, blessedly peaceful, reflective, and silent. I woke every morning before dawn and shuffled down to the darshan room, where I’d sit for an hour, meditating in front of Mother Meera’s empty chair. I’d been struggling with so many unanswered questions and still didn’t know how to write about Mother. Something was eluding me. I had hoped our time together in India would reveal this missing piece, yet I’d left Madanapalle more mystified than before. Every time I thought I had it, Mother’s story turned to mercury, slipped through my fingers, and disappeared. I’d written and thrown away a hundred-plus pages, talked to dozens of devotees around the world, ransacked my journals for forgotten details, pored through transcripts of interviews I’d done with her dating back to the 1980s in the hope of catching this missing thread, but the book would not materialize. I had even spoken to Andrew about Mother—a confrontation I’d avoided for fifteen years—and was reassured to hear that
Andrew had long ago forgiven whatever had happened between him and Mother. “I’m sure there are people that Meera can help,” Andrew admitted. Still, the book that Mother Meera encouraged me to write remained unfinished. I’d sit there every morning in the darshan room, meditating in front of her chair in the dark, waiting for a sign about what to do next. But nothing emerged.

  Finally, left with no other choice, I decided to stop pushing so hard and to turn this conundrum over to God, so to speak. I remembered Adilakshmi’s advice in India—“Find out what she is trying to teach you”—and was doing my best to follow her lead. Having come to the end of my stay at Darshan Hall, I had no idea where all this was headed. Might it be that Mother’s story was too enigmatic to cohere in a conventional narrative? Was I locked in a creative conundrum to do with some shortage of writerly skill? Or was this, in fact, a problem of faith? Maybe a person with so little faith simply could not do her story justice. I’d done my best to keep an open mind, to be sensitive to views I did not share, to maintain a willing suspension of disbelief in the presence of mysteries I could not explain. As for faith, I kept a hopeful line from Tagore nearby as a model for how to think about this: “Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings while the dawn is still dark.” I realized that the poet must be right, and yet I had not managed to sing. The song itself seemed beyond my reach.

  The day before I was to leave—June 14, 2015—after an especially peaceful sitting, I opened my eyes and felt the urge to do pranam in front of Mother Meera’s chair. I’d done this only once before, shortly after meeting her thirty-one years prior, and now, after hearing Kirsty’s story, I decided to follow the impulse again. Making sure that no one else was around, I stepped up to the empty chair, knelt down, and laid my forehead on the white cushion where Mother Meera rests her feet. Instantly, my ears were filled with that same buzzing I’d first heard in the foyer of Mother’s house the night I arrived there with Andrew. I stayed where I was for several minutes, enjoying the pleasant fizzing sensation the sound elicited inside my body. I emptied my mind as I knelt there, till eventually a prayer appeared: I asked to be shown what I needed to know in order to push through this present darkness. I surrendered to the urge to kiss the cushion; then stood up feeling light-headed and calm, and slowly made my way back to my room.

  I had no intention of writing that day and had planned to spend the morning hiking up into the forest behind the Schloss. Nor had I attempted to talk to Mother Meera; I was done with trying to force that issue. She’d given no indication that she wanted to cooperate and it was a relief to have dropped the struggle. From my bedroom window, I looked down at the walled-in park on the side of Darshan Hall, brushed now with light from the morning sun. Rather than have breakfast and venture out for my hike, though, I felt the urge to turn on my computer, to read back over the stalled manuscript. I put my fingers on the keyboard and waited. The lawn was turning emerald green; the birds were landing to drink up the dew. Not a sound could be heard from where I was sitting. I stared at the blank computer screen. Then a phantom rose up in my memory.

  It was fifteen years earlier, in the dead of winter. I’d been living in Mother Meera’s house for three long, frustrating months, wrestling with another book, the memoir about death and enlightenment. The German winter had been dreary and endless; day after day, I sat at my desk, listening to rainwater pour down the drainpipe, hardly able to write a word. As now, there was some insurmountable barrier standing between me and the story I wanted to tell. I’d been grinding my gears but getting nowhere, and ached to pack my bags and leave. Each time I planned to go, however, I would hear Mother Meera’s voice in the hall or catch sight of her outside in her parka and mud boots, and think, “Where do you think you’re running to?” I had no family or home to go back to; I was free to stay there as long as I liked. My anxiety was a clear indication that I was approaching something that scared me. I could choose to escape from this pressure cooker, fleeing back into the blur of life, but I’d miss the opportunity to grow through this darkness and learn what it was that I needed to know. So I stayed in Thalheim, week after week, waiting for the fog to lift and this frightening thing to revel itself.

  One especially bleak afternoon, I was typing at my computer when an inexplicable thing occurred. Out of nowhere, a stream of invisible “liquid”—syrupy, gentle, and warm—began to drip onto the top of my head. The sensation was soothing and weirdly hypnotic; my eyelids felt heavy and wanted to close. I resisted the urge to sink into this stupor, as if it were a vat of honey, and forced myself to get back to work. When I began again to type, a voice whispered into my ear: “Stop.” I assumed my mind was playing tricks on me and pushed myself to keep on typing as this nectar continued to fall from above. Once again, the voice told me to stop. I ignored it, focused on what I was writing, and it was then that the most “supernatural” thing in my life to date took place: My computer keyboard went dead. I’d been working on it for hours when it suddenly stopped for no apparent reason, and could not be revived. I tried to stand up, to shake off the weirdness, but found that I was stuck to my chair like an insect in a pool of amber. Golden syrup seemed to have hardened around me, yet although I could not move a muscle, my vision was perfectly lucid and clear.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Mother enter the room, seemingly real and physically present. She walked toward me, lowered her head, and rested her forehead flat against mine. I could actually feel our skin touch; then she said, “Remember that I love you.” Mother pulled away from me and instantly I was overwhelmed by a nightmarish film, an ugly montage of pictures from my childhood, flashing before me in 3-D—scenes of abandonment, suicide, rapes, forced isolation, and heartless betrayals; a horror show of ancient memories shot through with trauma and primitive loss. Beyond this visual onslaught, I heard myself screaming my own mother’s name as if from behind a cemented door, a no-man’s-land where no one could hear me. I realized that I was completely alone; my mother was long gone and would never come back. As this thought crossed my mind, I felt something crack in the back of my chest, like a bone being shifted and set back in place.

  When the episode ended, I opened my eyes; I was facedown on the floor with one arm wrapped around my stomach and the other hand stuffed in a ball in my mouth. The left side of my body was completely numb. I couldn’t move for several minutes. Then I heard Mother’s voice again in my ear: “Remember that I love you.” I knew in my gut what this vision meant, the warning she was trying to send me. As long as you believe that this is what being a child means, you will never surrender to life. You will never feel at home in the world or open your heart without fear to another. You will never feel comfortable in your own skin, recognize your essential goodness, or experience your connection to God. You will never love completely.

  That was my secret truth, after all, the terror that had blocked me ever since I could remember—emotionally, creatively, and spiritually. Long before I could give voice to these things, the prospect of being a helpless child had fused with terror and loss in my psyche. Before I knew what was happening, I’d vowed not to be like a child again ever—unguarded, dependent, trusting, naive—thinking that this would destroy me. Yet as long as I feared this humble perspective, the orphan inside me would never be free. I could never fully embrace the unknown or remain open to the divine. Instead, I would remain an impostor—defensive, paranoid, sometimes hard-hearted—fearing that if I dropped the mask, or allowed myself to care too much, a malicious shadow would swallow me up.

  Now, looking out from my room at Schloss Schaumburg, I grasped what had happened in India. After years of hiding from Mother Meera, I’d finally allowed myself to trust her and come to Madanapalle in need of her help. In return, she’d rejected me—brutally, it seemed to me—and left me feeling like an orphan again, exiled from the circle of love (as when I’d seen her playing with the ashram kids). I’d convinced myself that this orphan was gone, only to realize how fraught he still was, trapped inside my emotional body. This was
the lesson that Mother had taught me. The upshot of her message was clear: If you want to write a book about me, you will need to learn about trust. You will need to begin to surrender. You’ll need to be like a child again if you hope to approach the question of God. And if you want to tell my story.

  A wave of lightness swept over me; the truth transported my mind and spirit. There would be no final closure to healing, I realized, and that was exactly as it should be. Unless our wounds remain slightly open, we begin to forget how tender we are. We can’t possibly understand holiness without remembering the depth of our own pain, the separation we feel from God. How else can one hope to write about someone whose life is devoted to suffering’s end? Without dropping the remnants of my own armor, how could I begin to understand her? I realized that this was the missing piece—the step I wanted so badly to skip—the block that kept me from proceeding. For the first time in many months, I suddenly felt the urge to write. I turned on my computer, sketched out these thoughts, and didn’t stop working for two hours straight. I finally knew, without any doubt, that this mysterious book could be written.

  —

  At darshan that evening, I sat in the back row next to Herbert. I felt no need to rush up and see Mother or let her know that I was leaving the next day. I was perfectly content to watch from afar; there was nothing grabbing or pushing inside me. I felt no craving for something more; nor did there seem to be anything missing. Nothing to seek and nowhere to get to. When my turn came, I crawled toward Mother Meera and put my head between her hands. I felt nothing, as usual, when she touched my temples and examined me with her dark eyes. Afterward, I sat in my seat, knowing that there’d been a seminal shift. I passed Daniel in the lobby on the way out; he winked and nodded his head, as if to tell me he could see it.