Mother of the Unseen World

by Mark Matousek

  —

  The following morning, I wrote a goodbye note to Mother Meera. I wanted to let her know that I’d finally figured out what was blocking me and now understood how to tell her story. I included a favorite quotation that described how this breakthrough felt to me. It was from The Sparkling Stone, a collection of meditations by John van Ruysbroeck, a Flemish mystic, published around the year 1340:

  When love has carried us above all things…we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding and penetrating us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite, and an intuition of eternity?

  I folded the note into a parchment envelope and planned to hand it off to Herbert or Daniel before I left, in the hope that it would find its way to Mother. Not two minutes later, there was a knock at the door, so faint I almost didn’t hear it. It was Bettina, one of Mother’s helpers, asking if I could come for a visit. Mother wanted to see me, she said. Could I meet her downstairs at eleven o’clock? Absolutely, I assured her. I couldn’t believe this was happening now. Bettina bowed at the waist, turned on her heel, and disappeared down the long blue hallway.

  Was this some kind of cosmic joke? I ironed a shirt and found my notes. At the stroke of eleven, I met Bettina in the parking lot and followed her down the mountain in my rental car, past the town of Diez, over the Lahn River, and along a series of country roads till the Thalheim church spire came into view. I tailed her through the familiar streets till we came to Mother’s driveway. Bettina opened the door and we climbed the stairs to Mother’s apartment. There were three tiny pairs of shoes on the doormat. “We’re here, Ma!” Bettina called out. Mother opened the door, looked me straight in the eye, and told Bettina she could go.

  She was unusually dressed-up that day, in a rose-colored sari, carefully pressed, with her hair cascading over one shoulder, more salt and pepper than I had realized. Mother offered me a seat on the sofa and took a straight-backed chair for herself.

  She surprised me by inquiring about my work. “How is the book going?” Mother asked.

  I told her that the last two days had been my most productive in months. She smiled and said, “This is good.” I reached into my pocket for a tape recorder, but Mother requested that I not use it. Instead, I pulled out a notebook and a list of questions, half of which I’d already crossed out. Mother seemed to be watching me with a look of amusement. Or was it affection? The light was hitting her feline eyes, turning them a bright hazel. The frightening Mother from India was gone for the moment. Now there was simply this gracious woman, smiling, relaxed, and strangely familiar. For the first time in all the years I’d known her, I felt perfectly at ease with Mother Meera. We chatted together about this and that, my health, the global water shortage, the school in Madanapalle. Then Mother said, “You may ask your questions.”

  I picked up my notebook and pen. “Thank you, Mother. First, let me say that I know you’re a very private person.”

  “No, I am public,” she corrected me. Mother seemed to be teasing.

  “Okay, then,” I replied. “Can you tell me what it was like for you, being a little girl? Is Kamala Reddy still inside you?”

  “I never think about it,” Mother replied.

  “Was it strange for you to know who you were, and where you came from? When you were still a child?”

  She looked quizzical.

  “Do you understand what I’m asking?”

  “People could see I was different,” she said. “Even when I was young.”

  “Do you mean your parents?”

  “Everybody.”

  “What did your parents think about you?”

  “We were never close,” Mother said. There was no sign of regret in her voice.

  I told her that I’d seen her mother, Antamma, at the school in India. She was a stick-thin, kind-faced woman who’d done pranam in front of Mother like everyone else at darshan. “I wonder what she thought about her daughter,” I asked. “Knowing what she had brought into the world. Was she surprised?”

  Mother Meera said, “She treats me with respect.” Clearly, this subject didn’t interest her.

  “What about Mr. Reddy?” I said. “What would your life have been like without him? If the two of you had never met?”

  Mother considered this. “It was fate,” she said.

  “Do you mean you couldn’t not have met him?”

  “I recognized him and he recognized me.”

  There was nothing more to be said about it. I related to Mother my understanding that Mr. Reddy’s death had caused her great pain. “Is it hard not having him around to talk to?” I asked.

  “Just because he is not in a body doesn’t mean I cannot talk to him.” She sounded completely serious.

  “And do you still have the kinds of experiences you used to share only with Mr. Reddy?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “It must have been a great help having him around when you were young. Knowing that he believed you.”

  “If God’s grace is there, all is well. If it is not there, what good is it to ask anyone for help?” Mother said, as if this were an answer to my question.

  “You make that sound so simple,” I told her.

  “God is simple. It is humans who complicate things.”

  The ways she said “humans” was odd to the ear. “And the paintings you did of Mr. Reddy’s soul after he died. Is that what you actually saw?” I asked, thinking of those visionary pictures, figures flowing together through the prismlike air. This series of spontaneous canvases is the only glimpse we have into what Mother sees—and how she sees it.

  She nodded.

  “That’s amazing, Mother.”

  “No. It is normal.”

  I took a chance. “Can you tell me what you see when you look at me now?”

  Mother glanced at the space above my head. “I see your struggles. And also your challenges.”

  “Do these correspond to the knots you untie during darshan?”

  She looked at me without speaking. I longed to ask her more about this but continued with the questions I’d prepared. “Would you say that you have good days and bad days? On a personal level?”

  “Only in India.” Mother grinned.

  “I’d never seen you get angry before.”

  “In work situations only. I must shout sometimes. It must be done. But it is not my character.”

  “It’s in your character to feel emotions, though?”

  “Yes,” Mother said. “For an avatar, also, there is pain. I must bear it.”

  “Do you ever feel fear?” I asked.

  “I am never afraid,” she told me. “I used to love going out alone in the dark. When I was a child. People said it was dangerous because there were scorpions everywhere. But it never frightened me.”

  “Are you afraid of dying, Mother?”

  “No,” she said lightly.

  We talked about the state of the world and the challenges facing human beings. “There’s so much danger and fear,” I said. “When it comes to injustice, when is it right to fight back? To use anger? To take action in the service of the good?”

  “When your heart is clear, you may act,” Mother said. “Otherwise, you only make things worse.”

  “Isn’t it better to do something than nothing at all?” I wondered. “Even if your heart’s not completely clear?”

  “The destruction of the world is a human idea. Not a divine one,” she replied.

  “Many people are terrified. They think the world is about to end.”

  Mother Meera corrected this: “Humanity will not be destroyed. There is nothing to fear.”

  I hope you’re right, I thought to myself. There were a hundred more questions I wanted to ask but our conversation had come to a stop. We sat quietly for a couple of minutes. For once, I was not overwhelmed by her silence; my brain hadn’t melted or turned to mush. I could have sat there with her for the rest of the day, in fact, and never said another word. What more was there to
ask her, really? Except, perhaps, one more thing.

  “I have one last question, Mother.”

  She looked at me.

  “Will you ever come again?” The words sounded strange coming out of my mouth. “Will you have another…incarnation?”

  “I do not know,” Mother Meera answered. “It depends on Paramatman. And also on the wishes and prayers of devotees. For me to be born again.”

  I had the sudden urge in that moment to do pranam in front of her. I remembered Kirsty’s story about the importance of being ready, though, and held back from asking Mother’s permission. “Maybe next time,” I thought to myself. I thanked Mother Meera for asking to see me, told her it meant the world to me. She seemed to know this already.

  “Call if you need me,” Mother said. I promised her that I’d stay in touch, waited for her to stand up first, then followed her back out to the hallway. Resisting the urge to touch her shoulder, I put my hand on my heart instead. Mother looked at me with great love in her eyes. “Will I ever know who you are?” I thought when she turned and went back into her kitchen, leaving the door ajar behind her. I walked carefully down the white marble stairs and glanced back over my shoulder, once, to see that the door was still open. Then I stepped out into the glorious morning.

  AFTERWORD

  Late one August afternoon in 1991, Andrew Harvey and I were invited to hear a talk at the New Camaldoli monastery in Big Sur, California. The speaker was Father Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk and author who’d devoted his life to founding a Christian-Hindu ashram in South India, and to a rapprochement among the world’s mystic traditions. Knowing Father Bede from his writings, I was taken aback upon entering the small chapel by his otherworldly beauty, gaunt as an El Greco saint, snowy-haired in a saffron robe. In flawless Oxbridge tones, Father Bede proceeded to speak for an hour on a topic that didn’t interest me much—prayer in daily life, I think—then he turned, unexpectedly, to a recent experience that had shattered his own spiritual life.

  Seated outside his ashram hut one morning, Father Bede told us, he had suddenly been knocked to the ground by an unseen force while he was praying. Frightened, the eighty-four-year-old monk managed to crawl to his bed, where he remained for a week in a semiconscious state, attended to by a team of doctors unable to diagnose his condition. Finally, after ten days, the doctors gave up hope and Father Bede was given his last rites. A short time later, as he lay there dying, a voice came to him with a message. “Remember the Mother,” the voice said. Father Bede recovered shortly thereafter.

  I found this confession extraordinary. Here was one of the great mystic pioneers of our time, a devout Christian who’d spent the past fifty years working toward spiritual reform, admitting a major oversight in his faith. “It is the Mother,” Father Bede went on to say, who animates the whole of creation. It is the Mother whose grace is so sorely needed by the church, to help it enfold a suffering world, to quiet its fundamentalism, to dissolve its bureaucracies, and to heal our ailing planet.

  After the talk was finished, Andrew and I sat on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. The sun had nearly set behind a bank of golden clouds. We watched as the light played on the dark water, but felt no need to speak. “All of this is the Mother,” I thought, remembering what Father Bede had said. I imagined us floating in her glass belly, gazing out onto a magical world of fantastic colors, shapes, and adornments, being given an experience of what a moment in her body might feel like, the rapture of it. The boulders jutting up from the black water, the eucalyptus trees, the gulls and pelicans and seals squalling in the increasing dark: all these things revealed themselves to me as part of her in that moment. This wasn’t metaphorical thinking but a tangible presence, a sensory suffusion. I was breathing her—being carried inside her breath; the world appeared to expand and contract with the movement of my own lungs. When Andrew left, I stayed there for a long time, staring out into this natural heaven.

  I started this book with a simple question: How does a person choose to respond when confronted with incomprehensible things, aspects of reality we can’t fathom—the transcendental, the unearthly, the ineffable? Do we withdraw to our familiar corners, closing our eyes to evidence of the unseen world, or open ourselves to mystery and the overwhelming evidence of how little we actually know? This is, indeed, the most important choice any of us will make in a lifetime: question or withdraw, reveal or conceal, venture out or stay fixed in our views, denying what we are afraid to explore. “The saint is one who knows that every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis,” Aldous Huxley wrote. “For at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decision—to choose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness and the way that leads towards light and life.” Stepping through the door that Mother had opened, moving toward this invisible realm, I had chosen life and light. When I made that choice, my worldview was transformed. Today, I’m no longer as cynical about using the word “God,” either, since it doesn’t matter what we call it. As long as we admit that this power is there or, if we haven’t glimpsed it ourselves, are willing to be shown.

  “The greatest scientists are humble because they are used to what they cannot see,” Mother Meera tells us. “And because what they are discovering is revealing mystery after mystery to them.” Humility and wonder go hand in hand. Without humility, the willingness to be shown, the world goes flat, predictable, wrong. The mind holds sway, the spirit sags, and the mystical passes us by without notice. We shrink to fit into what we’re not afraid of; life comes to seem far smaller than it is. We forget that we’re children of this great Mother, floating inside her miraculous belly. Far from being unscientific, this awareness is “the sower of all true science,” as Albert Einstein affirmed. “The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical,” the father of relativity believed. “He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

  There are signs and wonders, if we keep our eyes open. Creation is a field of light.

  To David Moore

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest gratitude to Mother Meera and those close to her for their help with this book: Adilakshmi Olati, Kirsty MacGregor, Herbert Bednarz, Daniel Toplak, Michael Zarthe, and Tony Akkanen. Thank you, too, to the many devotees who shared their stories with me in India, Germany, and the United States.

  To my extraordinary editor, Cindy Spiegel, whose faith and support have been such a gift; to Joy Harris, my beloved agent, thank you for twenty-five years of friendship; and to my friend Sharyl Volpe, whose help in preparing this manuscript has been indispensable.

  Finally, to the family and friends who’ve kept me afloat along the way: Barbara Graham, Florence Falk, Robert Levithan, Eve Ensler, Gwenyth Jackaway, Martha Cooley, Catherine Ingram, Karen Fuchs, Gary Lennon, James Lecesne, Michael Klein, Joe Dolce, Jill Angelo, Belle Heil, Martin Shanker, Jeanne Demers, Nina Wise, Naomi Shragai, Trisha Coburn, and Andrew Harvey. Deep bows.

  And most of all to David Moore, my partner in all things. Amor est spiritus qui nos alet.

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