spiritual ‘autobiography’ as well as his revelations of the Mother’s inner dimensions contained in the
book On Himself and on the Mother had just then been out. And I hungrily plunged into it; with it my appetite to know the Mother increased all the more. My evening schedule was almost fixed, and I spent all my time in the Playground watching the Mother and her ‘multiple’ play. The Mother then was coming to the Playground every evening. She distributed salted peanuts to her children assembled there. Each of us would go to her by turn, do pranam, and receive the mahaprasad from her luminous hands. Sitting meditatively at a distance of about 30-40’ from her chair placed near the map of spiritual India I would alternately look at her and the starry sky above. My limited mind with its rationalistic set up for a long time would not digest the Master’s statement, “There are three ways of being of the Mother of which you can become aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe. Transcendent, the original supreme Shakti, she stands above the worlds and links the creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal, the cosmic Mahashakti, she creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces. Individual, she embodies the power of these two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and mediates between the human personality and the divine Nature.” * [Footnote-text: * SABCL Vol. 25, p. 20. ]Occupying an infinitesimal space in the infinitely vast universe, my mind argued to itself, how she would determine the entire cosmos. A mind that was accustomed to move only within the paramaters of space and time could by no means understand the language of cosmic consciousness. Though physically a part of the phenomenal universe, the Mother in her consciousness embodied the entire universe. The universe is of the nature of consciousness, and consciousness indeed holds the key to the riddle of the universe. Theoretically of course I was a student of Vedanta and had read the Upanishads and Brahamasutras as a teenager. Our universities and colleges, by the very reason of their establishment, do not initiate their students into the secrets of existence, nor do they ever believe in any secret purpose of creation. My national ethos and my cultural environment did help me in inducing a belief of sorts in the phenomenon of Avatarhood, but I had never expected to encounter an Avatar in flesh and blood in my life time.
Lo and behold, I was face to face with the Supreme Mother herself. In answer to a query:
“Q: There are many who hold the view that she was human but now embodies the Divine Mother and her “Prayers”, they say, explain this view. But to my mental conception, to my psychic feeling, she is the Divine Mother who has consented to put on her the cloak of obscurity and suffering and ignorance so that she can effectively lead us—human beings to Knowledge and Bliss and Ananda and to the Supreme Lord.
“A: The Divine puts on an appearance of humanity, assumes the outward human nature in order to tread the path and show it to human beings, but does not cease to be the Divine. It is the manifestation that takes place, a manifestation of a growing divine consciousness, not human turning into divine. The Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood, so the view held by “many” is erroneous.”
* [Footnote-text: * SABCL Vol. 25, p. 48.]
This and the other revelations about the Mother’s divinity in the said work kept me totally absorbed until I was wholly converted. It was not conversion, it was altogether a reversal of consciousness—a rebirth, or rather, a new birth into a different dimension of Reality. In Tagore’s language what I saw was no longer real, and the really real could not be seen by or known by the physical mind.
* * *
