Part One

1. THE JOURNEY TO JILLELLAMUDI

T

HERE IS A PROFOUND mystery at work in our lives. It is easy to miss. We live as hunting hounds, noses glued to the ground, seeing only what is right before us, never looking up at the trail ahead or behind at the path already traveled. It is easy to pass a life in that way, unaware that we are headed in any particular direction or coming from any recognizable point of origin. For the most part we drift. But there must come a moment in each of our lives when we pause long enough on the way to assess the territory, to gaze down the trail, to recognize its patterns, to wonder if there is not, after all, some larger plan or grander fate that gives context to our daily rounds. Are we not on a journey, you and I? At this moment it seems so. From this high peak the joys and the pains, the wrong turnings, the long and random drifts, the blind valleys and lofty viewpoints, all seem to have been necessary. Everything is in its place and life has a meaning, though not strictly a rational one. And all journeys have a destination, which is not necessarily a place, and certainly not anyplace I have not been before and am not now. And all journeys have a beginning, which is not separate from their final goal and not separate from the long and winding path. This realization is a moment of sheer magic when everything falls so uncannily into place, and mysteries and explanations dissolve wordlessly in a PRESENCE, which supersedes them both. It is the rarest of glimpses, forgotten almost as it occurs, the stuff of dreams, and yet real in a way that makes all else seem a dream. It is REAL, but for us this momentary awakening seems so delicate and evanescent. For us, the sniffing hound’s life of random, unconnected moments seems real, although, in fact, it is evanescent, vanishing from beneath our noses even as we cling stubbornly to the trail of scent. No matter. Fate is kind even when it seems least kind. It places an obstacle on the path. But that obstacle is an opportunity; the hound is forced, despite itself, to look up from the trail in wonder. For the first time, it is jolted from the trance of the chase; for the first time, it finds itself face to face with the prey. And yet it is not at all what it had expected. The prey is none other than itself, the hound is hunter and hunted, seeker and sought, source and goal. The obstacle is a glassy pool in which is seen, for the first time, one’s own flawless reflection. And so, dear readers, fellow travelers, this is the story of my journey—our journey—to Jillellamudi. Jillellamudi was my obstacle, my opportunity. But to say that the journey ended there is only half the truth. In reality, it began there. The journey to Jillellamudi is not yet complete. In Jillellamudi, I glimpsed my own true reflection in the eyes of one who was a perfect mirror for what is deepest within me. In her bottomless tranquility, I saw an image of myself as I truly am. But it was, after all, only a reflection. To grasp at it was to lose it; to lose it was to seek it again and again, to become a professional seeker of what had never been lost and could never be found outside myself, except as a mere reflection. And so this is the story of a journey that is not yet complete, a journey to Jillellamudi which is really a journey inward. Others wiser than myself have said that this stage of active seeking, of devotion to an ideal and grasping at reflections, is a necessary prelude. The hound must chase its own image round and round the pool until it drops exhausted in its own place, the place it never really left and therefore could never find—until it stopped looking. This is what they say. I report it as hearsay and not from experience. My experience to date is only of the chase and not the exhausted, surrendered fulfillment. Someday, perhaps, we will look into each other’s eyes and know, without a word being spoken, that the journey is done. But today we can only share one pilgrim’s tale of a journey to a place worth visiting. ❖

That Jillellamudi is a place worth visiting was something I didn’t know at the time. My initial attraction was casual. As so often happens with the truly important events of our lives, it hardly seemed remarkable, this trip to an anonymous village of mud

and thatch on the seared coastal flatlands. The hound, nose glued to the ground, had no hint of what lay ahead. I remember clearly my first meeting with Amma, how self-conscious I felt walking out of the heat and tropical brightness into that dim, windowless bedroom where she sat crosslegged on a large bed. All was still save for the air conditioner’s low hum. Why was I here? What did I want, that I had come to disturb her in a nursing home where she was no doubt suffering from some serious illness? Was I expected to prostrate? Would she notice my confusion? From the outset, I was ambivalent about coming to see Amma. At the time I first heard about her, I was living in another ashram (spiritual community) and had come to regard the holy man of that place as my spiritual guide. I had no conscious desire to look elsewhere; the very thought of it would have seemed disloyal and a sign of weak resolve. I had heard about the Mother from an Indian acquaintance who had been to Jillellamudi. As we chatted at a village soda fountain, he told me about Amma—how she almost never ate but loved to feed others; how visitors of all castes and from abroad were fed and housed free of charge at her ashram, which wasn’t really an ashram but the “House of All,” a home-like environment where the extended family of her devotees live and work. Most of all, he talked about how kindly and motherly Amma was, how she made you feel welcome and treated you less as her guest than as her own child. Being a poet at heart, my friend Debendra spoke glowingly of Amma’s genius at capturing the eternal truths of spiritual life in a colloquial, terse but eloquent Telugu. When he translated a few of his favorite sayings, however, I was impressed only by how flat and commonplace the Telugu puns sounded in English. Actually, for all his evident devotion and enthusiasm, nothing that Debendra said particularly struck me, and when he took me to his room to show me a small black and white photo of Amma, her round, amorphous features made her look more ordinary than it seemed a great saint ought to look. The tinsel crown which she wore and the aluminum trident which she held in her right hand, far from inspiring awe and reverence, made her appear slightly ridiculous to my jaundiced Western eyes. Still, I took down his instructions on how to get to Jillellamudi in the hope that it would be, if nothing else, a pleasant place to relax for a few days and meditate away from the hubbub of the large, internationally known spiritual community where I was staying. I didn’t think any more about it until the renowned guru of that ashram left for Bombay. Jillellamudi, less than two hundred miles away, seemed like a good place to take a break. So I headed off for a change of scenery without any great expectations. After a full night’s train journey sprawled on the bare wooden boards of an upper berth, I arrived at the town of Bapatla, a slow-paced district headquarters of low whitewashed residences, dilapidated temples, and open-air markets. The town seemed all but deserted as I made my way to the Matrusri Press, from where it would be possible, Debendra had said, to catch the converted World War II Japanese troop-carrier which shuttled back and forth to Jillellamudi village. Entering the musty print shop, the typesetters gaunt and shirtless seated by their large wooden trays of leads, I inquired of the elderly manager when the van would be leaving for Jillellamudi. “Jillellamudi?” he asked doubtfully. “No use going. You won’t find anyone there. Amma’s health has not been good. She’s staying for several months in a nursing home.” My spirits deflated like a punctured tire. I had come all the way to this dusty out-of-the-way place for nothing. It served me right, I reflected. I had no business coming. It had been sheer restlessness and now I was stranded. Was it possible to salvage anything? “Perhaps I might take Amma’s blessing at the nursing home,” I heard myself wondering aloud before there was a chance to consider if I really wanted to do that. The manager hesitated a brief moment before answering that he was under instructions not to reveal Amma’s whereabouts to anyone, so that she might recuperate without disturbance. “Well, this meeting is clearly not meant to take place,” I consoled myself inwardly with proper Indian fatalism, and was making my way to the door when the pressman had a change of heart. Since I had come all the way from a distant country, he allowed, perhaps an exception could be made in my case. It was the same gratuitous hospitality to foreigners which I had come across so many times before in India—banks cashing my travelers checks after hours, berths being found on fully booked trains. I took down the address of the nursing home and purchased a small booklet and a crudely printed color photograph of Amma. Thanking the manager for his help, I walked out into the town somewhat hesitantly, reminding myself that I had not been so keen to see this holy woman in the first place, and did I really want to make another long, possibly fruitless train journey on the off-chance of being able to visit her—in a nursing home of all places? In the end, the fact of my having come so far already, a reluctance to admit defeat even when a victory seemed of such dubious value, won out over the impulse to call it quits. Backpack in tow, I walked across the road to the railway station and boarded the next train southbound toward the city of Nellore where Mother was staying at the clinic of Dr. S. V. Subba Rao. As the train clattered across the expansive landscape, empty except for the widely scattered green islands that were the villages and an occasional windswept line of fan-leafed palmyra trees, I looked at the booklet that I had purchased from the Bapatla press.

The writing was admirably clear and to the point by the prevailing standards for such literature. Simply, and in the austere, inspiring tone of scripture, of legend, it told a biblical tale of visions and miracles-–a child who refused to eat and lived for years without food or water, who lectured her elders on Truth and God, and fell effortlessly into samadhi—the highest state of mystic rapture—while still in her infant’s cradle. The sayings of the Mother in the back of the pamphlet were enigmatic and strangely moving—“Long ago I begot and reared all of you—now I have revealed myself”; “No one knows my measure; I am the measure of all”; “There is one veil to disguise myself and another veil to exhibit my disguise to you. There is always a veil within a veil. None can penetrate with mere talk or treasure”. It appealed very much to a sense of mystery and of adventure. The tropical brightness and expansiveness of the landscape rushing past reverberated somehow with these strange sayings, magnified them in an odd way. I felt curiously elated, like a pilgrim who had just cast off all earthly ties, contented, self-contained, on the trail of something intriguing but as yet undefined. As the train sped across the coastal plain, I found myself looking down repeatedly at the small color picture. This apparently unremarkable photo showed Amma with her chin cupped by the fingers of her left hand, gazing directly at the camera. Her pleasing face appeared calm and expressionless. But there was something compelling—a startling directness—which unconsciously made me turn to it again and again. Before the trip was over, the Mona Lisa itself could not have appeared more unfathomable nor so quietly eloquent as this crude image! When I gazed down, it was as if a living person gazed back from the print. Was Mother even now aware of my impending visit? I thought back to one of the sayings in the booklet: “Those whom I don’t see, don’t come here.” I addressed the picture mentally: Are you seeing me even now, Amma? And those oddly penetrating eyes seemed to confirm it. Soon the train was rattling over the Penner River and a few moments later we were pulling into Nellore. Leaving the station, I wove my way past the waiting rickshaw-pedalers into the thronged city, losing myself for a time amid the chaotic profusion of carts and bicycles and langorous cows that, in typical fashion, chose the most crowded lanes to lie down in. Nellore had a vitality and color not to be found in its more grimly efficient counterparts in the West. In India, nothing is hidden. The Indian city is a Ganges of life and death and everything in between. And to walk those teeming streets was to be caught up irresistibly in the flow, to become a part of it, anonymous, a small bubble secure in its anonymity, at one with life’s tumbling waters. Monkeys jabbered and balanced themselves precariously on the high-tension wires, waiting for the opportune moment to swoop down on the fruit merchant’s cart below. At a corner shrine, a businessman devotee vigorously clanged the hanging bell, drowning out the tinny chimes of the bicycle rickshaws, the wooden rumble of the oxcarts, haggling voices, haunting fragments of song…. Floating above all, a thin thread of sound, the Moslem call to prayer. It was late afternoon, time to find a hotel. As I searched for a place to stay, my gaze was arrested by the photo of a woman draped in thick flower garlands from the knees up, which was displayed in the window of a photographer’s shop. Moving closer, my suspicions were confirmed. It was the Jillellamudi Mother gazing out at me once more. This was a very good omen, I decided. I checked into the first cheap lodge I could find. Tomorrow I would search out Dr. Subba Rao’s clinic. Awakening refreshed, the next morning I gazed over at the picture of Amma that I had placed on a stool at the head of the bed. Stretching out on my back, I repeated the sacred syllable Aum quietly to myself. As I lay chanting absentmindedly, a subtle vibration arose, an inner hum which rapidly grew in intensity until it seemed to fill every cell in my body. Then there was a quantum shift; I lost all sensation of my body; it had dissolved in the hum. There was the impression of the mind’s being sucked forcefully into an unfamiliar realm. Thoughts and images disappeared and, for a fleeting instant, freedom, radiant, absolute, like nothing I’d experienced before or since. Then in a flash I was back on my bed in the hotel room. It was over so quickly. I sat bolt upright, overwhelmed by the strangeness of it. How often had I sat in meditation, long and painfully, but nothing remotely like this had ever happened. It was as if I had been swept up in some ineffable psychic wind and then dropped just as swiftly back into my accustomed self. I sat on the edge of the bed, disoriented, a delicate sensation of incorporeal joy lingering on like a rare perfume… But of what? Of whom? It did not occur to me to make the connection with my impending visit to Amma. That association would come only later when the hound, at leisure, nose lifted from the spoor, would perceive that the strange wind had been Amma’s own breath, her welcoming touch. The great miracle-worker, Sri Sai Baba of Shirdi, used to say that his devotees were like birds whose feet were tied to a string. And he—Sai Baba—was the one who was holding the string. When the proper time arrived that he should reveal himself, he simply hauled them in by the leg. In retrospect, I can say that I was then in the process of being reeled in. But the curious thing is that the bird on the string thinks it is walking under its own steam. That was my impression, at any rate, as I headed off into the town in the still comfortable brightness of the morning in search of Dr. Subba Rao’s clinic. Arriving at the private home on a quiet, tree-lined residential street, I was greeted courteously at the

door without the usual surprise that the apparition of a foreign face inspires in such circumstances. When I stated why I had come, I was taken to a wing of rooms for patients at the back of the clinic. It was then left to me to register surprise, confronted— apparition-like—with the sight of the four Westerners who had preceded me. The young men were British and had been living with Amma at Jillellamudi for some years. When she left for the clinic, they had been invited to come along. Now and then, unpredictably, according to Amma’s health, it would be possible to sit with her in her room, I was told. And some hours later we were called. At the last moment, however, my head spun with misgivings. All the old doubts, feelings of disloyalty to my guru, feelings of inadequacy, painful self-consciousness, settled in like a swarm of angry bees. There was the impulse to escape as we were being ushered into the dim, windowless room. But escape was not possible. I entered feeling raw and exposed. At first, Mother appeared remote, as if absorbed in thought. Her surprisingly small form (she is a bit under five feet tall) was erect with a natural dignity and stillness. She seemed to be suffering physically and rather weak. But the overwhelming impression was of a tremendous coiled force. Her body was radiant, like the enhaloed saints painted by the Old-Masters. The room was bathed in a most delicate energy, a palpable inwardness. As we took turns bowing before her, Amma appeared almost not to notice, her eyes unfocused, gazing placidly off into space. When I took my place on the floor a few feet in front of her bed, Amma turned toward me. Her eyes glowed softly; there was neither curiosity nor judgment in her look, only a placid intensity and openness. Above all, there was the same startling directness in her expression that had been so intriguing in the small color photo. Something inside me wanted to surrender, to relax, but there was at the same time a desire to flee from her penetrating gaze. Amma sensed this immediately. She cocked her head and looked at me quizzically for a few moments. Amiably, with Dr. Subba Rao acting as interpreter, Mother asked where I had come from, how long I had been in India, what ashrams I had visited. My anxiety faded as I told my story. In addition to Dr. Subba Rao and his family and the Westerners, there was the young woman whom I would come to learn was Vasundhara, Mother’s dedicated shadow of an attendant. From the informal way Amma addressed them, it seemed to me that they must be especially intimate companions of hers. I would find out later that this was not really true, that Amma treats everyone with the same motherly familiarity, and that even infrequent visitors feel as if she were one of the family. Mother was at ease, beaming, gesturing fluidly. Her speech flowed in natural rhythms, pausing now for effect, now tripping gaily as water over stones. It seemed closer to poetry, to fine dramatic discourse, than to ordinary speech. It was all so effortless, so unaffected, that it was a pleasure to watch her. I remembered then what Debendra had told me about her eloquent use of words and wished that I could understand Telugu. It was enough to watch how others hung on her words to get the sense that she was indeed a master of language. The impression of weakness, of illness, had altogether disappeared. Indeed, she hardly seemed anymore a woman in her late fifties. Her expression was transparent and winning—a wide-eyed child sharing her secrets with some close friends. What struck me was Amma’s utter simplicity, the unpretentiousness in such sharp contrast with the self-important demeanor of so many other spiritual teachers I had come across. There was absolutely no hint of the assumed gravity, the pontifical distance, the self-conscious wisdom of the professionally holy. She smiled frequently and engagingly and told funny stories, yawned and stretched like a lioness. And yet, underlying the evident good cheer, Mother was solid as a rock, imperturbable. Her laughter was free without being abandoned, her manner refreshingly simple without appearing naive; her obvious affection for the devotees was touching but not in the least bit sentimental. It was impossible not to feel awed by her personality. She gave the impression of a stately palm tree, swaying with each passing breeze, but with taproots holding tenaciously to earth. There was a settled quality, an absoluteness; it looked superficially like poise or self-confidence, and yet there was something about it utterly unlike these rather too studied qualities of the world. The words of the Hindu Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, came to mind: “Beyond hope, beyond fear… the steadfast sage.” Just sitting and watching, something of Amma’s settled peace worked on the mind like a balm. It was easy to understand why the Hindu scriptures say that at the feet of the sage the devotee finds a true haven. Here I felt sheltered, secure. The dominant impression of that first meeting, however, was of someone who flowed into another person’s reality as water into a crack. When she addressed someone in her quiet, endearing way, Amma seemed to be speaking directly to the person’s heart, coaxing, soothing, reassuring. You could feel people letting down their defenses. When she smiled so artlessly, everyone smiled. Before long, I was forgetting to feel sorry for myself that I couldn’t understand Amma’s jokes. I found myself grinning broadly anyway, the joy no longer needing any explanation or pretext. Strangely, at this point Mother began addressing some of her Telugu comments to me, and she turned to me now and again as she talked, as if for my reaction. Somehow, it didn’t appear at all odd that she was including me in on the conversation. Was she not hinting that what she was communicating was not primarily

a question of the words (which I obviously could not understand) but of something behind them, something which I could tune in to from the silence which we shared? As if reading my mind, Mother motioned for Shyam (one of the Britishers) and myself to come closer. She knitted her brow and held her hand open in the air, searching for words. Then she grinned sheepishly and proclaimed in her thick Indian English, “Language problem,” as if by way of excuse. But no sooner had she said this, than her expression became thoughtful all of a sudden, and she answered herself: “No language problem. Only one language: mind language.” As she said the words “mind language,” Mother pointed to herself and then waved at us, the sense of this gesture being that we need not depend on words to communicate with Amma, nor she with us. Thinking that Amma was referring to mental telepathy or some such power, I objected that this might be possible for her, but not for us. Amma only smiled in response, and her way of doing so made it clear that she was not going to let me off the hook so easily! The truth of Amma’s contention has since been driven home powerfully to me. I don’t know much more Telugu today than I did at the time of that first meeting. Indeed, I never felt it was necessary to learn. I can hardly imagine what more she might say with words that she hasn’t already communicated wordlessly! On the few occasions when I have had some lengthy discussions with Amma through a translator, I couldn’t help but feel that the integrity of our communication had somehow descended, its purity compromised: the silence always seemed so much richer, cleaner, more precise. I’ve often thought that the reply which Amma made to a questioner who asked her for a message on how to live life is right to the point here. She said: “Only that which can impel you to act is the real message. Words can’t do it. If we had to depend on words alone, everything would end in doubt and confusion.” Splendid! She has really nailed the dry and unyielding quality of language, especially where spiritual questions are concerned. If spiritual seekers take words as ends in themselves, they lead inevitably into a desert of apparent contradictions, misunderstandings, or at best a sterile mental knowledge which, like a bowl of plastic fruit, lacks all juice. Fortunately for us, the sages have got the juice. They influence us, not by what they say, but by who they are. And who they are is very juicy indeed! This is what Mother is suggesting when she states: “Owing to the need to reveal that which transcends speech, this unique manifestation has become necessary....” All of this is not to say that Amma is the least bit uncomfortable with language. She uses words playfully, loves puns and alliteration, the melody of language and its capacity for enigma, for asking pointed questions and not—as is so often the case with us—out of a grim seriousness to impress, to convince, to formulate airtight answers. Occasionally, there are visitors who wish to engage in lengthy and often combative discussions with Amma on philosophical questions. Mother says these people come to practice their favorite hobby with her—talking. And she is generally willing to accommodate them. But she remains keenly aware that such talk is a hobby, a sideshow. The “action” is clearly elsewhere for one who does not need words, either to impart her own special treasures or to know the hearts of those around her. I realized the truth of this was driven home to me at the end of that first meeting. A cassette of Hindu devotional songs or bhajans was played. The poignancy of the bhajans meshed with my own mood of gentle longing. Being with Amma had stirred a vague nostalgia, for I knew not what, and I was relishing the strange sweetness of the mood. When the doctor’s wife came in to say that dinner was ready, I had a twinge of regret at the thought of leaving the music. Without missing a beat, Mother turned to me and motioned at the tape recorder, saying that I could take it with me and listen in the dining room if I liked. Ordinarily, the fact of Amma’s reading my thoughts should have struck me. And yet it had happened so seamlessly and without ceremony that it very nearly slipped by without notice. Does the child find it remarkable that its mother should know, without being told, when he is hungry or distressed? There was nothing to be surprised at in Amma’s knowledge. It has always seemed to me less a question of consciously reading another’s mind than a natural intuitive function of motherhood itself. The true wonder was not, as I would soon discover, that Mother knows the superficial contents of the minds of those around her, but rather that she could so consistently look beyond that content to the hidden depths. This is the mystery that was to unfold itself gradually during the coming days. How to express it? To be held by her gaze was to realize that all others before have merely looked from the outside; and now I am seen for the first time, seen not as the world sees me, not even as I see myself, but as I truly am, behind the shifting facade of thought and image. God looks at God and something tremendous, without limits, within me is unveiled, as it were, and recognized for the first time. The week in Nellore passed swiftly. When it was time to return to the ashram where I had been living, I was crestfallen. Had it been only a week? Mother seemed so familiar, as if I had known her my whole life. But even that is not quite it. It felt more like Mother was herself some integral—if long neglected—aspect of my own beingness. That is the strange part of it. She had somehow managed to lodge herself within my flesh, to become part of me. And how do you say goodbye to yourself? Resolving to return as soon as possible, I took my leave. And so a few months later, I was trekking across flat paddyland with an American and a young New Zealander whom I had

told about the Mother. We were making our way toward the House of All, a white phantom-ship shimmering between the seas of earth and sky. An absurd image flashed through my mind of the scene in the American movie classic, The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy and friends dance arm in arm down the yellow brick road toward the Emerald City. But was it so absurd an image after all? The Tin Man was looking for a heart, the Straw Man for a mind, the Cowardly Lion for courage, and Dorothy, to return to her real home. And was it not in search of similar qualities of heart and soul—and a comparable sense of belonging, a metaphysical home, if you will—that we were making our way down this dirt track to Jillellamudi? The analogy did not end there, as I would soon find out. Do you remember how the Wizard responded to each of them? Did he produce what they wanted magically out of his Wizard’s bag of tricks? Not at all. He told each that what he or she was searching for was already inside themselves—and it was true enough. This is precisely what Amma tells all who trudge this dusty road—and it is also true! But I have gotten ahead of the story. At the time, we were simple pilgrims who knew only our own shortcomings and our hopes that they be miraculously filled from the outside. That there might be another, more accurate, way of looking at it hadn’t yet occurred to us.

2. THE ARRIVAL

M

Y IDEA WAS TO STAY AT Mother’s ashram for a few weeks. Though I had not yet been to Jillellamudi, this journey felt very much like a homecoming. Little did I suspect that Jillellamudi was to be home for the better part of the next decade, let alone that time itself was about to lose all its accustomed meaning in this new world which, by the familiar Western standards of clocks and hurry, was already halfway to eternity. Days, weeks and months were to melt imperceptibly into a single serene flow with little to distinguish one from the next. Never before had I felt so isolated and timeless. Life had become radically simple. You ate rice and vegetable curry with your hand, you washed your clothes by beating them against a flat rock, you chanted at the temple at sunset, slept on a woven grass mat on the roof under the stars, and awakened with the first light of dawn. There no longer seemed to be anything convincing to worry about; even news of world events rarely trickled through to our womblike universe. Indeed, the only news that seemed to matter was whether or not Amma was giving darshan (appearing to offer her blessings to her devotees), something that she did when the spirit moved her, usually two or three times a day, depending on her health, the flow of pilgrims, and other, more nebulous factors. The romantic vision that I had formed of life in the presence of a great Christ-like saint turned out to be worlds away from what I found at Jillellamudi. Instead of an atmosphere rife with the miraculous and charged with a messianic excitement, I found a close-knit family and a back-to-basics sanity. Life had never seemed so blessedly “normal” before. It was something new for me— no TV, no telephone, no shopping malls or museums, none of the bread-and-circuses hubbub that a New York City upbringing had accustomed me to. Quite without any conscious effort or intention, the mind began to turn inward, the muddy waters of personality settled out a bit, and the inner and outer worlds appeared with an unaccustomed sharp-edged clarity. At Jillellamudi, even the most ordinary events became somehow special. Taking a bucket bath, writing a letter, chatting over a cup of milk tea in the late afternoon—things that get blurred beyond recognition by the neurotic speed of modern life here—became distinct and worthy of care and attention. All of a sudden there was time; time to do things properly, time to sit and reflect, time to do nothing at all, with no regrets or feelings of guilt. There was nothing to accomplish here and nothing to become. It was a challenge of a new kind. Westerners especially could feel overwhelmed by the reigning sense of benign nondirection at Jillellamudi. Not only were the usual worldly diversions absent, but there did not seem to be a disciplined atmosphere of ordered spiritual endeavor either. It’s easy for a casual visitor to misunderstand, to fail to see that the apparent purposelessness of life at Jillellamudi has a deep purpose, that the indolence is rich and full; even the boredom is interesting and the lack of formal teaching

is itself a teaching. To understand all of this properly requires the ability to let go—or at least to hold in suspension—certain basic habits and mental assumptions about time and utility. Not everybody can do it for long. There are those who cannot bring themselves to stay for more than a few days at a time, and even then they congratulate themselves for having undergone a difficult austerity. But for a certain type of person, Jillellamudi provides a kind of laboratory, where one learns by practical experience something of the values that Amma teaches: to accept what is with reverence and gratitude, to appreciate the sublimity of the ordinary, to refrain from struggling to impose one’s own pattern on the world. These are the passive, maternal virtues for which our goal-directed society has little time. And they are at the core of the Mother’s unique philosophy of life. I can hear a volley of objections that such attitudes would lead to stagnation, to an end to “progress.” They are, to some degree, my own objections as a Western man of the modern world, which is why I can hear them so well, I suppose. But what are the results of our crazed, headlong dash for unbridled self-assertion and progress? A world ready to blow itself up, poisoning itself with industrial waste, ready to pave over the last wild place and consign the last wild creatures to a zoo. A little wise stagnation, a little reverence, might not be such a bad idea, after all, if only to balance out a bit the wild rush in the opposite direction. So Jillellamudi, where nothing much seems to take place, is just fine in my book. There are plenty of other places to learn how to do things. Jill-ellamudi is a place to learn how not to do things—not make bombs, not take oneself so seriously, not foment revolutions (even spiritual ones). It is good that there is at least one such “useless” place left. Who knows, maybe it’s even useful! And what’s more, it‘s not nearly so dull as it might at first appear. A lot is happening, even if it is not on the surface for all to see. The drama at Jillellamudi is an inward one, the slow-motion drama of growth and development, insight and the birth of selfknowledge. It’s not the bread-and-circuses variety of restless entertainment that keeps us occupied here. Or, if it is a circus, then Amma is the ringmaster, animal-trainer, magician, and clown all rolled into one enigmatic bundle. To watch her, to ponder over her multifaceted nature, becomes a full-time occupation. But just try to pin her down, to grasp hold of her and, lo and behold, she’s wearing a new costume, acting a different role. Which is not to imply that there is anything devious about her. On the contrary, nobody could be more straightforward and transparent. Amma is what she is, unwaveringly. It is we, in our attempts to fit her into familiar categories—guru, seer, friend, philosopher, God—who are responsible for the disconcerting shifts in persona, for inevitably she didn’t remain for long in our pigeonholes. She was larger than the largest of them. Amma remained our koan, the unanswerable question whose solution suggests itself only at the moment of surrender to the impossibility of the whole attempt to find one. We came to Jillellamudi expecting Amma to “do something” for us. What we soon realized is that her influence is not so mechanical or heavy-handed as we might have expected. It isn’t so much that she did anything directly; she functioned as a catalyst who made possible an accelerated psychic chemistry in those who were ripe for it. The results were, in a certain sense, unintentional. Does the sun intend the flower to blossom or the thunderhead to form? Flowers and storms evolve according to the dictates of their own natures. The energy of the sun only provides the impetus for their growing into their own. The changes that people go through at Jillellamudi are perplexing in their diversity. An atheist might find herself unaccountably praying to God, a pundit questioning his cherished dogmas for the first time. Some find themselves taking up a regular meditation practice after coming into Amma’s orbit, while others might give up the sterile spiritual routine which had been with them for a lifetime. Not everyone gets what they came for. But what they do get is generally better and more appropriate for them than anything they might have planned. Few are transformed overnight into saints, but fewer still, I suspect, are left without hearts a bit broader, minds less rigidly set and convinced of their own exclusive rightness. Unlike almost any other spiritual institution that I’m aware of, people were not indoctrinated into any particular set of beliefs or practices at Jillellamudi. No one, so far as I’ve been able to determine, left the place mindlessly parroting Amma’s thoughts. (Probably nobody understood them well enough to do so!) But no matter. Quite a few did leave Jillellamudi with some novel thoughts of their own; and that seemed to be what Amma had in mind all along. In my own case, quite a few new thoughts were germinating during those first few months at Jillellamudi. There was a growing awareness of what I would call “the values of the heart,” qualities like longing, empathy, intuition, and ecstasy, which are largely ignored by the pragmatic culture of the West. Like other American males, I grew up in an environment that encouraged thought at the expense of feeling, where any activity that is intangible (anything that won’t put bread on my table or add lines to my resume) is held in deep suspicion. By and large, it was considered manly to treat one’s inner life as if it was an embarrassing and troublesome vestige that might just disappear if it were drowned long enough in a current of unreflective, competitive busyness. Inconveniently, it never does quite disappear. But neither does the inner life of the soul grow straight and strong as it was intended to. Rather, it ekes out a stunted, twilight existence at the far edge of consciousness. The shoot that nature meant to be the

backbone of life struggles like some unwelcome weed at its periphery. Perhaps it will be useful here to digress to my teenage years, when my journey to Jillellamudi began in a conscious sense. Like so many of my generation, I had grown up with a disturbing sense that something was missing from our well-ordered and well-fed lives. But I was only vaguely aware of what that “something” might be, and still less aware of how to fill the gap. I went through the usual stages of political rebellion, social nonconformity, drugs, and a growing disillusionment when none of these filled the emptiness. Simultaneous with this outward search, were the stirrings of an inward inquiry into the nature of things. What, if anything, was the meaning of this life rushing lemming-like to destruction, whether tomorrow or seventy years from now? Could there be any sense to ambition and love, fame and fortune, in a world where everything without exception that one could cling to will be consigned to the dust in the very next instant of cosmic time? And wasn’t it pathetic to leave this earth without one iota more insight into these crucial questions than when one had entered it? I remember writing a melodramatic essay in elementary school about the life-cycle of the middle-class American-—ending, as it so often does, with a rejected and bewildered bag of bones lying prostrate on some Florida beach. That was the American dream, wasn’t it—to retire to some palm-fringed strip of sand to daydream your final years away in the sun? Now you worked your tail off and earned lots of money. Later you could live it up, later you could do what you had really wanted to do all along. But when later comes along, it’s already far too late. Life has long since fled, dreams evaporated, even daydreams. And it is scarcely possible to do anything but wait for death. To live without dreams, to die without wisdom—there must be a better way. I refused to live such a life and die such a death! That was the impassioned conclusion of my boyhood composition. But youth is more sure of its energy than of its direction. It is easy for fresh young eyes to see that the emperor has no clothes. It’s a great deal harder to clothe oneself with a consistent sense of purpose and direction. Where was I headed? And how was I to get there? I seemed to be on a lone pilgrimage without guide or map or clearcut vision of the goal, with only the vaguest sense that there had to be somewhere, something greater and nobler and truer. In ancient times, society knew how to channel this existential longing of the young into vision quests and initiation rites. Nowadays, these age-old pathways have been asphalted over and replaced with spanking new expressways to nowhere. But here and there a remnant remains—a signpost. And it was on these stray signposts that my imagination rested. In particular, the works of two homegrown American sages—the inspired musings of Henry David Thoreau and the democratic mysticism of Walt Whitman—reflected enticing glimmers of larger possibilities. It was good to know that others before me had felt the same undefinable longings and had rejected the rat race of their own day in search of something higher and truer. It was possible to separate oneself from the current, to move off to some secluded pond, if need be, to find a deeper truth than the one currently offered in the marketplace. Thoreau had done it. I took heart in his words: “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” To be sure, the music echoing in my head remained measured and far away. It is not so easy to hear your own drummer when ten thousand advertising ditties and jingles and popular songs are blaring at you at once. But I wondered if it had not been hard for Thoreau, too. And I wondered if he had found what he was looking for. Did the path really end at Walden Pond in a hermit’s humorous disdain for men’s ways, or did it pass through there to some more permanent station of the soul? The writings of Thoreau and the other transcendentalists had always seemed provisional, a grasping for something just out of reach, a distant echo of a still vaster harmony. That vaster harmony awaited me in the book that had sparked the transcendentalist’s fervor in the first place: the Bhagavad Gita. Just how I came in my early teens to be so dazzled by the Hindu classic remains something of an mystery. I had grown up in a family of bagels-and-lox Jews, who rarely saw the inside of a synagogue and then only to attend some young relative’s bar mitzvah. My father was a serious soul, moody, introverted, a truth-seeker at heart who had, however, caught no conscious glimpse of a divine order behind the chaos of the world. He never quite managed to convince himself that God was anything but the way ancient peoples, ignorant of science, explained away the facts of nature which they could neither understand nor bring themselves to face unsentimentally. Dad was an amateur astronomer. He spent hours gazing up at the stars from the backyard of our lakeside summer house and, like the cosmonaut, he searched and searched the heavens above and saw no God up there at all, but only the stark and inhuman immensities of intergalactic space and cosmic time. And it broke his heart. But he was a true child of his secular age, albeit a reluctant one. He could find no solace in religion. And, stoically, he sought none. Sometimes I think that my own search for spiritual meaning arose directly out of his failure to find any. They say that we strive to fulfill the hidden, often unconscious, desires of our parents. And over the years it became increasingly clear that this sensitive spirit and budding writer, who had been pushed by his father into a career in the stock market which he was never fully

comfortable with, had a whole range of unfulfilled potentials locked deep within himself. Unexplored gifts which, tragically, made him feel like a failure at the end of what appeared, from the outside at least, to have been a richly successful career. In any event, the fact that my father was an agnostic (and that I would have called myself one too, if you had asked me back then) had little effect on the budding spiritual-seeker within me. The first reading of Juan Mascaro’s inspired paperback translation of the Gita released me into a wondrous spiritual realm where life made sense. I was close to tears of joy and rushed to my father with the book. In my innocent enthusiasm, I insisted that he read it. He did—but how crestfallen I was when I heard his uncomprehending reaction. What was there to get excited about? he wondered. It was, after all, only a legend, a mere myth. A mere myth! I was stunned. How could anyone call such a stirring revelation a myth? For my part, it had never even occurred to me to wonder whether the events in the Gita had actually taken place. What did it matter if an historical Krishna had spoken to an historical Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra? The fact was that he had spoken to me on my heart’s battlefield: he had ringingly confirmed what I already strongly suspected, that life was no pitiable seventy-odd year scramble after a few trinkets, some fleeting fame or power with an occasional joyless, sensual thrill. On the contrary, it was a high adventure, a journey of the limited to the Infinite, of the individual to his Transcendent Source. Perhaps the reason that the Gita was so easy for me to accept was that it never seemed to have anything to do with “religion.” The God of the Gita was so unlike the God I didn’t believe in that it never occurred to me to make any connection between the two of them. Instead of the fearsome, paternalistic, meddling old greybeard, the popular Western stereotype, the God of the Gita, it seemed, was simply another name for life—life stripped of its illusions, its limitations, its vain hopes and needless fears. In other words, God is the unifying reality behind appearances, the essential nature that we all share in common. That’s the vision that shone powerfully through all of the mythological trappings of the book. And what was there in such a conception not to believe in? Krishna’s promise that this inward divine essence could be realized, if only we strongly desired to do so, was not only reasonable but breathtaking. I resolved on the very day I read it to take him up on that promise…someday. For years, I kept the increasingly tattered paperback close at hand. It came to be almost a talisman for me, a sort of I.O.U. from the Supreme, which I would undoubtedly cash in one day. But, inevitably, the best intentions get diluted over time. Like the halfhearted penitent who prays to God to be freed from sin, “but not yet,” I turned my attention to the work at hand—social life, college, travel—and the high note of the Gita faded amid the fierce competing voices of post-adolescence. Years of vacillation among conflicting ideals followed. College offered some intellectual diversions (not to mention all the parties), but sadly none of the lifegiving spiritual rain my parched being yearned for. More and more, it seemed to me an empty charade. The learned professors had charted their scholarly pigeonholes to perfection, no doubt, but who knew life as a whole? Who even cared to know it? The seas of knowledge, for all their seductive fascination and vastness, proved to be empty of even a single drop of potable water. No wonder we undergrads were such a perpetually thirsty lot! I think particularly of an archeology dig in Central America which I joined for a semester. There were some thirty of us camped out on the remote Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, excavating the garbage heaps of a vanished civilization and classifying the mounds of potsherds and prehistoric shells we uncovered according to type and size. It was tough going. Indiana Jones notwithstanding, the rote work of archeology is, for the most part, neither romantic nor even particularly interesting. And it came to epitomize for me the larger failings of academia, this painstaking and obsessive work among the detritus of a lost civilization. Everyone was digging up and classifying his or her particular shard of knowledge, but who among the learned experts was putting them back together again? For that matter, who was even aware that these petty shards are but fragments of something larger and altogether more meaningful? At the end of that summer, the thirty of us had, by dint of our meticulous efforts, added some few factoids to the ant-heap of human knowledge. We now knew definitively what some beachcombers a thousand years ago threw into the garbage. But what they kept in their heads, in their hearts—not to mention in their souls—remained as mysterious as ever. At college, I majored in archeology’s mother subject, anthropology. I have always been intrigued by other cultures and by their radically different ways of understanding the world. And there was a spiritual lesson in it for me as well. It was humbling—and oddly liberating—to see that the assemblage of values and ideas we take for granted as Americans (our world-view, as the anthropologists call it) is just one among many—and most likely not the wisest either. The archeologist knows well that the orthodoxies of today are tomorrow's musty relics. On the other hand, yesterday’s wisdom may well become the basis for tomorrow's settled truth. I’ve always felt that there was a lot to learn from cultures that have been around for a while. There are living civilizations like India whose raison d’etre is, for all practical purposes, a closed book to us in the West. How much our civilization would stand to gain from a lively appreciation of the cultural insights that had molded a Ramakrishna Paramahansa, a Mahatma Gandhi! But no matter; if we have lacked an understanding of the great heroes of India and their spiritual milieu, we do know in meticulous detail what their distant ancestors

threw in the garbage. The archaeologists will have seen to that! As my coursework increasingly came to seem hollow and irrelevant, I found myself skimping on the required reading and spending my time in the college library poring over books on Zen Buddhism, on Sufism, on the Catholic mystics of the Middle Ages. One work in particular sparked my imagination as nothing had before: the Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda. If the Gita had mapped out, poetically and with awesome power, the spiritual ideal, Yogananda’s autobiography fleshed it out, gave it a human face, made it seem practical and eminently attainable. It demonstrated that there were living men and women who had scaled the heights that Krishna had described. To be in their presence was to be transported. Such was Yogananda’s testimony. It seemed I had my work cut out for me. The seeker now knew what he was seeking—he was seeking a saint. But to seek a saint in modern-day America was no easy task. It’s not that there was any lack of self-proclaimed candidates. I was to encounter a good number of them. And yet it had never seemed quite right. The advertising was always too slick, the weekend seminars too costly, and the holy men themselves too preoccupied with expanding their little empires, their eyes too filled with the same anxieties and ambitions as the rest of us. I remember one harangue delivered by a prominent Indian swami. His hawk-eyes darted about nervously as he discoursed in a shrill, high-pitched voice. At the end of the presentation, I was approached by one of the yogi’s followers and asked for my reaction. Frankly, the speaker had seemed restless and fidgety, I responded. Where was the composed peace that the holy are said to radiate? “You’ve got it all wrong,” I was assured. “That wasn’t restlessness. It was shakti (divine power).” Always there were explanations. But where was the saintliness, the deep peace, the radiant and self-effacing love that Yogananda had described? Maybe it was the sort of delicate fruit that doesn’t export too well. There seemed nothing left to do but to head for India. I won’t go into the details of that trip, a year’s pilgrimage through India and Nepal. It is enough to know that the quest led to Jillellamudi where the seeker in me found what he sought. What I found there, however, was both less and at the same time incalculably more than what I thought I was looking for. Mother was so thoroughly human and down-to-earth. In a certain sense, I would have preferred that she be a little more awe-inspiring, mystical, and mysterious. Moreover, I would have loved to have been struck down, cowering in my tracks like Saul on the road to Damascus, or been confided mystic secrets as Gurdjieff had, or at least been told that she had been waiting for me, her long-lost son, for many lifetimes. If I had composed the script, that is how I would have written it. What actually happened was more ordinary—but better. Before I met Amma, I thought a guru was someone who took you by the hand, revealed your innermost secrets, praised you or chastised you, told you in detail how to live your life, taught a profound philosophy, prescribed a sadhana (a regimen of spiritual practices). We Americans are no doubt a thoroughly practical people who expect our gurus to be glorified auto mechanics of the soul, repairing the faulty hardware with supernatural wrench in hand, and spelling out what we need to know in words of spiritual instruction. Truthfully, I must admit that, after spending more than three years at Jillellamudi, I had yet to see the wrench or to hear any teachings from Amma more metaphysical or profound than: “Take coffee,” “Go and eat,” or “Don’t worry.” That isn’t to say that there has been no guidance. But the guidance has been far more subtle, more inward than I had anticipated. She didn‘t tell anyone to do anything or to become anything. She simply reflected us back to ourselves. And then she loved and affirmed us just as we were. I remember how a young American woman came to Amma and recited a long litany of her “problems”; how she was lazy and unhappy and made other people unhappy just to be around her. She droned on with an objective-seeming description of her multitudinous failings, much the same way you might tell a service-station attendant that there is a loud knock coming from the engine and difficulty with the acceleration, a loose headlight, and so on. At the end of this dire-sounding list, she turned to Amma, awaiting her prognosis. Mother simply gazed at the young lady for a few moments in silence, then turned to the translator saying, “Tell her that she doesn’t understand the problem. When you understand what the disease is, then you know what the cure is also. Why don’t you spend some time here? Mother does nothing. But, somehow, those who stay around people like myself develop an understanding of the true nature of the problem and, as a result, they experience some peace of mind.” Though Amma did not explicitly state what the “true nature of the problem” was that the young lady would spontaneously become aware of, I can speculate from my own experience that, had she stayed on at Jillellamudi, it would have gradually dawned on her that the problem wasn’t so much in the mechanical failures of character that she enumerated, but rather in her inability to live gracefully with herself as she was, faults and all, without champing at the bit quite so much to be done with them. So what is the true nature of the problem that Amma was hinting at? Maybe the problem is the assumption that there’s a problem to be solved in the first place. For so long as we are intent on changing ourselves, we can’t begin to see ourselves dispassionately, not to mention compassionately. We will be forever caught in the oh-so-earnest struggle to become better than we

are, while secretly fearing that we are far worse. And we will be waging a full-time jihad against all that is “ungodly” within ourselves and in the world at large. This fanaticism to see oneself in black-and-white terms can be the epitome of spiritual discrimination. We tell ourselves that we are “bad” and “unspiritual” and that we must make ourselves “pure” and “spiritual.” And yet, far from providing a cure for our malaise, this heavy judgmental frame of mind is a major symptom of the disease itself. In such a case, prolonged contact with a sage often provides the first clue (and rather a surprising clue, at that) that it is inappropriate to view ourselves in such grimly polarized terms. We had come to him naturally expecting that he would become an ally in this running battle against our “unspiritual” aspects. Instead, we discover that the guru is an impartial witness. Rather than actively trying to reform us, he or she merely holds up the mirror. And what we invariably see in the mirror is a conflicted being, who is, ironically, struggling against himself in order to be himself. This mirrorlike quality is frightening at first. There is no place to hide. Here was someone, I quickly came to recognize, who knew me better than I knew myself. No pretense had the least chance of success with her. She had an amazing (and somewhat disconcerting) tendency to respond to the inner intention rather than to the outward meaning of one’s statements and acts. It was obvious that I was, in every sense, an open book to her. But at the same time, no one had ever accepted me so completely and without reservation, without any demand that I change. It was puzzling—the love seemed so unearned. Inevitably though, something of Amma’s own patience and tolerance began to rub off on me. If she, seeing as clearly as she did, could still accept me for what I was, couldn’t I afford to be a little more accepting of myself? To be sure, contact with Amma brought into sharp relief many personal failings. The mirror reflected the shadows and the light equally. It reflected every wave of my mental restlessness (or “monkey mind”, as it is called in India); it exposed my painful self-consciousness, my craving to be the center of attention, my bottomless neediness. All of these things stood out starkly. But the awareness of her unfailing love and support somehow put it into its proper perspective. There was space to view myself impartially for the first time, without anger or the impatient desire to reform. And perhaps with a wry hint of a smile, as well. On a number of different fronts, Amma was chipping away at the quality of humorless earnestness which had so characterized my approach to matters worldly and spiritual. I remember one occasion in particular when I was fanning her rather compulsively and stiffly. Mother turned to me and pronounced the single English word “duty” with a crisp and military inflection. Everyone laughed good-naturedly, and I couldn’t help but smile wanly myself. Amma had nailed me with a single word! All my life I had driven myself: in school, in interpersonal relations, and now in the spiritual life as well. As a child, I had been prematurely anxious to enter the adult world of responsibility and ambition, becoming the spokesman for the student government of my junior high school, leading a student strike, moderating a weekly interview program on a New York radio station, appearing as a commentator on a local television show. By my late teens, I had experienced some of the outward features of the success that one is expected to strive for in the world of grownups. But it hadn’t come without a price; I had paid in the coin of youthful spontaneity, which was sadly lacking in my life. I was such a very serious young man. Now Amma was coaxing me to turn back the clock, to relax my compulsive hold on things, to be a child once more, or perhaps for the very first time. Here, there was no need to prove yourself with achievements and titles, with how energetically you fan or how well you meditate, she seemed to be saying. For the most part, this message remained unspoken. Once, however, while discussing institutional matters for which I was feeling responsible, Mother spelled it out. “I don’t want you to worry yourself about such things,” she insisted. “I want you to be like a child playing carefree at its Mother’s feet, without worries or responsibilities. Even to say ‘child’ isn’t enough; I want you to feel like a newborn infant in your mother’s lap.” Whenever the question arose of what sadhana Amma prescribed, I think back to that admonition. The sadhana at Jillellamudi was to become an infant! In Mother’s presence, however, it happened effortlessly. I have seen wrinkled grandmas and grandpas curled in her lap as she gently stroked their grey hair. Clearly, Amma brings out the hidden child in all of us. Mother’s own attitude is best summed up by her oft-repeated assertion, “I have no sishyas (disciples). All are my sisus (children) only.” Many of those who have come to Amma look upon that event as being a kind of second birth for them. One sprightly retiree, who served for many years as the superintendent of police in a large South Indian town, confided to me that nothing he had accomplished—bringing up a family, rising to the top of his profession—could be compared to the simple fact of his having come to Jillellamudi. Life began, as far as he was concerned, on that day. And it was easy to see what he meant. One felt renewed in her presence. It was as if the slate of decades is wiped clean in a moment. Long-forgotten memories stir, yearnings and joys buried by the years surface to consciousness, and still more mysterious emotions—a feeling of boundless relatedness to life itself. Mother’s touch was like the springtime which brings fresh life to dry branches and gently awakens us to ourselves. As I write these lines, I am reminded that we live in a culture that has few words for the deep matters of the soul. And scant

desire to speak of them. Indeed, it often sounds awkward to do so or sentimental. Or even shameful, a private indulgence that we dare not reveal in public. We moderns—and males more so—are quite as ill at ease with the awakening of our spirituality as the adolescent is with his budding sexuality. Perhaps this is because we sense that spirituality (like sex, too, at its core) is fundamentally about vulnerability. That is to say, it is about becoming, in a profound sense, open and naked to reality, letting down our defenses to the totality of experience, to the ecstasy of life and also to the depth of life’s pain and transience. And in a society dedicated to maintaining control at all costs, that is a scary proposition! Scary, and yet powerfully seductive at the same time—especially in the presence of someone like Amma. One of the thousand names of the Divine Mother in India is “the seducer of worlds.” The divine powerfully seduces the devotee. Only in a far more radical sense than the usual one. It is the seduction of reality itself. In the environs of a great soul, who is an open channel for that divine power of seduction, we feel the urge not to peel off mere layers of clothing, but to peel away the layers of self. And we aspire to open ourselves to something “other,” to something greater in the fullness of our body, mind and soul. The utter nakedness of the sage, her sheer presence to the truth of what is—and indeed her being there for us—in each and every moment calls forth some sort of response in kind from all who encounter her. You can only properly respond to someone who is present with the gift of your own unclouded presence. Which is not always easy. We lead lives of habitual distraction and live, for the most part, in the world of our mind, not in the world as it actually is. We are caught up in the web of our desires, our hopes for the future, memories of the past, and knee-jerk conditioned reactions. Anyone who has practiced meditation—or tried to—knows how difficult it can be to extricate oneself from this tangled web of thoughts and simply to be present in the moment. The wonder at Jillellamudi was that a degree of mindfulness comes effortlessly there. Simply by being with Amma, the mind settled down and entered a more natural rhythm. And not only that, but a kind of wordless conversation ensued. Our presence, as it deepened and clarified, entered into a kind of dialogue with her presence. When I arrived at Jillellamudi, a prayer arose within me: Mother, give me back my voice! The strange part of it is that I had no idea what voice I was seeking. I was not conscious of having lost my voice, still less of needing to find it. But there it was, this prayer that I repeated under my breath without knowing quite why I was doing so, or even what it meant. When a child first learns to speak, he has no words—he merely babbles. And so did I. I babbled, I stammered. Since I couldn’t speak Telugu, I stammered to her wordlessly from my heart. I cried out to get my voice back, my inner voice. And, incredibly, Amma responded. At times, I sensed it intuitively, but often the response was more explicit. I would be sitting in a crowd of devotees and spontaneously this prayer for a voice would rise up in me; immediately, Amma would be gazing directly at me with a smile, a slight nod or a conspiratorial look. For days, I would be feeling dry inside, and Amma would seem to be scrupulously avoiding even looking my way. Then, in a moment of sincere opening, the log-jam of emotions would break and I would find myself calling out inwardly, “Amma!” The next thing I knew, she would be peering at me with a look of total understanding. I remember sitting in Amma’s room paging through a small copy of the Bible which a young man from Canada had brought for Mother to bless. Suddenly, it occurred to me that we were sitting in the presence of a Christ, that Christ was being asked to bless the account of his own life. At that very moment, Amma, who had been lying on her cot facing the wall, craned her neck fully around and, maintaining that unusual and uncomfortable position for a few seconds, gazed into my eyes. She remained silent. And yet nothing that she might have said could have been as eloquent as that penetrating gaze! At first when such things happened, I found myself wondering if it had simply been a coincidence. But a coincidence endlessly repeated ceases to be a coincidence. I soon discovered, in any case, that I was hardly alone in having such experiences. Indeed, most devotees just took it for granted that Amma knew our every thought; and not just our thoughts, but the unspoken aspirations, the hidden sorrows that we didn’t even know existed until she responded to them. We were open books to her. But who was she? Who was this being who remained so sensitively attuned to those around her? She must surely have transcended, at some fundamental level, the exclusive identification with her own body, thoughts and feelings that is the central fact of our egoenclosed existences. Devotees are fond of saying that Amma is not a human being like you or I, that she is an Avatar, a manifestation of God’s omniscience and love appearing in human form. But what have we actually said when we call Amma an incarnation of “God”? Have we solved the mystery or only given it a name whose true significance remains a mystery? Mother never uses the term Avatar to describe herself. What she does say is less an attempt to label or define than to describe the reality of her experience: “I am never alone; all are in me. I am ever aware of all... of more than one... persons, events, multiplicity itself. I am turning the whole world over in my mind. I am experiencing that my One Mind has become the many. That is why I say ‘I am all.’ I am never alone. My share is with all.” In the yogic parlance of India, this state of oneness with the cosmos is referred to as samadhi. There are said to be several

stages of samadhi—starting with yogic trance and temporary states of ecstasy and leading up to the highest condition in which the limits to consciousness disappear and you know yourself as the Pure Awareness underlying all things. Generally, this state is conceived of as something that can only be achieved as the result of years of intensive meditation in solitude. Throughout the ages, countless practitioners have striven to achieve the different levels of samadhi. But while the lower samadhis are not uncommon, the barriers to the attainment of the highest level are said to be formidable. Today there are a few living yogis who are widely acknowledged to be able to enter various states of samadhi at will. As an example, there is the Balayogi of Mumidivaram, a great ascetic who is revered by untold millions in the part of coastal Andhra Pradesh where Jillellamudi is located. This yogi remains the entire year inside a sealed temple chamber without food, fresh air or water. Only on the yearly festival of Shivarathri is his cell unlocked from the outside. For an entire day, the Balayogi sits unmoving in front of a crowd, often exceeding a hundred thousand persons, who come to obtain his blessing. After all have had a chance to briefly file by him, the yogi reenters his voluntary interment for yet another year of uninterrupted meditation. It is said that yogis of this stature are rare and that most of them remain in the seclusion of forest retreats or mountain caves far from the public gaze. In India, the solitary ascetic is a person accorded the highest respect and reverence. His or her conquest of the wayward mind and passions is said to be the greatest achievement that anyone can aspire to. The existence of someone like the Balayogi is a powerful demonstration for millions of Hindus that the truths of their ancient science of consciousness are a reality and that higher states of awareness do exist. But yoga is a gradual ascent lasting, it is claimed, many lifetimes. And there are numerous stages and plateaus along the way. Even a spiritual giant, able to remain for years at a time locked in some inconceivable state of samadhi, may not yet have reached the final peak of spiritual development. Indeed, so long as the practitioner remains dependent on a particular form of meditation or yogic practice to sustain the vision of oneness, he has not yet reached the end of the path. Only when that awareness becomes effortless is he said to be a jivan mukta, a free being. At that point, it ceases to matter whether the yogi is sitting crosslegged in meditation or cooking dinner, whether he is living in a bustling city or in some inaccessible Himalayan cave—all experiences, all places have become transparent to the light of the One Reality. In Sanskrit, this state is called sahaja samadhi, or the natural samadhi. It is an extremely rare condition, beyond even the imagination of most of us. But, typically, Amma has tried to demystify it and make it seem less awe-inspiring, more approachable. She calls it sahaja stiti, “the natural state,” and she says that it is the inborn nature of each and every one of us. It is who we all are before we all were, before we began to think of ourselves as somebody in particular—pure awareness. She goes on to reflect: “In my view, there are not a variety of (spiritual) experiences for anyone. The lasting realization that all is one, persisting at all times and under all circumstances, is the only true experience.” Amma would have us see this condition as something thoroughly ordinary. She would have us see herself as someone thoroughly ordinary. “I am nothing that you are not,” she is fond of insisting. The fire is cloaked in a veil of maternal amiability and we are deceived, for the moment at least, into taking her at her word. There are moments, however, when the veil slips aside. In the early days at Jillellamudi, Mother would fall suddenly into ecstasy while formal worship of her was being performed. Her body would stiffen, her hands spontaneously assuming the divine mudras (symbolic postures) which can be seen on the idols of the Hindu gods bestowing blessings, imparting spiritual instruction, and urging the onlookers to “fear not.” At the same time, her breath would become extremely shallow or disappear entirely as the devotees looked on wonderstruck. By all accounts, this metamorphosis of a diminutive village housewife into a self-conscious Divinity was an electrifying experience for the first visitors to Jillellamudi. But in the early fifties, these samadhis stopped occurring. Thereafter, Amma remained conscious and alert while receiving worship. She explains that the “trances” served as concrete enactments, as it were, of her state of consciousness for those who required it. Their purpose having been achieved, they ceased to occur. Amma points out that, ironically, it is easier for people to see the divinity in a stone god than in a fellow human being. The carved and inanimate image of the Buddha in meditation or of Christ’s eyes directed heavenward are far more easily identified as being divine than Buddha or Christ would have been had we run into them on the streets of ancient Jerusalem or Benares. The stone idol embodies a changelessness and a frozen intensity of spiritual feeling that is all but impossible to recognize amid the flux of life. We are most impressed by holy men and women when they approach most closely the condition of a stone idol and assume a static posture of prayer or meditation. I have noticed that when Amma is chatting, serving tea, or distributing packets of blessed kum-kum powder (the red powder which is placed by Hindu women between the eyebrows as a symbol of shakti, the divine life-force) to departing visitors, it is hard to feel in awe of her. But then, moments later, she will be sitting in silence and a whole new aspect is suddenly revealed. The cordiality and easy smile have vanished and Amma appears engrossed in contemplation, her eyes open but looking within. It has

become hard to read her expression—sometimes, it seems brushed with a wistful sadness, as if from regret that we, her children, cannot follow her where she has gone. And it is true; we feel ourselves to be on the margins of something vast and inscrutable, in the presence of a life that can be sensed but not quite entered into. A very deep calm spreads over the gathering of devotees, and none dares disturb Mother with idle chatter or requests. The silence is like a boundaryless ocean; we are enveloped in it. But this oceanic calm is not a void. The silence is a presence, a fullness which holds us spellbound. At such a juncture, the mind is irresistibly drawn inward. It might appear that Amma is all alone, separated from us by an unbridgeable gulf of consciousness. But, paradoxically, she has never been closer, the communication never so poignant. Mother seems to stand at the edge of the world, and yet she doesn’t step over the edge. She could easily cut the thread now that ties her to our pain; instead, she remains with us, visibly touched by a faint sadness. But how can it be, this curious sadness of one who is beyond the sway of joy and sorrow? A devotee once said to her, “You shed tears? Not a single drop should fall on the earth lest it spell disaster!” And Mother replied, “All of the earth’s waters are my tears. One drop! Countless showers of drops have fallen and are yet to fall….” The tears of Isis, the tears of Mary, the never-ending tears of the Mother for the sufferings of Her children. And so it is that Amma’s profound calm is tinged with sadness, the regret of a mother whose children have gone astray into worlds of their own illusion. She stands at the boundary of the promised land and is wistful: saddened that we remain lost on the twisted paths of our pain, and that we cannot follow her where she has gone, to that realm of deep contentment where grief and pleasure have become equal and love alone exists. There is a small, often-repeated ritual that has come to symbolize for me this wistful mood. Mother picks up a small pink rose, one of several that have been left on her bedstead as an offering, and gazes at it for a time, absorbed. Now she rolls the blossom between her palms, now she squeezes it softly, now she presses it to her forehead like a child delighted by some new toy. She sniffs it, then she discards it, then picks it up again, opens it with an infinite tenderness, examines the tiny stamen and pistil. She does this playfully, and yet there is an earnestness about her actions, a purposefulness that makes it seem more than just play, a touching and pensive quality. Now Amma plucks one small petal and then another. The delicacy with which she performs this act is remarkable. It is almost as if she fears to hurt it. Is this the way that God plays with the world, with souls, with my own soul—gently, with a childlike wonder at the marvel of his creation, pressing it to Himself, probing its every tolerance, coaxing it open, sniffing, delicately pruning a petal here and there? What a lovely metaphor Amma has enacted. And yet watching her tonight, the metaphor has burst its bounds and become somehow real. It no longer seems that Amma is playing with a rose; she is playing with a human soul, opening it out, quickening it with her touch—she is playing with my own soul. Suddenly, Mother motions for me to approach her cot. She passes the flower briskly to me, like a child wearied of a toy handing it to a companion. It is Amma’s reward to me for having found her out! It is customary for a visitor to Jillellamudi to offer a fruit, flower or leaf to Amma as a symbol of the pure heart that is being surrendered at her feet to mold as she sees fit. It is a curious fact that one can make the offering many times in the prescribed manner and Amma will pay scant attention to it. But give it once consciously and with true devotion and she will pick it up and fondle it lovingly for the longest time. I am reminded that the famed miracle-working saint, Shirdi Sai Baba, would keep a small purse of coins which he used to empty, mumbling softly to himself, “This one is Nana’s, this is Bapu’s, this is Kaka’s,” naming in turn each of his close devotees. He used to spend long hours rubbing them down until they were no longer recognizable as rupees and quarter-anna coins. In this way, Baba was demonstrating graphically the inner spiritual help he was providing, rubbing down the rough spots, polishing the hearts and minds of those whose training he had taken upon himself. Amma does the same thing in her own way. But it is symbolic of the difference in their styles that, while the crusty and hard-edged Baba would grind down metal with his fingers, Amma uses hers to gently coax open a flower. I like to think that this is precisely what Amma was doing with me personally. Before I went to India, the life of my spirit was like a closed bud, hidden from sight. Although I had consciously rejected the materialistic values of my society, I was too much its child to fully trust my own more creative and spiritual instincts. The artist, the writer, the lover were still in chrysalis, unseen, undreamt of even. And the mystic was dankly imprisoned within my head. Spirituality was an idea, a great philosophy—I’d read all the right books, after all—but it was not yet a livable reality. In fact, the channel between thought and life was clogged. There was precious little flowing between the head and the heart. Left and right brains were separated by the Berlin Wall. I was so very like my father, emotionally stunted and prematurely old. But after meeting Amma, the bud began to open. Not dramatically or overnight, but gradually over the months and years, imperceptibly. Light began to filter through to parts of myself that I hardly knew existed. Love’s subtle fingers opened areas of

innocence and wonder, gratitude and reverence. The hidden bloom was in her hand and she was sniffing, squeezing, teasing it open, then folding it back again mischievously. I felt as if life were beginning afresh, full of unimaginable possibilities. In this new life, I was the merest infant, awkward, dependent, painfully aware of my helplessness. But this inadequacy was more than matched by Amma’s patience and understanding. Mercifully, she ignored my weaknesses and concentrated instead on my awakening strengths, fostering them by her attention and care. This attitude comes naturally to Amma, who frequently affirms, “As a mother, I can see no evil in the child.” It is precisely this tendency to see the good in others (even what appears as evil is really only goodness warped by unavoidable circumstance, according to Amma) that brings out the best in those who come to her. A beggar treated long and consistently enough like a king will come in time to act like one. The same principle is at work in Jillellamudi. Of course, Mother would have put the analogy somewhat differently; it isn’t a beggar becoming a king, but rather a king (raised to think of himself as a beggar) awakening at long last to his true status and nobility. As we have seen, Amma is far from blind to our faults; she does reflect them back to us impartially. But with unfailing generosity of spirit, she responds only to what is highest in each of us. It’s something like an infant just learning to use its vocal cords. In the process, it makes all sorts of grunts, murmurs, and gurgles. The parents hear all of these, no doubt, but, since they are intent on their child’s learning to speak, they will only respond favorably with smiles of encouragement to those sounds which most resemble adult human speech. At the first recognizable “ma” or “pa,” they are ecstatic. Gradually in this way, the infant comes to recognize which sorts of noises are pleasing to its parents. And, lo and behold, before too long the child is talking. In the same way, by responding selectively to what is most noble in each of her spiritual children, Amma nurtures these qualities. Encouraging the “good” doesn’t mean that she is blind to the “bad”; she simply withdraws her attention from our inevitable stumblings, thereby discouraging them. By seeing the best in us, she invariably brings out the best. But not without forcing us to face our shadow-side in the process. A few months after coming to Jillellamudi, I went through a difficult period when my mind was constantly agitated. There were episodes of intense (if objectless) fear when I wondered if I was going out of my mind. Being around Mother’s energy powerfully churns the subconscious and the superconscious alike. All sorts of demons and angels are aroused by those eyes, which pierce unerringly into the soul’s hidden places. And while we might like to imagine that living with such a one will be all sweetness and light, that is hardly the case. In any event, all my attempts to bring my mind back into harness through meditation served only to increase my unrest. I reflected darkly that, if even at Jillellamudi in the presence of such magnificence this was my condition, then my case must really be a hopeless one. In the depths of this dark mood, a schoolteacher friend, Sri J. Chalapathi, came to my room and told me that Amma had just remarked to him, “All of my children are calm, but especially Richard. Isn’t he a peaceful fellow?” I was thrown into confusion by this so obviously undeserved compliment. Was Amma making fun of me? Surely she knew all about my distracted mental state. It is strange, but immediately the extreme restlessness which had been plaguing me subsided, as if charmed away by her words. On another occasion, I was sitting in Amma’s room obsessed by “impure” thoughts that made me feel undeserving to be in her presence. This was the playing of an old and familiar tape-loop in my head. Feelings of unworth-iness have been with me since early childhood for complex psychological reasons that I won’t get into here. I’ve since learned that a good many people are afflicted with this particular demon, although at the time it seemed a uniquely personal failing. And, in Mother’s presence, these thoughts flared up with renewed vigor. The awareness that she knew the inner contents of my mind and heart made me feel acutely ashamed and exposed. In the midst of this flood of emotions, Amma called me over and started telling another devotee what a satwic (pure-minded) person Richard was. She made him translate it all for me, showing that her remarks were really meant for my own edification rather than his. I was embarrassed by this compliment, and also puzzled by it. My initial impulse was to answer, “Mother knows the true state of my mind. Instead of merely calling me pure, it is her responsibility to make me so!” But I restrained myself from giving this ungracious reply and, as I mulled over her surprising words, it occurred to me that the Richard that Amma was seeing was pure already; from her standpoint, there was no question of “making me pure.” Because she herself is pure of heart, she can see through to the hidden core of purity within others. And she knows quite well what we desire for ourselves in our innermost being. Amma has said that we already are what we most deeply aspire to be. While she knows how formidable the barriers can be to our realizing the truth of this (mind and matter resist changing every step of the way!) what really counts for Mother is the inner resolves which we make. She isn’t fazed by our troubles. You might even say that the Universal Mother deliberately puts these very obstacles in our path in order to purify and strengthen our resolve through the process of struggle, until it becomes an invincible flame of aspiration. Amma does not allow herself to be fooled by the passing parade of our moods and thoughts which loom so large for us. They

are, to her, like bubbles on the surface of the sea, forming and dissolving. What really matters are the deep abiding currents of the soul. These were some of the ideas which came flooding in to me when Amma said that I was pure. If I appeared “impure” in my own sight, it was because I could see no more than what was underneath my nose at the moment. Again the unexpected happened: seeing myself through Amma’s eyes worked effortlessly to clear the mind of the dejection which had seemed so formidable and solid when I struggled against it on its own level. Mother’s seemingly incongruous comment had once again become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Underneath the ever-changing shadow-play of thoughts and feelings, there was an essential Richard—or “Ree-chaard”, as Amma used to intone—forever untroubled by restlessness and untouched by impurity. Amma could see him, and her seeing him allowed me to see him as well. I am reminded of an incident. A visitor offered an apple to Mother. It looked good from the outside. But Amma said that it was rotten and easily pushed her finger through the skin to expose the spoiled brown flesh inside. The devotee was naturally upset at this and reflected sadly, “It always happens to me like this. Perhaps I am all right on the outside and spoiled at heart like that apple.” But Amma would have none of this. “I say your rot is gone,” she reassured him, and ate the rotten portion herself. When she had consumed most of the fruit, she pointed to the inside, saying, “It isn’t as you said at all. Look, the core is fresh.” And it was true. It is also true of us. Amma has no place in her teachings for the concept of sin. “Have all the centuries of moralizing about good and evil really worked?” she would ask rhetorically. If sermons can bring about the reformation of mankind, then those already given would have long ago done the trick. But just the opposite is the case. The louder the chorus against evil, the more entrenched it seems to become. Mother points out that, ironically, the most vociferous and self-righteous of the critics are often the ones most in need of their own medicine. What is the answer then? Amma isn’t glib enough to offer any. Indeed, she insists that there isn’t any answer in the dualistic sense that we are looking for one. Evil exists. It is a fact of our life on Earth. If it were really in our power to wish it away, then an rousing sermon and a timely New Year’s resolution would be all the inspiration we needed to transform ourselves into saints. But nature is not about to be cheated so easily. Good and evil—or what I would prefer to call the power of universal expansion and contraction, both in ourselves and in the world at large—are factors ordained by a Power infinitely transcending our puny wills. According to Amma, if responsibility must be assigned for the existence of evil, then it ultimately rests with God alone, who ordained it in the first place. In the polarized theologies of established religion, the universe is split into two equal and apparently exclusive domains—the good works of God and the evil works of the devil, the pure will of the Divine and the impure human will. Amma, on the other hand, does not make any such arbitrary division of the pie. God is the one, without a second, as indeed creation is one, a seamless whole. Mother teaches that what we label as good and evil are equally His creations and equally necessary to the balanced functioning of the Whole. Every rose comes with a thorn attached. Great lights cast deep shadows. The limited wills of human beings are not separate from, but rather integral expressions of, His will. ALL is HE. There is nothing new in this. The teachings of non-duality are the highest manifestation of spiritual thought and can be found in all of the great religions and even in folk sayings from around the world. But in many traditions, this teaching was largely suppressed or embodied in esoteric formulae understood by only a few chosen initiates. This is true also in India where, even to this day, the truths of the Advaita Vedanta (nondualism) are generally deemed by their hereditary custodians, the Brahmin pundits, as too dangerous to be revealed openly to the common run of humanity. For many well-intentioned guardians of the established faiths, religion is less a revelation of Truth than a bulwark against immorality, a finger in the dike holding back the surging waters of chaos. In such an atmosphere, a doctrine that speaks of the relativity of good and evil, and of a single Divine Power which is responsible for both, is automatically suspect; it seems to fly in the face of human accountability for our own acts, and to call into question the existence of an inflexible and divinely decreed ethical code on which the existing religious systems rest. Naturally, the teachings of nondualism came to be suppressed, hidden in esoterics or watered down with the do’s and don’ts of popular religion. But in practically every age and culture, the spiritual iconoclasts sprang up anew, risking misunderstanding and often persecution, to proclaim their difficult truths to the world. Lao Tzu was such a one. He was a solitary ascetic held in awe by his contemporary, Confucius, the apostle of China’s ancient system of ethics. Confucius looked upon Lao Tzu as an eccentric spiritual prodigy who had transcended human laws. But he also feared that the sage’s paradoxical teachings on the uselessness of cultivating virtue posed a danger to less-evolved individuals, who might employ these ideas as a pretext for antisocial behavior. Lao Tzu, on the other hand, saw in Confucius a misdirected reformer whose attempt to codify and enforce morality was, in effect, to kill it. He taught that to strive for any kind of spiritual ideal was to hold that ideal at arms’ length by making it into an object external to oneself. Striving for the good, for example, can

subtly reinforce one’s sense of inner poverty and guilt. As an antidote, the great sage recommended that we jump out of the whole sorry business, that we cease self-consciously obsessing over doing good and avoiding evil. Only after the mad dash for virtue is ended, he claimed, does natural virtue arise as a phoenix from its own ashes. This is the same paradox which was central to Amma’s approach. When people asked how their evil tendencies are to be conquered, Mother advised them not to worry about evil at all. The best attitude to develop, she said, is that even what we consider to be bad in ourselves has come from God, the Divine Mother. The Mother has given it and only the Mother can take it away, when she sees fit to do so. This movement of surrender to what is, when it is complete, leads to that rarest of boons: peace of mind. We become content to be who we are, freed from the agitation of spiritual ambition. As a further inducement, Mother assured us that she would take all responsibility upon herself: “You see, this is my state; you may go out and smear yourself with mud, but when you return home, I bathe you and feed you. That is the position; you can forget yourselves and know that you have no responsibilities. What more do you need? This is the blissful state. This mystic state is not even the lot of a person who experiences the condition of samadhi for a short while and then returns again to the consciousness of the world.” It would be easy to misconstrue this promise. A superficial reading might suggest that Amma was advocating a regression to the thoughtlessness and irresponsibility of childhood, the shirking of mature duty. The real sense of her words, of course, is far more sublime. One is reminded of Christ’s admonition to “take a lesson from the lilies of the field which neither spin nor toil but are fed and clothed by God.” Similarly, Amma was advocating an innocent trust in the Divine beneficence. She was reminding us that all good things come from God’s own earth: the pure air and water, growing things, the beauty of the sunset and starlight, consciousness, pure thoughts, the gift of life itself. Even the greatest scientist is powerless to create a single one of these things in his test-tube. The greatest among us, and the least among us too, is a child nestled in the lap of the universe. Yet how easily we forget our childlike dependency. In earlier times, there were still many who knew how to receive with gratitude the bounty of life. Today, by contrast, most of us feel that we need to take. We are conditioned by advertising and a culture of competition to grab everything we can as quickly as we can. This acquisitive attitude, however, poisons the well of our intimacy with the earth. When you learn how to take in an obsessive manner, then you forget how to trust. You forget how to suckle on the breast of your Mother and you come to imagine that everything hinges on your own cleverness at taking. And this attitude leads invariably to sorrow. As Amma put it succinctly; “All worry arises from the feeling that you are the doer. When you think that everything is your own doing, then you feel yourself to be under a heavy burden. When the responsibility is thrown onto God, then you feel relieved and happy.” When responsibility is “thrown on God,” I am not shirking my duty but only recognizing the obvious: that there is a greater force than my own isolated ego at work in the universe, and that the ultimate success or failure of any venture lies beyond my personal control. I act as I must, and yet I never allow myself to forget that the results are not in my hands. And I recognize as well the truth of the lyrics of the popular song: “You can’t always get what you want... but...you get what you need.” This attitude might be called “primal trust.” The wisdom of primal trust is less a matter of religious conviction than of simple common sense. And yet, how rare it is to find a person who has actually divested himself or herself of the illusory sense of self-importance. Most of us live in a “mecentered” universe. Our entire world revolves around our personalities, our possessions, our desires, our acts. And this is an invitation to a lot of needless worry, according to Mother. As a practical matter, even the pious are anxious for their future, even the pious gloat over “their” successes and torture themselves over “their” failures. In the apt metaphor of the sage Ramana Maharshi, we are like the peasant on a train who fails to realize that the floor of the compartment will bear his luggage and keeps it balanced precariously on his head for the entire journey. But before too long, even the most ignorant country bumpkin can be coaxed to let go of his luggage by a well- meaning conductor. The saint is the conductor on the train to God. His job is to make the passengers feel confident and relaxed enough to let go of their anxieties, their defenses, their guilts and their compulsive holding on. He initiates this process by creating around himself an atmosphere of abiding peace and security in which it is possible to disarm oneself. For me, Jillellamudi was just such a place. I had never been in a such a tolerant community, where the latitude for personal freedom and even eccentricity was so great. Unlike other spiritual groups, there was no pressure here to conform to any particular way of thinking or acting. Communists and industrialists, Hindus, Moslems and Christians, vegetarians and meat-eaters, politicians and spiritual aspirants, hippies and tourists, village housewives and city women in silk saris–every conceivable human type was sincerely welcomed and made to feel at home at Jillellamudi. There was a family atmosphere there and a harmony, on the surface at least, that was new to my experience. The place seemed a living expression of Mother’s indiscriminate embrace of life in all its myriad forms. I sometimes recalled the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,

your huddled masses....” If there were ever a place which lived up to these words, this was it! Hadn’t Mother said: “I don’t pick and choose and reject the rotten stuff.”

3. THE HOUSE OF ALL

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T TIMES IT WAS A REAL mystery how everything managed to hang together at Jillellamudi. There was no disciplined routine of worship required of the residents; no inflexible schedule for meals (Amma has specifically instructed the kitchen staff that anyone who comes at whatever time of the day or night should be promptly fed); no daily program of work (one is free to volunteer in any capacity or to do nothing). Though contributions are accepted, there is no charge made for food and lodging and no systematic effort to raise funds. People who, because of age, infirmity or mental or physical handicaps, could never be expected to contribute anything tangible to the bread-and-butter life of the community were nonetheless accepted into it ungrudgingly. And this rare indulgence does not end with those who aren’t directly useful to the community, but extends even to persons who are harmful to it, as I found out. Nobody could have been a less desirable guest than the young man from Bombay who was brazenly stealing money from the visitors, jewels from the temple, and office equipment from the community hospital. But no one called the police or asked him to leave. The affair was handled as it would be within a close-knit family. Amma told the boy privately that he was causing her pain and should stop taking what didn’t belong to him. And she added that, if he should need anything in the future, he should just ask her for it directly. Hearing Mother’s words, the young man felt remorse. He returned those items which had not already been sold. Despite all the trouble that he had caused, I am sure that, if he came again, he would be welcomed to Jillellamudi, without bitterness, as a problem child is welcomed back into a loving household. Another visitor who would not have made it past the front gate of most ashrams was the bizarrely attired ex-sailor from Belgium, who fancied himself the Second Coming of Christ. The middle-aged man, unwashed, with a disorderly beard and a brightly colored, tattered robe, was not only admitted to the House of All, but given gifts of new clothes and soap and generally treated with a smiling indulgence. When he came into Amma’s presence for the first time, he strode purposefully up to her chair and proclaimed in a loud voice, “I am the one you have been waiting for, my dear!” With arms outstretched, he began to “bless” her in front of the large group of devotees. No one appeared to be bothered by this behavior, least of all Amma, who gazed on with a compassionate twinkle in her eyes. During the few days that he stayed at Jillellamudi, I never saw Amma treat this strange guest with anything less than complete respect and affection. It was a revelation to see how oblivious she was of the outward mask of psychosis which he was wearing. For the rest of us “J” was alternately an object of humor or pity. But for Amma, he was apparently just another child, no more and no less. At times, he seemed visibly to respond to Mother’s affectionate treatment. I remember particularly one time when Amma called him over and smilingly poured fresh milk-sweets into his open hands. He walked away radiant. “Did you see that! Did you see!” he called out tearfully to all and sundry. It was a very moving moment. For it was clear that Amma had penetrated through the impermeable shell of separateness that he had built up around himself. And I realized that he was here for exactly the same reason as the rest of us—to receive her love. There was a young woman at Jillellamudi who walked about the grounds of the ashram oblivious of everything and everyone around her, in a kind of catatonic haze. I had never seen her engage in any purposeful activity or talk to anyone except Amma. When she went upstairs, Mother invariably called her over and alternately scolded, cajoled, stroked her arm or fed her by hand. The madwoman mouthed a few words slowly and deliberately in reply to Mother’s words. And it was clear that, in some incomprehensible way, Amma had actually gotten through to her. As was the case with “J,” Mother had accomplished this, without condescension or the patronizing and misplaced pity that are usual in such cases, by treating her in a fully frank and human manner. The famous words of the philosopher, “Nothing human is foreign to me,” is evidently true of Mother’s experience. There is no state of mind, however bizarre, that Amma could not penetrate through with the spotlight of her love. I can’t resist telling here a story which was related to me by a businessman-devotee from the port city of Vizagapatnam about

his son, a severely retarded boy, who was taken to Jillellamudi to receive Amma’s blessings. The parents had no expectation that their son would respond to Mother’s presence. Indeed, he was in no position to understand why people had gathered around him, since his mental development was that of an infant and his use of language restricted to grunts and groans and occasional monosyllables. As expected, he sat rather dully through the darshan without the least outward sign of interest or involvement in what was happening around him. Some weeks later, however, after returning home, the boy’s father was startled to hear his son crying out in an agitated voice, “Amma, Amma, Amma!” When he rushed over to him, he found the boy with tears in his eyes clearly shaken. “Do you want your mother?” the father asked, (Amma means “mother” in Telugu) but the boy shook his head no and gestured toward a photograph of the Jillellamudi Mother on the wall. On their next visit to Jillellamudi, no sooner had they arrived than the young man slipped away from his parents and made a mad dash up to Amma’s room. They were naturally embarrassed by his breach of etiquette in barging in on Amma uninvited. But at the same time, they were thrilled at this unprecedented act of initiative on their boy’s part. Above all, they were overjoyed to know that Amma had wordlessly entered their son’s heart in the same mysterious way she had entered their own. In America, you are not thought to be qualified to deal with emotionally disturbed or retarded persons until you have completed a lengthy doctorate in psychology. And here was someone without so much as an elementary school education, surely ignorant in a formal sense of all contemporary theories on mental and psychological disorders, who could effortlessly commune with the most severely “abnormal” individuals. I am sure that the experts would have learned a lot simply by watching Amma. But doubtless the most important thing that they would have learned is that love is the universal solvent. By focusing on that place where we are all the same, Amma dissolved the barriers between herself and others. And she awakened each of us—the “normal” and the “abnormal” alike—to an awareness of our shared humanity. Something that no sophisticated theories or accumulated expertise or fancy letters appended after your name is capable of bringing about. During the early days, when Amma lived in a grass thatch-and-mud hut in the village proper, visitors were often amazed to see animals that are instinctive enemies—rats, cats, snakes and dogs—frisking about and playing together on the loose end of her sari. A kitten was seen suckling at the teats of a mongrel there, oblivious of the fact that they belonged to different species. Sometimes, this happened to Mother’s human children as well. When we were with her, the differences in race, culture, personality, and social class melted away in the lucid silence of a presence that made these distinctions appear petty and insubstantial. There was almost the feeling of having one mind. It was as if we were limbs of a single body having the exact same experience. And Mother was the beating heart at the center. This true communion of souls was especially poignant at night when perhaps a dozen devotees gathered informally on the rooftop by Amma’s room while she talked, paced back and forth, or lay on a cot at the front of the gathering. The busy thoughts and schemes of the day, slowly dissipated. The dome of the night was like a primeval womb that beckoned us back to ourselves. And everything was filled with a slow graciousness; unobtrusively, people would come and go, prostrate and sit down on the bare concrete. Through it all, the moonlight played a furtive game of hide-and-seek behind the low scudding clouds. In the far distance, the perennial dance of lighting illuminated massive cloudbanks like lamps under shades. Amma spoke softly, expansively, with long pauses in her speech, and yet in the silence her words were soothing like the night and clearly audible for yards around. How completely different the rhythm was now from the crowded daytime darshan of a few hours ago when the shavenheaded pilgrims were on their way home from the gold-domed Tirupathi temple, India’s wealthiest shrine. When they disembarked from the tourist bus, they were shepherded upstairs where they prostrated one after another before Amma, as they had done before the black stone idol of Lord Venkateshwara the day before. People milled about, babies bawled, parents shouted to their children, and the alcove rang with the orchestrated chanting of Mother’s name. Sitting on a large upholstered chair in front of the gathering, Amma, serene and impassive and wearing a brilliant green silk sari, had appeared like a calm eye in the storm of noise and bustle. By dusk, however, all of the daytime visitors were gone and a natural intimacy had returned. No more were the curious peering at Amma as if she were some rare specimen in a museum, or giving her the exaggerated and supplicating reverence due a goddess. The atmosphere was now that of a small family gathering. Under the stars each one sat alone, introspective, yet somehow tied to all the others by the strands of lucent stillness. The longer we sat with Amma, the more we were drawn in to the center, as it were. In time, even the low murmur of voices died away and the enchantment became unbroken. Silence happened naturally around Mother. I have been told that, during Mother’s whirlwind tour of South India in 1975, there were times when she would be sitting on a raised dais giving darshan to over a hundred thousand people, and a hush would fall over the crowd. There were moments when a pin-drop silence reigned over the whole vast gathering. What an unforgettable scene! The world has seen its share of rabble-rousers who could rouse a mob to fever pitch with their shallow charisma and mindless slogans. There has never been any shortage of those who could set thousands to chanting “Sieg Heil!” or “Down with!” or

“Amen!” with their compelling verbal wizardry. But to hush a mammoth congregation for an hour or more at a time—that is without a doubt a rarer gift and a more constructive one. I must emphasize, however, that the silence that emanates from a figure like Amma is not in any sense a negative or a forced phenomenon. It is not the tense sort of pious hush that happens in a church, for instance, when the pastor announces gravely, “And now let us pray....” On the contrary, it is the same spontaneous overflow of reverence that we feel when confronted with a natural wonder–the sight of an awesome snowcapped peak, the birth of a foal, or the chromatic brilliance of a tropical sunset. We are in the presence of something so far beyond expression that words become superfluous and jarring. There is a common misunderstanding of spiritual silence, and of Eastern methods of meditation in particular, which sees in them a kind vacuity or emptiness. It is true that these spiritual states are frequently empty of anything that you can easily talk about. But if they are empty of the familiar, they are, at the same time, full of a luminousness, a peace, a transcendent knowledge which is no less real for the fact that it defies clear-cut definition. This is what you experienced at Jillellamudi. Contact with a saint awakens the dormant spirituality within us and brings it to the surface. This is a fact long known in India where scripture speaks glowingly of the power of satsang (literally, “being with Truth,” that is to say, being with one who is a living embodiment of Truth). The true guru actually communicates the flame of spirituality in much the same way that a glowing ember ignites a piece of dry wood with which it comes in contact. The traditional accounts speak of several methods by which this transfer of consciousness can be effected, among which are the initiation by mantra (or word of power) and the initiation by verbal teachings. Even more direct methods include the initiation by touch and the initiation by glance. But of all the various methods of awakening spirituality, the most potent and the one least liable to distortion is the initiation of silence. Silence alone of all these methods is beyond the dualities of assertion and denial, object and subject, giving and receiving. And it is therefore through silence that the guru makes the highest statement of her teachings. But bear in mind that the silence of the saint is not the silence of an ordinary person (if it were, then we could all of us transform ourselves into saints by buttoning our lips!). Indeed, silence is not, in its highest sense, just the absence of noise and chatter. On the contrary, it is a state of mind that persists just as much when we are speaking as when we remain quiet. When we are silent in this inward sense, we are truly imperturbable. And anyone who enters the presence of such a one feels himself to be enveloped in a vast calm. That calm is called mouna in India, and the silent one is called a mouni. Silence is not something the mouni does or doesn’t do, but something he is. I have often seen Amma gossiping amiably, sometimes for hours at a time. And yet as I watched, it seemed that the stream of words and gestures was flowing through her from the outside and passing on tracelessly, like a plume of incense smoke or a line drawn on water. Inwardly, she appeared completely untouched. And invariably she appeared just as fresh when she finished as when she started. Words, acts, laughter and tears, they all passed over Amma like water over a duck’s back. A vigorous and youthful government minister from the city of Hyderabad where many of Amma’s devotees live, a man of considerable energy who worked twelve or more hours a day and was a leading figure in several Indian national sports organizations, told me that when Amma came to his city, he found her whirlwind tour visiting hospitals, slum areas, schools, prisons and the like, quite impossible to keep up with. And strangely, she never wearied of this grueling schedule. You need only look at Amma’s childlike face at age sixty without a single worry-line or crease, or marvel at her hands and feet, as soft as a newborn babe (and that after years of physical labor as a farm-wife!) to realize how incredibly little life has worn her down. To act in the world is—for ordinary mortals at least—inevitably to be acted upon, as well. But with Amma, this equation did not seem to operate. She neither acted nor was acted upon. Hence, the impression of someone unmarred by life, without in any sense being innocent or naive, someone who was, as Christ enjoined his disciples to be, one of the rare ones who was “in this world, but not of it.” Or to express it in a more earthy mystical language, she was like the butcher in Lao Tzu’s wellknown poem, who all day long chops precisely at the joint and whose knife, therefore, never goes blunt however much it is used. When we act calmly and with precision, without paying attention to anything but the task at hand—and without undue anxiety as to the results of our acts—then the sharp blade of our energy is never blunted. Indeed, it feels as if we are not acting at all, that our acts are, in a certain sense, effortless. This is what Lao Tzu enigmatically termed “actionless action.” Which brings us to the other side of the paradoxical coin; if the sage remains actionless in the midst of his action and silent in the midst of his speech, then the curious truth expounded by Lao Tzu is equally true: “By his non-action, the sage governs all.” In commenting on this maxim, the contemporary South Indian holy man, Ramana Maharshi, has explained: “Non-action is unceasing activity. The sage is characterized by eternal and intense activity. His stillness is like the apparent stillness of a rapidly rotating top. Its speed is too quick to be followed by the eye and so it appears to be still.” We can certainly observe this in Amma. Even when she is apparently inactive, there is nevertheless a quiet intensity, an alertness that is palpable. Perhaps the best way to put it is that we are in the presence of a person who is totally awake and alive in

every cell of her being. This awakeness is so profound that it seems at first sight almost supernatural. Those who are clairvoyant could perceive this quality as an aura of subtle energy radiating constantly from the Mother and bathing those in her presence in a rarefied psychic atmosphere. It is easy to understand why saints in various religions are pictured surrounded by haloes of light. This is no picturesque adornment, but an actual physical rendering of how a holy one appears to the inner eye, as a fountainhead of radiant divine power. Observing Amma, I often get the feeling that she is probing for a suitable recipient for this subtle energy. From a distance, she might appear motionless, statuesque. But, moving closer, one notices her eyes darting swiftly and calmly from one person to the next, as if she is scanning the crowd until she senses a receptivity, and then holding her gaze there for a few moments before moving on. Throughout the darshan, her face shifts sensitively as her attention moves from one person to another in the crowd before her. One feels in this searching gaze a yearning on Mother’s part to share something of her own inward state, to pour herself out. Yet few, if any, it seems, are in a position to fully accept her gift. Those who are able to hold her gaze, however, feel enriched by something indefinable yet powerful—an inward opening, a sense of having been strangely lifted up into a rarefied atmosphere of thought and feeling. Or at times it feels as if you are wrapped in a cocoon of luminous silence. This subtle sensation might persist for hours or even days Experiences such as this make you wonder how much we can really understand of a great soul and her effect on the world by looking only at the surface drama of her actions. I often think that what is visible is less than the tip of the iceberg and that a whole undreamt-of spectrum of powers is operating below the surface—healing, instructing, opening and transforming those close at hand, and perhaps at great distances, as well. You certainly feel cleansed after sitting with the Mother for some time, the world becoming unaccountably fresh, vivid, bracing. Once when Amma was gazing off, seemingly absent-mindedly into space, a devotee asked her what she was looking at. She replied, “I am watching thoughts coming to me crooked and distorted and leaving me straight.” It was a telling remark. Many have commented that, when they are with her, it is nearly impossible to hold on to feelings of anger, worry or agitation, however compelling they seemed just moments before. And even afterwards, these emotions seem to have less of a hold on one. One devotee termed this remarkable effect “the subtle alchemy.” In a later chapter, we will examine the impact of this subtle alchemy in greater detail. And we will also look at instances of Mother’s so-called “miraculous powers.” Many physical healings, mystical experiences, and spontaneous character transformations occur around one such as Amma. Spiritual power may not yet have been detected by any Geiger counter nor distilled in any test tube. But in a place like Jillellamudi the effects of it are to be seen everywhere you turn! Only where Mother is concerned, this power always seems a natural expression of her being, like breathing in and breathing out, and not at all “miraculous.” For the moment, however, we’ll return to some of Amma’s more mundane (if, in their own way, equally surprising) actions. It has always amazed me, for example, how Mother was able to attend to two or more activities at one time without losing the thread of her concentration. She may have been engaged in a deep philosophical discussion, but would not fail to notice and respond to those moving in and out of her presence, if only by a welcoming nod, a gesture that they take their meals, or that coffee be served to them. I would occasionally massage Amma’s legs and feet. All the while, she would be indicating by unobtrusive movements of her hands and feet how much pressure should be applied and where precisely, even which toes I had inadvertently missed. I am ashamed to admit that Amma was far more sensitively attuned to what I was doing than I was myself! Indeed, whatever you did for Mother—whether it was massaging or fanning her, sweeping her room, or cooking for her visitors—it was invariably to be trained in the most efficient and conscious way to accomplish it. She was not so much a hard taskmaster as an intensely observant guide who endeavored to inspire those around her to give the same care and full attention to their actions as she herself gave to whatever she did. On many occasions, Mother personally served a meal to her visitors. However large the group, she invariably knew as soon as one had run out of water, or when another was ready for seconds, or whether still another preferred the spicy or the blander types of curry. If one element in the multicourse South Indian rice meal was not palatable for a certain person, Amma would know this without being told, and she instructed the kitchen in advance to prepare a substitute. She had an uncanny faculty for knowing the intimate habits of those who came to her. She would tell her attendant, for instance, “Go and get some lemon chutney. ‘X’ takes lemon chutney with his curd rice.” Needless to say, it would be a mystery to X how Amma knows what he eats in the privacy of his own home! More remarkable even than her precise knowledge of our habits was her loving attention to the task at hand. When Mother served food to the devotees, I often thought of Christ washing the feet of his disciples. Not only were you struck by the humility of the deed, but even more by the extreme care and, indeed, reverence with which it was performed. Mother had stated: “Worship is

what goes on all the time, not for one hour or one day only. It is not a question of reciting certain formulas and performing certain ritual actions. Continuous awareness alone is worship” It is this unwavering attention that Amma lavished on everything she did which elevates even simple acts to the level of worship. The popular stereotype of the holy man as someone with his head floating somewhere in the clouds, far removed from the practical concerns of life, is contradicted by Mother’s total engagement—as indeed it must have been by Christ’s, as well. For Mother, the world is not an illusion to be shunned, but a manifestation of God Himself. And as such it, it is worthy of her precise and cherishing attention. One facet of Amma’s surprising attention to detail was her phenomenal memory. It is said that she never forgot any of the untold thousands of people who came to Jillellamudi. Many years after meeting her, Mother would tell people on what date they first came to her, how they were dressed, even what they ate for lunch. Once Mother described the design of the long-sleeved blue shirt that I had worn during my first darshan in the nursing home at Nellore. (I myself had long since forgotten that shirt, but her description awakened a vague memory of it.) Sri Lingeswara Rao told me how Amma had mentioned during his first meeting with her at Jillellamudi that she had seen him many decades earlier in the town of Chirala when he was a youngster. Amma was herself a child at that time. She said that she had caught a glimpse of her future devotee momentarily through an open door, playing cards with some young friends. Lingeswara Rao had no memory of it, but when he checked with his elderly mother, she confirmed that in those days he had been in the habit of playing cards with a few companions at the location which Amma had mentioned. Still more difficult to grasp is the occasion when Mother told a visitor that she had seen him standing in a crowd while he was waiting for a train to arrive on a certain date in 1911. (Amma was not born until 1923.) To his amazement, when he checked with relatives, it turned out that he had indeed been traveling on the date Amma specified to the ancient hillside temple at Mangalagiri to serve as a volunteer cook during a festival there. Perhaps this was Amma’s way of saying to her devotee, “I have ever been with you.” For whatever else it may have been, it was obviously not a simple question of memory, however photographic. When she was asked how it is that she can recall details from the distant past. Amma replied, “Mother has no forgetfulness.” I think that a lot more is implied here than merely being able to bring to consciousness instantly anything that she has ever perceived. In a deeper sense, she seems to be saying that there are no boundaries at all to her knowledge, in either time or space. Mother once remarked: “Whatever I need to know is known to me in that moment.” It seems she is not describing a process of memory, but rather a kind of universal recall, in which she just knows certain things directly, without going through any particular process of knowing. Indian spirituality teaches that there exists a kind of Universal Consciousness—a cosmic computer, if you will—in which all knowledge is permanently recorded. (Western esotericists speak of the “Akashic Records.”) Perhaps one who has transcended her limited identification with ego-consciousness is in constant contact with this universal store of consciousness and need make no special effort to access it. I myself and many others have experienced chatting in Amma’s room while Mother was apparently asleep and snoring, only to have her make specific reference to what was said after she awakened. Mother confirms that her “sleep” is not, as it is with us, a state of unconsciousness of her surroundings. Exactly what sleep is for Amma remains one of the many mysteries of a personality whose every function—sleep, memory, intuition, attention—transcends all familiar definitions and becomes something that, to our eyes, at least, looks superhuman. ❖ Well, perhaps you will have gotten some sense for why I was fascinated, nay, obsessed to unravel the mystery in whose presence I found myself. The book that you hold in your hands is a product of that obsession. The more I learned about Amma, the less I felt I understood. But the sheer impossibility of understanding her in the usual sense did not discourage me, but spurred me on to search for all the clues that I could find. I pored over everything that had been published in English about Amma. I studied the cryptic, Indianized translations of the biography which Mother herself had dictated. And whenever there was a chance to talk with the old-time devotees, I listened eagerly to their reminiscences. But more than anything, it was the spare, Zen-like tales of Amma’s youth that struck me. These gems in the rough, it was clear, needed only a little cutting and polishing in order to shine with a rare light. I had encountered nothing in the spiritual literature of mankind that detailed the youthful blossoming of a great soul so poignantly. As my appreciation for the uniqueness of Amma’s life increased, I longed to see it presented to a wider audience. I had done a little writing and journalism at school, and I toyed with the idea of bringing out a book on Amma in English. But many reasonable objections prevented me from jumping too quickly into the fray. Not the least of these was the fact that, for all my feelings of devotion, Amma remained a mystery of the sort that recedes just out of reach at the very moment you try to pin it down. Was she the Divine Mother of the universe in human form, as many of her devotees believed? Was she a realized soul, come to show us the

way to enlightened consciousness? Or was she (as Amma herself had often hinted) not essentially different from ourselves, but indeed the unconditioned human being, the unadulterated “I” at the heart of all of us? How to write about such a figure? Could I really hope to explain to others what I understood so imperfectly myself? And, furthermore, would Amma be pleased or would she find it presumptuous that someone so little qualified as I should even think to attempt such a book. For several months these conflicting feelings seethed in me. Then one morning as I was sitting alone in my room at Jillellamudi, it quite suddenly and forcefully became clear to me that I must simply go ahead with this work that I felt so drawn to and that I must start it immediately. This was not something that was reasoned out logically. All of the very good reasons for not doing it were still valid—and remain so today. They were, however, suddenly overridden by a devotee’s irrational—though perhaps not unreasonable—assumption that the very Power that makes him want to accomplish something will itself see to it that it is completed successfully. After finally deciding to go ahead with the book, it was as if the floodgates had opened. I was filled with a sense of euphoria and enthusiasm. Within minutes, a messenger from upstairs was at the door—“Mother wants to see you. Please come right away.” What could it possibly be? I literally raced up the stairs to the third floor. When I arrived at Mother’s apartment, I was directed by her attendant, Vasundhara, to take a seat and wait in the empty reception hall. A few moments later, Amma strode in purposefully from the kitchen with a banana in her hand, which she lost no time in unpeeling. Without a word of explanation, she started crushing the soft fruit between her fingers and shoving it into my open mouth, as a mother feeds her infant. Having completed this task, she walked off again, leaving me to puzzle over what had just taken place. Surely she didn’t call me upstairs just to feed me a banana? I sat there, reluctant to leave. Surely she would return and reveal the “real purpose” for her summons. But nothing happened. As I stumbled out of the room perplexed, it suddenly dawned on me: “You decide to go ahead with the book and are immediately summoned by Amma, not to be fed a banana, but to be symbolically blessed thereby in your new resolve!” By the grace of that blessing, the book is now complete. The mystery which I presumed to elucidate is not less mysterious now than it was then. So if there is anything of Amma to be found in these pages, it is solely by virtue of that blessing which I have felt guiding and inspiring me throughout. In concluding this introductory section, I would like to share an essay which I wrote for Mother’s ashram magazine, the Matrusri Journal, that sums up my feelings about how I came to be there and what I found when I arrived. ❖ At Jillellamudi there is something absolutely unique. I have not seen its like anywhere else, not in the overstocked supermarkets of my homeland, not on color television, not in the cavernous libraries or lecture halls of universities, and not on any of the superhighways or crowded skyways of the modern world. The scientists have so far failed to isolate it in their test tubes. Astronomers have never sighted it with their highest- power radio telescopes. The most brilliant philosophers have not yet guessed at its existence. It is the simplest thing of all, the smallest, the humblest, the easiest to overlook. There is not even a proper word for it. When we speak of it, we call it “love.” I knew little about this entity. I surely was unaware that it was something to be sought, to be longed for. I had come across the word, of course, heard it trumpeted in a hundred popular songs. But mostly, they seemed to be talking about sex and the curious bewitchment that men and women feel in the presence of each other’s bodies. I noticed others, the preachers, use the word in a slightly different sense. They say, “God loves,” but hates the sinner and sends the disobedient to eternal damnation. Somehow, I was never able to make much sense of this word “love,” or to understand why everybody made such a fuss about it. Then one day quite unexpectedly, without searching for it or even knowing what to search for, I found myself in the presence of a smallish woman with a simple manner and fathomless eyes, in an out-of-the-way corner of rural South India. As I quietly watched her silences and her speech, her ready and joyful acceptance of all, her respect and consideration for all, it suddenly occurred to me that this was the thing that everyone talked about but nobody knew. Here was the love proclaimed from every rooftop, yet all but extinct in practice—love without motives, pure, selfless–without limits. What was it that brought me to her for the first time? What was it that brought me back again? What was it that kept me there for years at a time, so far from my native land? A thing I never sought, nor knew to seek, the smallest thing which is at the same time boundless—the Power of Love.

Part Two

4. THE BIRTH “My history is limited: my life is unlimited.” — Amma

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of our planet’s slow revolutions, a flame streaks through a thick and troubled atmosphere and illumines for a moment the landscape below. The multitudes asleep in the heavy structures of their ignorance see nothing. A mere handful—those who are awake and anxiously searching the night sky—will watch the marvel in wonder, a brilliant fireball passing swiftly, silently overhead. The lives of great souls are like that, blazing with a rare glory, yet passing all but unnoticed through the world of humans. Only a few eyes gaze up in awe at the miracle of light being shed upon us. The rest remain ignorant of the blessing that was theirs; but none remains unaffected by it. The healing influence of the sage is showered on all to uplift the Whole. Invisible to the mass of humanity, the waves of Love and Truth which she releases ripple through our world in ever-widening circles of benediction. The Great One comes to bless; she walks the paths of men and women solely to bless them by her touch. Because she is selfless, her life is lived out for the benefit of all beings everywhere. She comes to set an example, to provide a mirror in which each of us can view his or her own purest reflection and understand the hidden potentials of our humanity. For those who aspire to know themselves, the life story of the self-realized sage is something priceless—her least words are scripture, her deeds a living testimony of hope and inspiration. Mother’s earthly sojourn began in the spring of 1923, as the world records time, in the small rice-growing village of Mannava, situated on the coastal plains of southeastern India between the Bay of Bengal and the low line of barren granite hills which rise up to form the Deccan Plateau. But, in truth, her story is not limited to the facts of time and place, and the details of her outward life are external symbols and signs pointing to that true life, the inner life which is eternal and without limits. We may begin our narrative, however, some few months before her conception. Sri Sitapati Rao, the karanam (headman) of Mannava village, a man not wealthy but comfortably positioned in life, a small landowner, a Brahmin by caste and a descendant of one of the original founders of his village, is sitting in the shade of a tamarind tree, brooding over the tragic loss of five of his six children to the diseases of infancy. Suddenly, the countryside before him is bathed in unearthly light. And there appears before him the luminous form of a small girl, perhaps five years old, her pleasing features strangely familiar. As he looks on in wonder, the form of the young girl dissolves and in her place there appear the radiant figures of Lord Vishnu and his consort, the Goddess Lakshmi, the deities of Sri Sitapati Rao’s worship. They linger only a few moments before merging back into the form of the same young girl. Finally, she too fades away, and once again the peaceful rural scene of tree-bordered fields and distant hills is as it was before. Sri Sitapati Rao is thrilled, uplifted. But this practical businessman is puzzled by the experience, which is at once too vivid to be denied and too extraordinary to be fully understood or accepted. He concludes that the vision must have come as the result of some special worship which he has recently been conducting and dismisses it as best he can from his mind. Some time later, Sri Sitapati has another experience, equally vivid, but coming this time during sleep. In this dream, he sees a middle-aged woman of striking beauty and an otherworldly serenity sitting alone in the center of a room bare of furniture. Her most distinctive feature is the sacred vermilion kum-kum mark on her forehead, which is larger and placed lower than is customary. “Who are you?” he asks. “I am the Mother,” she answers. “Whose Mother?” “I am the Mother of All,” she replies matter-of-factly. OW AND AGAIN IN THE COURSE

The experience stirs Sitapati profoundly. The following morning he goes to a well-known scholar and close friend of his, in order to have the strange vision interpreted. The pundit is awestruck and explains that the dream foretells the birth of a divine child. The woman who appeared to him was a Goddess who would soon be incarnating into his family line, the pundit declares. At the time, Sri Sitapati could not give much credence to this prediction which sounded too far-fetched and superstitious for his matter-of-fact temperament. The experience nevertheless left its mark. Several decades later, when the first devotees were already gathering around his daughter at Jillellamudi, he would recognize in her distinctive features and characteristically large kum-kum mark the woman in his dream-vision. Many years earlier, he came to the realization that the “oddly familiar” girl of the tamarind tree vision was none other than his young daughter, Anasuya Devi. Some few months after Sitapati’s second vision, his wife Rangamma was once again pregnant. But rather than causing them to rejoice, it filled the unhappy couple with anxious forebodings. The memories of the children that they had lost were painfully fresh in their minds. Nevertheless, for Rangamma these fears were eclipsed by a series of unusual inner experiences which started at the time of conception and continued until the birth. Time and again, she found herself inundated with a powerful wave of joy. So intense were her emotions that the usually modest and retiring woman would laugh uncontrollably or weep out great streams of joyful tears. The impetuous force of these experiences made them as blissful as they were disturbing and incongruously out of character for the otherwise shy and retiring woman. At times, she even feared that her own life might be endangered by the sheer forcefulness of her ecstasies. As strange as they must have seemed to Rangamma, her spiritual moods were even more puzzling to those around her. Sometimes, she would be observed sitting stonelike for long stretches of time, her eyes open but unblinking, completely oblivious to all that was going on around her. Rangamma confided in her husband that on several occasions she underwent brief moments of self-transcendence when she felt one with the infinite. At times, these experiences would become focused on the unborn infant, and she would feel strangely as if she were carrying the whole of creation within her womb. Rangamma is described as having been a conventionally pious and kindly woman, but never as a mystic. She was not at all learned in spiritual lore and knew nothing of yoga or meditation. As with her husband and his visions, Rangamma could only have been bewildered by these strange experiences, which came to her unsought and unannounced. Little could she have guessed their hidden significance at the time, or known of the great event which they presaged. On the sacred Suddha Ekadasi (a day dedicated to fasting and prayer) of the Hindu month of Chaitra (March–April) at 4:30 a.m., just as the first orange light was tinting the eastern horizon, a child was born to Rangamma. At the exact moment of birth, a special ceremonial function to celebrate the auspicious dawn was reaching its climax in the nearby village temple. The first sounds that greeted the newborn were the metallic clanging of the massive temple bell, the wailing of the ritual horns, and the resonant trumpeting of a sacred conch, which seemed to proclaim the holiness of the moment to the world. The relatives and the two midwife assistants who had gathered around mother and child gazed wordlessly at the infant who had come out with arms and legs intertwined, and was of an unusually pale complexion and delicate appearance. For one interminable moment, the child remained motionless. Could the worst have happened again to poor Rangamma? Was the child stillborn? But when some brass vessels were rattled loudly by the birth attendants, the infant burst obligingly into tears and a palpable wave of relief passed through the gathering. Immediately one of the midwives, Nagamma, set to work. Grasping a knife and a length of rope, she prepared to cut the umbilical cord. But just as she was about to do so, a strange vision overpowered her. The knife became transformed into a trident (a Hindu emblem of divinity) and the rope, which was to be used to tie up the umbilical cord, elongated to the point where she could no longer make out either end of it. When the wonderstruck midwife glanced down at the infant, she observed a sacred conch (a symbol for Aum, the seed vibration out of which creation is said to have arisen) on the newborn’s abdomen. But no sooner did the conch appear than it changed into a lotus flower, in the heart of which a divine figure danced fluidly in ecstasy. Overwhelmed, Nagamma shut her eyes in disbelief. When she opened them moments later, the vision had disappeared, and she saw in its place only the questioning looks in the eyes of those who wondered why she had paused so long in her work. An embarrassed Nagamma made the excuse that she had felt giddy and proceeded to sever and tie shut the umbilical cord. But her mind was elsewhere, filled with a rare bliss. The newborn appeared unusually bright and alert, her eyes radiant with intelligence and with something deeper and harder to pin down. Several of those who moved around her in the days and weeks that followed were left with the uncanny impression that Amma knew what was going on around her. The infant’s gestures and facial expressions seemed to respond to the words and actions, and even at times to the unspoken thoughts and feelings, of those around her. But those who sensed this mostly dismissed it as being the product of an overactive imagination. Only many years later would their memories revive with a true sense of their significance. That Mother was, in fact, fully aware of all that was happening around her as a newborn babe was dramatically confirmed

recently when she recounted to her mother-in-law, Kanakamma, certain minor incidents and narrated verbatim some of the dialogues which took place just after her birth. Kanakamma, who was present at the time of Mother’s birth, confirmed that Amma had related several events which she herself had long since forgotten but was reminded of by Mother’s words. As we have already seen, Mother explains such wonders by asserting that she “has no forgetfulness.” Neither is time perceived by her in the three separate and distinct categories of past, present and future. As a result, all events that have occurred, are occurring, or will occur appear to her omniscient gaze to be happening in the here-and-now. To illustrate this, Mother uses the analogy of a room divided into three sections by a partition. The individual whose vision is blocked by the partition will

5. YOUNG AMMA “I am not anything now that I was not before. From birth onwards I have been ever the same.”

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—Amma

ON THE FOURTH DAY after the birth, there came what, to all appearances, was a sudden crisis in the child’s health. The infant’s body became senseless and stiff. There was no movement in her tiny limbs, and her tender skin had turned an asphyxial blue. For long periods, her breath was barely perceptible or suspended altogether. Rangamma spent her time in sorrowful vigil with the infant in whom the signs of life were all but extinguished, and wept disconsolately at the bitterness of her fate. On the morning of the tenth day of this mysterious “illness,” as Rangamma was sitting in tears with her comatose child, she distinctly heard a voice assure her: “No danger, don’t worry.” When she gazed around the room, there was nobody there. “How can the child speak?” she wondered, and then heard the disembodied voice once again saying, “Don’t be depressed.” Rangamma’s spirits were revived by this and she went immediately to her husband to recommend that the ceremonial bath, a traditional Hindu function for infants, be arranged for the very next day. “Let us first be sure that the girl has some life in her,” Sitapati cautioned. But when Rangamma told him of the strange assurance that she had just been given, he agreed that they should go ahead with preparations for the bath. And so it happened that, by the following day, the infant had inexplicably recovered from her curious illness. And the ceremonial function went ahead on schedule. Exactly one hundred and eight village ladies came bearing vessels and the child was bathed with a small measure of water from all of them as a token of the collective blessings of the community for its newest member.1 After the ceremony, Amma was placed temporarily on a makeshift rice-winnowing basket-cradle and left in the care of some village children. But before long, the last of the youngsters had drifted off to play. At this point, a large dog wandered over and, placing its muzzle at the child’s feet, lay peacefully asleep for ten minutes. When the elders returned, they were alarmed to see this big black mutt next to the unattended infant and they tried to drive it off. Despite being thrashed with a stout bamboo cane, however, the dog refused to budge. Only when Amma’s tiny feet stirred did it get up and, after pacing full circle three times around her as if in reverent circumambulation, walk off. In a few minutes it returned, licked up a bit of the infant’s vomit, and then lay down directly in front of her. Gazing placidly into Amma’s eyes, the mongrel breathed its last. The village folk watched this short drama with wonder. They were struck by the fact that the dog had shown no signs of ill health prior to its death at the child’s feet. Rangamma and Sitapati witnessed a similar incident a few weeks later, when an otherwise robust pet cat of theirs died, its head resting gently on Amma’s feet, after pacing around her and purring enthusiastically for over half an hour. These were not the only untimely deaths which seemed connected in some mysterious way with the newborn. During the four weeks following Amma’s birth fully eleven persons among Rangamma’s and Sitapati’s extended families had passed away. Sri Sitapati consulted a pundit about this extraordinary state of affairs and was told that the deaths were an auspicious sign, indicating that a Mahapurusha (great soul) had been born into the family, purifying the line and thereby enabling these individuals to merge into the absolute and attain moksha, the final liberation from the rounds of birth and death. Amma’s great grandmother, Maridamma, a devout soul well versed in spiritual lore, came independently to the same conclusion and assured Rangamma:

“Through this girl, your family has been greatly sanctified; otherwise, so many deaths would never have occurred.” On the twenty-seventh day after her birth, the infant was given a name in the traditional Namakaranam ceremony. A proud Sitapati Rao drew the curvaceous Telugu letters for Anasuya with his finger on a plate covered with vermilion kum-kum powder. He could not have known at the time how fitting this choice was to prove; Anasuya is a Sanskrit term which means “one who is completely devoid of hatred.” After the name had been fixed, each of the celebrants came forward individually and sprinkled a mixture of rice grains and kum-kum powder over the infant in symbolic blessing. One among them was Amma’s cousin, the 10year-old Nageswara Rao, who was to be her future spouse. Because of Rangamma’s anxiety over Anasuya’s health and her superstitious foreboding that any child brought up by her hands was doomed to an early death, Rangamma gave over most of the practical responsibility for rearing Amma to Maridamma and the midwife, Nagamma. In a short time, both women became very attached to the infant and lavished upon her the doting affections of a mother for her own child. When Maridamma had to leave Mannava for an extended stay with relatives in a nearby town, she took sorrowful leave of the infant and told Nagamma to take the child to her own home to suckle and bathe her. She also instructed her to bring the infant to Rangamma for a short time every day. Nagamma was delighted with her good fortune. When she approached her hut cradling the child in her arms, however, her joy was shattered. Lying in wait at the entranceway was a cobra with its hood fully spread, facing them.2 Her initial terror, however, turned to wonder when the serpent bowed down its hood, as if in reverent prostration. Meanwhile, the villagers fetched bamboo canes to drive the snake away. But just as one of them was about to strike it, there was a blinding flash of light. When the light had faded, the cobra was gone, having literally vanished into thin air. The village folk suspected that sorcery was behind this. But Nagamma must have been reminded of her vision at the time of the child’s birth. No doubt, she pondered the mystery of the young one whom she clasped to her breast, and whose birth and infancy were attended by such strange and portentous signs. In the days and weeks that followed Nagamma was captivated by the serenity of her charge, and how she never cried out to be suckled, was never moody or irritable as other infants are. There was a quality of self-sufficiency, an inner joy which radiated from the young Amma at all times. The midwife was in awe. Gradually, her admiration would turn into something more akin to devotion, and she would compare herself happily with the gopis (milkmaids) who were blessed with the constant companionship of their Lord, the young Sri Krishna. “Amma, you are brilliant like the midday sun,” Nagamma was to proclaim some years later. “The only difference is that, while we cannot look directly at the sun, we are powerless to close our eyes to you!” When great-grandmother Maridamma came back to Mannava a year and a half after leaving and asked for the young Anasuya Devi to be returned to her care, Nagamma was devastated. Tearfully, she returned the child to the family home. But her anguish was to be short-lived. As if in recognition of Nagamma’s surpassing devotion, the young Amma used to weep bitterly unless taken at least once a day to Nagamma’s hut. And it soon happened that Nagamma would neglect her own housework in order to spend every free moment attending Amma at Maridamma’s house, so great was her attachment to this child who appeared to her loving gaze radiant with the light of divinity itself. One afternoon shortly after returning to her ancestral home, the 19-month-old Anasuya was observed by Rangamma to be seated in padmasana (the crosslegged posture of meditation). Her eyeballs were strangely inverted in their sockets, as if gazing inward. Rangamma, returning from the village well at the time, mistook this rigid yogic posture and the child’s obliviousness to the world for an epileptic fit. She rushed over to her child and poured onto her the contents of the large water vessel which she was carrying, in an attempt to revive her. When this dousing failed to “awaken” Amma, Rangamma called on the village doctor, who administered a variety of pungent liquids into her nostrils. But still the child did not stir. In half-an-hour’s time, Anasuya Devi, still sitting in padmasana, returned of her own accord to consciousness of the external world. On another occasion, Anasuya Devi was observed seated under a neighbor’s pomegranate tree in deep meditation. Once again, her eyeballs were turned inward and her breath was suspended. In the child’s open palm there lay a single pomegranate flower. Her maternal aunt, Annapurnamma, watched the young Amma for some time. When the child finally got up from this posture, Annapurnamma asked her what she had been doing. Amma replied casually that she had been in a mystic pose called shambhavi mudra, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a girl not yet two years old to be in a state of breathless trance. Perhaps incidents such as these had prepared Rangamma to accept a fuller revelation of her child’s identity. For a few days later, while she was returning with her daughter to Mannava, an old man in the ochre robes of a Hindu renunciate approached their cart, which had halted briefly on the way to the railway station. The words that the monk addressed to Rangamma were spoken with a quiet authority, brief and to the point: “Your child is a manifestation of God. This is your last birth.”3 Having said it, he slipped away as quickly and mysteriously as he had come, leaving Rangamma to ponder deeply all that had been revealed to her. Perhaps she recollected the long series of wonders that had taken place in the two and a half years since

Anasuya’s conception. But, like the experiences which had preceded it, this latest and clearest revelation was not destined to have a permanent effect on Rangamma’s thinking. It would give her some temporary pause to reflect. But in no time, the more immediate concerns of life were to press in upon her and this incident would be consigned, like so many others, to a growing list of curiosities and imponderables. It is said of Yasoda, the mother of Lord Krishna, that after each of the many glimpses that she was granted of her son’s divinity, the obscuring veil of maya—the great cosmic illusion which keeps us ignorant of the divine nature of reality—would invariably descend and she would once again see only the mischievous and all-too-human child. So it was with Rangamma: the miraculous events which she had witnessed were like stray flashes of lightning at night, illuminating the landscape momentarily and then leaving it in the same dense darkness as before. After the monk’s revelation, the cart continued its journey to the railway station. As Rangamma and her daughter were making their way to the platform, Amma was touched by a scene of human suffering. She could not resist slipping off one of her delicate gold bracelets and handing it to a blind beggar women, who was sitting with her lame son and two blind daughters. This spontaneous act of generosity was not noticed by Rangamma, who was walking slightly ahead of her at the time. Soon the train whistle blew loudly, signaling an imminent departure. Amma’s maternal uncle, who had accompanied them to the station, handed Rangamma two tickets and bid his farewell while mother and child hastily boarded the train. As they made their way through the packed compartment, Rangamma was amused to see that her brother had purchased a full ticket for Amma, who was eligible to travel free of charge. “Probably your uncle bought two tickets because he regards you as an adult,” Rangamma quipped as the train slowly picked up speed. “Let’s wait and see for whom it is meant,” Amma replied slyly. In a few short minutes, the significance of these prophetic words was to become clear. Amma and Rangamma had barely found their seats when the train screeched to a halt, as if someone had pulled the emergency cord. A young woman nervously entered their compartment. But seeing the ticket-collector approach, she dashed out again and tried to jump off the train. It was too late. The huge metal wheels were well into their rhythmic acceleration and she was forced to beat a reluctant retreat back to the compartment. Amma got up onto her mother’s lap to clear a space for the woman, who sat down tensely beside them. Rangamma asked her daughter to squeeze in beside her. “Ticketless people should not occupy even an inch of space,” was the child’s crisp reply. “Why do you think that you have no ticket? Here it is, child,” said Rangamma, handing her the extra ticket. “This is not mine, it’s her’s.” As Amma said this, she passed the ticket to the bewildered woman by her side. The timing could not have been better. At that very moment, the conductor came by and the fortunate woman, Shantamma by name, eagerly surrendered her newly acquired ticket to him. Relieved and with tears of gratitude coursing down her cheeks, Shantamma hugged her young savior. When Rangamma gave her a questioning look, she proceeded to narrate the unfortunate circumstances which had forced her to risk traveling without a ticket. “I was thinking all the while that God would save me,” she concluded. “But I never thought that this little mother would come to my rescue!” “Why don’t you feel that the one who saved you is God?” suggested another woman in the same compartment. She surely meant that God is in all and His will is done through all. But knowing what we do now about Amma, these words take on a double meaning and seem inspired indeed. The conversation continued and a travel-weary Rangamma fell asleep in her seat. Meanwhile, Amma removed the remaining gold bangle from her wrist and placed it tenderly in Shantamma’s hand. Caressing her palm, Amma said softly, “Use it for your needs.” When the train pulled into her stop, Shantamma was at a loss for words and torn about what to do with the gold bangle. She gazed mutely at the child. Amma whispered, “Go!” There was a tone of command in her voice which could not be disobeyed. Shantamma stepped off the train, thankful, clutching her precious gift. Soon the train pulled into Nidubrolu village station. Amma and Rangamma stepped down and joined Sitapati, who was waiting for them on the platform. As Rangamma lifted the child into her arms, she noticed with alarm that Amma’s two gold bangles were missing. She told her husband this, but he seemed unconcerned. “Let it go,” he insisted. “At least, the child is safe. People don’t stop at anything these days for the sake of money!” The family and servant boarded a bullock-cart for the last leg of their journey back to Mannava. Along the way, the cart halted in the open countryside so that Amma could answer the call of nature. Sitting down at a particular spot, she said to her mother, “This place is good. Let’s stay here.”

“But there is no house here. How can we stay?” countered Rangamma. “Is one necessary?” the child responded with a quizzical smile. “Can little children stay without their mothers?” “When you are no more, I will be the Mother,” was the prophetic reply. Rangamma was impressed with these words which sounded so mature and strangely confident. “What talk! Not a single word is wasted,” she exclaimed with a mother’s pride. “This tongue is not a leather strap flapping about aimlessly,” was her daughter’s reply. And indeed, it has always been the case with Amma’s words that—even when spoken casually or seemingly in jest—they frequently contain several levels of meaning, some of which may come to light only many years later. This is certainly borne out by the preceding dialogue. When Amma said, “This is a good place. Let’s stay here,” Rangamma could not have taken it to be anything more than the innocent prattle of a child. Little could she have guessed that on the very spot where the young Anasuya Devi said that she wanted to stay, there would one day be an idol of the Divine Mother as Goddess Parvati.4 The words of the sage are never spoken in vain and his least utterance is bound to materialize in time!

6. FOOD “In perfection, there is neither increase or decrease, nor is there eating. Because it is completeness, there is no hunger. There is neither growing thin, nor growing full.”

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—Amma

ITH THE SUCCESSFUL BIRRTH and rearing of Anasuya Devi, Rangamma and Sitapati must have entertained the hope that their run of bad luck had finally come to an end. But fate was not to have it so. When Amma was 2 years and 9 months old, Rangamma gave birth to a boy, who died shortly thereafter. Four months later, Rangamma was pregnant once more, but in another four months she had spontaneously aborted. Once again, the dark cloud of dejection had settled over the unfortunate couple and, as before, the full burden of caring for Anasuya Devi fell on Maridamma’s willing shoulders. On one occasion, while tending Amma during a high fever, Maridamma noticed Rangamma choking back tears. In an attempt to console the poor woman, Maridamma told her about the great siddha (miracle-working saint) called Mouna Swami, who had spent some time at Mannava and cured many illnesses there through his spiritual powers. She said that Amma’s fever could be similarly cured by invoking the Rajya Lakshmi Yantra, a sacred copper plate inscribed with mystic letters, that this saint had installed in the village temple. Hearing this, the child immediately sprang up from her prone position. “That is not the Raja Lakshmi Yantra, but the Rajarajeswari Yantra,” she corrected. “You are just a small girl. Why should you bother about such big things?” Rangamma expressed her surprise. “Because elders are bothering about small things,” was the caustic reply. “Yes, yes, you carry all things in your head,” Rangamma murmured affectionately, as she drew Amma to her bosom and covered her head with the tail of her sari. “Yes, because all things are Mine,” was the muffled response. Shortly after Amma had recovered from this illness, there came a far more puzzling crisis in health. Maridamma noticed that the meals of rice and vegetables which she was feeding her would be excreted in exactly the same form without having undergone any digestion. Maridamma consulted a homeopathic physician, but his treatment for this unique malady was without results. When a wandering medicine-man came to Mannava, he was asked to try his hand at curing Amma. He prepared a talisman from a poisonous herb and was about to hang it from the child’s neck when she grabbed it from his hand and put it into her mouth. The healer called out in alarm that she would surely die if she swallowed the herb. But Amma was unperturbed. “Can such a thing kill one who is not destined to die?” she calmly inquired. And then she proceeded to answer her own question, saying, “Just as a man whose time is up cannot prolong his life with medicines, so too if one is meant to live, you cannot

end his life with poison.” As she said all of this with a disarming smile, Amma slowly chewed and swallowed the poisonous herb. The medicine-man was more than a little surprised when she suffered none of the expected symptoms, and left wondering how she could have survived the deadly dose.1 Needless to say, the peculiar digestive “disorder” was not cured. And yet, Amma did not suffer any ill effects from her failure to digest food. Since she did not grow weak or thin, with time, it simply came to be ignored. Nowadays, Mother takes a cup or two of coffee a day and, at times, a little vegetable broth. Yet her body is stout and she often points to her potbelly, remarking humorously, “Mother is always pregnant!” There has never been any rigid, self-imposed discipline of not eating in Amma’s case, and occasionally she will take a few bites when others insist on it, or if they will feel offended if she does not partake of their offerings. But left on her own, she rarely eats and explains enigmatically, “I have not given food up. Food has given me up.” Mother hints at the deeper spiritual meaning of this when she declares that, “The One who nourishes all creatures Herself needs no nourishment.” We can interpret this to mean that, being a manifestation of perfection or completeness, Mother is self-sufficient and does not need to take in anything from the outside in order to maintain her existence. Even more to the point, there is nothing which can be said to “come from the outside” for one who identifies with “the All.” On another occasion, the boy, Nageswara Rao, asked Amma to take meals. “I have no hunger,.” she told her future husband. “What have you eaten so far that you don’t feel hungry?” asked Amma’s aunt, Annapurnamma, who was familiar with her sparse eating habits. “I ate some tamarind leaves,” was Amma’s curious reply. “Who collected those leaves for you?” her aunt questioned skeptically. “I brought them along with me while coming to earth,” Amma replied. Annapurnamma could not fathom this cryptic response. The family cook, Raghavaiah, however, intuited a deeper meaning and tried to explain that Mother was punning on the Telugu word chinta, which means both “tamarind” and “sorrow.” Amma was not eating because of her sorrows, he clarified. The cook’s interpretation was confirmed by something else that young Amma said: “In this kali yuga, I feel no hunger.”2 If even an ordinary mother loses her appetite when she sees the suffering of one of her children, how much more so the Mother of All, when She witnesses the wholesale suffering found everywhere in our contemporary world. As long as her children are in pain, as long as millions go hungry and young ones starve for want of proper nourishment, we can reasonably expect that Amma will continue to “feel no hunger.” In Mother’s case, the impulse to eat had been transmuted into a continual anxiety to feed her children. Indeed, it is a curious paradox of Mother’s life that one who was indifferent to eating herself spent a large portion of her time and energy feeding others. That this preoccupation had been a central concern of Amma’s life from the beginning can be seen from the following dialogue, which took place in the latter period of her childhood. One afternoon when family members had finished their meals Amma addressed Aunt Maridamma: “Brother Raghava Rao has not yet taken food. Mother feels the pain if even a single child does not eat!” Maridamma was surprised at these maternal sentiments. “What is this—you feel as if your brother Raghava Rao is your child? The mother who would feel pained if he did not take his food has passed away!” (She was referring to the death of Rangamma some years earlier.) “Though the mother who would feel pained if he did not take his meals has passed away, the Mother who would feel pained if anybody does not take food is here” Amma countered. And it remained true throughout her life, that invariably the first question that Amma asked a newcomer to the “House of All” was, “Have you taken your meals?” Nothing seemed to please her so much as personally looking after arrangements for feeding the visitors. Mother commented humorously once by way of explanation, “You grow weak if you don’t eat, but I grow weak if I don’t feed!” We needn’t feel that Mother’s feeding of her children was restricted to nourishment for the physical frame alone. It might be said that the food which Amma distributed so lovingly was a material symbol of the subtler spiritual nourishment, the grace which she invisibly showered on one and all who approached her. Mother herself occasionally pointed at these deeper implications. When a visitor asked her why she did not give any formal spiritual initiation, she answered: “The food I give you is your upadesa (initiation).” Whatever eatables Mother distributed were treasured by the recipient as prasadam (a sacred gift, such as the ash or food that one receives in a temple) and considered to be charged with potent spiritual blessings. Pilgrims to Jillellamudi did not feel that their visit was complete until they received prasadam from Amma directly, and many great miracles of healing were attributed to this blessed food.

But, despite its obvious spiritual significance, we would be mistaken if we felt that Mother’s feeding was only a symbolic act. A mother’s heart is only satisfied when giving fully of all that she possesses to her children. Whether the gift was spiritual or material or both at once would not even enter her mind. It was Mother’s nature to look after the well-being of her children in every respect. To each one she gave whatever he or she was capable of receiving at the moment. “To feed you and look after you is my concern,” Mother asserted, and when perceived truly, her entire life was a living commentary on this singular ideal. Young Amma was in the habit of feeding, with her own hands, poor people and stray animals. Often she would ask her guardians or household servant for food and then secretly sneak it out to the street for distribution to the poor. When food was not available, she would give away whatever she had on hand—money, jewelry, even in one instance, the clothing she was wearing. Needless to say, this impulsive charity was not appreciated by Amma’s parents who found, to their chagrin, that everything they gave their young daughter would “disappear” before long. But all of their attempts to moderate her charity were doomed to fail. If her generosity had been merely a habit, then it could have been broken or altered. In Mother’s case, however, it was her very nature. She could no more stop giving than others can cease eating or breathing. In fact, it was clear that Amma never felt as though she were “giving to others” at all. Once when an elder acquaintance criticized her for what he considered to be indiscriminate charity without concern for the worthiness of the recipient, she responded in a way which cogently summed up her feelings on the question of giving. “Whatever I give them, I don’t consider it a charity. I feel that their thing is with me and I am handing it back to them. It doesn’t show my grace or magnanimity. The question of another person’s worthiness comes up only when we are giving them something. It doesn’t arise at all when we return to them their own things. If you think that I am giving something, then I say that I see only their need and not their worthiness.”

7. WHAT IS DEATH? (Talking about the death of a young man:) “Where did he go? Consciousness is everywhere. Where could anyone go? He is one with the Universal Consciousness. He is where he was all along”. —Amma

A

S WE HAVE SEEN in the last chapter, Rangamma became pregnant twice after Amma’s birth. But her curious run of bad luck seemed to have reasserted itself and, tragically, neither child survived. Soon she had conceived once more. By this time, however, her deep grief had begun to take its inevitable toll on her delicate health. She was wracked by a chronic fever and cough and it was decided to take her to the town of Bapatla for an extended course of treatment. Provisions were made for Rangamma to stay in the home of relatives. After setting the house in order in expectation of a long absence and revealing to her husband the quantity and location of the gold hidden away and the amount of precious metal which had been given over to the goldsmith for the production of ornaments for Anasuya Devi, Rangamma was ready to leave. She joined her palms together in a reverent farewell. As she was about to cross the threshold of the house, someone among the well-wishers who had gathered to see her off sneezed. Sitapati’s heart sank at this most unfortunate omen. He called his wife back and instructed her to wait for some time before leaving, in order that she could make a more auspicious exit. She dutifully complied. But the atmosphere was heavy with grief. More than a few of the family members and neighbors who had gathered there on that day to see her off had the troubling premonition that Rangamma was leaving on her last journey. She stood limply before her husband and made an heroic effort to suppress the growing waves of sorrow that were engulfing her and to appear confident—to no avail. What started as a small trickle of tears quickly turned into a torrent, and Rangamma collapsed weeping uncontrollably at her husband’s feet. Seeing this, Sitapati could not contain himself either and burst into tears, which rained down upon the crumpled form of his wife. Amma, who was in his arms at the time, gently wiped Sitapati’s tearful face and implored him, “This is no good at all, father. Please ask my mother to get up.” He took courage and, putting the child down on a mat beside him, lifted Rangamma up by her shoulders and hugged her to

him. Comforting her, and at the same time wiping his own tears, he said softly, “Don’t worry, you will be all right. Anyway, it’s out of our hands. If it is destined that my wife should live, then you will recover.” He glanced over with concern at his daughter and added, “At least for the girl’s sake please control your grief, or else she will become upset.” At that time, Amma was resting comfortably on her side with an arm propping up her head. In this posture, she appeared like Lord Vishnu floating on His banyan-leaf couch, and her eyes were as calm and detached as the God’s. Seeing the child apparently so content and peaceful, Sitapati felt thankful that she obviously didn’t understand the sorrowful implications of what was taking place. Lifting Amma up onto one arm and taking his wife’s hand with the other, he led them both out to the waiting palanquin. Rangamma took her seat and stretched out her hand to receive her daughter. A coconut was broken as a parting blessing; the bearers rose and the palanquin appeared to float like a solitary raft into the surrounding brightness. Rangamma pressed the child to her bosom and fell into a kind of reverie. Forgetting all about her sorrow, she could think only of her young daughter. As the palanquin moved on in its stately progress, Rangamma turned to her daughter: “Child, if I die, where will you stay?” “Everywhere,” replied Amma. Rangamma thought that her question had been misunderstood and said, “No, child, not that. Who would you like to stay with?” “I will stay with all, mother.” “Tell me precisely,” Rangamma insisted. “With anybody. It will be just as you wish,” was the tender reply. “You said that you would stay with anybody, but shouldn’t they take good care of you?” “I should also love and take care of them, shouldn’t I?” “Not that way, child. It is the responsibility of your elders to love and take care of you.” “But I say that those who are best able to look after others are the true elders,” was Amma’s response. And the implications of those profound words were not lost on Rangamma. The reply that the child had made to a similar question on a journey two years earlier echoed clearly in her mind—“When you are no more, I will be the mother.” As Rangamma was immersed in her thoughts, the palanquin halted and the bearers, removing their sandals, bowed reverently in the direction of the Chenna Kesava Swamy Temple, which they were passing at the time. Rangamma remained seated and offered her own salutations with joined hands. When she looked up toward the gopuram (temple tower), a spectral vision filled her with a strange thrill. Perched on the tower she saw her young daughter smiling broadly, with arms outstretched in the manner of a mother welcoming her child. When she gazed down, Amma was peacefully asleep on her lap. To everyone’s happy surprise, Rangamma responded well to the medical treatment at Bapatla, and after a few months, she had recovered so much strength that there was talk of her returning home to Mannava. But it was not fated to be. One afternoon, a dangerous drug was administered by mistake and Rangamma immediately developed severe shooting pains in the abdomen. The attending physician could only look on helplessly. Sitapati, panic-stricken, left to consult a doctor in a nearby town. But Rangamma was sinking fast, and when he returned the following morning his wife was already gone. The sudden death of Rangamma—just after she had made a miraculous recovery—came as an especially bitter shock to Sitapati. His pathetic tears as he gazed at his wife’s lifeless body were truly heartrending. Anasuya Devi made an attempt to console him. She seemed so composed and unruffled that her father assumed she hadn’t grasped what happened. “Your mother is gone!” he wailed, trying impress upon her the gravity of the situation. “Where to, daddy?” she asked calmly. “Yes, where to?” he murmured in an abstracted way. “First, let me know where mother has come from.” “She is dead. Your mother is dead!” he cried still thinking that his daughter had not understood. “What is death?” the child asked catching hold of her father’s chin and gazing deeply into his troubled eyes. “Your mother is gone,” he repeated mechanically. “Here she is. My mother hasn’t gone anywhere at all. She is right here,” Amma insisted pointing at the corpse on the ground. One of the relatives feared that the child was not ready to accept the truth and placed his hand cautioningly over Sitapati’s mouth. “Your mother is only sleeping,” he assured her with all the conviction he could muster. “If she is only sleeping, why does everybody weep? Mother slept every day. Why didn’t people weep every day?” Amma wondered pointedly. There was clearly no answer for this. A tense silence reigned, broken now and then by a brief choked wail, an inconsolable

cry. The very air seemed leaden with grief. Chidambara Rao, Amma’s maternal uncle and a well-known lawyer, decided to take the bereaved Sitapati and his daughter upstairs to the open veranda, where he hoped the fresh air and light, away from the weeping relatives, might offer some relief. When they had settled down comfortably outside, the child turned earnestly to Chidambara Rao: “Grandpa, first tell me what death is.” As he was brooding over how best to answer this, she followed up quickly with another question: “Where do people come from in the first place?” “From the mother’s womb,” he replied. “Is the child always in the mother’s womb?” she pressed. “No, they aren’t.” “Then how do they get there? Where do they come from in the beginning, grandpa?” “God sends them.” “Then where do people go? You said (of Rangamma) ‘she has gone.’ Where does she go?” “To the cremation ground.” “If the body is not sent to the cremation ground, does it mean that the person is still alive? In that case, let’s keep mother right here.” “What kind of questions are these!” Chidambara Rao exclaimed with a bemused smile. “Tell me, grandpa, where do people go?” the child demanded sternly. “To God,” he replied “Why is that?” “It is His will.” “The one sent by God returns to Him at His will. What is there in this to weep over?” she reasoned with a gentle smile. Even in this most sorrowful time, Chidambara Rao could not suppress his pleasure at the child’s cogent analysis. Laughing out loud and hugging and kissing Amma, he exclaimed in amazement, “Where did you learn all of this Vedanta (spiritual philosophy)?” At this point, the child turned to Sitapati and asked him softly, “Now you tell me, father—why should we be sad?” “Your mother is gone, isn’t she?” he stammered out. “First, tell me who my mother is. Is she the one who has left us or is she the body? If she is the body, then she has not left us, after all. If she is the one who left us, then we have never seen her in fact. So in either case, why all this agony?” But before Sitapati had a chance to respond, he was called down to attend to the last rites. The body was lifted onto a makeshift bier to start its final journey to the cremation grounds, accompanied by the mourners. Because of her tender age, Amma was to stay at home. She watched in silence as the somber procession wound its way slowly into the distance and heard the fading chant of the crowd—“Narayana, Narayana. Narayana, to God, to God, to God.” That evening as it was growing dark, Chidambara Rao, who had returned home early from the cremation grounds exhausted by the heat, heard Amma cry out urgently, “Grandpa, she is being consumed in flames!” “Where is it? Let me see,” he called back and rushed over to his young relative. Amma, who was gazing intently at the burning wick of a kerosene lamp, proceeded to give a detailed account of the scene at the cremation ground, which she had never visited, and to narrate the fine points of the rites which were taking place there at that time. Chidambara Rao was more than a little impressed with this clairvoyant display, and wondered at the remarkable qualities of Amma—the wisdom, the detachment, and the maturity well beyond her years—that he had witnessed so clearly on that day.

8. IN THE EYES OF

THE PERCEIVER “I am not a guru and you are not the disciples. I am not a guide and you are not the pilgrims. I am not God and you are not the devotees. I am the Mother and you are the children.” —Amma

I

N THE PERIOD FOLLOWING her mother’s death, Amma was given almost unlimited freedom. She was permitted to roam about at will and her guardians seemed unconcerned with where she went, what time she returned home, or whether or not she had eaten her meals. Probably, they had realized early on that it was simply not possible to control such an independent spirit and abandoned all attempts to do so as being futile. Amma’s maturity and self-sufficiency must have been clear to all, so that nobody worried much about her and she was left to her own resources to do as she wished. From some stray incidents of this period which have been recorded, it is clear that wherever Amma went, people of all ages and backgrounds recognized her unusual qualities and found themselves irresistibly drawn to spend their time with this young girl in whose presence they enjoyed such rare peace and happiness. Hearing these stories of her childhood. we are vividly reminded of the young Lord Krishna, whose warm smiles and captivating personality are said to have beguiled all who met him. Amma knew no shyness in the presence of elders. She was as at ease with total strangers as she was with friends and family members. In fact, it is clear that she never recognized any distinction between companions and strangers, or between young and old. She treated all in the same familiar fashion. Her motherly nature was so obvious even then that most people spontaneously addressed her as Amma (Mother), instead of using the Telugu diminutive ammayee applied to young girls. Whoever came within her orbit responded spontaneously to the appeal she made straight to the heart. Even hardened criminals, it is said, were won over by her transparent purity, and a number of people leading immoral lives were transformed by their contact with the young Amma. Like a bee of love pollinating all the flowers which it rests upon, but not pausing too long at any one, the young Amma moved swiftly from place to place, imparting experiences of various sorts to all she met in accordance with their different natures and capacities. Virtually everyone felt strangely uplifted and refreshed by their contact with Amma, however brief. A fortunate few were ripe to perceive that Amma’s bright charm and tender sympathy were—like the tip of an iceberg—merely the visible portion of something vast and divinely impersonal. Two striking incidents occurred during a family pilgrimage to the temple of Lord Veera Raghava Swamy in Tiruvalloor, Tamil Nadu state. Leaving the sanctum after having had darshan of the Lord, Amma’s relatives went over to the sacred tank, sprinkled brown sugar in the water as an offering to the deity, recited the appropriate mantras, and took their ritual baths in the prescribed and ancient manner. Amma, however, did not stand on ceremony. She jumped right in, splashing about joyfully in the pond-sized tank as if it were her private pool. The relatives became anxious when Amma disappeared under the stagnant water. But moments later, they breathed a sigh of relief when she surfaced near the center of the tank and pulled herself up onto the mandapam, a small island-pavilion set aside for the worship of the deities during the yearly temple festival. While Sitapati was gazing out at her, a holy man in ochre robes came up to him and asked, “Who is that girl sitting on the mandapam, sir?” “She is my daughter,” Sitapati admitted, with a tinge of embarrassment at her unconventional behavior—little anticipating the sadhu’s response. “Blessed man! You are the father of a Goddess,” the holy man proclaimed. And then, without waiting for Sitapati’s reply, he disappeared among the jostling crowd of pilgrims. However much Sitapati searched the temple precincts thereafter, the strange messenger of the divine was nowhere to be found. When the proud father blurted out the story of the holy man’s revelation a short time later, it evinced little enthusiasm from his sisters. One of them mocked her brother’s innocent credulity: “What if he did say so? Sadhus talk like this for money. At least he hasn’t told you that the child is threatened by some danger and that he will save her for a price! Everything is deceit with them. Did you actually believe his words?” The other sister chimed in sarcastically, “You are puffed up because you think that a Goddess was born in your line. Don’t entertain the thought for even a moment. Would a Goddess be born in your house?” We can reasonably speculate that Sitapati’s enthusiasm was dampened by these common-sense attitudes of his sisters. In fact, despite having had several visions and other miraculous experiences, Sitapati was not to achieve a sustained sense of Amma’s spiritual perfection until much later. In 1969, a few years before his death, he would reflect nostalgically in a letter to Amma: “When Nanda (Krishna’s father) took the child Krishna in his arms, he was not aware of his greatness. So too, I did not know who I carried when I clasped you as a child in my arms.”

At about the time that Sitapati was talking with his skeptical sisters in their room at the temple choultry (free pilgrims’ inn), Amma was standing at an open door a few rooms away. The burly occupant, a professional wrestler, was trying to engage her in conversation, but she proved reticent at first. It should be noted that this wrestler was an ardent devotee of Murali Krishna (Krishna with the flute) and had been praying fervently for the Lord to grant him darshan and to speak to him directly. “How is it you are not talking? Will you break these iron chains?” the wrestler asked Amma, pointing at his formidable exercise links in an attempt to lure her into conversation. “I cannot break any chains; I cannot make any chains either,” she answered thoughtfully.1 “Are there chains other than these?” he wondered, perhaps suspecting some deeper meaning to Amma’s words. “Anybody can break these chains, but you cannot break the chain that is the basis for these chains.” “Where is that chain?” “It exists in all things, yet it is not a thing in itself.” The wrestler could not unravel the riddle. “How does that chain appear?” he asked, pressing for something more concrete. “Like all this,” she replied with a sweep of her hand. “You mean like both of us?” “Yes, something like that. Like being ‘I’ and becoming ‘We,’” she responded. In the light of Amma’s subsequent teachings, we can understand that the One (I) becoming the two (we) constitutes the primal chain, or bondage, of creation. Freedom, on the other hand, is to realize that, behind the apparent multiplicity, One alone exists. The wrestler asked for further clarification. But apparently, the frontiers of language had been reached, beyond which nothing more could fruitfully be said. “This is not the sort of thing that can be clarified and known in such a way. It will stand revealed only when the destined moment arrives,” Amma insisted. “When will that moment come?” “You can’t know when it will come. Only when it comes will you know,” was her pithy response. The wrestler was altogether won over by Amma’s charms. A beguiling image flitted before his mind’s eye and he offered hopefully, “I have a peacock feather; will you wear it?” “Where to put it?” “Your fine figure, your plaited hair are so well suited to it.” “Does the feather suit me, or do I suit the feather, or when both are combined, is that combination suited to something else?” she asked with an impish smile. “Yes, that’s right. You become suited to him,” the wrestler said pointing at a colorful calendar image of Murali Krishna with the characteristic peacock feather rising from his flowing locks. “If I am suited to Him, then to whom would I be unsuited?” she said, implying that one who was “suited” to the Lord would necessarily be suited to everyone. “You say that you are suited to all. Are you suited to me?” the wrestler wondered. “Let me know what you mean by the word ‘suited.’ At first you used it with reference to forms. Now you seem to be using it with reference to mind. Tell me exactly what you mean and I shall answer,” Amma probed like a seasoned master of philosophy. The wrestler was amazed to see where the simple offer of a peacock feather had led him. “You are taking me to the depths,” he said in mock complaint. “I was just answering your question. To whatever depths you take me, I shall follow.” In an instant, tears of joy were welling up and the wrestler tenderly drew Amma to him. “I was praying that Lord Krishna come and speak to me. When I showed you the picture a while back, his divine beauty seemed to radiate from you. Gradually, you have come to appear indistinguishable from him.” As he said these words, emotion soared beyond the bounds of expression and he stood for a very long time motionless and silent, as one entranced. When he had regained his composure, the wrestler spoke again in a tremulous voice—“Krishna, have you come as Radha? The other day I thought of getting your picture with Radha. But there is no longer any need to do so. You stay with me in this form alone!” As he finished speaking, he pressed his chin lightly on Amma’s head and lost himself once again in rapture. When the wrestler finally returned to normal consciousness, he carefully placed his peacock feather in Amma’s hair and handed her a flute. Then, fetching his camera, he snapped the child’s photo in the way he wished to remember her, in the characteristic pose of the charmer-of-worlds, his beloved Lord, Murali Krishna. Some time earlier, when the sadhu saw Amma’s radiant form in the middle of the temple tank, he intuitively recognized her as

the incarnation of a Goddess. Sitapati’s sisters, on the other hand, influenced by their intimate family ties, perceived only the alltoo-human child. The wrestler, charmed by her unique personality and inward beauty, saw Amma as the God of his own worship, Murali Krishna. So it is that each one understands Amma according to his or her mental makeup, and can penetrate her mystery only as deeply as his insight will take him (“To whatever depths you take me, I shall follow.”) In a sense, all who come into contact with Mother expose their own personal images on the delicate film of the heart. Like the wrestler, each of us poses Amma in the manner which pleases him most—some as an awe-inspiring divinity wielding the instruments of sovereignty, others as a teacher discoursing on the eternal Truths, still others as a mother embracing her children in unconditional love. But, whatever way we may choose to take our picture, it is a supreme truth that Mother transcends all limited conceptions, all partial images. She never states that she is the incarnation of any particular deity, a prophet, a spiritual guide or Avatar come to redeem the race. She called herself “Mother,” but says that even this is only a figurative way of pointing at the inexpressible, a luminous symbol for that which is beyond words and symbols. She asserted that “Mother is the All, the One without a second.” We picture her in so many ways. But in the end, when we exhaust all dreams of gurus and Gods, of mothers and children, we come to know that she was never separate, after all—that all along she was our very own Self.

9. CREATOR, SUSTAINER, DESTROYER “The one who has no birth or death, but is the cause of all births and deaths is Mother.”

—Amma

BECAUSE SITAPATI FELT inadequate to the task of bringing up Anasuya Devi alone, now that his wife was gone, the responsibility had fallen to Chidambara Rao and Annapurnamma. Living with them in Bapatla, a town some distance from the ancestral home in the village of Mannava, Amma had very little contact with her father during this period. On a few occasions, she made the tedious journey by train and bullock-cart to the isolated village of her birth for brief visits with Sitapati. She left for one such reunion accompanied by Chidambara Rao, great-aunt Maridamma, and the family servant Khasim. After boarding the train at Bapatla station, Amma stood gazing from the open door for some time without taking her seat. “Standing like that you might just fall off the train!” Chidambara Rao called out anxiously. “There are so many who stand at the door without falling out, aren’t there?” “Don’t ask silly questions. Just come inside!” he demanded. Amma entered the compartment and sat down by the window opposite a young boy and his grandfather who had boarded the train at an earlier station. Almost immediately, the young man’s attention became riveted to Amma. He continued to stare at her in innocent fascination as the train clattered swiftly past several small village depots and across one of the turbid, mud-banked canals which are the life-veins of the fertile South Indian plains. When he finally broke his gaze to look out the window at the countryside rushing past, he was disoriented, like one waking up all of a sudden from an absorbing dream. “Grandpa, why are all those trees running so fast in the opposite direction?” the boy inquired with naive wonder. “That is what is called ‘illusion,’ ” murmured the old man. “It’s true, grandpa. Look for yourself,” he insisted emphatically, and then glanced over hopefully at Amma and addressed her for the first time. “You tell us the truth, please.” As he said this, he thrust his arm through the open window to point at the world, which was rushing so mysteriously by. Instantly, the raised window guard became detached from its latches and fell with a jarring crash onto the boy’s hand. His shriek of pain brought everyone in the crowded compartment to their feet to render assistance. In the tense and confused moments that followed, someone raised the heavy window guard and carefully removed the child’s injured hand. All the while, the boy’s glazed look was fixed on Amma—not even his eyelids stirred. A terrible doubt crossed the mind of one of the passengers. He gently touched one of the child’s vacantly staring eyes; there

was no corneal reflex. Another felt for his pulse. A third placed his hand on the motionless chest. There was neither heartbeat nor pulse. “It’s no use,” one of the passengers pronounced gravely. Another passenger nodded his head in mute agreement. All eyes were focused on the grandfather with profound expressions of pity and sadness. Until then, the old man had been sitting perfectly motionless, dazed and uncomprehending. Now, he hesitantly placed a finger under his grandson’s nose. The breath of life was indeed gone, and the frail and helpless old man became convulsed with pitiable sobs. “There isn’t so much as a bruise—surely no fatal wound. So many have managed to survive even serious head injuries. But this case is different—a most unfortunate incident,” exclaimed one of the travelers with an air of finality. “Should we pull the chain now and stop the train?” another wondered. The old man rubbed his tear-filled eyes. “What can I do between stops? Let me get down at the next station.” “Where is your home, grandfather?” Amma asked soothingly. “I live quite far from here. With great difficulties, with my own sweat and tears, I have brought this boy up. He is my daughter’s son and has lost his mother as well as his grandmother.” “Your difficulties are now over,” someone chimed in with a universal and timeworn formula. Amma was struck with this all-too-facile consolation. “Isn’t this a difficulty as well? Is one difficulty necessary to remove another?” she wondered aloud and then directed her gaze at Chidambara Rao, who was seated next to her. “There was suffering for the boy when he was struck. Later, there was suffering for the boy’s grandfather. The old man’s pathetic state caused suffering for the passengers. Among these sufferings, are all the same? Or is there one which is greater than all the rest? First of all, grandpa, what is meant by the word ‘suffering.’” “All that you have just now seen is suffering,” he replied. “To whom?” “To the boy and his grandfather.” “But you were also sad,” Amma pointed out. “Yet, even so, you weren’t as upset as you were when you saw me standing by the open door of the train a short while ago. You were beside yourself with worry for my safety. But, as it turns out, even one seated safely inside could not avoid what you were so afraid would happen to me.” In this way, Amma reflected on the inscrutable nature of human fate. “That is very true, child,” Chidambara Rao conceded. “But the mind won’t rest with that.” “Is restlessness the nature of the mind?” she probed. “Yes, exactly. That’s right,” he agreed. As they were engaged in discussion, the train steamed into Nidobrolu station, from which place they would proceed to Mannava by bullock-cart. Amma got down onto the platform with her relatives and family servant, followed by the pathetic figure of the old man, the body of his grandson draped over his shoulder. He staggered aimlessly a short way and then settled down on the bare concrete, looking gaunt and lost, the corpse cradled in his lap. Amma was overwhelmed with compassion for the old man’s plight. “Grandpa, shall we help to arrange the funeral of the boy?” Her voice was strangely determined. Chidambara Rao shot back a severe look. “Why should we trouble ourselves? It’s getting late. Let’s go.” But Amma was adamant. It was unthinkable to her that the old man should be abandoned in his distress and confusion. Leaving her relatives, she made her way to him, slipping easily through the small crowd of the curious that had already gathered around his weeping form. The grandfather gazed up long enough from the limp corpse to perceive Amma. There was a glint of admiration in his tear-swollen eyes. “Aren’t you the child who was sitting opposite us on the train? Though small, you seem to carry such a very lot on your shoulders.” To the surprise of the onlookers, the small child placed one of her hands consolingly on the old man’s shoulder and started stroking him tenderly, as a mother comforts a grieving child. “Why do you weep, my dear?” she addressed him familiarly. “Is it because the child is gone, or because you have nobody to look after you in your old age? Why such great sorrow?” “I thought the boy would take care of me. Once when I was laid up with fever, he himself nursed me back to health,” the grandfather reminisced. “That means that you are really crying for your own self,” Amma reflected. “You brought him up for your own satisfaction. Sometimes you would tenderly feed him sweets because it made you happy to watch him enjoy them. On other occasions, you punished and disciplined the boy because it gave you pleasure to see him behave correctly. Now that his life is gone, you are

weeping because you haven’t enough money for a proper funeral, or because your responsibility is ending, or because the object of your love is lost.” All who had gathered around were amazed by the spectacle of a small child who spoke with the poise and seasoned wisdom of a sage. The grandfather himself had become so engrossed by her gentle words that his tears of grief had ceased, and he was gazing at his curious young benefactor spellbound. Meanwhile, the family servant Khasim had arrived on the scene. His urgent message broke the charmed spell. “Your grandfather is getting angry. He is looking for you, Amma !” But the child was unperturbed. “That is also for his satisfaction,” she continued undistracted from her previous line of thought. “Let us first give some help to the old man. Only then can we think of leaving.” “Grandpa is upset, Amma !” “Going home right away would satisfy grandpa. But staying here and helping the old man will satisfy me,” she reasoned. Amma asked Khasim to tell Chidambara Rao that she would be coming along shortly. When the servant was out of sight, she removed a gold ring from her finger and placed it in the old man’s palm. “Use it for your needs,” she said. For a time, he just stared at the ring with a look of genuine puzzlement. “You are only a small girl. Why do you bother yourself, when even elders pass me by without the least concern?” “I do it for my own sake, for the satisfaction it gives me.” “What satisfaction do you get from giving me this ring?” “In this world, whatever we do, is done for our own sake alone. That is the way I feel.” As Amma was saying this, the old man attempted to slip the ring back onto her finger. She withdrew her hand and smiled impishly. “Suppose your grandson comes back to life? Who knows? Maybe he has only lost consciousness temporarily due to shock. He could well awaken. If he does, kindly place this ring on his finger.” “Will the dead come back to life?” the old man wondered drily. “If it should happen, please give the boy the ring. If not, then use it yourself, however you wish.” With these parting words, Amma took leave of the old man and went in search of her relatives. She found them lounging by a waiting bullock-cart just outside the station. With a note of irritation in his voice, Chidambara Rao asked Amma if she was finally ready to leave. But she pleaded for still more time to help the old man. This stretched Chidambara Rao’s patience to the breakingpoint. He heaved the luggage onto the waiting cart and boarded it, telling Khasim to bring Amma along with him whenever she was ready. With a loud crack of the whip, the bullocks started lumbering toward Mannava. Meanwhile on the station platform, the old man was jolted out of his sad reverie. He could hardly believe his eyes. “Is it possible? Did his hand really move?” he wondered. No sooner had he remembered Amma’s curious words about the boy’s regaining consciousness than there she was standing once again before him, smiling broadly. Just then the boy’s other hand stirred, this time clearly and unmistakably. The old man was beside himself with joy. Tears of bliss now streamed down where those of grief had so recently run. “Perhaps this is why people say that ‘a child’s words are God’s words,’” he said referring to a familiar Telugu proverb as he pressed his palms together in a gesture of gratitude. “That’s not exactly true,” Amma corrected him. “Only those words that are innocent of illusion are God’s words.” “Maybe you are that Brahman yourself,” the old man suggested, his voice breaking with emotion. “The one who is totally free of illusion is Brahman. That could be anyone at all. Please put the ring on the boy’s finger when he awakens. I must be getting along now,” Amma insisted. “With your own blessed hands, kindly place it on his finger. You have given life back to the dead! I don’t know how to repay my debt to you.” “There is nothing like a debt. Nobody is ever indebted to anyone else. All things happen when their destined moment arrives. That is all,” Amma assured him. “Do tell me where you live. I will come there myself. You must be our protector and savior!” “There is one savior alone for all living beings,” Amma revealed. “The One who creates dangers is the one who protects you from them. He who caused your grandson’s injury, created the impression that he was dead, resuscitated him, moved him, and will make him rise again, is One and One alone.” Amma’s profound words stirred the old man deeply. He marveled at the profound philosophical truths which she expressed so plainly and yet elegantly. What she said resonated with the scriptural teachings of his own guru, Khader Mastan, and brought to mind the Mahavakyas (the great scriptural sayings) which the master had imparted to him for his contemplation. When he told Amma how he had been taught the age-old formula “Aham Brahmasmi” (I am God), she became inspired to reveal something of

the deeper significance of this familiar phrase, which he had been repeating mechanically without any real understanding. Amma explained: “When the ‘I’ remains as ‘I’ alone, that is the ‘I’ referred to in Aham Brahmasmi. When that same ‘I’ manifests as ‘I’ and ‘you,’ that is what is referred to as Ahamkara Brahman (Brahman manifested as ego.) That is to say, that when the One appears as two, that is the state of Ahamkara Brahman—but even here we must not think that Brahman is absent but only that it has assumed the form of duality, ego.”1 The old man felt a strange thrill as he heard Amma’s words. It was as if he were sitting at the feet of the original Rishis, the forest sages of old, and listening to the source scripture of Hinduism, the holy Upanishads, directly from their lips. The child spoke with such confidence and ringing authority that it was clear that what she said had arisen out of the depths of her own living experience of Truth. This was a rare opportunity, not to be wasted! Spontaneously, the old man put to Amma a pressing question—the very same question that aspiring souls have been addressing to their spiritually enlightened companions throughout the ages: “Mother, how is delusion to be overcome?” Rather than answering this in the stereotyped fashion by suggesting certain practices, setting forth precepts to be followed and attitudes to be cultivated, Amma replied in her own characteristic way. “There is nothing to explain. When the destined moment arrives, delusion will itself remove delusion.”2 Amma was determined to guide the conversation away from dry theory back to the concrete situation at hand. Looking over at the young boy—who remained unconscious, but stirring fitfully now and again like one lightly asleep—she questioned his grandfather. “You kept your grandson’s body sprawled loosely on the ground earlier, thinking that he was dead. Before that, when you thought of that same body as being alive, how carefully you treated it! You know very well that the body is transient—your guru surely told you as much. But still you were weeping bitterly over it a while back, weren’t you? Why is that?” “Was I weeping for the body?” he asked, taken aback by Amma’s direct query. “Think it over. Tell me why you were weeping.” “I can’t explain the reason,” the old man admitted. Just as he was considering how best to respond, he noticed with a start a column of black ants making their way up his leg. Reflexively, he brushed them off and jumped clear of their path. Amma seized upon this incident to drive home her point. “Why did you move, dear?” she probed. “Some ants were stinging my leg.” “That is also nothing but the body,” Amma observed. “It is the body no doubt.” “They were stinging what is, after all, transient and unreal. Why did you feel it as pain? Who was pained? The one who is transient or the one who is eternal?” “Atman (Self) is eternal,” he said parroting what he had been taught by his guru. “I am not interested in the Atman, which they say can’t be known or seen. What I see in front of me is the body.” Amma was attempting to throw him back upon the actual facts of his daily experience. But the old man’s knowledge of Hindu thought had little connection with his actual experience of the world. So when it came to questions of practical application, he was at a loss to know how to respond. He suggested that Amma go to see his guru who, he assured her, would be able to explain these matters properly. Amma, however, would not let him off the hook so easily. “I will make you my guru. You tell me,” she insisted. “I am not authorized to act as a guru,” the grandfather demurred. But a few moments later his pride of learning rose up once more and he offered, “Do you want me to teach you about lochupu (looking within)?” “If outward things appear as they are in reality, that is enough. There is no special need for looking inward,” she reflected.3 When Khasim returned from a walk in the town, Amma revealed to him the surprising news that the boy was alive. “The one who we thought was dead never died at all, as it turns out. His prana (life-force) was only temporarily suspended.” Khasim was incredulous. “No! I saw him myself. He surely seemed to be dead!” “That’s it.” Amma harkened back to the point she had just made to the old man about seeing things as they actually are. “When something exists, yet appears not to exist, that is what we call ‘illusion’.”4 As so often happened in Amma’s presence, circumstances soon conspired to bring into dramatic relief the very question that she had been addressing about what is real and what is not. Being too late to leave for Mannava, they decided to go to the Bhavenarayana Temple to pass the night. Arriving at the sacred precincts, they arranged themselves comfortably on the ancient stones of the temple courtyard. Amma and the old man continued to discuss spiritual questions far into the night, as Khasim slept soundly at their feet. With the passage of the hours,

the old man became progressively more enchanted by the pleasing melody of Amma’s voice, the subtle radiance of her physical features, her rare gracefulness of gesture. He felt as if everything about her was vibrant with an inexpressible beauty, and under its sway, gradually became silent and absorbed. As he gazed at Amma in this exalted mood, the external world suddenly vanished like a burst bubble. The child God, Bala Krishna, appeared before him. A lustrous gem shone on Krishna’s bare chest. The young God played an ethereal tune on his flute as he danced in ecstasy, his silver anklets tinkling out an intoxicating rhythm. How long the old man was lost in this entrancing scene he could not guess. Time itself seemed to have halted, as if awestruck before the wondrous vision. Impulsively, the grandfather embraced the divine child crying out—“Krishna, I don’t need anything more. My life is now fulfilled!” His lips were quivering, his hair standing on end. “It is me, old man. Look at me,” Amma called out. He opened his eyes and saw her standing entangled in the fervent embrace intended for the child Krishna. “Is it you? Is there nobody else?” he said unclasping her from his arms. “What a sweet dream I had! Was it nothing but an illusion, after all? Scriptures say life is a dream. What then of this dream within a dream—can it be anything but unreal?” In this way, using his book-knowledge as a bludgeon, he proceeded to reason away the vivid experience he’d just had. But Mother offered him an alternative way of looking at things, hinting at the reality of all that he had felt and seen. “Suppose life is not a dream, but a fact. In that case, won’t a dream also become a fact?”5 The logic of Mother’s comment escaped him and. as usual, he simply called to mind one of the traditional formulas which his guru had taught on the nature of the real and the illusory—the aphorism of the rope and the snake. In this famous metaphor—from ancient times the mainstay of those schools of thought which propound the illusory nature of the world—the rope represents Brahman and the snake, the world of appearances. When the rope of Brahman is viewed in the shadowy darkness of ignorance it takes on the appearance of a snake (i.e., the world of names and forms is seen). When that same Brahman is perceived in the full light of wisdom, the snakelike illusion of the world disappears. The old man asked Amma if she had heard this aphorism, but she pleaded ignorance. After he briefly outlined the meaning, Amma playfully turned the tables and asked: “What about seeing a snake and mistaking it for a rope? Delusion could work just as well in either direction.” There is a serious idea behind this suggestion, which becomes clear when viewed in the light of Mother’s later teachings. On the one hand, she was hinting that perhaps the world is real, after all, and the abstract, formless Brahman of the philosophers an unreal imagination. But in a deeper sense, Amma seems to have been saying that, so long as we take there to be two distinct entities—Brahman and the world—either one can be taken to be the real thing and the other an unreal projection onto it (“illusion can work either way”). Whether we call Brahman real and the world illusion, or the world real and Brahman illusion, is entirely a matter of the particular perspective we assume and not of Truth, which is beyond all limited viewpoints and dualities. It would surely have proved disconcerting to the old man, steeped as he was in traditional dogma, to find that the familiar example of the rope and the snake can as easily be used in negation of the world-illusion position as in its support. But it is highly unlikely that he had considered Amma’s words deeply enough to be disconcerted by them. The child added a final provocative observation that seemed to put a cap on the question of the real and the unreal. Referring once again to the example of the rope and the snake, she told the old man, “Illusion is there only for the one who knows both ropes and snakes. It doesn’t exist at all for persons who know only one or the other.” In later years, Mother illuminated this point in the following way: “If you take this creation to be real, then it is real; if you take it to be unreal, then it is unreal. Problems arise only when you have two thoughts about it—when you are not certain whether it is real or unreal. When the oneness of everything is felt, maya does not appear at all. When you see the One everywhere, there can be no more doubt. Maya is seeing the duality of creation without feeling its oneness. That is where all problems arise.” The conventional wisdom of the old man was fully contingent on the dualities of ropes and snakes, Brahmans and worlds, reals and unreals. He was not in a position to appreciate Amma’s subtler wisdom, which undermines these comfortable assumptions in order to reveal the One Reality which underlies them and is their basis. As their conversation continued, the old man once again recommended that she go to his guru, who would, he assured her, explain spiritual things in the proper way. Finally, annoyed by her persistent questioning, the old man chided, “You are not following well. It seems you have no brains.” Evidently, he had forgotten all about the divine vision and his earlier conviction that Amma had brought the young boy back from the dead. But, as before, circumstances were about to take over with a compelling power far beyond the words that were being spoken that evening. The young boy woke up and started weeping. “I will go to Mother,” he declared emotionally. “You have no mother, dear. She is dead,” the grandfather reminded him gently.

“I want the mother who gave me the ring,” he said as he rubbed tears from his eyes. “That child is right here.” The old man had barely uttered these words when his grandson sprang to his feet and embraced Amma. Crying out “Mother!” in a loud voice, he collapsed, as he had on the train, his lifeless form clinging loosely to her shoulders. For a moment, the grandfather showed no reaction at all. He seemed paralyzed, unable to move. But then in a flash, the floodgates of his pain burst open. The air was torn with a heartrending wail. “How unjust you are!” he screamed. “Is this some black art? From the time you entered the train compartment these calamities have been happening. Why did he come back to life having once lost it? I brought you along, thinking you were a pious girl. Who are you in fact?” “I am his Mother,” was the matter-of-fact reply. The grandfather heard these words without comprehension, lost in the world of his own tumultuous thoughts. Khasim was concerned with the practical question of what to do with the corpse. As dawn was approaching, he expressed his fear that the priests would become enraged by the pollution of a dead body within the temple compound when they arrived for their morning rounds of worship. “Corpses should be kept here alone,” Amma insisted. “How blessed he was to merge in Divinity. Otherwise, he would not have died in a temple.” “You might as well say he merged in you because he died in your lap!” the old man shot back sharply. “Who said he didn’t?” The grandfather was taken aback. Sore with grief, he cried out, “Was it you then who took his life?” “Why not? The one who gives life will also take it away.” “But you haven’t given him life,” he protested. “In that case, I haven’t taken it away.” “But you did take it away.” “Then I must have given it as well,” she answered softly. Some time passed in tense silence. Amma fixed her gaze unwaveringly upon the old man. “Neither the giving of life nor the taking of life is ours to do,” she reflected. “You have learned many great sayings and become wise, so naturally I appear to you as a mere slip of a girl. On the other hand, to the young boy, I appeared as a Mother. There ought to be a cause for each of you to perceive me in your own way. That same cause, that same Shakti (divine power), is responsible for wounding the boy in the compartment, then for protecting him, and finally for taking away his life after granting him the realization that I am the Mother.” Suddenly, a mighty transformation came over the young Amma. She jumped to her feet, as if propelled by a whirlwind of irresistible force, her eyes burning with an imperious determination. In a moment she had lifted the corpse and was walking off briskly into the surrounding fields, bearing it effortlessly on her shoulders. “Come on, hurry up,” she called out commandingly to the grandfather and Khasim. When Amma found a suitable location (the same spot where she had previously stopped with Rangamma on their way back from Tenali, and where the Temple of Sahasra Lingas now stands), she placed the body down on the dark soil. Picking up a spade left there by a field hand, she quickly dug a shallow trench and lay the corpse down in it. Then she walked over to the old man. “Have you removed the ring?” he inquired anxiously about the gift she had made to the boy. No, she had not and would not do so, Amma told him firmly. “Why should the ring be thrown away unnecessarily? After all, it will only mix with the earth,” the old man complained. But Amma was unyielding. “The body which was brought up with so much love and affection, that is going to be mixed with the earth, as well. You don’t seem as concerned about that as you are about the ring. We can have another ring like that made up. But another boy like him will never come again.” Chastened and submitting, the grandfather started walking with Amma and Khasim toward the makeshift grave. But he did not get that far. A sudden attack of vomiting halted him in his tracks. A moment later, the old man collapsed to the ground unconscious. “Cholera, after all! Perhaps the boy was a victim of the same,” Khasim pronounced with a sudden chill. Kneeling down beside the old man, Amma called out softly, “Grandpa. Grandpa.” He opened his eyes slowly. Gathering his last shred of strength, the old man whispered, “I thought you were the protector of the distressed, but I see now that you are a fearful angel of death.” “Is that so?” she said, and smiled in a manner both guileless and enigmatic.

What he perceived during his last moments in that smile, in those deep, luminous eyes will never be known. Only his final words remain as evidence of a crowning realization: “I am mistaken, Mother. Please forgive me. You are not an instrument of death alone. You are the Creator, Sustainer and Destroyer of all.” Saying this the old man joined his palms together in prayer, then closed his eyes forever.

10. MOTHER EARTH “Mother is like the Earth, which assimilates filth as well as good things. Whether a thing is good or bad is your concern—the Earth and Mother make no such distinction.” —Amma

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S WE HAVE SEEN, Amma was a natural icononclast even in earliest childhood. Her habit of questioning elders about the meaning of conventional beliefs and practices must have struck many as being highly precocious. But she was undeterred by the incomprehension of spirits less inquiring than her own. For Amma, nothing was to be accepted that had not been thoroughly forged and hammered out in the furnace of her own keen scrutiny and tested in the laboratory of experience. One day, Amma visited the Bhavanarayana Swamy Temple in Bapatla together with some of her young friends and stayed on there after all the others had left to play. She approached anyone who would listen to her—a learned acharya (scholar), a relation of hers, several devotees—and peppered them with a barrage of questions about the worship that they were performing of the deity. “Why are coconuts broken before the idol? Is the stone image itself God? Where do the idol and its ornaments come from?” Nobody had satisfactory answers, as far as Amma was concerned. Most simply brushed aside her inquiries, saying that there was no need for such a wisp of a girl to concern herself with such weighty affairs. When Amma brought in some flowers and sacred tulasi leaves for worshipping the deity and placed them temporarily on the ground in front of her, the temple priest become upset and cried out, “Why have you placed these things on the earth when they are meant for the Goddess? Don’t you know this is a sacrilege?” “These plants have themselves sprouted from the earth. Was that also a sacrilege?” she countered wryly. The priest had no answer. The reasons for the ancient prohibitions were long since lost. They had become their own reasons. To question them seemed to him only pointless and perplexing. Later on, Amma went into the inner sanctum for a closer look at the deity. The priest did not notice her there and unintentionally locked her inside the temple when he left for the evening. She took advantage of this unique opportunity to approach the image of the Goddess and examine it with clinical thoroughness. She removed the metal eye-coverings from the idol and found no eyes but only cold black stone underneath. Then she undressed the image, removed all of the fine ornaments one by one and felt the sticky color painted on the basalt image. She tried to move the Goddess, but it was fastened to the altar and wouldn’t budge. When she playfully called aloud to it, the idol remained mute and insensible. All the while she was reflecting: “Is this idol of stone really God, or is God something else? The image looks completely different without the ornaments. Are the ornaments God? Is the one who recognizes divinity in the idol God? Or perhaps the Earth itself is God: the Earth which is the source of all of these (idol, ornaments, worshippers etc.,) the source of all that is. Maybe the Earth is the true deity worthy of our worship!” She picked up a handful of nearby soil and addressed it warmly: “Mother! They are worshipping all of the things that are born of You, grow up in You, and merge again back into Yourself, but they are neglecting You. Why don’t You make them recognize You? “You tolerate it patiently when plowed or trampled underfoot. You calmly bear the good and the bad without making any distinction between the two. Though they slaughter Your own dear children and make Your tender body spill with blood, though they break Your heart with axes still You don’t condemn them, You don’t abuse them, You will never punish them. On the contrary, even the most wicked, You take upon Your lap to comfort and refresh.”

Overcome with anguish, Amma gazed silently at the soil in her open palm for a time. “Why this forbearance? Who will recognize Your magnanimity? Who could enter into Your boundless heart of compassion?” she questioned out loud. After a few moments of reflective silence, she added softly, “Yes, truly, it isn’t for anyone’s sake, it isn’t for anyone’s praise that You are such. It is Your very nature, Your Dharma (the inner law of one’s being), the expression of Your heart of hearts, so generous, wide and pure. In that broad heart there is a place only for the eternal, surging nectar-tide of kindness and love.” Filled with gratitude, the child fell prostrate on the ground, as if to embrace the all-embracing Earth, to bind it firmly in her heart and arms. “Mother! How sacred is Your life, how selfless and pure and fragrant with the divine aroma of sacrifice and universal love. Therefore, I address You as the Supreme Goddess of forbearance and patience. I wish all people would worship You alone. I want everybody to adore You day in and day out.” We can read these words in praise of the Earth as Mother’s indirect commentary on her own life and mission. The Earth is a living embodiment of those qualities of long-suffering endurance and selfless giving which Mother has come to manifest in the human world. While it is said of other Avatars that they incarnated to protect the righteous, to spread spirituality and destroy the wicked, Mother denies that there are any such goals in her own case. Her’s is not the limited task of protecting some and destroying others. Mother—like the Earth itself—is capable only of clasping one and all, the virtuous and the wicked alike, in her redeeming embrace of Love.

11. LOST AND FOUND “That which is not found even by searching is God”

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—Amma

MMA SPENT THE entire night inside the temple engaged in the heartfelt praises of Mother Earth. As the first tentative brightness lit the eastern horizon, she left the inner sanctum and went out into the cool stillness of the morning to the locked main gate of the temple compound to await her release. At precisely eight-thirty, the temple priest, Rangacharyulu, arrived to commence his daily rounds of worship. No sooner had the massive wooden temple doorway creaked open than his gaze fell upon the young girl standing serenely inside the courtyard. The priest was so overwhelmed that he hardly had a chance to consider who she was and how she had come to be inside the locked temple grounds. He just stared mutely at the child, whose calm figure and beatific visage wreathed in an angelic smile, sent thrills of bliss coursing through his body. A warm haze of light seemed to engulf his heart and simultaneously the realization dawned that the child was Ammavaru herself, the temple deity of stone turned flesh and blood to grant him darshan. His body trembled as if from an electric shock. Losing all control of his limbs, he dropped down limply at Amma’s feet. She touched him once lightly on the head, the trembling stopped, and his supine form became transfixed in blissful trance. Slowly, Amma ambled out of the temple compound. By the time Rangacharyulu had finally regained consciousness of the external world, she was no longer to be seen. He had an agonizing moment of doubt. Had his blissful vision been real or the illusion of an overheated imagination? With this question bearing heavily on him, he rushed into the inner sanctum and caught hold of the two feet on the idol of Ammavaru, as a drowning man clutches a floating plank. “Mother! Have you granted me darshan?” he cried out, and almost immediately became lost again in self-forgetful bliss. His abundant tears of joy now bathed in earnest the stone feet of the idol which he had so often washed mechanically during the daily ritual of abhisheka.1 At that very moment, the temple trustee Ranga Rao strode purposefully into the sanctum in a far less exalted, but equally oblivious haze of his own. He didn’t seem to notice the ecstatic state of his priest, but was struck immediately by the idol of Ammavaru, bereft of its usual silk coverings and valuable ornaments.

“What, Rangacharyulu! Is today a special festival for the Goddess without clothing and without jewelry?” he cried out sarcastically. The priest lifted his head from the idol’s feet with difficulty and noticed for the first time that Ammavaru was indeed missing her usual adornments. His mood of devotion quickly gave way to panic. Though he could barely rouse himself to move, due to his temporary trance, he somehow managed to locate another sari and to dress the idol. But the ornaments were still nowhere to be seen. In his anxiety to recover the jewels, Rangacharyulu prayed fervently within himself: “Mother, have you left this idol of stone and entered into my heart with all of your ornaments? Is the idol now merely a lifeless hunk of stone? Even if I lose my job on this account, please never leave me. Remain installed forever in my heart! But, if it be your will, let me have the ornaments, Mother, in order to wipe out this blot on my character. What is more, I can’t bear to look at you like this (bereft of ornaments).” No sooner had he prayed in this way, than it flashed on him intuitively where he should search for the ornaments. He found the jewels and brought them eagerly back to replace upon the idol. But it was already too late to placate the incensed Ranga Rao. The trustee’s outrage only increased, and he addressed Rangacharyulu in summary fashion. “What is this? Having stolen the ornaments, you are returning them again? Look into your account and take whatever back-pay is due to you.” The temple priest gazed imploringly at the idol of Ammavaru as to an old and trusted friend and bowed low before the image that he had worshipped so devotedly and for so long. “Whether I lose my job or not, please keep your blessed form always fresh before my sight, Mother,” he prayed. The priest lifted himself up from his prostration and was about to leave the sanctum, when Ranga Rao called out harshly, “You’re going—let it be for good!” The dazed Rangacharyulu walked through the main gate into the town with a sinking heart. Almost immediately, he came upon Amma standing in the street outside, as if she had been waiting for him. His present depressed state of mind was like a heavy veil and it did not occur to him that this was, in fact, the same “Child-Goddess” he had seen earlier that morning. He questioned Amma in an offhanded way. “Whose girl are you?” “I belong to whatever person I am with at the moment,” she replied. “In that case, do you belong to me?” the priest asked. “Why not? If you regard me as your own, wouldn’t it be so?” Rangacharyulu became suddenly abstracted, mindful of his earlier experience. “I have seen my Mother today,” he confided dreamily. “Did my Mother appear to you too? What an extraordinary Mother she is.” He closed his eyes as if to better visualize the morning’s darshan. But when he opened them again, the child’s form was already vanishing down the road. As he watched Amma disappear into a side street, it occurred to him how closely she resembled the young Ammavaru he had seen earlier in the temple courtyard. He brought to mind Amma’s suggestive words of a few moments back, her mature and self-assured manner. “Perhaps this child is the same one who appeared to me earlier,” he mused. Suddenly feeling a keen desire to test this theory, the priest started running off down the road. The impulsive chase through the quiet residential streets ended by the town railroad station, where he found Amma seated contentedly under a spreading jumbu tree. Panting and gasping for breath, he went up to her and blurted out, “Mother, tell me the truth. Are you the one who granted me darshan yesterday?” “Tell me the truth, was it yesterday, or the day before yesterday that you had darshan?” she teased him. “My mistake, it was early this morning,” he remembered. “Did I appear to you in the early morning? Tell me exactly.” But before he could answer, Amma addressed him again, this time with a mischievous glint in her eyes. “I think you’ve come to steal my jewels like you stole Ammavaru’s jewels at the temple!” Rangacharyulu was stunned by her knowledge of what had transpired between himself and the temple trustee in the seclusion of the inner sanctum. Instantly, he fell at the child’s feet, crying out: “Mother, don’t cover me up again with your maya. Take me quickly into yourself.” But Amma, in a playful mood, feigned surprise. “Why do you fall at my feet and call me ‘Mother’? I’m only a little girl, the daughter of Chidambara Rao’s brother-in-law. I’m here because I lost my own mother. I visit the temple now and again to have the darshan of the Mother in the temple, that’s all. Please call me ammayee (little girl) and not Ammavaru, as you seem to imagine me to be.” The priest was once more thrown into confusion. Struck as he was by the reasonableness of her words and the utter unreasonableness of his taking her to be a flesh-and-blood deity, he wandered off without saying anything, embarrassed at his own

erratic behavior. As he made his way home sunk deeply in thought, he heard the same comforting words of assurance echoing again and again in his mind. “There is no cause for fear. You will get your job back,” promised the inner voice. Meanwhile, Amma had returned to Chidambara Rao’s residence, stopping briefly on the way under a flowering punnaga tree to collect some delicate white blossoms. Entering the house unobtrusively, she placed the flowers on the ground near the family shrine. It seems that, in the hectic preparation for the Navaratri festival of the Divine Mother, nobody had taken notice of the fact that she had been out all of the previous night. When Aunt Annapurnamma came into the hall and saw the blossoms which Amma had placed so unorthodoxly on the floor, she flew into a fury. “Why do you put them on the ground? Get some roses from the backyard!” she ordered in a huff. Amma immediately went out to fulfill her aunt’s instructions. Returning with a handful of fresh blossoms, she asked, “Auntie, where should I put them now?” “Put them on your head!” Annapurnamma fumed. And Amma, in literal obedience, did just that. Which further enraged Annapurnamma. “What! Is it for this that I asked you to fetch the roses?” she bellowed. “Since you told me to collect the flowers, I did so. When you asked me to put them on my head, I followed your instructions. It is only because I did not know what to do with them that I asked you for directions,” Amma explained. Prakya Subbiah, the priest who had been called in to perform the special festival worship of the household deities, was impressed by the child’s calm and mature replies. He tried to placate Annapurnamma. “What does it matter if she did place them on her head? Is she not bala?2 There is no defilement in the innocent acts of a child. You can go ahead and offer the flowers.” The priest scrutinized Amma thoughtfully for a few moments and then addressed Annapurnamma. “I saw this girl at the temple yesterday. She was talking with some elders there. How is she related to you?” he asked with illconcealed admiration. “She doesn’t even know how to ask for food,” Annapurnamma snapped. “You must have seen someone else.” “No, this is the same girl. I saw her clearly. I have heard people say that there is something unique about her.” Annapurnamma grew irritated at this talk, the likes of which she had already heard more than enough in the household of Chidambara Rao. She ordered the priest to go ahead with the pooja (ritual worship). He reluctantly complied, but all the while he was worshipping the household deity and reciting the Lalita Sahasranamam (the thousand names of the Divine Mother), his attention was riveted on Anasuya Devi, whose liquid eyes and soothing features held a strange fascination for him. When it came time to break the coconut and wave the camphor flame before the idol, he unconsciously performed these facing the child instead of offering them to the idol of the Goddess as was expected. As soon as the pooja was completed, Amma left the hall and wandered over to the nearby residence of Ranga Rao, sitting down casually on the doorstep outside his house. When he returned from some business in town and saw Amma resting by the house, he called out and asked her who she was. “I am a relative of Rangacharyulu,” she claimed. “How is he related to you?” “He is like a son to me. That is to say, his mother and I are sisters.”3 “Are you coming from his house?” Ranga Rao asked. “No, I am just on my way there now. It seems that someone fired him from his job. He is a good man with a fine disposition. It is the temple’s loss that he is being asked to leave.” Hearing these innocent words of truth, Ranga Rao became engrossed in thought. Rangacharyulu’s years of devoted service passed before his mind’s eye and he felt suddenly remorseful for his hasty action. Taking along some back pay, fruits, and ten rupees extra as a token of his repentance, the temple trustee went directly to the priest’s home. After offering his sincere apologies to Rangacharyulu, he handed him the money and fruit asking him to perform a pooja to Ammavaru and offer her the fruits. Ranga Rao walked off without any further words, leaving the priest alone to ponder this latest shift in the winds of fortune. Rangacharyulu was hard pressed to understand what had caused the trustee’s sudden change of heart. Dazed, he wandered over to the open window of his upstairs room and peered out reflectively at the busy town life below. In a flash, he spotted Amma’s diminutive figure weaving its way through the crowd. “Mother!” he called out in exaltation, and rushed headlong down the stairs. But by the time he had reached the road, she was gone, having vanished tracelessly amid the busy throng of faces that swirled and eddied about him. Sadly, he turned back to his house, praying inwardly with the intensity of his thwarted devotion: “Mother, why do you play hide-and-seek with this child of yours? Be kind enough to grant him your darshan completely and permanently. I can’t stand being

tossed about in the ocean of this world any longer. Amma, draw back this curtain of maya and take me into your blessed lap, once and for all!”

12. THE TEACHER AND THE TAUGHT “I have no disciples. Who could possibly be my disciples, when I am All that is?”

I

—Amma

N THE MONTH OF November, 1929, Maridamma took Amma to the district seat of Guntur for a short stay. With the irrepressible energy of a free spirit, Amma explored the large commercial town on her own, wandering past ancient temples, imposing colonial office buildings and crowded thoroughfares bustling with carts, rickshaws, uniformed schoolchildren, rotund merchants, and sweating coolies dragging their loads of unhusked rice and cotton like so many beasts of burden. One day as she drifted through the bazaar, she heard a distant thread of sound, the sonorous recitation of scripture, mingling with the workaday noises of the busy market. She located the source of this in a nearby residence, the hermitage of a Hindu renunciate, and entered inside. The Swami, Kalyananda Bharati, a revered scholar, sat upon an elevated platform in front of an attentive group of his devotees and other religiously minded folk. He was discoursing animatedly. The singsong recitation of the Sanskrit slokas alternated with the Swami’s learned Telugu commentaries and vivid exhortations to his listeners to live a moral and dharmic (or righteous) life in the world. Unobtrusively, Amma entered the hall and listened to the talk in silence. Thereafter, she visited the Sannyasin’s hermitage daily to attend his lectures. But invariably she would sit alone in a corner, seeming to be in a world of her own, rarely paying much attention to the scholarly discourses and never speaking to anybody. At the end of the talks, Amma would quietly slip away without approaching the Swami and prostrating before him, as was the practice there. The Swami was greatly intrigued by his young visitor. He noticed a remarkable radiance about her, and found himself compelled to gaze into the deep pools of her eyes. Nevertheless, despite his mounting curiosity, the detached dignity expected of a man in his position prevented him from approaching Amma or making any inquiries about her. It was not until the thirty-first day of her attendance that he could no longer restrain himself and beckoned for Amma to approach. “Who are you, my dear?” he asked with a kindly smile. “That is exactly what I have come to find out. I am here because I don’t know who I am,” she answered. “What caste do you belong to?” “To the caste of sperm and ovum.” The Swami was filled with a strange thrill. These unconventional answers from one so young plunged him into admiring silence. Surely such a gifted young prodigy must be initiated into spiritual life without delay, he mused. “I will give you a mantra,” he offered hopefully. “Will you practice it?” “Why should I?” she replied. “Didn’t you say before that you’ve come in order to find out who you are?” “Are you saying that a mantra is going to tell me?” Amma challenged. “Isn’t it necessary?” “First, tell me what a mantra is.” “A mantra is a group of powerful syllables arranged in phrases. Swamis like myself impart divine power to these mantras and then give them in secret to people like yourself.” “Out of all these syllables, which is the most powerful?” After reflecting for some moments, the Swami said, “It is we who charge the syllables with power.” “But just a moment back, you spoke of certain powerful syllables. If the capacity to charge them is yours, then you can as well

impart that power to a blade of grass.” “Why trouble yourself with all this? You are just a child. Be satisfied to learn what I’ve got to teach you.” “I will just hear what you say. I can’t be taught. To be taught seems to mean that I have to simply repeat mechanically all that you tell me. I will hear what you say. That is all.” In enlisting Amma as his pupil, it seemed, the revered Swami had taken on a lot more than he had bargained for! But far from feeling discouraged by Amma’s insistent questioning, the broadminded guru found himself both stimulated and charmed by his difficult young sishya (pupil). Their first conversation ended when the Swami was called in for his customary evening bath. Amma returned the following night after the Swami’s daily discourse. As she made her way toward the door of the hermitage, a man tried to drive her away, saying that there was nothing for her there and that she should return home. Undeterred, the child made a typically enigmatic reply to her challenger and continued on her way—but not before the elder had slapped her soundly on the cheek for her impertinence. Amma wasn’t in the least disturbed. The Swami, however, hearing the commotion called for her to come in at once. “What was that clapping noise?” he asked with alarm. “It was the sound of the coming together of the two,” Amma replied tersely. “What exactly does that mean?” the Swami pressed. Amma demonstrated by slapping her own cheek. “Was it the noise of another slapping you, or of you slapping yourself?” “What you have heard without seeing was the noise of someone slapping me. That which was heard while seeing has slapped itself.” With these few pithy words, Mother had conveyed the very essence of the nondualistic philosophy of Vedanta and also made a thinly veiled proclamation of her own divine status. When we “hear without seeing” (i.e., without the nondualistic vision of pure knowledge), we perceive there to be multiple actors on the stage of life (one slaps another). On the other hand, when the divine vision is operative, then only the One Actor appears (“That which was heard while seeing has slapped itself”). By her answer, Amma has defined the perspective of the jnani (or enlightened sage), who sees no others apart from himself and, at the same time, identified herself with him. The Swamiji, on the other hand, is identified with the ajnani, the ignorant person for whom the world of multiplicity appears to be real. Because of his familiarity with the language of vedantic discourse, the Sannyasin was in a unique position to relish the subtlety of Amma’s reply. He was filled with enthusiasm to pursue the conversation. “Why are you so late today? Why didn’t you come at noon as usual?” “The taruna (divinely appointed moment) had not yet arrived. Now it has arrived, and so I have arrived.” “What is meant by ‘taruna’?” “There are certain things that cannot be avoided, however much we might try to avoid them. There are other things that cannot be accomplished, however much we might struggle to accomplish them. In either case, taruna is the deciding factor, my child.” The Swamiji was startled by Amma’s words. “Why do you call me your child?” “That is my destiny,” she revealed. Hearing this, the Swami became all the more anxious to initiate Amma into the spiritual life. His earnest request to her had in it a note of pleading. “After all, wouldn’t you like to be given a mantra?” “Your explanation of the meaning of mantra was not good enough. If it had been adequate, I would have taken one already.” “In that case, you please do it yourself,” the Swami offered. “Are you asking me to give you a mantra, or to explain what mantra means?” “According to your pleasure. I leave that to you. Both are needed in my case,” he admitted with a broad grin. “Then in what capacity should I act?” Amma asked playfully. The Swami was overjoyed. Abandoning the reserved and pious demeanor of his profession, he drew Amma into his large arms and kissed her on the forehead. “Though you are outwardly a child, in reality, you are Mother! What class do you attend?” “I don’t go to any school. I have only come to this school. But this seems to be a school without a teacher.” “Yes, indeed, Mother,” the Swami agreed, his portly form quivering with laughter at this latest blow to his egotism. “If I give you something to eat, will you take it? What fruit do you like best?” “That fruit which is not diminished by being eaten and can be enjoyed eternally—the ripe fruit of the head (i.e., ripened wisdom.)” The Swami’s eyes glistened as he handed Amma a large yellow mango. “You can go home now,” he told her. “Be sure to

come again tomorrow.” Amma returned the following afternoon in the middle of the daily discourse. Seeing the child seated quietly in her usual place at the back of the hall, the Swami became restless to resume his talk with her. His exposition slackened of its own accord and was wrapped up far earlier than usual. When all had filed solemnly by the Swami and prostrated before him, Amma came forward and offered a large citrus fruit to the holy man. The Swami hugged her enthusiastically. “Who are you, dear Mother? Certainly, you must stay with me!” he exclaimed. “I can’t stay. It is for you to keep me with you,” she responded, implying that even in her absence, the Swami could keep her spiritually present through a devoted heart. Once again, their talk turned to the subject of mantras. But by now the tables had fully turned and the learned Swami was humbly seeking instruction, rather than offering to give it. “Won’t you tell me what a mantra is?” he implored. “Do you really wish to be taught? Then what will you be while learning?” “Whatever you make of me!” Amma could not deny his sincere request. But she had a question of her own to ask first. “Won’t you tell me who I am, in your opinion?” “You are Bala Rajarajeswari (the Divine Mother in the form of a child),” he replied, without a pause. Now Amma was ready with her definition—“Mind itself is the mantra. The sacred syllable (bijakshara) is a root vibration (sabda). The various grades of sound are the sacred syllables.”1 The Swamiji followed up with a technical question on the science of mantras, which Amma answered insightfully and with a scholarly precision. He marveled at the child’s masterly exposition of a recondite subject that is a puzzle even to experts in the field of spiritual science. Amma had passed the Swami’s final test with flying colors. He was fully convinced of her towering spiritual stature. The roles of teacher and taught had become reversed and he now eagerly sought the spiritual initiation which he had been so anxious to impart to Amma. But rather than openly requesting it (a request he probably feared would be denied), he contrived to cause Amma to act unknowingly in accordance with the traditional ritual of initiation. He had a cup of payasam (sweet milk pudding) given to the child, and when she had eaten half of it, he pleaded with her to share the remaining portion with him. His idea was that, if he could partake of the food left over by her, it would, in effect, constitute an initiation. (In India, it is customary for the guru to offer food from his own plate to those he wishes to accept as disciples. In so doing, he symbolically commits himself to “sharing his wisdom” with them and to looking after their spiritual sustenance.) Amma, however, saw through his ploy and quickly ate up all of the remaining payasam. It should be noted here that Amma has never accepted disciples in the formal and traditional manner. As Universal Mother, she sees all her children as being equally worthy of her help and attention, and so does not single out any for the special status of discipleship. Furthermore, in Mother’s view, there is only one guru, the divine Shakti, which guides all through the mediation of its instrument, the mind. When the mind itself is inspired to recognize the greatness of an individual and to humbly seek guidance, that itself constitutes initiation in the subtle, spiritual sense. No outward ceremony is necessary. Whether the Swamiji, in his inability to obtain initiation, consoled himself with similar thoughts or not, we cannot say. But in any case, his curiosity to learn more about the mysterious prodigy in his midst had not abated and eager questions poured forth once again. “What is the purpose with which you have come to the world? Where are you living? What is your mother’s name?” “My mother’s name is adhara (basis, concrete support, the earth) and my father’s name is avakasha (infinite, undifferentiated space, the sky).” The Swami wondered why Amma had cited these two highly abstract Sanskrit philosophical terms instead of proper names: “You mentioned adhara and avakasha, but don’t your parents have distinct names and forms?” “Isn’t adhara a name? Isn’t there a form to it?” she countered. “What form does it have then? Please tell me.” “Take, for example, the wooden plank of your joola,” she said, pointing to a ceremonial swing on which the images of deities are placed and worshipped. “The chain is the adhara (support) of the plank. The beam is the adhara of the chain. The earth is the adhara of the beam. There are so many adharas if we go on analyzing in this way. All things in their turn are dependent on adhara (the universal principle of support.) Therefore, adhara is the all-familiar (i.e., Mother of All).”2 “So is there nothing beyond adhara?” the Swami wondered. “Nothing exists independent of it, nothing above it,” she declared with a confident authority. The overwhelming admiration that the Swamiji felt at that time for his young mentor could not be contained. It spilled over as

tears of pure joy. As the waves of exaltation gradually died away, the intensity of emotion left in its wake a profound and settled peace. The Swami sat in unbroken stillness for over two hours, immersed in the unknown depths of the heart. When he finally opened his eyes and saw Amma sitting before him, he put to her the question that had been obsessing him for days: “Tell me your real identity!” he pleaded. “Reality itself is my state,” was the terse response. “Truly, Mother!” he exclaimed in wonder. After a few moments of reflective silence, he asked, “How do your people view you?” “They view me as I appear to them.” “Do you appear similarly to all?” he asked. “Let’s put aside the question of appearing similar to all for a moment. Have you been viewing me in the same light since the day you first saw me? My form has remained the same, no doubt—but how differently I appear to you now! So when even your own view has changed, where is there a question of appearing the same to all? Everyone views me according to his own mental state. Mind is the measuring rod. Each one measures me according to the reach of his or her own mind,” she revealed. But then she added a final cautionary note on the impossibility of ever fully grasping her with the limited instrument of the mind. “There are inches in a yard, but no yards in an inch.” With this final enigmatic gift of wisdom, Mother sought the Swami’s leave. As she was placing her hands together in a parting gesture of reverence, the Swami caught hold of them and tried to pry them apart, embarrassed by the worshipful attitude of one he now knew to be his spiritual superior. “Namaskara (salutations) cannot be prevented by holding the hands apart. It is not merely the physical joining together of the palms,” she gently remonstrated. “Bless me!” Amma requested with a smile. But, without waiting for the Swami’s response, she added: “Blessing is not the sort of thing that can be requested or granted in such a manner. I’ve asked as a mere formality, that’s all. I‘ll take my leave now.” The Swami watched sadly as Amma walked off into the busy town, vanishing like the sun’s rays which shine only a few brief moments through a gap in the clouds on an overcast day. Or perhaps the light of divine darshan continued to shine on in memory, even after the young Anasuya Devi had disappeared phantomlike from the learned Swami’s life.

13. PROTECTRESS OF THE DISTRESSED “Service to others is true worship of God.”

A

—Amma

MONG ALL givers, it is only the mother who gives without considering the worthiness of the recipient. To be her child is in itself to be worthy—there are no further qualifications. Would any mother pause to ask if her child is deserving before feeding him? Still less could she withdraw loving thoughts and attention from her own offspring, however naughty, obdurate, even villainous, they might turn out to be. The moment she starts putting conditions on her affection, at that very moment she ceases to be a mother. Truly, it is in the mother’s care for her child that we see the closest human approximation of God’s love for His creatures. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the fruits and support of the earth, are available equally to all. The sun shines down on the good and the bad, the deserving and undeserving alike. So too, only the mother showers her gifts indiscriminately on all her offspring, without the least regard for their worthiness. The world inquires if one deserves before it gives, but the mother asks only if one needs. The hungry child is fed by her, whatever the nature of the child might be. The sated one is not. Though her love is directed equally toward all her children, the mother’s care is naturally drawn to the one who most requires her help. In a dramatic reversal of the usual order of things, it is generally the smallest, the least capable, the naughtiest and most troubled that monopolizes the mother’s attention, while the well-

adjusted are left to fend for themselves. It is natural, therefore, that Amma, the Mother of All, has consistently given her special attention to the poor, the old, the infirm, the rejected ones of her universal family, those whose need is the greatest. On many occasions, the young Amma would forsake childhood play and brave the misunderstanding and sometimes bitter criticism of her elders in order to render loving service to these neglected ones, the true “untouchables” of society. The joy and gratitude which her beneficiaries felt can better be imagined than described. There is the case of Gundel Rao. For twenty years, he had suffered from a nearly total paralysis. Without wife or children to look after him, he was thrown on the mercy of his brother’s family for all his needs. But, with the passage of time, they became indifferent to their burdensome charge and increasingly neglected to see to his proper care. When Amma, accompanied by her relatives, first came to the house in which he was staying, the old man was in a miserable condition, seated resignedly in clothing soiled with his own urine and waste. She made her way straight to his cot and smilingly handed him a fruit. When he put the gift aside, unable to peel it, Amma immediately peeled it and fed him by hand. Then she removed Gundel Rao’s soiled clothing and dressed him in a clean garment. The old man just looked steadily at her as tears of joy came welling up. All he could manage to say again and again was, “Ramachandra, Ramachandra,” the name of his beloved Ishta Daiva (chosen deity) and his sole support in life. For the next two weeks, Anasuya Devi came to Gundel Rao regularly. Her days, from morning till night, became one continuous loving service, as if in compensation for the decades of neglect the old man had suffered at the hands of callous relatives. Naturally, his thoughts—even his dreams—were soon focused on Amma alone. He wished for her to be with him always and could not bear the least separation. Her soft words and touch, the strange tenderness of her glances, were like a fountain of cool nectar to his parched spirit. His longing for her companionship was sharpened by the intuition that his life’s end was fast approaching. One day as Amma was attending to him, he beckoned for his brother Ramachandra Rao to sit by his side. Catching hold of Amma’s hand in one of his hands and his brother’s with the other, he struggled to voice all that was in his heart. “Annayya (brother),” he started, but melted into tears before the word was fully spoken. Checking the surging waves of his emotions, he declared, “The one who is sitting beside us is no child. We are in the presence of a Divine Being. These last fifteen days, she has served me with wonderous affection, just like a mother. She is my own Lord, Rama himself, come to save me! “Annayya, believe my words. My Rama has come down in this form. Who else would have such compassion for me? In fact, only Rama has a loving heart like this. Such pleasing lotus-eyes, compassionate looks, sweet words, enchanting figure—without a shadow of a doubt, she is none other than my Raghu Rama. Why has my Rama showered this grace on me? That ‘Ocean of Love,’ how has he come to overflow his waters upon this unworthy child of his? What have I done to merit such love?” He paused for a moment reflectively and then proceeded to answer his own question. “For my Rama’s love and compassion, there need be no cause. He has assumed this form (Amma) for that purpose alone—to save the distressed. I beg you, please surrender yourself to Amma and worship her with all your thoughts, words and deeds. “I am at the door of death; otherwise, I would myself reveal this secret to so many. I would proclaim with a thousand mouths the truth of her divinity. Her own relatives don’t seem to recognize who she is. They are indifferent to her. Indeed, the great always live hidden from common view, like diamonds in the earth. Unless they themselves allow it, we can never recognize them for what they are. “I have been noticing these past weeks how she is ignored by elders, who are careless of her welfare. Nobody bothers to ask whether she has taken her meals. Annayya, ours is a religion that teaches us to see God even in the rag that we use to mop up the floor. When that same God—out of His boundless compassion—comes to grant us darshan, we are treating Him as carelessly as a worthless rag! I will tell you my one fear—that this world will turn like a demon to devour her, who has come to save it, that this world will become a vicious serpent to bite the hand that pours upon it the healing milk of love. What will become of such a tender heart at the cold touch of the cruel?” Gundel Rao’s chest heaved with emotion. His brother sat speechless, overwhelmed. All the while, Amma appeared immeasurably distant with a faraway look in her eyes. When a rice meal was brought for Gundel Rao, Amma took hold of the tray herself. “Shall I feed you, nana? (child),” she asked softly. “Why should you take the trouble, Amma? You are just a small girl,” Ramachandra Rao objected. “Please don’t say that!” Gundel Rao was vehement. “Let her feed me just a single morsel. I will be blessed if one grain of rice is served by her hand.” Saying this, he shuffled nearer to Amma. As she was mixing together the rice and vegetables, the old man spoke to his brother once again in a tremulous voice, weak from the strain of his emotion. “Come what may, your surrender should be complete. Our faith in Amma is our talisman.” Whether moved to faith by these strange utterances, or merely by sympathy, Ramachandra Rao now joined his elder brother in

raining down tears. Amma chucked a small ball of food into Gundel Rao’s mouth, but the old man had not the strength to swallow it. Instead, he gathered together the last spark of his energy and spoke a final paean of gratitude. “Such unimaginable compassion has been showered on me without cause. I am indeed blessed!” With these words, the old man closed his eyes, damp with the tears of blissful release, never again to look upon the world which had brought him so much pain. Gundel Rao suffered much toward the end of his life. But through it all, he had never lost faith in the grace and love of his Lord Rama. The steady light of that devotion had illumined the obscurity of a dreary existence and made bearable the sorest trials. It is an article of faith for devotees that the Lord never abandons his devotees. Whatever difficulties he may send along the way, he is finally bound to protect his bhaktas (devotees) and merge them into Himself. This was the firm conviction of Gundel Rao, and in the end, the strength of this faith itself brought to him the ecstatic fulfillment of his lifelong devotion. There is a saying in India that the Lord is a slave of those who love him, a servant of his own servants. The life stories of the historical incarnations bear this out. Krishna was the charioteer of his devotee Arjuna; Christ washed the feet of his disciples. Likewise, Amma came to feed and to serve. But in her case, there was no question of disciples or devotees. Mother came to feed and serve her children, and her children include all—believers and nonbelievers alike. Among these myriad progeny, Amma’s motherly heart invariably drew her to the forgotten and the distressed, at the very moment of their greatest need. Witness the following incident: One day, Amma was sitting with her maternal grandfather, Sri Venkata Subba Rao, and some ladies of the house on the stoop in front of their residence in the town of Tenali. A rubbish cart was clattering slowly down the road, and a scavenger lady was following along behind sweeping the street, trailed by her 3-year-old son. When the driver goaded his bullocks, the animals lurched and picked up speed. The scavenger lady ran after the cart, leaving her son trailing well behind. He tried to catch up, but in his haste, he tripped on a stone and lay weeping on the road. This was unnoticed by his mother who was, by then, out of hearing range. Meanwhile, two water buffaloes were racing blindly down the road. Seeing the danger to the boy, Amma rushed out and lifted him onto her shoulders. carrying him out of harm’s way and over to her relatives. When the boy’s mother noticed what had happened, she headed over to fetch her child. Venkata Subba Rao was filled with pride, as much for his granddaughter’s lightning-quick reflexes as for her evident compassion. But Mother’s aunts, who watched from the house, had an altogether different reaction. Janakamma and Annapurnamma looked on with revulsion as their young relation carried the untouchable boy toward them. The scavenger woman was beaming with joy and gratitude. “My lady, have you carried him? How fortunate my son is to be carried by a Brahmin girl!” This was more than Janakamma could bear to hear. “Our Brahminhood has gone to dust! What more is there to say? You take your boy and go,” she bawled out with disgust. Venkata Subba Rao was pained to hear his wife’s sharp words. “Why so hasty? There is no crying over spilled milk. Aren’t we traveling in trains?” he said, trying to pacify her.1 But Amma had a reply of a different sort to make to Janakamma: “Yes, it’s a fact. Because our Brahminhood has gone to dust, you refuse to touch him.” She was suggesting that the original meaning of Brahminhood had been forgotten, and the narrowness of caste distinctions had come in its stead. Brahminhood, according to Amma, is not belonging to an exclusive caste. It refers to those who know the Brahman, that Supreme Consciousness which is manifest as all beings and forms in the universe. To be a Brahmin means to perceive everything as being an expression of the One Divine Life. It is indeed ironic that this noble concept of universality had degenerated in time into an exclusive religious club, and such things as untouchability were instituted in its name. Sri Venkata Subba Rao grasped these deeper implications of Amma’s reply and was genuinely delighted at it. He tried to explain the meaning to the ladies, saying that, by her actions, Amma had demonstrated that she alone was aware of the true meaning of Brahminhood. But it seemed that they were in no mood to appreciate the philosophical subtleties of the issue. “Of all people, you alone have taken up Brahminhood!” Annapurnamma addressed Amma sarcastically. Meanwhile, the scavenger woman extended her arm and called for her son to come back to her. He did not move. She tried a second time, but the boy clung all the more tightly to his young savior. Everyone was amazed to see the child unwilling to leave Amma—not least of which was his own mother. Impulsively, she embraced Amma along with her son and said, “I am not the mother of this child. You are his true mother, and my mother as well.” This proved to be too much for the already wounded sensibilities of Janakamma and Annapurnamma. Remarking on what a nasty sight it was, they retreated hastily into the still undefiled premises of the house. In short order, the family servant came out with a message from Janakamma—“Tell Amma that unless she removes her gown and throws it away to the scavenger woman and enters through the back door, and unless she is given panchamrutalu (a purificatory drink containing milk, curd, ghee, honey and

plantain-pulp), and unless she is sanctified by bathing, she cannot step into the house.” Amma communicated her own forceful reply to the ultimatum through the same servant: “Why should I remove the gown? If I am polluted, how can I be cleansed by merely throwing off some clothing? Even to remove my hand with the idea that it was defiled by touching the child isn’t enough. I carried him on my shoulder. He touched my tummy also. Besides, his mother embraced me from head to toe. And not only my body, but my mind was polluted, the very moment I thought of carrying him. I’m destined to be like this. My fate itself is contaminated. Moreover, the One who ordained that fate must have been contaminated by ordaining it!” Amma paused a moment and then reflected ironically, “The end result of all these pollutions is that the Mother of society is exiled from society.” Venkata Subba Rao beamed with delight to hear Amma’s impassioned response. Yet, being anxious to avoid all unpleasantness with the ladies of the house, he took off Amma’s gown and handed it to the scavenger woman. Lifting her up onto his shoulders, he carried Amma to the backyard, where she would be able to take a purificatory bath prior to entering the house. The child, however, was not about to compromise her ideals. “I don’t feel like taking a bath,” she insisted. The servant Ankalu, who had acted as intermediary between Amma and Janakamma, backed up Amma. “The girl has just spoken justly. Everyone has become unnecessarily upset. She is free from all caste distinctions. The other day when she was sent idli (rice cakes), she fed me some with her own hands before taking any herself.” “Did she eat the crumbs from your mouth?” Janakamma asked sharply. Amma addressed Ankalu. “You said I fed you because I have no kulabedham (caste distinction). The fact is that, if I had any sense of gunabedham (distinction based on traits of character), I would never have stayed in this household! When I don’t distinguish between one quality and another, what is so surprising about my not distinguishing between castes?” How difficult it is for humankind to comprehend the universal vision implicit in these words! We quickly condemn the Great Souls of our race when they overstep the petty bounds of social convention and call them “revolutionaries.” In fact, they are revolutionaries in a far profounder and more radical sense than we ever imagined. The social reformer is satisfied to break down the barriers of caste and class alone. But the saint does not rest until he has completely transcended every man-made limitation to thought and action in his or her own life. Good and evil, pure and impure, sacred and profane—all the countless distinctions of “conventional wisdom” fall away from the soul who has realized that One Divine Power is manifest as all the names, forms and qualities which comprise the world. The saint acts in a manner consistent with his realization of Oneness. But for those of us who do not share this sublime equal vision, it is not surprising that the actions of the Great Soul often appear incomprehensible. Janakamma and Annapurnamma were neither the first nor the last to be offended by Amma’s unorthodox ways. Gundal Rao’s dying prediction that the world would not understand Amma has been borne out on many occasions. But through it all, Amma never altered her words or deeds to please the crowd or to allay the objections of bigots within the Hindu community. Generally, the very embodiment of softness and flexibility, Mother was capable of an unbending firmness when the situation demanded it. Her unwillingness to take a purificatory bath is a case in point. For fully half an hour, she stood silently, refusing to bathe. Finally, Venkata Subba Rao suggested diplomatically that she be admitted into the house after being lightly sprinkled with water. In view of Amma’s intransigence, Janakamma was compelled to give in.

14. MARRIAGE “The merging of the individual in the Absolute is marriage.” —Amma

I

N THE YEARS OF transition between childhood and youth, Amma continued to shower those near her with inexplicable experiences. Chidambara Rao—Amma’s maternal uncle who was so impressed by her wisdom and poise during the funeral of her mother—found his regard for her deepening with the passage of the years. He found her words both spiritually illuminating and full of a rare wit and insight. Once when he marveled at how everything that Amma said, even her casual banter, approached the Advaitic state (the condition of nonduality), she corrected him. “Where is the question of approaching? It is already there!” Sri Sitapati’s understanding of Amma’s state matured more slowly than Chidambara Rao’s. He was an earnest and simple man, without the lawyer’s wide experience or his intellectual and spiritual interests. Though he had limited contact with his daughter, he nevertheless esteemed her highly. But he was more puzzled than anything else by Amma’s strange words and precocious nature. Once when he was peeved with her, he chided that she took after her late mother. Amma responded, “When others are angry with me, they say that I have inherited my traits from my father’s side. When you are angry, you say that I have inherited them from my mother’s side. I have not inherited my traits from either side. All of you have inherited my traits.” 1 Among Amma’s relatives, perhaps it was Maridamma, by virtue of her many years’ practice of yoga and her highly devotional nature, who was in the best position to understand Amma. On one occasion, Maridamma took the child to see a saintly devotee of Lord Rama, Sri Vasudasa of Brahmanakodur village. Feeling pity for the motherless child, the saint asked Amma whether he should bless her, that all should love her. “Please don’t!” she objected. “Bless me, rather, that I should love everyone always, whether anyone loves me or not.” Sri Vasudasa asked her why she was requesting this. “Only if I have love will I know love. What will I know of love if others have it?” Amma told him. “All right then, tell me what it is that you want,” he said. She replied, “I want to be without wanting anything at all!” Hearing Amma’s words, he gazed at her transfixed and unblinking for five minutes and then exclaimed, “Rama is Brahman!” When some disciples asked him to explain, he said, “It is neither something that I can tell you, nor something that you can hear. In the future, you will understand it yourselves from experience.” As Amma approached maturity, the question of her marriage became uppermost in the minds of her guardians. When the son of her father’s sister, Nageswara Rao, was put forward as a potential match, Amma made no objection. (Cousin marriages were quite common in their community of Brahmins at that time.) Negotiations between the two families were set in motion and a date was set, invitations printed, and sweets prepared in readiness for the wedding. At the very last moment, however, a disagreement over the scheduling of the ceremony led to its postponement. With time, the rift between the parties widened and it gradually came to seem as if the marriage were destined not to take place. Many of the relatives, on Amma’s side especially, became bitterly opposed to the match. The large gap in means between the two families (Amma’s family was quite well off and the groom’s side relatively impoverished) is said to have been the major bone of contention. Mother, however, felt no compunctions about “marrying down.” And she had no concern for the significant change in her lifestyle that it was certain to entail. She told her relatives that all such financial questions were totally out of place and irrelevant. Furthermore, so far as Amma was concerned, the very thought of the marriage which had taken root in the minds of so many had established it as an incontrovertible fact. To start looking for a new match at that stage, she said, would be tantamount to infidelity. Mother’s unwavering insistence finally led to the wedding being performed during her thirteenth year on the fifth of May, 1937— some three years after the invitations were first printed! Many of those who were unreconciled to the match stayed away in conspicuous protest, casting a shadow upon the happy day. The ceremony itself took place under a colorful pandal (tent), which had been erected outside Chidambara Rao’s Bapatla residence. As the elaborate rituals proceeded, the initial coolness of the morning rapidly gave way to the searing midsummer heat. A desiccating wind was blowing in steadily from the Deccan hills. At times, Amma appeared to drift off into temporary trances. This became noticeable to everyone during the stalipakam ritual, when the bride places handfuls of cooked rice into the palms of the groom, who then offers them into the sacred fire. To the amusement and surprise of the guests, Mother continued mechanically to go through the motions of handing over the rice long after Nageswara Rao had withdrawn his hand. When Amma later reminisced about her wedding, she related how elements of the symbolic richness in the age-old ceremony became revealed to her while the marriage was in progress. During the yoking together of bride and groom, for example, it occurred to Mother that the configuration corresponded to the ida and pingala nerves which, according to yogic science, carry the two complementary psychic currents along the spinal column. The small opening in the wooden bullock’s-yoke equidistant between them represented the shushumna passage, through which psychic energy rises during the practice of yoga. She realized that metaphorically this small opening also symbolized “the straight and narrow path” that the couple must walk in their new life together. On a less esoteric level, the yoking showed the equality of male and female, according to Amma. And it graphically demonstrated how neither was anymore a free agent, able to do as he or she pleased. Both partners were constrained, from that moment onwards, to walk like a pair of bullocks in perfect step and balance, one with the other.

In the muhurtam ritual, in which the bride and groom pour uncooked yellow rice grains on each other’s heads, Mother saw a dynamic acting-out of the unconditional offering of one’s inner thoughts and feelings to the spouse. This is the sense of her definition—“The pure offering of one’s undefiled mind to another is marriage.” The Hindu wedding is performed with bride and groom separated from each other’s view by a thin curtain. As Amma sat thus in isolation, the words of a song by the medieval saint-composer, Tyagaraja, imploring the Lord to remove the veil which hides him from view, came spontaneously to her mind. To Amma’s way of thinking, the curtain was like the veil of maya, which has to be pierced before the individual can have darshan of Reality. The ancient proscriptions of Pativrata Dharma (the way of the devoted wife) enjoin the bride to regard her husband as an actual living embodiment of the Lord of the Universe. In this way, she is able to rise above the merely physical level of relationship and make use of marriage as a prop and an aid in reaching the highest state. Mother has said that the wife who treats her marriage as a sadhana, a spiritual discipline, is fortunate indeed. This path of serving, obeying, and revering one’s partner is one that Amma has scrupulously followed throughout her married life. In her case, however, it was not as a sadhana that she adopted this role, but in order to set a living example for others. Mother says that what the yogi strives for by leaving home and repairing to some lonely spot, the devoted wife can realize easily by maintaining a worshipful and pure attitude toward her husband. Marriage is only a hindrance to spiritual progress when it is perceived crudely as an exclusively physical or emotional union. By opening oneself to the spiritual dimension of marriage, Amma insists, it is possible to transform married life into a royal road to perfection. She teaches that the hidden inner meaning, the high purpose of marriage, as it was perceived by the seers of old, was not merely the physical coming-together of bodies, but nothing less than the merging of the individual with the Absolute. This is effected by surrendering one’s personal will and desires to God, in the form of the wife or husband. Only when all selfishness and egoism are surrendered in this way will it be possible for the impersonal divine vision to dawn. Marriage at its best becomes a training ground for unselfishness and the spirit of sacrifice. There is a perfect demonstration of Mother’s attitude in a small incident which occurred at the end of the ceremony. Hindu weddings often conclude with a playful game. The priest tosses a small ornament of gold and one of silver into a vessel full of water and then directs bride and groom to reach simultaneously into the container and blindly grab one. The party coming up with the gold piece is proclaimed the winner. Perhaps this is a light way of foreshadowing the element of rivalry which is bound to crop up with time between even the most harmonious couples. Significantly, when Amma reached into the vessel, she did not scramble for an ornament, but gripped tightly her husband’s hand. The priest, assuming she didn’t understand, explained the game to her and urged, “Come on, let’s see who comes out on top, Shiva or Parvati!” But the results were exactly the same the second and third times around. It was clear that Amma didn’t intend to compete, even in jest, with her new husband. Competition is possible only when there are two to compete. In marriage, which signifies the merging of the two into one, Amma felt her own fate and fortune to be inextricably linked with that of her husband. After the completion of the wedding ritual, food was served to the assembled guests. Ironically, just as the ceremony was concluding, a local train pulled into the nearby Bapatla station and hundreds of curious commuters gathered by the pandal to watch the proceedings. Mother, gazing over the crowd, made a signal for all—invited guests, as well as the onlookers—to partake of the wedding feast. Chidambara Rao was thrown into a state of panic by this. Food had been prepared for, at most, two hundred people, he told Amma. The crowd had swelled to nearly three times that number. There was simply no way to feed everybody. But Amma remained calm and assured him that the food would suffice. And it did—with large mounds of cooked rice inexplicably left over after all had finished eating.2 In keeping with custom, Amma and Nageswara Rao did not set up house together immediately. For some time, Amma continued to move from the home of one relative to another. At one point, when her strange lapses of “absent-mindedness” and trances were causing concern, she was sent to a missionary hospital in the town of Chirala. Amma stayed there for nearly two years—less as a patient than as a willing assistant to the doctors and nurses, tirelessly serving her fellow inmates. Some of the Christian members of the hospital staff, including one American lady, are said to have been so moved by their bright helper’s selfless and compassionate ministrations that they came to regard her as a living embodiment of Mary and of Christ. In 1941, Nageswara Rao was appointed the chief village officer for Jillellamudi, a remote hamlet seven miles from the town of Bapatla. Amma, carrying her newborn son, Subba Rao, in her arms, arrived there with her husband in April of that year, and they set up house together for the first time.

15. INITIATION “God is the only guru.”

W

—Amma

HEN THE QUESTION is asked, “Did Amma have a guru?” the usual response is that she has been in the same state of spiritual perfection from the beginning and has therefore never required the guidance of another. If Mother herself speaks of there having been a guru for her, it is only in the impersonal sense that the circumstances of life itself have been the guide, mundane household chores her only sadhana. But in the strictly formal sense of the term, there was a guru for Amma—she was Desiraju Rajamma of Bapatla—and the story of Mother’s brief “discipleship” to Rajamma is one of the most fascinating and revealing chapters of her life story. During her twenty-sixth year, at the instigation of her aunt, Amma approached this locally renowned teacher in the guise of a humble seeker of Truth. But before long, the roles of teacher and pupil were to be dramatically reversed. Though Amma was to accept initiation in the sacred “shakti moola mantra” from Rajamma, she did not leave until she had bestowed her own initiation in the form of a shattering vision, through which the elderly guru would finally come to recognize the divinity of the one she had presumed to teach. In the dialogues which have been preserved for us from these encounters, we have a ringside seat on the dramatic transformation of a soul steeped in ritualism and dogma to the point of a climactic spiritual awakening. Perhaps in no other recorded conversation does Amma so clearly and explicitly reveal the truth of her own divine nature, or speak so uncompromisingly from the perspective of nondualism, as she does in these talks with Rajamma. The youthful Amma relentlessly compels her “guru” to explain everything, to justify each minor ritual step in the process of initiation. And she makes use of an often amusing verbal jugglery to expose Rajamma’s lack of inner clarity and conviction. At one point, flustered by Amma’s disconcerting way of taking her mundane statements and twisting them deftly into metaphysical conundrums and Zen-style paradoxes, Rajamma complains—not without seeming justification—that Amma was only interested in distorting her words and exploiting slips of the tongue. Mother replies matter-of-factly, “I am looking for the real veil to slip.” And the cumulative effect of her often bizarre and always brilliant probing is that the real veil finally does slip off, if only temporarily, from Rajamma’s eyes. Perhaps these words of profound wisdom retain the power to cause the veil of ignorance to slip momentarily from those who read them with the respect and attention that they deserve! Of the nearly one hundred pages of published dialogues between Rajamma and Amma, there is only space to present a small selection here, enough to convey the flavor and reveal something of the philosophical depth of their encounter. Where I have inserted my own commentary on Amma’s words, the reader should not limit himself to what is written, but take it as a point of departure for his or her own meditations on their inner significance. Though Amma often speaks humorously in these talks, she never speaks lightly. Nothing she says here is idly spoken or frivolous, and often even the simplest and most straightforward comments have multiple layers of meaning, which unfold as we meditate upon them. The one who dives deeply will surely find treasures here. Before getting into the talks, a few words of background. One of Amma’s aunts, recognizing the “spiritual promise” in her niece, decided to take the girl to her own guru, the widely respected Desiraju Rajamma, for formal initiation in mantra yoga (the spiritual practice of the repetition of a sacred phrase). The widow Rajamma was at that time already well known in the area of her native Bapatla for her austerity, scholarship, and zeal to initiate people into the spiritual life. On the 23rd of August, 1949, at five-thirty in the evening, Mother arrived at Rajamma’s house accompanied by her aunt. In keeping with tradition, Amma offered some rock-candy to the aged guru and prostrated before her. But Rajamma hastily withdrew her feet, saying that if she allowed anyone to touch them, then the sins of others would cling to her. After asking some questions about Amma’s family and background, Rajamma asked her why she had come. “Why else would I come except for darshan?” Mother replied. Yet Mother’s answer—as was to be the pattern throughout— was curiously ambiguous. Had she come to grant Rajamma darshan or to have Rajamma’s darshan? “Do you spend your time striving after the Real (i.e., in spiritual effort)?” Rajamma asked the young housewife. When Amma claimed not to understand what she meant by “spiritual effort,” Rajamma responded derisively. “Aren’t you

educated, even a bit? It’s strange that these days a girl can’t understand even that much!” “However many girls one might see, there will always remain some who are not seen. I am one of those,” Amma answered. And indeed, it was a veiled forecast of what was to come. Here was a pupil who was to prove herself altogether different from the others Rajamma had seen. She was truly one of the “unseen ones”—her nature had not yet been grasped by Rajamma. Perhaps it was un-grasp-able, invisible to the eye, elusive to the mind which tries to understand it in conventional terms. This was to be no cut-and-dried discipleship. Wrapping up their talk, Rajamma instructed Amma to come back the following day and to note carefully what she saw in her dreams that night. Perhaps she wanted to implant the suggestion in her pupil’s mind that she have a memorable dream (hopefully, with Rajamma herself as the leading character!) so that she might appear to have demonstrated prophetic powers later on. But Amma saw through her ploy, and asked playfully, “Do you mean that I am sure to have a dream, or simply that I should tell you if I do have one?” Rajamma replied with an evasive “yes,” and Amma repeated the same question over again. Rajamma was flustered. “Why do you keep on asking me?” “Nothing special—I am very fond of dreams, and fondness is always for what we don’t have.” “Don’t you ever dream then?” Rajamma wondered in surprise. “I never dream. Nothing is illusory (for me.)” “How long has it been since you stopped having dreams?” Rajamma asked, showing clearly that she had not grasped the deeper implications of Mother’s comment. “I could answer that only if I had ever had one.” “Haven’t you ever dreamt?” “It’s pointless even to speak of dreams, when I haven’t the slightest experience of them,” Mother replied. In the inspired writings of the East, the world is often referred to as “a dream.” Actually, as Mother explained, it’s not the world that is a dream. Rather, it is we ourselves who perceive the world in a dreamlike manner. The world is real enough, according to Amma. But when we try to cling to the evanescent objects, events, and beings of the world, as if they were permanent and worthy of our deepest allegiance, then we are living in a dreamworld of our own making. We are seeing reality through the colored glasses of our own desires. The enlightened one, on the other hand, is he or she who awakens from this clinging to the transient into an awareness of the Reality which underlies all phenomena. For such a one, there are no more dreams. Everything is seen as it is, in Truth. But Rajamma missed this point entirely. She told Amma to come back at 10 p.m., but Mother’s answer was indefinite. “I can’t say.” “You mean you won’t come?” Rajamma asked. “I can’t say that either.” When there is a power higher than our own will at work in the world, who can presume to speak for destiny? Good metaphysics, but for Rajamma, a frustrating reply. Resigning herself to so much uncertainty, she offered Amma her casket of kum-kum powder, so that she could place a mark of blessing on her own forehead. Ordinarily the guru will place the kumkum mark there herself. But, being a widow, Rajamma, by tradition, was not allowed to wear kum-kum or to apply it to others—lest her own unfortunate status be transmitted to them. Mother, however, had no such fears and softly requested, “If you personally have no objection, please go ahead and apply the kum-kum to my forehead yourself.” “I am not entitled to do so.” “Do you really feel that way, or do you worry about what people would say?” “It is a very ancient tradition,” Rajamma protested. “So you mean to say that there is no real harm in it, providing that the public and the tradition accept it?” “Yes, that’s right.” “Then please go ahead and put it on,” Mother urged her. Rajamma hesitated, and Amma continued, “I can see that you are holding back because you fear that I will be harmed if you place the kum-kum on my forehead. If bringing misfortune is in your hands, then go ahead and do it. Let’s see! All women have their kum-kum applied by those whose husbands are alive. In that case, why would any of them become widows? “That is their fate,” Rajamma responded. “Then your kum-kum can’t be the cause of it, one way or the other.” “No, it can’t be” Rajamma conceded. “Anyway, take the kum-kum and then take your leave,” she insisted. Mother complied and left for her own home. On the following morning, during the sacred hour before dawn, she returned to

Rajamma’s house. Just as she was about to knock on the door, Rajamma opened it herself. “Who is there?” she called into the darkness. “It is I,” Amma responded. “Oh, it’s you. Did you just call me?” “No, I didn’t. I only thought of calling you. But there was no gap between my thought and your opening the door.” “How strange,” Rajamma reflected. “I was sure that I was called.” “Maybe the thought itself was heard by you. But whose thought was it?” “Indeed, whose thought?” Rajamma wondered. “It is the thought of the One who wills everything,” Mother answered, using the Sanskrit term “sankalpa,” which connotes both “thought” and “will” at the same time. Her terse reply carried two levels of meaning. On the one hand, by saying that her thought to knock on the door was “the thought of the One who willed everything,” she was pointing at her own identity with the Absolute. Perhaps even more profoundly, however, she seemed to be saying that a thought that can be perceived simultaneously by two individuals (Rajamma and herself) does not really belong to either one of them, but comes from a source beyond them both. Actually, all thoughts, however much we cling to them or identify with them, according to Amma, are fundamentally impersonal. What arises mysteriously in the mind and departs similarly, without our volition or desire, is, properly speaking, neither “mine” nor “yours,” but the result of the workings of universal nature in us. All of these philosophical considerations, however, must have escaped Rajamma’s notice because she misunderstood Amma’s comment on a far more fundamental level. She seemed not to realize that by “the thought of the One who willed everything,” Mother was referring to the divine will. “Is it not the will of God?” she asked Amma. “It is not the sankalpa of God—sankalpa itself is God.” For Amma, there was no God separate from the manifold play of His will, which constitutes this visible creation. But once again, Rangamma did not grasp the exalted nondualism of Mother’s words and said, “Our will must be there for anything to be accomplished and His grace also must be there. Won’t you please step into the house?” As Mother entered, she responded to Rajamma’s point. “Just now you spoke of ‘our will.’ Who is it that inspires this will in us in the first place?” Realizing her mistake, Rajamma conceded: “Of course, this will is also His.” In order to drive home her point, Mother continued to question her elderly guru on the nature of sankalpa and related issues, but Rajamma quickly grew impatient to start with the actual initiation. “Don’t you want to be taught anything?” she asked, hoping to remind Amma of her ostensible purpose in being there. “Isn’t all of this ‘being taught’?” Amma asked, leaving the crucial question of who was being taught curiously ambiguous. “Of course it is. But apart from that, the work that has to be accomplished remains before us” “All right, but first you must tell me this. You are talking about the work—who is it that puts forth the effort? Who is it that teaches, and who is it that is taught?” A real enigma! Rajamma was quite conscious of being the guru, but is the true guru conscious of teaching? Mother seemed to be suggesting that she would not be, and that, furthermore, the fundamental assumption on which Rajamma was acting—that there was a “teacher” who, by virtue of her own efforts, imparts wisdom to her pupil—was itself faulty. Are not guru, God and disciple inseparable aspects of the one Self, as the great South Indian sage Ramana Maharshi used to insist? Rajamma promised to answer her question, and Amma replied, “For that alone have I come to you!” “But yesterday you told me that you had come for darshan?” Rajamma objected. “True, I have come for darshan only. The significance of that darshan is this conversation.” The word “darshan” generally refers to the blessed act of seeing a holy person. But here, Mother seems to be using the term darshan in its broadest sense, meaning not only “seeing,” but the fullest revelation of divinity in all its aspects. And indeed, she was using the medium of their conversation to reveal her own divinity to Rajamma. What Amma had previously only hinted at, she was about to express openly. When she did, however, the revelation was so unexpected that it passed by Rajamma unnoticed. “Your aunt told me something,” Rajamma said. “What was that?” Amma inquired. “That is, she told me what it is that you require.” “How can she know what I need?” “I thought that you wanted her to intercede and tell me that.” “The Infinite Mother without boundaries does not need any intermediaries,” Amma assured her.

“I don’t understand your words at all.” Rajamma complained. “Are my words ambiguous? Can’t you understand the words of a girl?” “Your words sound strange.” Once again, Rajamma became annoyed that precious time was slipping away in useless talk. “It is half-past five now. No, it is six! If you get ready quickly, we can finish of the first part of our work wholly.” “Will the part itself become the whole?” Mother asked doubtfully, playing with Rajamma’s words in such a way as to wryly hint that the divine transformation by which the partial and limited consciousness become one with the whole of creation might not perhaps follow Rajamma’s prearranged timetable! “What does ‘the whole’ mean?” Rajamma objected. “I was only saying that we should complete our work.” “That’s just my point. Why bother about what takes place by itself? Whatever is to happen will happen anyway. All talk of our finishing it turns out to be so many empty words.” When God is the sole doer, then the accomplishment of any task must necessarily proceed in His time and not in ours. Rajamma’s attitude, on the other hand, seemed to be that she herself, and not God, was the instrumental party in this work of spiritual initiation. Mother tried to disabuse her of this conceit, but Rajamma purposefully ignored the sting of Amma’s words by changing the subject. “You haven’t told me your name yet.” “It is the same as my aunt’s,” Amma answered. “Is it Anasuya?” “Uhaa...” “Well,. then you may take your leave now,” Rajamma instructed. “By the way, did you have a dream?” “If you were able to tell me beforehand that I would have a dream, why can’t you be certain now that I have had one?” Amma teased. “You don’t seem to know how to speak to your elders,” Rajamma retorted icily. “The difference between elders and youngsters is not known,” Mother answered—and once again, there are two equally valid levels of meaning implied in her words. In the first place, Amma was suggesting that it was Rajamma who didn’t know the difference between the old and the young. (Compare this to a comment that she made to her own mother, Rangamma, over two decades earlier, in which she said that the true elders were those whose superior love and wisdom equipped them to look after the interests of those not equally well endowed.) In this sense, Amma was the true elder (though Rajamma wrongly fancied herself to be, by virtue of her chronological superiority in years). In the other sense of Mother’s comment, there was the implication that she herself was the one who couldn’t distinguish between young and old. After all, the divine one who sees God in all ceases to pay attention to superficial differences in name, age and form, but sees all with a sublime equal vision. Rajamma was struck more by Amma’s seeming impertinence than by the profundity of her words, and reflected condescendingly, as if to herself, “It is useless for such a one to be initiated. It wouldn’t stick.” “What is it that wouldn’t stick to me?” Mother wondered. “Jnana (wisdom), child.” Mother pretended not to have heard her properly and asked, “Is it ajnana (ignorance) that doesn’t stick to me? If it is ajnana that doesn’t stick to me, then what does stick is surely jnana.” “You seem to be quite childish!” Rajamma chided. “I am childlike perhaps, but I haven’t become a child.” “But I feel that you have become one,” Rajamma insisted, and Amma turned the rebuke cheerfully around and accepted it as a compliment. “If that is so, then what more is needed?” Amma was interpreting the word “child” here in the same exalted sense that Christ used it when he said that the Kingdom of Heaven was open only to those who regain the purity and innocence of children. Rajamma asked Amma if she could read and write. The colloquial term in Telugu for being literate is “akshara jnana,” literally, “knowledge of letters.” But an alternate meaning of “akshara” is “that which is eternal.”1 Mother chose to ignore the more conventional meaning of Rajamma’s question and quipped, “I have only kshara jnana (knowledge of the transient). I have no akshara jnana.” “Why is that?” Rajamma wondered. “Because the distinction between the two is not known. Jnana is that which is above kshara jnana and akshara jnana. Clothing ajnana in words, you have asked whether I have (akshara) jnana. Do you mean to imply that there are several types of jnana? Is not the supreme jnana omniscient?. Does it pertain to some things and not to others?” To ask a jnani (a realized sage) whether she can read or write is a bit like asking a great writer whether he can recite all the rules of grammar. Whether he can or not is beside the point. The jnani stands at the summit of knowledge and knows, in the words

of the Hindu scriptures, “that by which all else is known.” His wisdom is comprehensive: it includes and subsumes all lesser forms of knowledge, whether conventional or spiritual, knowledge of the transient and knowledge of the eternal—even wisdom and ignorance themselves are but aspects of his all-embracing totality. So in asking whether Amma was literate, Rajamma showed that she was still very much on the wrong track. Rather than trying to answer such an inappropriate question, Amma attempted to undermine it, and in a deeper sense, to undermine Rajamma’s dualistic assumption that jnana is a particular sort of knowledge (an entity like ignorance which some have and others lack), something that can be transmitted by initiation. As before, Rajamma seemed to be unaffected by what Amma said and dismissed it indulgently. “Oh, it’s all right.” “What does ‘all right’ mean? Is it an expression of your acceptance of what I have said, or an expression of your weariness?” Mother pressed. “It is neither. We will both have ample chance to discuss all of these things at our leisure later on. But our time is fast running out. So many visitors will be coming here shortly. Once your business is finished, we can talk about all of these things.” “But all of this is my business. If it weren’t, I would not be sitting here so long,” Mother said, hinting once again at her real purpose in coming. “My business and your business are intertwined,” Rajamma pointed out. “Are they bhava and abhava?” Amma queried. Bhava and abhava are always spoken about together as being interrelated and mutually dependent one on the other. Bhava refers to the manifest, the limited aspect of physical reality, and abhava to the unmanifest source of all forms. By asking this question, Amma was implying that her consciousness was united with the unlimited source, whereas Rajamma represented the conditioned and the limited. Once again, however, Rajamma dismissed her comment out of hand with an impatient, “All right!” “You are always saying ‘all right,’ but you are not saying what you mean by that. Neither am I getting a proper reply to my questions,” Amma complained. “It (wisdom) does not come by mere words,” Rajamma replied smugly. “Does it come by your benign look?” Amma asked. The idea behind this question was the commonly held belief that a guru can communicate wisdom more perfectly and directly through a glance of power than by mere words. But Rajamma apparently took offense at Mother’s query and answered sharply, “Poor girl. You can go now. And be quick about it!” “Oh, it looks as if the one who speaks and the one who accomplishes are very far apart from one another,” Mother drolly observed. As would soon be clear even to Rajamma, the one who accomplishes was Amma, and the one who merely spoke like a guru but lacked the power to spontaneously awaken the inner wisdom of her disciple was Rajamma. Amma took her leave and returned a few hours later, prepared to start the actual ritual of initiation. She had come with her 3year-old son, Ravi, and brought a bunch of six ripe bananas, a wad of betel leaves, and several rupees as dakshina.2 These she placed at the feet of her elderly guru in ritual offering. Then she bowed reverently before Rajamma and sat down on a nearby mat to await her instruction. Rajamma told her to sanctify herself (take a bath, etc.) in the traditional manner, as a preparation for the initiation ceremony. But just as Amma was about to do so, Rajamma noticed that she had not brought the change of sari necessary in this ceremony. When she chided her for this oversight, Amma responded with her usual wit. “A mere change of sari won’t sanctify. Therefore, it didn’t even occur to me to bring an extra one along. The one who sanctifies and the one who is sanctified are both here. Only the sari is not here.” Rajamma was not amused and asked, “What is sanctification without a change of sari?” Mother, in turn, asked what must be done to the sari to constitute sanctification. Rajamma explained in detail how the garment has to be drenched completely, sprinkled with holy water and dried before it can be considered sanctified and suitable to be worn during the holy rite of initiation. When she had heard the entire intricate explanation, Mother remarked that the procedure was meant to be symbolic of an inner purification. She explained that pouring the bucket of water over the sari and then squeezing out the excess moisture represents sadhana, the necessary inner work that has to come first before the power of initiation can soak in, as it were, the uniformly soaked sari is a symbol of the attainment of inner equanimity which results from spiritual effort. Rajamma, however, was only concerned with the nuts-and-bolts questions of procedure, and she neither affirmed nor denied Amma’s elegant interpretation. In order to expedite matters, she gave Amma one of her own saris, which had already been sanctified, telling her to change into it. Mother asked Rajamma whether it would be appropriate for her to remove her blouse (which had not been sanctified) for the duration of the initiation. “That is rejected by sastras (scripture),” Rajamma replied tersely (the belief being that it is inauspicious for a married lady to be without a blouse, as widows are expected to be). “Is sastra such a thing—does it accept some things and reject others? Has it originated in the same way as creation itself—of

its own, without intermediary—or was it formulated by individuals?” This problem which Mother raised is one that has preoccupied religious thinkers of both East and West. Is scripture of divine provenance or is it the product of the ordinary human mind? The implication of Amma’s question is that, if scripture were revealed by God, as is claimed in an exclusive sense by the advocates of different religions, then it would be as all-embracing as God Himself is, and beyond the limitation of accepting some things and rejecting others, commanding some things and prohibiting others. But for Rajamma, these lofty ideas seemed oddly out of proportion to the task before them. “Why do you set the plow to the mountain?” she exclaimed, using a Telugu expression, which means to relate trivialities to major Truths. Mother, whose comprehensive wisdom was incapable of making artificial distinctions between major and minor Truths, answered, “I know neither the mountain nor the plow. But leaving that aside, only if it is possible to apply one to the other can it be done. It may not be profitable to do so—but that it is possible to do so you seem to be admitting.” Mother wanted Rajamma to concede that it was possible to ask fundamental philosophical questions about the initiation that was about to take place. Rajamma, however, was at the end of her patience. “Oh, I can’t stand this hair-splitting any longer!” But it did continue, and Rajamma felt alternately intrigued, challenged and irritated by Amma’s words. At one point, she exclaimed, “I don’t understand your replies. They are endless. You are enigmatic and baffling.” A few minutes later, she complained, “You are always looking for slips of the tongue.” Mother’s reply was brief and to the point: “The real veil must slip.” Still later, Rajamma, misunderstanding one of Amma’s subtle points, exclaimed scornfully, “You talk as ignorantly as a native of the wild forest!” “Please destroy the thick forest of my ignorance with the axe (wisdom) that you have,” Amma retorted. Her pride inflated, Rajamma answered, “Of course, that is what is now taking place.” And then Mother pricked the bubble that she herself had created. “Neither the forest nor the axe is real. Both are purely imaginary.” Indeed, though she posed as a guru, Rajamma’s axe of jnana was sheer illusion. And, although she appeared to be a disciple, Amma’s forest of ignorance was equally nonexistent. But Rajamma continued to ignore or deliberately misinterpret all of Amma’s hints, veiled or explicit, as to the true nature of the situation. Although it had not yet become apparent in the conversation, something inside Rajamma was beginning to open up, and a subtle transformation was gradually taking place in the way she was viewing her young “disciple.” The first clear indication of this came unexpectedly. In the midst of a weighty philosophical dialogue, Rajamma suddenly observed, “Everything about you—this very meeting itself—seems to be extraordinary. There’s something uncanny in the very expression of your face that seems different from before.” Mother tried to engage Rajamma in conversation, but the older woman was not in the mood to speak. “Dear, we can think of all that later on. But don’t move now. Hush, stay quiet for a while,” she implored as she gazed fixedly at Amma. She remained staring like that for a long time. A shiver passed through her body and simultaneously her eyes became moist with tears. She cried out hoarsely, “Mother, Annapurneswari!”3 And then she passionately recited a Telugu poem entitled, The Mother of All Mothers. “All the while, I was being weighed and judged by you,” Rajamma reflected, as she choked back her tears. “What were you weighed against?” Amma asked. “Mother, I can’t speak now.” In the very act of saying this, her faltering voice died away and her eyes snapped shut of their own accord. For fifteen minutes, she sat unmoving, as Mother appraised her silently. But whatever it was that Rajamma experienced in her reverie did not seem to have dampened her enthusiasm to initiate Amma. For Rajamma was suddenly reminded again of her unfinished business. Buoyed perhaps by the thought of the glory that awaited her as the spiritual guide of such an exalted soul, she told Amma, “Finish washing my feet, child. Then I shall serve you your meal.” Mother reacted with surprise that Rajamma did not seem to know that she didn’t eat. “Don’t you ever eat?” Rajamma asked in wonder. “There is no vow that I should not eat,” Mother admitted. “You have put me in a bind,” Rajamma reflected. “It is I who am caught in a dilemma,” Mother responded. “Why is that?” “That the all-knowing teacher should have to ask me like that,” Amma said with a wry grin. Once again, Rajamma’s eyes filled with tears and she cried out, “Mother, Annapurneswari!” But, as before, she quickly recollected her business and told Mother to wash the greasiness from her feet. “The greasiness is samskara (persistent tendencies of the personality),” Mother remarked. “Now samskara is washed out by

soapnut.” So saying, she scoured Rajamma’s feet with the detergent-like soapnut. Amma noticed that the oily film which was on Rajamma’s feet now floated in small globules on the surface of the water. “The greasiness that has left your feet floats in the water just beside them. If oil was there in the first place, it doesn’t just disappear. It’s bound to remain somewhere or other,” she remarked to Rajamma. In her typically cryptic manner, Amma was hinting at Rajamma’s samskara of pride which, despite being subdued momentarily by her visionary experience, had reared its head again moments later in her renewed enthusiasm to play the guru. By now, Rajamma was not unaware of her own erratic behavior. She responded, “Mother! I am dazed and confused. I can’t figure out who you are, or why you’ve come, or what I myself should do. I’m being pulled this way and then that.” But she did not let this uncertainty deflect her for very long from her singleminded course. A few moments later, she was urging Amma to recite the initial invocation known as the samkalpa, which is a formal resolution made at the start of any sacred activity. As usual, Amma took the opportunity to probe at the root meaning of the recitation which Rajamma would have her do unthinkingly. And she made it explicit why they must proceed so slowly and deliberately. “The object of my coming and what you give me must be praiseworthy to all. The purpose of this meeting is not for you and me alone; it is for all of us and for the future.” Amma was perhaps looking forward to the day when spiritual aspirants throughout the world would be poring over this remarkable dialogue, which contains, in seed form, all of the themes of Mother’s mature teachings. Rajamma could hardly have anticipated this. But she was thrilled nonetheless at the scope and majesty of Amma’s words. “What did you say? How marvelous!” “It is the marvel of the cosmos,” Amma replied softly. This comment further sparked Rajamma’s visions of personal glory and she responded with enthusiasm: “Girl, if you would only stay for two years with me.” “What is a two? Do you mean that two are one, or that one is two?” Mother playfully defused Rajamma’s ambitions. Her imagination pulled down again to terra firma, Rajamma admitted dourly in mock confession, “It seems I don’t know how to speak, girl.” “What do you mean?” Amma inquired with a grin, “With me?” Rajamma ignored the question and gazed at the circle of red kum-kum on Mother’s forehead. “Did you mix any sparkling stuff with your kum-kum powder?”4 she asked with a start. “My kum-kum itself might shine, but I did not mix anything with it.” “I want to know the significance of kum-kum and its application on the face, girl,” Rajamma asks, as the roles of teacher and pupil begin to shift. “What is there that you don’t need to know?” Amma pointedly retorts. Rajamma managed to ignore this latest jab at her pretensions to knowledge and told Amma to sit by a leaf-plate facing the east (in rural India, people eat on plates stitched together out of leaves), and to mix various items of food with the mound of rice on the plate. The time had come for guru and disciple to join together for a ceremonial meal, she told Amma. “What do you mean by joining together? Is it simply eating what comes to our hands from the same plate? Or does it signify the disappearance of duality and the guru and disciple eating as one?” But as was so often the case, Amma’s question was rhetorical and intended to reveal the true meaning of the time-honored ritual to Rajamma, who was bent on performing it without any real appreciation of its underlying significance. Rajamma instructed Amma to place a little of the food in her mouth and, after she complied, Rajamma did the same for Amma. “Will I attain perfection by this morsel of food given to me by the Goddess Annapurneswari?” Amma asked, generously attributing the same divinity to Rajamma as Rajamma had earlier attributed to her. “What is meant by ‘perfection,’ girl?” “Rising above (the illusion of) diversity in all respects.” Rajamma seemed highly pleased with Amma’s answer, but asked for further clarification: “What do you mean by ‘in all respects’?” “You have just placed some food in my mouth. At the same time as I eat that food, I am also eating the food that is in this lad’s mouth.” As she said this, Amma placed a ball of rice in the mouth of her young son Ravi, who was sitting at her side. She was about to eat the remaining rice which stuck to her fingers, when Rajamma’s cat pounced on her hand and licked off some of what was left. Taking his cue from the cat, Rajamma’s pet dog then did the same. At which point, Amma placed the few grains of rice remaining on her fingers from the original morsel partly eaten by her son and partly by the dog and the cat into her own mouth.

Shocked at this explicit demonstration of “rising above diversity in all respects” that her question had elicited, Rajamma cried out, “Oh no, oh no!” For a brahmin to eat what has been touched by “unclean” animals is a great sacrilege. But Rajamma’s troubles had only just begun. A series of events had been set into motion which, like a chain of falling dominoes, would not cease until Mother’s point was fully dramatized. A knock was heard at the door. “The beggar has come,” Amma said. “Open the door, girl. He is not a beggar, but a brahmin lad who was invested recently with the sacred thread. He comes here every day,” Rajamma proclaimed confidently. But when Amma went to the door, she saw that Rajamma was wrong and called back, “It is not as you say. He is an ordinary beggar.” “Well, whoever he is, give him this food,” Rajamma said, pointing to some of the excess rice which had been prepared for their meal. Amma took the rice to the beggar and began to place the large sticky masses of the grain into his bowl, when the man’s young daughter pulled at the bowl and fell down crying, spilling the rice on the doorstep. Mother took the bawling child into her arms and served what was left of the rice to her father. Then she brought the girl into the house and hand-fed her, eating part of what was left over herself. When Rajamma saw this, her face contorted into an ugly grimace. “Whose child is this?” she called out in disgust, as she walked toward the front door. Seeing the beggar, she immediately recognized him as a member of the scavenger caste who periodically came around to clean her lavatory. “Oh, it is you,” she exclaimed. “You are not to be seen these days. Oh, that you should show up today of all days!” “Yes, it is I,” he answered, his words muffled by a mouthful of rice. “See how hasty he is,” Rajamma said, turning to Amma in disgust. “It is not haste, ma'am;, it’s hunger. You don’t seem to know what it is to be hungry,” Amma rebuked her. “Why are you not cleaning the latrines these days?” Rajamma asked the scavenger. “My wife is bedridden,” he replied. “Take your child. She’s crying,” Amma told him. “I entirely forgot about her. You have given me a bowlful and my belly is full,” he reflected. The girl clutched Amma’s sari tightly, but Mother relaxed her hold and placed the child on the ground by her father. “My God, it is his child,” Rajamma exclaimed with a shudder of revulsion, as it dawned on her that the low-caste child was inside her house. “I brought the child in when it fell down. I don’t know whether it’s his child or not. But at that moment, I felt that it was my child and took it in my arms,” Mother responded. “And how do you feel now?” Rajamma asked her. “Of course, she is my child even now.” “Then why did you put her on the ground?” “Even my own children aren’t staying with me all the time. Though they are always in my heart.” “Do you feel the same about all people everywhere?” Rajamma asked incredulously. “Yes, it’s the same for all that I’ve given birth to and raised.” “But you’ve given birth only to three children.” “Yes, only to the three,” Mother agreed. “What do you mean by ‘the three’?” “The three aspects of time (past, present, and future), the three states of consciousness (waking, dream, and deep sleep), the three primal forms of God (Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Siva, the Destroyer).” “You’ve dragged me into a wonderful piece of conversation, girl. I’m very happy for it. But the circumstances are painful.” “The conversation is the product of the circumstances. Why is the one pleasant and the other painful?” “Some of what has happened is contrary to accepted tradition and is really quite upsetting,” Rajamma lamented. As he walked down the road, the beggar called out, “I shall take my leave now, mistress.” “What consolation is there in your calling me ‘mistress’? You’ve made a royal mess of everything! Well, it’s no use blaming you. My past sins must have ripened out in this way,” Rajamma reflected bitterly. “When the bad matures out, only good remains. That’s the natural outcome,” Mother pointed out, and then stepped into the house for a moment. Meanwhile, the beggar returned and addressed Rajamma, who was standing at the doorway. “My good mistress, the child is calling for the younger mistress. Please ask her to come out again.”

Amma heard this herself and stepped to the door. When the child saw her, she started to squirm impatiently and slipped from her father’s grasp, falling directly onto Mother’s feet. Mother signaled that nobody disturb the girl and stood perfectly motionless herself. The child’s body went strangely stiff. The beggar feared she might die, but he was paralyzed by a kind of wonder and could not do a thing about it. In the meantime, a small crowd of passersby had gathered to watch. For half an hour, Mother stood frozen like a temple deity, with the child equally immobile at her feet. When the girl finally returned to her senses, she fixed her gaze on Amma’s face and stared fixedly at her for several minutes. Then she cried out, “Mother, give me the chakra.”5 “What is this, mistress?” asked the beggar. “Why does she ask for a chakra?” “I don’t know, child. After all, I don’t have any. My hands are empty.” “Then what is it that she has been seeing all along? Mother! What is all of this—the child lying at your feet, the crying for a chakra. The girl is generally so shy of others.” Rajamma had been a silent witness to the whole affair, seated on the stoop, her chin resting between her two palms. But her indulgent patience had been stretched to its limits by this latest obstacle to the fulfillment of her cherished desire. “It is already evening, girl. We set about this work at four in the morning and we haven’t finished our business yet!” “The business that we have in store for us is, after all, being accomplished.” Mother replied. “What do we have in store for us? Is it pollution (from the unlawful mixing of castes)?” Rajamma questioned sardonically. “Just that which has been ordained for us.” “Let’s end all of this talk, at least for the moment,” Rajamma insisted. “Let’s clean up everything and finish our business. Come on, girl!” Amma picked up a broom. Encouraged by Mother’s ready cooperation, Rajamma made bold to ask, “Won’t you finish your purificatory bath now as well?” “Is it essential to take a bath, now that I am in your sanctifying presence? Your state of perfection is my goal.” Rajamma was irritated by what she took to be further goading. “Don’t raise that subject again with me. I have initiated so many, but never before was there such confusion as there is today. Wash your hands and feet, at least, and put on a sanctified sari. And don’t say anything more.” When Amma left to do as instructed, Rajamma lit a kerosene lamp, whose glow merged with the final rays of the setting sun. Outside, the town’s whitewashed roofs glowed bright red for a few moments and then quickly faded to a uniform, dusky gray. Amma gazed out the window at the growing darkness. She was finally wearing a fresh sari in readiness for the ceremony. “The day is coming to a close.” “That is my complaint,” Rajamma snapped. “That is my pleasure,” Amma responded calmly. “Is it our failure to accomplish our task that pleases you?” “Yes, exactly—because it demonstrates that no one can avoid what is in store for him.” “Oh, there is no end to this conversation, there is no method to it.” “That is because there is neither a beginning nor an end to it—because it is the beginning and the end.” “What is it? Which is the beginning and which is the end?” Rajamma questioned. “I am the beginning and I am the end,” Mother replied matter-of-factly. “How can you be both?” “I am the beginning at birth, and I am the end at the time of departure.” By a supreme irony, Rajamma’s son, Sri Baparao, came in as Amma finished speaking, to say that a close relative of theirs has just passed away and that they would have to observe a period of “pollution.” The day on which a relative dies is considered unfit for the performance of any auspicious ceremony, such as an initiation or a marriage. Rajamma could not help but reflect on how, at every step of the way, some strange power seemed to be foiling her best efforts to complete this initiation. “Fie! Man proposes one thing, and God disposes some other way,” Rajamma proclaimed. In a sense, this idea of the divinely ordained and inevitable nature of our experience is precisely what Amma had been pointing at all along. Nevertheless, Mother did not let Rajamma‘s dualistic expression of this fact go by unchallenged. “Only if God wills for him to do so can man think to propose something in the first place. There is nothing that he can conceive independently of God.” This argument sounded strange to Rajamma’s ear and she answered, “Your words and deeds have neither rhyme nor reason. You are undisciplined. Your actions are not guided by any law.” Though Rajamma hardly intended this as a compliment, it did nevertheless accurately describe the freedom of the enlightened one from the artificial constraints of custom and philosophy. Mother chose to respond to only this positive interpretation. “You are implying that I have everything other than what you have just mentioned.”

Confused by Amma’s queer argument, Rajamma reflected, as if to herself, “It is all totally dark and incomprehensible to me.” “Yes, one can’t see even when there is a lamp.” Amma was referring to Rajamma’s spiritual blindness, which was not illumined even by the lamp of her own divine presence. Rajamma immediately turned and stared at Mother in surprise. Amma’s face glowed in the flickering orange light of the kerosene flame. “Even though you have eyes you can’t see,” Amma said softly. “Why is that? What is the reason for that?” Rajamma wondered. “Because you lack the mental powers to recognize what is here before your eyes.” “Is it the eye or the mind that perceives?” Rajamma asked, and then seemed surprised at her own question. “My God, I don’t know how to talk you. Besides, there is the pollution of bereavement.” “To whom does that apply?” Mother asked suggestively. “To my family.” “Then what prevents you from initiating me?” “The period of pollution is unsuitable for initiation,” Rajamma insisted. “But you look the same now as you did before the pollution of bereavement.” “That pollution is not visible to the eyes. It is only a belief, a supposition.” “What if we suppose and believe that there is no pollution?” Amma suggested. “You don’t seem to observe the traditional codes of life—the pollution of birth and the pollution of death,” Rajamma chided her. “Why not? But where is the need of deliberately doing so? When there is the joy of a birth in the family, there is naturally the pollution of birth. When there is the sadness at death, then there is the pollution of death. When they are there naturally, where is there a question of our voluntarily observing them?” Just as Amma was saying this, Sri Baparao entered the room again and addressed Rajamma. “I forgot to tell you that the state of pollution is lifted if a bath is taken.” Rajamma was happy to hear it. “Thank God! You have revived me,” she called out to her son. Then she told Amma to start fetching water from the well. When several buckets had been filled and set by the wall of the bathroom, it was Amma who poured them over her elderly guru and diligently scrubbed her body. It is curious to note how Amma, who refused to take a purificatory bath herself, saying that it was not necessary, ended up giving such a bath to her “guru.” This is just the opposite of what tradition would have prescribed. But, in a profounder sense, it was just right. For it was Rajamma and not Amma who was in need of the spiritual cleansing which the bath signified. As usual, circumstances themselves conspired to bring about what was needed. When the bath was over, Amma dried Rajamma with a towel and helped her to dress. Rajamma realized with a start that she had not yet made the customary offering of the lights, a ritual performed in Hindu households just after sunset. She directed Amma to do this without delay. “There is no wick, no cotton, no ghee,” Amma objected. “I will give you everything that is necessary,” Rajamma reassured her. “I don’t want you merely to give me ready-made items. Please explain their significance and then you can tell me to act accordingly.” “Do you want me to explain even the offering of the lights? Don’t you offer the light to God in your home every day?” “I know the purpose of a lamp. But why should there be the need to offer one when there is already a lighted lamp here?” Ostensibly, Amma was referring to the kerosene lantern. But, in reality, the lighted lamp was herself. And the irony was that Rajamma was persevering in small acts of habitual piety while ignoring the radiant presence of Divinity in the flesh. As Rajamma was mulling this over, Mother inquired, “Tell me, granny, if our darkness is dispelled by a common lamp, does the offering of the light dispel the darkness of God?” “How can there be any darkness to God? You always talk in such a shocking manner!” exclaimed Rajamma. Indeed, for Rajamma—as for all who have not yet realized Him inwardly—God remains an abstraction, an idealized composite of certain good qualities: wisdom, power, compassion, light, and the like. But, for Mother, God was not an abstraction. He was a lived fact, a supreme fact which includes all—ignorance as well as wisdom, weakness as well as power, darkness as well as light. When Rajamma took exception to Mother’s “shocking” reference to the darkness of God, Amma asked her point blank, “What is God?” Rajamma was completely taken aback by this most fundamental and direct of all questions. “Lord, you are asking me what God means!” Rajamma stammered in disbelief. “Yes, I am not insisting that you show Him to me, but only that you explain the meaning of the word ‘God.’ If you can do that

much, if you can spark faith in my heart by your explanation, then you are one with Him.” But this was precisely what Rajamma was incapable of doing. Though she fancied herself capable of initiating others, she had not herself had that vital contact with God which would enable her to inspire them with His living reality. Her words and deeds were spiritually sterile. Perhaps she had already begun to realize this, or maybe it was just weariness at Amma’s questioning. But, in either case, Rajamma made no attempt to respond to this latest question about the nature of God. “What impertinent questions! Tell me, why you have come to me?” Rajamma demanded irritably. “In the hope that you are one who knows reality. Because I hope that you can reveal to me the Truth I am seeking.” Already Rajamma had seen far too much, however, not to suspect that there was more involved than this. Time and again, she recognized some greatness or spiritual luster in Amma, only to have her perception clouded by her ambition to act like a guru. Rajamma’s mental state was curiously like the night itself—for the most part overcast, but intermittently filled with the ethereal light of the full moon pouring down from above through the occasional chink in the clouds. Light, then darkness, and then once again light. But so far, no sustained illumination, no clarity nor certainty—only partial glimpses when there were gaps in her desire to play the guru. It was already half-past nine. Rajamma’s curiosity got the better of her caution and she probed, “Tell me, dear, what has been your real state since infancy?” “If it were merely a question of speaking about my real state, I wouldn’t be sitting here for so long,” Mother answered. She hadn’t come to speak about her state, but to propel Rajamma to experience it directly for herself. Like a Zen master, Amma had been systematically pulling the rug from under all of her guru’s comfortable assumptions. It seemed that Rajamma was beginning to appreciate this fact. “I feel that you have come with some special purpose,” Rajamma announced, with a dramatic flourish. “Of course, that is true,” Mother answered. “Do you say that you have come for that?” Rajamma pressed. “When you say ‘for that,’ you seem to know what it is.” “You are not to be grasped so easily!” “I am the Mother who is not wounded by anything,” Amma responded with a smile. “That is why you are such as you are, sweet Mother!” “That’s right, I am the Mother who does not believe.” “What is it that you don’t believe in?” Rajamma wondered. “I don’t believe what people say. I believe what they do.” “Are you angry, dear?” “There is no anger. But there is memory. Anger is a type of activity, and so is memory. The Divine has no anger, but only records impersonally all that we do and reflects it back later, in the form of various karmic results. What might seem, on one level, to be the outcome of God’s wrath is more accurately the result of the automatic working of God’s all-registering memory, making return in kind for past actions that we have ourselves performed.” But, as usual, Amma’s comment seemed only to awaken once again Rajamma’s desire to press on with the initiation. She said, “Child, hours are rolling by and our task is still held up. My mind is wandering every which way. I can’t understand what is before me or imagine what is about to take place. The glow on your face is changing in a way that I am unable to describe.” She continued to gaze at Amma in perplexity for a few moments and then begged her, “Please learn this.” Mother responded with bemused surprise. “Whatever might take place, you seem intent on initiating me. What is the reason for that? This conversation of ours, this probing on my part, this setting of an example for others, this accomplishment of the task without hurting, without compromising in the least the Truth, these dualities, this elaborate procedure—all of this is not merely for my sake. It is for me, for you, and for the world.” However, even these eloquent and prophetic words were not sufficient to deflect Rajamma from her course. And Mother herself realized that the time for words was coming to an end. The time for deeds was fast approaching. She picked up a crystal rosary and prostrated in front of Rajamma. The older woman leaned forward and whispered in Mother’s ear the Sanskrit verse in praise of the teacher. “Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Maheswara.” (“The guru is the very essence of the Gods.”) Then she asked Amma what mantra she wanted. “You have just taught me one,” Amma objected. “That is not a mantra, but the preliminary verse for meditation.” “I will repeat only this. Why is this not a mantra? It appears to me as if all words are mantras and I have no desire to learn any others. This one is sufficient.” But Rajamma had no intention of stopping now, so close to the goal. “No more of this impertinence! Learn the principal

mantra; that is the Shakti Mantra,” she demanded and curtly dismissed Mother’s request for further elucidation. The moment Rajamma had been waiting for had finally arrived. Once again, she leaned over toward Amma, this time to whisper in her ear the six syllables considered most sacred to the Divine Mother, the Moola Shakti Mantra: “Aum Aym Kleem Hreem Sreem Aum.” Mother grasped the first bead of the rosary and, gazing straight ahead, commenced the initial prolonged repetition— “Aaaa...uuuu...mmmm....” But even before this first resonant syllable had merged into deep silence, she lost all connection with the outer world and sat immovable in ecstasy. Rajamma was wonderstruck. An hour passed, and then another, and yet another. Soon the ubiquitous crows were cawing to hail the imminent dawn. Still Amma had not stirred from her unwavering absorption in the depths of the Spirit. At half-past four, almost exactly twenty-four hours after she had arrived at Rajamma’s house, Amma opened her eyes and discovered Rajamma sprawled loosely on her lap. As she reached over to touch the guru’s feet, Rajamma awakened from her reverie. “Mother!” she cried out. “You are the Mother of all Creation! Are you touching my feet? Please don’t,” she pleaded and then reached out to touch Amma’s feet. “Elderly one, now that my hands are seeking your feet while your hands are seeking my feet, does it mean that the one who is initiated and the one who initiated are One?” Mother asked with a playful tenderness. “Mother, I am not able to hear your words, but your form is firmly enshrined in my heart.” “Revered one! Whatever I hear is your word, whatever I see is your form, whatever I do is your service. In the touch of your feet, I feel the touch of my husband’s feet. That doer of all is the doer of all this. That devotion to my husband is this devotion of mine to you.”6 Wave after wave of joy broke over Rajamma, like surf over a reef. She could neither contain her feelings nor understand them. As a ship searches for a secure harbor during a storm, so Rajamma craved the comfort of Amma’s embrace. “Mother, please take my head into your lap just once. The prayers that I have offered, the chantings of the mantra—their number is incalculable. As a result of all this, divinity itself has come to me, to be taught by me, to teach me thereby and to bless me with the sight of the Divine Form in the guise of a young girl. And yet this form of yours has not appeared the same for two consecutive moments. Whether you are my mother or my child or God Himself, whether you are truth or whether all of this is sheer illusion, I can’t say. All I know is that an inexpressible bliss is flooding my being. My body is shaking from head to foot.” Mother gazed at Rajamma with a look of boundless understanding—“Yes, yes, the limited form has touched the unlimited. Therefore, the bliss is ineffable.” Rajamma was overcome by the desire to perform arati to Amma. She searched for and found some camphor, but was unable to locate a coconut. Seeing Rajamma’s search, Mother pointed to her own head. “You can go ahead and take my coconut,” she joked.7 “Oh, but it will hurt you,” Rajamma protested, with a smile. “There is no pain, even if there is pain,” Mother replied. And, indeed, she lived far beyond the addiction to pleasure and the fear of pain, which hold the world shackled. For the enlightened one, pleasure and pain have become equal. Hence, “there is no pain even if there is pain.” Once again, Rajamma’s eyes moistened with tears of gratitude. “Mother! Can anyone in the world imagine, not to mention see... can anyone so much as imagine the vision that you granted to me at half-past two in the morning?” But Amma pleaded ignorance. “Did I think that you would see it? I don’t know what you have seen. I didn’t come to bestow that vision. I came to see.”8 “Was the experience that I had last night real? Or was it merely a dream, a fantasy?” Rajamma pressed. “How do I know whether you dreamed or heard a tale? I just came to see you.” The word that Amma used for “see” has an alternate meaning in Telugu—to give birth to—and it is this sense that she referred to in her response to Rajamma’s next comment. Rajamma said, “It is not to see me, but to grant me sight of your form that you have come, Mother.” And Amma punned in reply, “Is it to give birth to you and rear you that I have come?” Rajamma was stirred by these words, which brought back vividly to mind what she had realized as a result of her vision. Some moments passed in spellbound silence. When she finally spoke, there was a faraway quality to her voice as she relished her precious memory. “Yes, that’s right. How aptly you have put it. You are the true begetter and sustainer of this creation. That is what I finally realized last night. And now I have heard it from your own lips. How fortunate!” “Who is fortunate?”

“Whoever it is, I have something important to tell you.” “What is either important or unimportant about any thought?” Mother asks. “The very same thought might seem profound to one and petty to another.” “Be that as it may! Just listen to me.” “Have I not been listening to you? All that I hear are your words, all that moves in my mind is your consciousness. Even the changes in creation are all your movements.” “As you are in such a state of perfection, it is natural for you to see perfection in everyone,” Rajamma observed. “It is your purity that enables you to recognize mine,” Amma remarked. “The peace that is in you has enabled me to recognize it. I will place before you some of my wishes. Is that all right?” “Yes, go ahead and ask. When it is you who make me act, what do I have to fear?” “You are sure that it is not a trouble to you? It is a solemn responsibility.” “Go ahead and place the sweet burden on my shoulders. If what you ask me to do is possible, then there is no difficulty at all. But if it is not possible....” “Nothing is impossible for you,” Rajamma insisted. “That which happens is the possible. That which is merely talked about is impossible, because it has not gone beyond the stage of empty words.” Perhaps Amma was hinting that Rajamma was still caught in the notion that spirituality is something that can be communicated verbally. But Rajamma’s attention was diverted from the request she wished to make by the curious experience of hearing various musical instruments reverberating in Amma’s voice. She told Mother about this sensation and mentioned that she had heard reference to such celestial sounds in scholarly descriptions of yogic phenomena, although she had never before experienced them herself. Mother responded by saying, “These sounds can be heard in every word.” “That may be possible for you, but I am hearing them in every word that you utter, and that too only on and off since last evening.” Rajamma importuned. “Amma, I want to hear the story of your life!” Mother, who didn’t identify herself with the outward facts of her biography, replied, “My life is infinite, my history limited. I have already told you that.” “How difficult it is to understand you.” “You have understood that already.” “What is it that I have understood?” “That nothing is understood. Illusion and truth, guru and disciple, child and God—all of these forms, and so many more besides—have been recognized by you, even though they can’t all be recalled by you at the moment. If then I am to be understood, it will not be in one way, but in many ways, in an infinity of guises, for the One is the many. That is why I am understood in a multitude of ways. You yourself are the many.” We might best grasp the import of Mother’s comment by visualizing what is perhaps the single most awesomely evocative image of the Divine ever devised by the human imagination—a massive body of cosmic proportions and, atop the shoulders, two diverging lines of heads vanishing infinitely, like the reflections in face-to-face barbershop mirrors. One countenance is smiling blissfully, another is wreathed in flames, then a bearded ancient face, then the face of an innocent babe, now male and now female, now animal and now human, now fierce and now calm, now static and now dynamic. To this day, Hindu artists continue to fashion powerful images of the Vishwaroopa Darshana, God in the form of the universe. When Mother talked about the nature of the Divine, it was never in the sense of the unqualified Brahman—a homogenous white radiance without boundaries—but always in terms of Shakti, of manifest power and multiple attributes. Amma said that God, like the many-headed deity of Hindu iconography, is not the faceless abstraction of philosophy, but the sum total of all qualities, all faces, all temperaments and moods. We ourselves, as flesh and blood images of that divine fullness, are equally multifaceted, although we generally perceive just a limited range of our potentiality, which we falsely identify as the “I.” Only the enlightened one has successfully transcended this illusory identification with the limited and knows himself to be not one self, but many selves—all possible selves—with no exclusive locus of personal identity to rest in. Christ is speaking for all who have glimpsed their unlocatable divine nature when he says, “Birds have their nests and foxes their dens, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” When Rajamma said that Mother was difficult to understand, she was reflecting the predicament of all of us who try to fit her into the same narrow cubbyholes that we have designed for ourselves to hide from our own totality. While we may pretend that they contain us, they most inconveniently fail to contain her. So, like Rajamma, we are puzzled, and indeed wonderstruck, by a

personality which violates all our rules about how personalities are supposed to conduct themselves. Multiple-headed Gods are apparently much easier to paint than to engage in conversation! Rajamma was reduced to inarticulate stammering by Amma’s latest revelation and cried out, “What a Mother you are!” “The Mother that gave birth,” Amma returned. “What did you give birth to?” “I am the Mother who gave birth to you. And you are the Mother who gave birth to me. Who is the Mother and who is not the Mother?” Throughout their conversation, Amma had been attributing her own divine qualities to Rajamma. Ostensibly, she was doing so to dramatize the proper attitude of the disciple, who views the guru as being indistinguishable from God. But this was no mere play-acting or setting an example for others. Mother was quite serious when she spoke of Rajamma in divine terms. The perfect one, as Rajamma herself noted earlier, cannot help but see his own perfection in all. Or, as Ramana Maharshi used to tell his disciples, “The jnani (enlightened one) perceives no ajnanis (unenlightened ones).” Elsewhere, Mother has put it in her own inimitable way: “Real Motherhood does not consist of the simple recognition of one’s own Motherhood. Motherhood must be perceived in everything and everyone.” It was always characteristic of Amma that, when people acknowledged her spiritual eminence, she immediately directed them back to their own selves, saying that she was nothing that they were not, and that the Divinity that they perceived in her was actually their own latent divine qualities projected outside themselves, their own light mirrored back to them. This is precisely what she was doing now. During the first part of their discussion—when Rajamma thought too highly of her own competence and spiritual stature—Mother did everything necessary to disabuse her of her pride. But now that she had succeeded, and Rajamma could finally see her own limitations sharply etched against the luminous background of Amma’s perfection, Mother started pushing the other way, emphasizing again and again their essential oneness. Ultimately, Mother had not come to defeat or humiliate Rajamma nor to assert her own superiority, but to awaken Rajamma’s slumbering awareness of her own divinity. A Buddhist sage was once asked why he would assert one thing on one occasion and just the opposite on another. He answered that, when someone strays too far to the right on a path, he must be told in no uncertain terms, “Go left,” and when someone strays too far to the left he must be urged, “Go right.” So it is that the “lefts” and “rights” of the enlightened one are not absolute values but necessarily relative to the position of the pilgrim on the path. We pilgrims, on the other hand, tend to magnify them out of all proportion to their true significance. Either we inflate these lefts and rights into elaborate dogmas, watertight philosophies and exclusive religions, or we become bewildered and demoralized by their apparent inconsistency. Mother’s revealing comment about her being Rajamma’s mother and Rajamma being her mother evoked this second type of response from Rajamma—that of confusion. “Can’t you be grasped, Mother?” “Why not?” Amma affirmed. “So long as you have the net that catches.” “Where is it to be found?” “The net that holds (the Divine) is held by the One who made it.” A paradox: the faith by which we come to accept God, the devotion by which we come to love Him, the very desire to unite with Him, the wisdom by which we finally come to know Him, must come from God Himself. No amount of willful effort or cleverness can ever catch hold of Him; no guru can reveal Him. Mother said that God is the only guru—there are no others. In Hindu philosophy, God is referred to as “swayambhu”—the self-revealed One. With reference to her own divine qualities, Mother said, “You cannot know me. I must make myself known to you.” The process of making herself known to Rajamma had already begun. The seed had been planted in the depths of Rajamma’s soul. It had indeed just sprouted in the form of an intense yearning in Rajamma to understand the living enigma in whose presence she found herself. This restless inquiry was the first, if still unripe, fruit of the initiation that had taken place. An initiation conveyed partly through Amma’s words, partly through the glorious vision that Rajamma had been granted, but most powerfully by the vital radiance of the sun of Amma’s divinity, which was slowly stirring to life Rajamma’s dormant spirituality, so long eclipsed by unthinking orthodoxy. As a result, Rajamma craved to know everything about Amma. “I need to know the story of your life. That alone should be the scripture of the future,” she exclaimed grandiloquently. And some minutes later, she pleaded again, “Mother, won’t you tell me your life story?” But Amma was reticent. “A priceless story, no doubt. But limited all the same.” Mother wanted Rajamma to look beyond the historical facts of her personal biography to the essence of the Divine, which she shared with Rajamma herself. But Rajamma was insistent: “Is it so unutterable? If not today, at least sometime in the future—your

birth, your divine qualities, how you came to be known, how various people came to recognize you, the experiences of your childhood, the unfolding of your greatness—all these things you must tell me. I want to know even how you came to swallow your first dose of castor oil. And also about your marriage also—I dare say that your wedding must have been the glory of creation!” “No, it’s not that way. My wedding was not the glory of the world. The world itself is my wedding.”9 Mother corrected, pointing again at the inadequacy of trying to understand her through the external historical facts of her life. “There is another wish,” Rajamma continued. “I shall give you several mantras. It is my desire that you propagate them all over the world. There is one final wish, but I will not mention it yet. What do you say about the mantras?” “Since I have not yet understood what a mantra is, how can I propagate them?” “You are mantra itself. Where is the question of understanding it?” Rajamma countered. “Then where is the question of propagating it?” Caught again! But undeterred: “I will give you a written list of mantras. Just impart them to those who come to you, according to their worthiness.” “I don’t have the scales needed to measure their worthiness!” Amma objected. And indeed, for the one who sees the essential Godliness of all beings, there is no question, either of deserving or not deserving. “Whether you have the scales or not, I insist. It’s an obligation. You can’t avoid it.” “If it is inevitable, then it will happen,” Amma responded noncommittally. Rajamma took hold of Amma’s hands and pleaded softly, “Then you can’t avoid this. It isn’t a command though—only a wish.” “Can I fulfill all wishes? I can neither wish nor fulfill the wishes of others.” Mother replied with a hint of wistfulness. 10 But Rajamma pressed her, and Amma finally agreed to seek permission from her husband to perform the initiations Rajamma had requested her to do. The elderly teacher had one final request to make. She wanted to have her photograph taken with Amma as a memento of their extraordinary meeting. Amma agreed to ask her husband’s consent for this, as well. He gave his permission, and some days later Amma and Rajamma came together for the last time. The photograph taken on that occasion showing the young Amma seated on the ground at the side of a stooped and gaunt-looking Rajamma is the first image that we have of Mother. She appears self-assured and tranquil; the fingers of her right hand are gently touching the ground in an ancient gesture of steadfastness and immutability.11 Like a stone Buddha, she seems to be calling upon the Earth to bear witness to all that she has revealed to Rajamma. We are conscious of observing an historic moment. The obscurity in which Amma had been living was about to lift. In the next few years she would become widely known in the surrounding towns as an incarnation of Divinity itself. The anonymity which allowed for the playful and dramatic revelations of her state to Swami Kalyananda Bharati, Rajamma, and others, was ending. A new “public phase” was about to begin. That Mother was keenly aware of this is clear from something she said to Rajamma before being photographed during their last meeting: “It is becoming manifest. The day has dawned when it (her spiritual stature) will become known. Everyone will hear of this day in the future.” That prediction is even now being fulfilled.

16. JILLELLAMUDI “For me, the four Vedas were the mortar and pestle, the broom, the hearth, and the kitchen knife, and the fifth Veda was the winnowing basket.”

T

HE APPREHENSIONS of family members about the hardships that Amma would be forced to endure as a result of her marriage were amply borne out during her first decade at Jillellamudi. From a comfortable life of leisure in a spacious townhouse with servants, she was thrust overnight into a mud hut in a backward settlement, where she shared the daily routine of the poorest of the village poor. But what would ordinarily have proved a wrenching experience for a well-bred and physically delicate woman was embraced by Amma with remarkable cheerfulness. Enthusiastically, she set about her new duties—

arising before dawn to feed and milk the cattle, hauling clay vessels full of water from the village reservoir, grinding spicy chutneys with basalt mortar and pestle, making dung cakes for fuel (a necessity in this region of few trees), washing clothes, cooking, cleaning and whitewashing the hut, dunging the floor daily. As the Karanam’s (village officer’s) wife, Amma was frequently called upon to look after visitors to Jillellamudi. And during the season, she would work in the tobacco barn or assist her husband in the fields. These tasks were in addition to the normal work of a new mother (Amma bore three children, although she conceived four.) Jillellamudi in those days was a primitive and isolated village of eight hundred inhabitants, most of whom were day-laborers of the earth-mover’s caste. The nearest paved road was over a mile distant, and the approach by foot along the narrow field paths was difficult and frequently impassable during the rainy season, when floods would cut off the village from the outside world for weeks at a time. Sitting exposed on the windswept and treeless coastal plain, the hamlet was vulnerable to the multiple ravages of a harsh climate—blast-furnace winds in the summer giving a parched and desolate appearance to the landscape, seasonal cyclonic gales, crop-leveling hailstorms, and the yearly monsoon, which transformed the village into an island of mud afloat in a sea of flooded paddylands. When Mother and her husband Nageswara Rao (called Nannagaru) set up house at Jillellamudi, they became the first Brahmin family in the village. Alone among the surrounding hamlets, Jillellamudi had no temple, mosque or church, and no Hindu priests to perform the obligatory rites of passage. The people were illiterate and highly superstitious. There were no schools, no doctors or medical facilities, no flush toilets or even outhouses in the entire village. For the villagers, the sole point of contact with the great spiritual and cultural traditions of India came during the occasional burrakatha performances, the rustic dramas in which mythological stories and the legends of the saints were enacted by semiprofessional troupes of actors and puppeteers. Socially, the village folk were fragmented into various religious and political factions. In addition to the lower- caste Hindu majority, there were a scattering of Christians and Moslems in Jillellamudi. Lording it over their less fortunate neighbors, three large landowning families vied with each other for influence and patronage. They held the landless poor in a virtual economic stranglehold. For the great majority, life was an unrelieved struggle for the next meal. They felt themselves to be helpless puppets of forces beyond their understanding or control. An untimely storm, a delay in the monsoon, too much rain or too little, a shift in the seasonal labor market, illness, a fall from the graces of the powerful—almost anything might spell disaster for an entire family. Even in good times, the grim specter of hunger was never far away. And the anxiety over food was, by far, the overriding obsession in their precarious lives. Amma’s heart melted at the plight of the village laborers, who were bound to go hungry whenever work was even temporarily unavailable. To help them through these difficult times, Mother organized a grain-bank. In days of surplus, the villagers would set aside a handful of uncooked rice before every meal. At the end of each week, they brought this excess grain to Mother, who stored it in her hut. Whenever circumstances left them without resources, they were free to take rice sufficient for their needs out of the bin. It is said that, after this grain bank was set up, none among the participating families was compelled to go without so much as a single meal. Despite Amma’s selfless ministrations to the poor (or perhaps because of them), she and her husband were held in deep suspicion by some. The reigning powers in the village perceived the newcomers as being a threat to their own unquestioned and ruthless sway. Schemes and plots were hatched against them, spies sent to snoop on them by night and day. And various forms of harassment were employed. Mother is believed to have suffered greatly during this period, though she has refused to comment about the persecution which she underwent. For the most part, the unpleasant incidents from these years are hidden in deep shadow. And it will be best to allow them to remain there. The rumors and fragmentary stories that one hears today are impossible to confirm. Those who acted against Mother are understandably reluctant to give first-hand accounts. And Amma—who harbors no bitterness and feels only a boundless compassion for evildoers—is equally unwilling to reveal their deeds. What is known, in a general way, is that several attempts were made on her life and that she suffered physically from them. After one such brutal poisoning, Amma is said to have remarked, “You see the physical symptoms, and so you say that I am suffering. But the real suffering started long ago, when the idea first entered the minds of the perpetrators.” We might pause a moment here to consider why it is that the great souls of our race, armed as they are with foreknowledge and divine powers, have allowed themselves to be victimized by the cruel persecutions and crucifixions of a perverted humanity. From the worldly point of view, there is nothing so foolish—nor so incomprehensible—as the injunction to offer the other cheek to the tormentor, not to resist the evil that threatens to annihilate us. But love lives by a different code entirely from that of the world. Love is incapable of erecting barriers, of driving away any who approach it. Mother has said, “The one who tosses flowers and the one who throws stones are the same to me.” Amma knows

that even aggression can be a twisted attempt to engage in a dialogue. And love’s deepest law compels it never to reject the dialogue, in whatever form it comes knocking. Mother has revealed this innermost principle of her nature: “It is only in order to say ‘yes’ to everything that is said and everything that is done by one and all that this form has come into the world.” What is the result, the worldly man will wonder doubtfully, of this attitude of total acceptance? But the question itself is off target. The nonresistance of the saint is not practiced with any goal in mind. Nothing is intended by it. And yet it is precisely this indifference to results that creates the space for the miracle to occur—the effect without a cause, the thunderbolt out of the blue. Now and again, evil, confronted with the incomprehensible acceptance and forgiveness of pure love, is magically transmuted into its opposite. The one who comes throwing stones or worse stays on to toss flowers. The heart darkened with hatred is kindled with divine love. It happened that way with Mantrayya, a village thug and drunkard and an accomplished stick-fighter. He was hired by a wealthy landowner to attack Amma and Nannagaru. But something changed inside this ruffian when he first saw Amma. Not only was he unable to do her any harm, but he stayed on as a hired hand, helping Nannagaru in the fields. In those days, Mother used to read Mantrayya passages from the Bhagavad Gita, and she explained in simple terms their practical import. As the result of these daily visits, Mantrayya repented of his past misdeeds. The evil habits of a lifetime fell away. He felt Amma to be near him at all times. Often he would go out to work in the fields and see a vision of Amma, standing on his crude wooden plow or floating in the air before him. When he went to her hut later, invariably she would be wearing exactly the same ornaments and sari as he had seen in his vision. When Mantrayya fell seriously ill and realized that his days were numbered, he called a friend, Reddy Subbaya, to his side, and confided in him these unusual experiences. He secured Subbaya’s promise to go to Amma and serve her after he was gone. When Mantrayya passed on a few days later, Subbaya was faithful to his word. Daily, he would rise at two in the morning to haul the water for Mother’s bath and heat it in a huge copper cauldron. Apart from his hired work in the fields, Subbaya would enthusiastically help with all of the heavy labor which Amma previously had to do unaided. As with Mantrayya, he came to treasure the time spent in Mother’s presence above all else, and he experienced many things which rendered firm his faith in her greatness. Amma conveyed to Subbaya the principles of spiritual life less by precept than by concrete example. One day as he was beating a rat with a long bamboo cane, Subbaya saw Amma fall to the ground and grab her side in agony. He immediately dropped his cane in alarm. If Mother had told the uneducated farmhand in an abstract way not to torture any living creature because she herself is the indwelling life in all beings, we can justifiably wonder whether the message would have sunk in. But demonstrated so vividly, it was a lesson that Subbaya would carry with him the rest of his life. By the early 1950s, word of the existence of a spiritually illumined housewife in Jillellamudi village had spread to several of the surrounding hamlets, and a few locals were regularly making the long trek across the fields to enjoy the rare pleasure of Amma’s company. One of these visitors, the learned Brahmin, Sri K.R. Sastry, proclaimed of Amma in wonder, “She is like a lone tulasi (sacred basil) among worthless jilledu weeds!” Srimati Nori Manikyamma from Poondla village was so struck by Amma’s unearthly radiance that she felt as if the Goddess Lakshmi had stepped directly out of heaven when Amma first greeted her at the entrance to her hut, attired in the simplest of cotton saris. When Doctor Veerayya was called in to examine Mother, he found, “more symptoms of yoga (union with God) than of roga (disease).” Another physician, Doctor Seetachalam of Kommur village, who was summoned to treat Mother during a fever, was startled to see the mercury rise directly to the upper limit of his thermometer. Placing his fingers on Amma’s wrist, he was unable to detect the slightest pulse. Amma simply sat quietly smiling during the doctor’s comically ill-fated examination. And so it happened that people, recognizing in various ways a hidden greatness in the unassuming Mother of Jillellamudi village, came to flock around her. Mother compared this process to the natural attractiveness of a sweet-smelling blossom—“The champak flower does not bloom for anyone’s sake. But even when it’s located in the middle of an isolated forest, its scent attracts all. It draws even the woodcutter. He might chop down the tree, but he will at least realize his mistake afterwards. Wherever a true sage might be, his greatness, by its very nature, becomes known to all.” One of the early devotees was a relative of Amma, Sri Gangaraju Lokhanadham of Kommur. When his wife’s leg became paralyzed and she failed to respond to medical treatment, he sent word for Amma to come at once. At first, Mother suggested that the woman be sent to a hospital. The messenger insisted that nothing short of Amma’s physical presence would satisfy the good doctor, and Amma relented. Arriving at the woman’s bedside, Mother spoke to her consolingly and stroked her leg. Immediately, sensation returned to the afflicted limb. The woman walked. News of this miracle quickly spread, and Amma spent the next few days visiting the homes and businesses of those who craved her blessing and her healing touch.

When Amma returned to Jillellamudi by Jeep, an unusual incident occurred. A woman who had been travelling in the vehicle with her suddenly became deranged and started loudly abusing Amma. As Mother was entering her own hut, the lady followed her inside, all the while screeching foul epithets. Subbaya pushed her out of the hut, but still the tirade continued. After some time, the woman’s tongue swelled up and she became unable to speak or even to close her mouth. Feeling pity for the helpless woman, Subbaya told her to go to Amma and beseech her grace. She obeyed at once, entering the hut and falling at Mother’s feet. Amma instructed Subbaya to go out and collect a certain type of leaf. When he returned with a handful of these, Mother crushed a few onto the grotesquely swollen tongue with her own hands. Within a few minutes, the tongue was back to normal and the woman had become calm. As devotees started to gather around his wife, Nannagaru was at first uncertain how to react. One thing that disturbed him was the way people would touch and massage Amma’s feet and place their heads in her lap, to be stroked and comforted. Once he wondered out loud what other men would do if he acted in the same way with their wives. Amma responded that, if he approached another woman in the same innocent spirit as her “spiritual children” came to her, then there would be no cause for suspicion. Nevertheless, her husband’s doubts made her duty clear. Amma forbade Subbaya and the others from approaching her. After five days, however, Nanagaru had a change of heart. Realizing the pure and childlike affection that the devotees bore for Amma, he gave his consent for them to return to her. Mother has often said that it is only due to Nannagaru’s generous permission that we were able to approach her as freely as we could. If at any point he had objected, then a great mission of mercy and succor to the world at large would have been prematurely aborted. Nowadays, some women might criticize Mother for what would seem to them an overly submissive attitude toward her husband. But Mother preferred to conquer Nannagaru through love and not by an exercise of will. She complied with the patriarchal conventions of her society at the same time that she undermined them, simply by being who she was. Mother did not preach the power of women—she demonstrated it. But at the same time, she deferred to her husband and respected the prerogatives that Indian society had given him. Nannagaru did not share the sentiments of Mother’s devotees during these early Jillellamudi years. For a husband to regard his own spouse as a holy being is itself a superhuman feat. While others began looking upon Amma as God incarnate, Nannagaru saw only his seemingly human wife. In the early days of their marriage, it is said that he would sometimes beat and abuse her. He was, by turns, confused and enraged by the attention that others were paying to Amma. But with time, Nannagaru began to have a change of heart. He permitted others to worship Amma, even before he could fully sympathize with their point of view. In later years, however, all sense of possessiveness vanished. He would refer to Amma in conversation as “your mother” and never as “my wife.” The greatest attachment that a man can have had been severed, and Nannagaru recognized the divinity of the one he had looked upon as his spouse. Mother’s attitude toward her husband during their years of family life together was unwavering throughout. Daily, her first act was the worship of the mangala sutra, the consecrated ornament that Nannagaru had fastened around her neck during their marriage ceremony, and which had remained there as a constant physical reminder of the sacred feet of the one she had vowed to honor and serve as a living symbol of the Lord. In all matters, large and small, Mother’s obedience to Nannagaru’s wishes was unquestioning and immediate. Before undertaking any work or traveling outside the village, she would invariably seek her husband’s permission. It was only after thus obtaining his consent that Mother allowed a devotee, Sri Satyanarayana, to perform the first formal worship of her person during her visit to the town of Chirala. And afterwards, whenever she was asked to sit for worship, Mother would always seek Nannagaru’s approval first. When he acceded, as he always did, Amma would offer her own reverent homage at Nannagaru’s feet before she would accept the homage of others. The humility and dutifulness of the youthful Mother of Jillellamudi village were cause for wonder to those who first recognized her exalted state. Just as they were placing her on the pedestal of their devotion, she was putting her husband on a still higher pedestal. Those of us who, in recent years, were fortunate to witness Amma’s public worship of her husband’s feet on the yearly anniversary of their marriage felt ourselves to be on the threshold of a very great mystery. The Godman and Godwoman accept human limitations in order to show the way by their own example. If Sri Ram humbly 1 worships his guru Viswamitra, or reveres his father Dasaratha, and gladly accepts exile in the forest at the elder’s command; or if Christ conforms to “the law and the prophets” by accepting baptism from John, or if he washes the feet of his beloved disciples; or if Mother worships the feet of her husband—we can take it that it is not for their spiritual upliftment that they do so, but for our own. They are showing us the way to humble ourselves before others and before God. There are times in all of our lives when we must acquiesce to the will of other people. It need not be humiliating to do so, the sages assure us. Far from it. When we freely and not abjectly humble ourselves before others, we remind ourselves in doing so that we are not autonomous beings, that we are dependent on a power and subject to a will that are not our own. That is why the discipline of humility is so important for the spiritual aspirant. It powerfully orients us towards the Divine Reality beyond our

skins. But there is another sense as well to the Godman’s humility, a profounder mystery. When God worships man, he worships his own reflection. He seems to be saying to us, “I have made you in my own image. I have placed inside of you my own pure light. I can perceive it always, but from you it is hidden by the concentric rings of matter. Peel them away, like the layers of an onion, and you will discover the secret yourself; you will understand the greatness that is in the heart of man, and you will come to know how it is that I worship myself by worshipping him.” Mother says that there is no God sitting icily aloof and apart from the world. God is the sum total of what exists. And she insists that we worship him most truly by serving and feeding living beings, which are his manifestations. What always impressed the pilgrims to Amma’s thatched cottage was the extreme care and attention that she paid to each visitor. The ancient maxim of India that the guest is God was perfectly fulfilled in Mother’s gracious hospitality. Anyone who came to Jillellamudi in those days was assured a tasty meal served by Amma’s own hands. And devotees say that she would somehow always know in advance when and how many people were coming and prepare just enough food. Even large groups showing up unannounced would discover, to their surprise, that Amma had piping hot meals ready to serve them immediately upon their arrival. When the visitors were ready to leave, Mother would offer each one a parting gift of prasadam, usually packets of kum-kum. If kum-kum was not available, Amma would stoop down and gather up some soil, offering it with her blessings. To the amazement of the recipients, the earth would emit a sweet incense-like scent, and in some instances continued to do so for several years after Amma’s miraculously transforming touch. Prominent among the early pilgrims to Jillellamudi was a group of business and professional men from the town of Chirala, who came regularly on weekends and religious holidays, laden with camphor and kum-kum, and baskets of betel leaves, fragrant flowers and fruits for use in worship rituals. They placed these offerings at Mother’s feet as they recited sacred mantras. Spontaneously at such times, Amma’s body would stiffen, her breath becoming extremely shallow, her eyes shutting or remaining half- open, unblinking and unseeing. Like a living image of the Buddha statue, Mother’s hands would assume various symbolic mudras. The sight of her majestic form rigid and absorbed in samadhi thrilled the onlookers with awe. They felt themselves transported for a time into an exalted realm far beyond the familiar world. Generally, Mother would remain immobile in this posture for twenty minutes or a half an hour, and then return gradually to exter-nal awareness. As we have already seen, Amma did not need to be worshipped in order to enter into ecstasy. Moods of absorption would come upon her, at times with a puzzling suddenness in the midst of quite ordinary activities. Nannagaru remembered walking into the kitchen area of their hut once. He was startled to see Amma sitting, senseless to the world, with one of her hands fully immersed in a pot of rapidly boiling water. Incredibly, when the hand was removed, it was found not to be scalded or even reddened by its fiery ordeal. Contrary to the usual spontaneous pattern, the most mysterious and lengthy of Amma’s trancelike absorptions was apparently premeditated. Mother called Dr. Seetachalam of Kommur to Jillellamudi and told him that she was about to embark on an 11-day “journey.” During the interim, he was to look after the body and make certain that nobody moved it or interfered in any way. Thus charged, the doctor watched Mother lie down on her cot and immediately lose consciousness. When he bent over to examine her, he found that her breath and heartbeat had ceased. Gradually, Amma’s joints stiffened and her complexion took on a blue-gray pallor. For days, she remained frozen in this inert state. Nannagaru and his mother, Bamma, lost all hope and wanted to cremate the body. But Doctor Seetachalam was placed in the rather curious position for one in his profession of insisting that, though clinically dead, the body would come back to life and should not under any circumstances be touched! The physician’s faith was vindicated on the eleventh day of his strange vigil when Mother awakened slowly and with difficulty at first, as if from a prolonged sleep. Many other strange phenomena became manifest during these years. Once Nannagaru and several others were being served food by Amma when, without warning, the point between her eyebrows at the top of her nose (the ajna chakra, the seat of spiritual consciousness, according to yogic science) burst open with a violent spurt of blood. Mother casually placed her palm over the spot and closed the wound. When she took her hand away, it was unaccountably full of powdery gray sacred ash, which she distributed as a sacred gift of prasadam to all who were present. As we have seen, the clods of earth which Amma blessed often gave off an indefinable sweet scent. At other times, the odor seemed to emanate from her body itself, and for several feet around, the air would be fragrant with a heavenly perfume of unknown provenance. In still other cases, the objects with which Amma came into contact—the water in which she had she bathed, clothes which she had ironed, religious objects that were blessed by her touch—emitted this pleasing scent. Once Amma’s youngest child, Ravi, went up to his mother and complained that everyone but him could smell this miraculous perfume. Smiling, she took hold of his schoolboy’s slate for a brief moment, then handed it back to him. For days thereafter, Ravi’s effusively

fragrant slate was the marvel of his classmates. While word of supernatural occurrences such as these undoubtedly had some effect on luring the curious to Jillellamudi, what actually impressed them most when they came was the atmosphere of calm joy around Mother that caused the worries and concerns of the world to drop away for a time. It was a solace just to sit with her. Mother has likened the saint to a beacon’s light shining high above the community. Those who are seeking for the light of wisdom and the lifegiving warmth of unconditional love flock naturally to the saintly. As the number of visitors to Jillellamudi steadily increased, it became difficult for Amma personally to cook for all of her guests. The elderly Manikyamma of Poondla, who felt a motherly affection for Amma, frequently brought along with her baskets full of clarified butter, vegetables and spices to supplement Amma’s own supplies. While similar gifts of food from others were, as a rule, politely declined, Manikymma’s were accepted. From the very beginning, she was treated as a member of the family. Manikyamma had several unusual experiences. When she first came to Amma, she related that a loud knocking and rustling noise at night was terrifying all of her family members. She begged that the ghostly spirits be driven away from her home. Mother answered that ghosts don’t exist, and that, in any event, they had no cause to worry. Manikyamma went away unsatisfied. But, from that day onwards, the ghostly visitations ceased entirely. At one time, a snake used to live in an abandoned anthill in a corner of Amma’s hut. Instead of being driven away or killed, the snake was treated respectfully and offered sweets and other delicacies by Mother. It would not eat these immediately, but would invariably give evidence of having partaken later on. At times, an unearthly light was observed to emanate from within the mound. Everyone regarded this as a sign that the snake was a divine being or a great yogi come in that form to enjoy the blessings of Amma’s proximity. Once Mother asked Manikyamma to bring over a pinch of earth from the mound to be offered as prasadam for a departing visitor. Misunderstanding this, the devoted woman placed nearly the entire mound on a tray and brought it over to Amma. Just as she reached Mother, Manikyamma swooned and fell unconscious into a deep trance, apparently overwhelmed by the spiritual power of her strange offering. Manikyamma soon recovered, but the mysterious snake and the remnants of its mound had vanished, never to be seen again.2 Manikyamma’s intense devotion put her in almost constant intuitional contact with Amma. During odd hours of the day or night, she would suddenly feel an urgent desire to come to Jillellamudi. At such times, she would quit whatever she was doing, bundle up some foodstuffs and set out down the dirt road to the neighboring village. Invariably, she would arrive just when Amma needed help, and the supplies which she had been inspired to bring along would be exactly what was needed at the time. By the late 1950s, however, even Manikyamma’s devoted help was not sufficient to cope with the daily influx of pilgrims. A contingent of regular visitors approached Amma with the idea that a separate, full-time kitchen be set up to look after their needs. Mother went to her husband with this idea. At first, he could not be reconciled to it. It is a matter of sacred duty for a householder to feed his guests, whatever the cost in money and effort, even if he must starve himself in the process. It did not seem right to Nannagaru that others should bear the responsibility which was properly his own. But Mother presented the situation in a different light. The visitors were not their guests, she said, but their children. When children are small, they are fed by their parents. When they grow up, however, they set up their own household and feed themselves. Likewise, the family of spiritual children had grown up and was now ready to look after its own needs. Reluctantly, Nannagaru gave his assent. On the fifteenth of August, 1958, a rough shedlike structure was inaugurated by Amma. Lakshminarasamma, a newly widowed devotee, was asked by Amma to take charge of the facility, which was named the Annapurnalayam, after Annapurna, the Goddess of food and feeding. The kitchen provided meals free of charge to visitors at all hours of the day and night. It is said that the slow-burning rice-husk cooking fire, which was lit on the first day of Annapurnalayam’s operation, has never gone out. It has not needed to be relit up to this day. Two year after the inauguration of the Annapurnalayam, the ground floor of the House of All was opened adjacent to the kitchen to provide lodging for overnight visitors, as well as to house those who wanted to live full-time in Amma’s presence. Slowly and without any conscious directing effort on Mother’s part, an institution was growing up around her. People started pouring in from towns and cities all over Andhra Pradesh state. Organized bus pilgrimages added Jillellamudi to their itineraries. The intimacy and homelike atmosphere of the late ’50s was giving way to the bustle of a growing and dynamic spiritual community. Mother’s freedom of movement was becoming increasingly restricted, as she acquiesced to the new demands on her time and energy.

17.

HYMA “Empathy for the suffering of others is the hallmark of divinity.” —Amma

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VERYWHERE YOU find Mother’s devotees, you will see her photograph. Serious, mature beyond her years, slenderlimbed, delicate, almost seraphic. In her quiet intensity, she gazes out at us from large, darkly luminous eyes, remarkable eyes full of the deep sympathy and tender sorrow of one who has suffered much and felt deeply the sufferings of others. Today, she looks out upon the world only from these haunting photographs, and through the glass eyes of a lifesized idol in the Hymalayam temple in Jillellamudi, which is also her tomb. But for thousands—most of whom never knew her in the flesh—it is as if Mother’s daughter Hyma is alive and with us still. For these devotees, she didn’t die in the emergency room of the hospital at Guntur. And they will tell you of their visions, their dreams, spontaneous healings, and all of the remarkable ways that they believe she has intervened in their lives since that day. Hyma remains, for these devotees, a living spiritual presence, a sister to confide in, a goddess to pray to, an example to emulate, of human kindness and forbearance, and an exemplar of the one-pointed striving and devotion which alone has the power to bring us back home to the Mother. These are not all roles in which Hyma would have felt comfortable. She was, before all else, a humble devotee. She never felt that her position as a daughter of Amma entitled her to any special consideration from others, or even from Amma herself. And she was as acutely aware of her own shortcomings as she was of the relative merits of those around her. Far from trumpeting her own virtues, it was as if she were unaware of them, as if long intimacy had rendered them invisible. But others did not fail to notice what she herself overlooked. All who knew Hyma were captivated by an innocence and an austere purity which seemed not entirely of this world. Some indeed were troubled by a sense that Hyma never really belonged here. Her painful sensitivity and delicacy of feeling seemed to mark her since the very beginning as an exile from a higher realm, unaccustomed to the harsh dissonances and the heavy atmosphere of this Earth. It was an air that she was not to breathe for long. Like so many other ambassadors of the divine—like the Hindu prodigies Shankaracharya and Vivekananda, like Jesus Christ himself and Saint Therese of Lisieux, she was to break the earthly bond during her youth. It is a fate for which Hyma prayed without ceasing: “Mother, break the veil. Take me back into yourself!” Some fires glow slowly with a dull flame; others flare up briefly in glory and are gone. Hyma’s life was cast in the latter mold. Her early death was not as much tragic as it was inevitable. Physically, emotionally and spiritually she had consumed herself. The funeral pyre had burst into flames at the time of her birth and had blazed brilliantly until the end. By the hour of death, there was nothing left to burn. Hyma was not cremated—that would have been redundant. She was entombed, as are the saints in whom the last vestiges of attachment and earthly desire are already transformed to ash.1 The psychic fires which burned within her soul were manifested in a variety of physical maladies—frequent fevers, chronic headaches (so ubiquitous a companion were these headaches that Amma used to refer to them as “Hyma’s friend”) and painful sores in the mouth that made eating a major trial for her. And all the while, Hyma was curiously aloof and unconcerned about her bodily aches and pains. Mother had to coax her even into speaking about them: “Is your ‘friend’ acting up again, Hyma?” But for Hyma, the real anguish was elsewhere, in the “ever-present pain of separation and deep discontent,” as she would write to Amma during her one and only trip away from Jillellamudi just a few months before her passing. “The years are rolling by and the flames in the heart are burning me alive,” she wrote. “Though staying with you, I am unable to know you, Mother. I am a useless one, incapable of accomplishing anything. For how many years should I drag on with this purposeless life?” But her moments of despair were dark shadows on the luminous landscape of her love. The restless impatience that she felt during these “dark nights of the soul” was ultimately more a token of her spiritual success than of failure. Only one who had tasted of the highest could have felt so despondent when it was temporarily withdrawn again, out of her reach. “Whether my eyes are open or closed, whether I am awake or asleep, I am unable to keep my mind from the steady stream of affection for you,” she would write. “Could I, dear Mother, ever attain that state where my consciousness will be filled with you and you alone? This is the anguish of my heart right now.” Hyma was a lover of solitude, forever engaged in spiritual practice. She never regarded Amma as a mother in the ordinary sense, but always as an object of devotion, an incarnation of the highest. When one of her companions would refer to “your

mother,” Hyma would invariably correct this by saying “our Mother.” And it was exclusively in this universal sense that she perceived her. For hours at a time, Hyma would sit before a photograph of Amma, repeating her name. And every day she would perform formal worship to the photo. She would not eat until she had offered her food to the framed image. Hyma knew by heart the Telugu devotional lyrics about Amma by songster Butchi Raju and would sing them frequently and feelingly. At other times, she would sit in lotus posture before her makeshift altar and solemnly chant the Lalita Sahasranamam, the thousand Names of the Divine Mother, or perform the abbishekham offering of water to Shiva, Lord of yogis. Whatever worship she performed, however, she was always thinking that it was Amma who would receive it. For Hyma, Mother was the inner reality behind all the Gods, the repository of all divine virtues. When her sadhana failed to produce the expected results, it was to Amma that she would go to complain. The outcome of Hyma’s bold questioning could be as humorous as it was poignant. On one occasion, Hyma bemoaned her lack of progress. “With such a fickle mind as I have, can I ever achieve my aim?” Mother smiled gently and said, “What to do, Hyma? As for myself. I don’t bother about goals, so what advice could I give you on how to attain them?” “Yes, Mother, as you are yourself the goal, you need not think about it. It is left to us to think about it and to strive to reach it,” Hyma responded. “Well, for me there is joy and satisfaction just in playing and doing mischief,” Mother confided with a smile. At this point, one of Hyma’s friends, Bhavani, spoke to Amma: “That is why we are so free with you. I don’t know why Hyma is thinking along these lines. For my part, I feel that instead of worrying about goals and striving to reach them, playing near you and enjoying your mischief is more fun.” Hyma looked sharply at Bhavani and turned to Amma. “It isn’t for others’ sake. Answer me without dismissing it with a joke and a laugh.” “What is this?” Amma asked in mock surprise. “Even your grandma asked questions like these. Why do such thoughts occur to you now?” “Because you are all and know all, you can be casual and enjoy yourself playing and making mischief. But we aren’t like you. From our point of view, an aim, a spiritual path, making an effort, a final attainment—all these are there,” Hyma responded. Amma replied with a smile: “If I did not live as a common housewife, you would not have been born or grown up.” “But why have you given birth to me?” Hyma blurted out. “That is my will,” Mother answered sternly. “You have no business to ask, and I have no need to answer you.” Hyma smiled helplessly. Amma’s visage softened: “There is no need to lie. In fact, you will be the Reality itself.” It was a prediction that Mother was to repeat several times, in one form or another. One evening, the white-bearded pundit, Sri B. Rama Sastry, came, as was his daily custom, to place some flowers on Mother’s feet. In the darkness, he mistook Hyma’s feet for those of Amma, by whose side she lay. Hyma was very much embarrassed by this misdirected worship and cried out, “Grandpa, they are my feet, not Amma’s!” But Mother reassured her daughter in a soothing voice: “It doesn’t matter even if he does worship your feet thinking them to be mine. That is what will happen anyway.” And on yet another occasion, Mother said, “Hyma is veritably my reflection. One day, she will be worshipped in her own right.” Indeed as the years passed, Hyma was to come more and more to resemble the one she so completely idolized and revered. Visitors to Jillellamudi in the middle- and late-’60s remember her most fondly as a model of selflessness, soft-spoken, and with a motherly concern for people, even those many years her senior. As she grew older, the slight shyness and reserve of her youth blossomed into a marvelous, open-hearted warmth and affection. Indeed, some who visited Jillellamudi came to treasure Hyma’s friendship almost as much as they valued their contact with Amma. Hyma never viewed friendship as a casual bond of mutual convenience. When she gave of herself, it was always a full-souled and unwavering commitment. Few could return such unqualified affection in kind. And it was inevitable that Hyma would remain, in a certain fundamental sense, alone, isolated by a compassionate intensity very much her own, that all admired but few could fully understand. Perhaps only Amma understood. It was her love, after all, that was reflected in the now calm, now stormy sea of Hyma’s spirit. It is in recognition of this spiritual—and not merely physical—kinship that Hyma came to be known as “chinna Amma” (little Amma). Many were convinced that Amma was grooming Hyma as her eventual successor. They were certain that she would ripen into a great yogi and sage. But it was a different, and perhaps a higher, fate for which she was being prepared. Of all Hyma’s qualities, there was one that is most often remarked upon by those who knew her. That is her acute sensitivity to the suffering of others. And it is this capacity that prompted Mother to compare her to the Buddha, whose anguished awareness of life’s sufferings and of death was the driving force behind his own iron-willed search for—and final discovery of—the meaning

of life. There is a simple story told about Hyma that could just as well have been told of the young prince of the Sakya clan, the future Enlightened One. It might have been told of young Amma herself. One day, Hyma was standing on the baked-mud pathway which runs through Jillellamudi. She gazed up at the thatched roof of a village hut at the very moment that a lizard’s nest became detached and fell to the ground. The nest, that had been so carefully and laboriously constructed, was destroyed in an instant. All the eggs which had been so lovingly tended were smashed to pieces. It was the type of small tragedy that life is full of. But to Hyma, it assumed monumental proportions. She brooded about it constantly. For a full week, she did not touch food. And Mother did not pressure her to eat. After all, Amma must have sympathized deeply with this youthful fast. Had she not said during her youth that, in this kali yuga of wholesale suffering, she felt no hunger? The week ended and the intensity of the mood abated. Hyma started eating again. But the rawnerved and painful tenderness continued. More glimpses: a fledgling sparrow fell from its nest and broke its wing; Hyma reared it herself until it flew away on its own; an insect was in its death throes and Hyma wept bitterly. It is said that two things would invariably awaken her deepest pity—a motherless child and a childless mother. If anybody was criticized in gossip, if fun was poked at anyone for whatever reason, Hyma could not bear to hear it and left immediately. If anything she did or said inadvertently caused pain to another, Hyma would get no sleep at all, sometimes for days at a stretch. If she heard that someone was in trouble or in pain, she would run weeping to Mother and beg her to put the matter right. In a letter to Mother, Hyma wrote, “I pray that, wherever I am and whatever happens to me, you will bestow health and happiness on all.” The words of the great medieval tailor-saint Kabir—as quoted by Neem Karoli Baba—seem to be a singularly appropriate description of Hyma: “A saint’s heart melts like butter. No, it melts even more easily than butter. Butter melts only when you put it near the fire, but a saint’s heart melts whenever anybody’s heart comes near the fire.” Given such a tender nature, it was inevitable that suffering would be a constant and intimate companion for Hyma. It was something that she would come to know in all its shades and hues—physical pain and mental anguish, her own suffering and the suffering of those around her. And Hyma would not have had it any other way. Some are made to seek their own separate peace, their personal salvation, free from sorrow in a world of alarm and pain. But Hyma was not cast in that mold. Hyma was made in Amma’s mold—Amma, who when asked about her daughter’s frequent and painful illnesses, had replied sadly, “I only wanted to suffer it all myself.” We know for certain today that Amma did suffer for many years with the most painful knowledge that any mother can possibly have—the awareness of her daughter’s impending death. She gave clear hints of it at times. When relatives pressed her to arrange Hyma’s marriage at the usual age of sixteen, Mother replied that it should not even be considered until her twenty-fifth year. It was during the spring of Hyma’s twenty-fifth year that she became seriously ill after visiting the shrine of Sai Baba at Shirdi, en-route to her uncle’s residence at Aurangabad. The doctors in Aurangabad made the grim diagnosis—smallpox. When this news reached Jillellamudi, the entire village was plunged into grief. Sri B. Rama Sastry, the pundit who had mistakenly worshipped Hyma’s feet, went to Amma and pleaded for permission to make the long trip to Aurangabad, where he could minister to his ailing pupil. (Sri Sastry was Hyma’s Hindi and Sanskrit teacher.) But Mother would not allow it. “Your golden opportunity to serve her will come in the future,” she told him. It was not until he had become the first priest of Hyma’s temple that Sri Sastry would come to appreciate the import of these words. When worried neighbors and devotees came to express their concern to her, Mother answered that there were proper medical facilities in Aurangabad. And then added ominously, “Everything happens as it is ordained for her. It does not happen as we wish or as we suppose.” But few, if any, took the painful hint. On the 28th of March, Hyma returned to Jillellamudi. Her condition had improved so much that nearly everyone was elated. Everyone but Amma, that is. “You are happy that Hyma has been cured of the disease very quickly,” she remarked gravely to those who had come to her with their congratulations. “But that is not the usual course of the disease. It is not a good sign and I am skeptical.” True to Mother’s words, Hyma suffered an apparent relapse on the 1st of April. Severe shooting pains in the spine and a sensation of burning all over the body continued for several days and gradually intensified. By the 5th of April, Hyma’s condition had so deteriorated that people wanted to shift her to Guntur Hospital. But Amma resisted. “I don’t like the idea of moving her from the house. It will happen to her as ordained. She won’t die because of lack of medical care. She won’t live if she is not fated to do so.” And then she added, even more bluntly, “What can anyone do for her in her last moments. She is to live only a few more hours. The journey to Guntur would only aggravate her suffering.” But the desperate hope against hope of relatives and the advice of doctors prevailed. A car was brought to take Hyma to

Guntur some sixty kilometers away. But, as Amma had predicted, her condition worsened. Halfway through the journey, Hyma complained that she could not see anything anymore. Mother removed her nose-ring and asked, “Can you see me now, dear?” And, curiously, for the rest of trip Hyma could see Amma’s face, but nobody and nothing else. When the car reached the hospital, Amma pleaded once again, “Let’s turn back, at least now.” But her words were ignored in the general anxiety. Hyma was rushed upstairs to the emergency room, while Amma remained in the car. Oxygen was administered. There were a few minutes of desperate activity. Then Hyma cried out loudly, “Amma I am coming.” And it was finished. The body was taken downstairs to the car for the agonizing return journey to Jillellamudi. Hyma’s body was set out on the veranda of the family cottage for all to see. In a few minutes, the news had spread throughout the village, and a knot of people had gathered in mute disbelief. The initial sense of unreality soon gave way, and the air was filled with tortured moans and cries. A few wallowed in the dirt like griefstricken elephants. Others just stared at the body, as if grappling to convince themselves of the unthinkable, that the one who had quietly endeared herself to all was with them no more. For most of that day and the following morning, Amma remained in seclusion. When she finally came out, Mother appeared gaunt and weakened by her sorrow. Some of those who had been standing vigil outside the house burst into tears on seeing her. A few made attempts to console Amma. One of them gave voice to the unspoken feelings of many, wondering out loud, “Why has it happened like this, even to you?” Mother turned and answered calmly, “I wanted it this way and then got it done. Nobody else is responsible for this. I made the dagger. And then, with that dagger, I stabbed myself.” When Nannagaru had suggested earlier in the morning that they should get ready for the cremation, Amma had replied, “Where did she go? I will bury her at this very spot. That would satisfy everyone, including me.” In fulfillment of this wish, a pit was dug some thirty feet in front of the entrance to Amma’s hut, and all of the necessary ritual articles were assembled there for the obsequies. By late afternoon, the stage was fully set for the final act. Amma made her entrance through the throng of villagers and devotees with chilling dignity, appearing like the Goddess of Sorrow, as some would describe her later, the very image of a fathomless, archetypal grief. For a few heartrending moments, Amma stood by the edge of the grave pit and gazed slowly around her at all who had gathered to witness the last rites. Her eyes were opaque, glazed over like two massive and frozen tears. Then she turned to the body and set to work smearing Hyma’s hair with camphor, and making use of the other sacred substances arranged in the trays and vessels before her to anoint and bless the body for the last time. Amma cut her finger on the sharp edge of a coconut that she had just broken as an offering. She placed her bleeding finger between Hyma’s eyebrows, where she had daily put a dot of kum-kum, and left the stain of her own blood as the final benediction of an undying oneness and love. The ritual continued with a ceremonial oil-bath for Hyma’s body. Amma garlanded her daughter and tied a fresh spray of fragrant jasmine to her hair, as is the daily custom with South Indian women. Strangely, Hyma’s body, which had been stiff with postmortem rigor just moments before, was now supple and soft. Mother easily placed her in the yogic posture called siddhasana, facing eastward at the bottom of the pit. Hyma appeared every inch the yogini engaged in perpetual meditation, as some were to recall. Indeed, the heavy pallor of death had lifted. The onlookers found it difficult to believe that it was not a living and conscious being that now sat in her final resting place. A most unusual transformation had come over Amma. As she vigorously set about her work, Mother’s earlier sorrow seemed to vanish like an early morning haze in the rays of the sun. She moved briskly and instructed those around her with a ringing confidence and authority. Amma lips were pursed in a half-smile, and it was as if a strange, compelling power bristled from her every word and act. The change of mood was electric. People who had been weeping bitterly before could not now suppress a growing elation. The last rites took on the semblance of a celebration. It was as if the participants sensed that they were somehow witnesses, not of an ending, but of a wondrous beginning. Amma herself gave expression to this sentiment when she remarked to those near her, “Nobody should feel sorry about what’s happened. Hyma hasn’t gone anywhere. She is here with us. This place will become a seat of spiritual power, where people will engage in meditation and prayer. The heart’s desire of so many will be fulfilled at this very spot.” For some time, Mother stood at the edge of the pit with her foot resting on the crown of Hyma’s head. When Doctor Potiuri Subba Rao prepared to take a photograph of this, Amma gestured toward the pit and asked, “Should I also get in?” Then she smiled and remarked somewhat wistfully, as if to herself, “How can I get in? Haven’t I got some more things to do? I can’t stay here.” Mother gazed down at her foot on Hyma’s head and said, “My fire has entered her. My foot is getting roasted by the heat. The pulse may also return–but what would be so surprising about that?” Amma gestured for the doctor to check. To his amazement, Hyma’s body was indeed hot to the touch. And, incredibly, her chest heaved visibly, as Doctor Subba Rao and several others who

were nearby could easily observe.2 Mother lay her own gold bangles in the grave, picked up a plaited hand fan and began to fan Hyma’s flushed body. Meanwhile, devotees were filing past with offerings of vibuti, kum-kum and flowers which they tossed into the pit. Once again, Mother turned to those around her, this time to speak poignantly of Hyma and of herself. “She is now in the place from whence she came. She has returned to her source. If you ask me whether I am suffering and weeping, I say yes, I am weeping, I am suffering. As I cover myself when it is cold and fan myself when it is hot, so sorrow comes and I weep. I don’t try to quell my tears. My sacred duty is to do precisely what has to be done at each and every moment. Because I have a body, because I’m flesh and blood like the rest of you, I’m experiencing the cold and the heat. Because I am in your midst, these are inevitable. I wanted to stay for a while, so I am staying—otherwise, all of these (heat and cold, sorrow and joy) wouldn’t exist. I don’t think that all of you are not myself. I have come in this form because I wanted to be near you. A while back there was sorrow, so I wept. Now I no longer feel it. When I came out, thinking that this was my sacred duty, sorrow left me.” For some time, Amma sat quietly at the edge of the pit with her eyes closed. When she opened them up again, she looked toward Doctor Subba Rao and quipped, “If I sit like this, people will say that I‘m transmitting power.” “That is exactly what I am going to say!” the doctor answered with a smile. Then Mother offered another coconut and placed sacred ash on the top of Hyma’s head. At just this moment, the electricity failed. The lights that had been strung up on poles around the pit blinked off, leaving the area in total darkness. When they came on again a few minutes later,. Mother pointed to the flow of blood coming from the uppermost crown of Hyma’s head, the place which yogic science calls the sahasra padma.(the “thousand-petaled lotus,” the highest of all the chakras, and the final barrier which must be crossed before the individual soul can merge with the infinite). At which point, Mother covered the pit with a white silk sari and turned to Doctor Subba Rao: “Doctor, my work is over,” she said. Then, together with her husband, Amma waved a tray of burning camphor as a final tribute before the grave.