A homage to Mother Meera
Alicia Torres, poet, essayist and translator, was born in 1960 and has lived in London, San Francisco and India. A Jungian-oriented psychotherapist, she holds a private practice in Caracas, where she was born and now lives.
In this week’s guest post for The Culturium, Alicia recounts her deeply moving and heartfelt experience of receiving silent darshan from Mother Meera, an embodiment of the Divine Feminine.
OM MA
A humming inner sound, an ultra-high vibration. The air sizzles. She is coming.
oOo
Mother is above all, an extraordinary atmosphere. You can feel it all about you, a boiling of all the possibilities. High energy.
My body knows it is in the realm of the extraordinary.
oOo
Ma, Ma, Ma. Your body is made of the stuff of our yearning. Millions of voices begging the Light to release the Beautiful among us. Are we deserving?
My being is at the same time taut as a guitar string in its alertness, and very porous to the promise of Her presence.
She comes.
oOo
On seeing Mother the first thing that one notices is how small she is. She comes in looking demurely down, looking at no one. She sits swiftly and the first person kneels before her. She means business.
How can anybody be businesslike and majestic at the same time?
But this is Divine business.
After a while she looks monumental, bigger than life. To me she is like a sacred mountain, she has the same kind of solidity, the same kind of stability: spiritual mass.
I will never forget the shock I felt the first time I touched her feet. The sensation traversed my whole body. It was like touching the unbelievably ancient roots of a big tree. I had never had the sensation of anything more solid and rooted in my life. Those felt like feet where upon the whole creation could stand.
One night, many years ago, I had a dream where she took me firmly by the hand taking me somewhere, and Her hand had exactly the same feeling.
I have often wondered about the traditional Indian worship of the feet of the Guru. The Guru’s feet connects him or her to the ground, to this earth we inhabit, to us.
I am not Indian, but after touching Mother’s feet, I understood something.
oOo
She comes in.
When she is nearing the room, something like a shiver goes through that one single body of Her devotees, as if we were one large animal bristling its skin. Like an ocean wave, we all stand up respectfully.
She comes in.
We have all been waiting in silence for about 20 minutes, and then, She comes in.
On seeing Mother, one of the first things that one notices is how beautiful she is. A burning jewel.
The last time I had seen her, before this one, was seven years ago. She seems to have grown younger and even lovelier. Is that possible?
It does seem right to think that the transforming Divine Light flowing from Her is polishing her body into the perfect image of the all-adored Goddess.
oOo
Mother means business. No music, no superfluous images to distract the senses. The whole procedure looks almost stark in its simplicity and austerity. But can there be anything else? Her presence saturates the big hall almost unbearably.
Hers is an extraordinary presence that lets itself be known about 40 minutes or so before one actually gets to the place were She is. What would that be in miles? I have always been very bad with numbers. The first time I went to Thalheim, it was with a friend; we drove all the way from England in an old Volkswagen campervan. It was past midnight and we were exhausted, thinking that we might had taken a wrong turn somewhere and were lost. Running, as my friend said, on pure Shakti, since the gas should had exhausted hours ago.
Suddenly, we both started feeling this tingling energy, this bubbly, sizzling feeling in the air and in our bodies. The tender power. We were amazed and exited. After a few minutes we could see in a road sign that we were very near. This was totally unexpected, but we learned how to recognize it: “Mother-energy”.
About a year after this visit, I was in India. I knew that Mother was in her Madanapalle home, but had been warned that she was very private there and didn’t receive visitors. I was respectful of that and didn’t try to go there, happy to know that I was in the same continent, but also sad and a bit frustrated about not being able to see her, being so relatively close.
One night, after spending some days in Puttaparthi, I was sized with the intense desire to leave the town and get back to Pondicherry. I packed my rucksack and jumped on to the first overnight bus heading to Chennai. It promised to be a hellish ride, arriving at my destination at midday the next day.
That night, also near midnight, half asleep, I started getting the unmistakable bubbly feeling in the air, in my body. I looked out in wonder. The flat Indian landscape had turned into gently rolling small hills, fairy-tale like. Dark shadows over the dark, thick atmosphere of the night, made softer by a starry sky. I feel the “Mother-energy” still stronger, and at the same time I overhear an Indian woman talking softly to her companion saying the name, “Madanapalle”.
My heart jumps. It cannot be. Although with Mother, anything goes. I call the man who oversees the trip going up and down the isle every now and then when more awake. He was chatting up the driver so that he wouldn’t fall asleep. He comes and I ask, “Is the bus passing through Madanapalle?” He moves his head in that ineffable way Indians have that can be so annoying to Westerners when pressed to know definitely about something. He must have seen something in my face because he completed: “Yes, we stop there in half an hour or so,” with another head weaving.
Amazing.
I was there in the Madanapalle bus station, in the hush of midnight, for about 10 minutes, steeped in Her energy, smiling to myself blissed out about Her sense of humour, Her kindness, Her sense of the serendipitous (Mother must have invented the word) and my luck. The wonder.
There is another place where I have felt the same quality of light atmosphere: the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.
oOo
June. South Germany is hotter than Venezuela today. I did not have any short-sleeved T-shirt and I have to wear one that I am taking to my nephew as a souvenir from the Hanover Expo. It says “MENCH” in large white letters— “people” in German. I find it funny that I have to see Mother with something written on my chest.
When it is one’s turn to stand up and sit on the waiting chair to get Mother’s Darshan, one knows unmistakably. My heart starts pounding erratically. I am afraid I will have a heart attack. This is the sign for me, and from what I have heard, many devotees feel something similar.
It is the heart that leads. It knows what we don’t and hears the call. It is the heart that goes and sits at Her feet. The rest we drag, we push, everything else is ambiguous about transformation, but the heart is always itself, and it knows.
I stand before her briefly in an awkward namaste that she doesn’t see because Her eyes are lowered, waiting for me to kneel so that She can take my head into Her hands. She touches me. I feel only an intense, intimate love that softens me into something infinitely pliable. I do not know if it is my love for Her or Her love for me. I just know that for some seconds I am inside Love.
The first time she ever held my head, I almost jumped when I felt something like a low voltage electrical discharge coming out of her hands. I was very surprised. It never happened again, neither do I expect it to be repeated. Just as the melting love of this summer.
I know enough as not to expect Her to repeat Herself.
oOo
Second Darshan.
On Friday I had felt like waiting almost until most people had passed to go to her, needing to wash out first, in silent patient waiting, some of the extrovert energy that I still had in me from the week before, when I had had to read poetry at some big events at the Hanover Expo.
On Saturday, I feel eager, like a child that cannot wait to get into her Mother’s lap when she comes back home after having been out. My heart drags me there to be one of the first.
She is wearing a Durga-red sari, and she is like a blazing, golden-red flower of fire, burning within Her intense silence.
I touch Her feet and this time I forget myself. There is not a “me”, I can’t remember anything, only standing back a little so that we can look into each other’s eyes. I get lost in the molten gold of those eyes, as if at sea.
Mother’s eyes are extraordinary, and it is not only their obvious striking beauty, it is because of the quality of that gaze. I find it totally abstract and impersonal, like looking into a storm or the starry sky, and at the same time, infinitely intimate, with the intimacy of eyes that know you more than you know yourself.
Still, I guess It is never an altogether human gaze, precisely because this intimacy of knowledge is reserved for the gods. And maybe for true lovers, at moments of enlightened and infinitely human tenderness.
Mother’s eyes are a phenomenon and you cannot escape them.
Many people have perceived them coming alive in the photos. It has never happened to me, since I am kind of thick for that kind of open-eyed psychic experience, but I can well understand why others are launched into that experience.
oOo
I am writing to the rhythm of the music composed and played by a friend that has lived with Mother for more than 20 years. He has in his demeanor, at the same time, childlike freshness and spontaneity, and an almost brooding, very mature unsentimentality. I trust him.
His new music tells me a bit about the inner places she has taken him. Deeper into Joy and Energy. I never ask too much. I prefer to respect Mystery. I can see by what he says to me that she also talks very little in normal life. She unfolds Her work in a wordless canvas of pure action. It all happens in life.
Often I have wondered about my relation to Her Silence. I am a person of words, but it is her very silence that nourished me since the beginning. Although I remember my mind resenting Her some times: “Why doesn’t she just pick up the phone?” Imagine the scene? Either total speechlessness or an overflowing of neurotic demandingness. Maybe I am wrong. In any case, I tell myself that the silence gives me, or demands of me, the possibility of a sharper focus, the effort of an inward seeing that must get more and more real and unadorned.
oOo
What else can I say about you, Ma? You are the Mysterious Itself. A force that changes everything. My life is never the same around the time I go to see you.
The first time, even the dust beneath my feat was not the same any more.
Friends ask, “How was your visit to Mother Meera?” And I am always at a loss for words because as an “event” it is either absolutely extraordinary, or terribly ordinary—not really much to say. I tell some that one must look for Mother in sudden or progressive inner expansion and an outer melting of obstacles, a stepping into a field of increased awareness, or at least, that is how She affects me. That, and an intensely synchronistic mode of experience. Doesn’t She say: “Be always ready to wonder and accept miracle?” There is a reason.
oOo
She leaves.
After a few minutes of waiting to make sure that everybody has had their Darshan, Mother stands up and leaves, business done, in the same smooth stride that she enters.
The air is redolent of her psychic fragrance. I feel drunk.
I know it will probably be years before I can see Her again.
“You can pray for the Light to stay,” She has said.
I still have to find the words.
Post Notes
- Mother Meera’s official website
- Mother Meera’s official website UK
- Alicia Torres’ profile on BigBridge.org
- Alicia Torres’ poetry on Thing.net
- Gabriel Rosenstock: To Thine Own Self Be True
- Mahapajapati Gotami: Mother of All
