by Ram Dass: At one point Maharaji said, “See everything as the Mother and you will know God.” What was he talking about, seeing your mother in everything?
We Westerners have our share of relationship complexities with our mothers, with interpretations galore courtesy of Dr. Freud. The view of the mother in India is different. The country is called Mother India. A Western devotee once told Maharaji he hated his mother, and nobody understood what he was saying. The concept didn’t make it across the cultural barrier. In India the mother is so deeply respected and revered, there was no way that statement could be understood. There is an Indian saying that there may be bad children, but there are no bad mothers.
The Divine Mother, the Goddess, has many dimensions. In the broadest sense consciousness and energy, eternal spirit and matter are male and female. Out of the One in the first glimmer of duality comes purusha, the formless spirit, and prakriti, the cosmic energy that coalesces into form. As God and Goddess they are Shiva, who personifies pure absolute consciousness and the seed of procreation, and Shakti, who manifests infinite forms.
Seeing the world as the Mother, seeing everything as her manifestation, involves a shift in perception. The way you go about your daily life may be the same, eating, sleeping, defecating, reproducing, socializing, gratifying your senses, earning your livelihood, solving problems, contributing to society, relieving suffering. But you see it all as a child sheltered in the loving arms of your Mother, who is all creation. The blue sky is her mind, the green leaves pulse with her blood, the wind is her breath, the rain, her water of life. She is Gaia, the Earth Mother, but also subtler than that.
By telling us to see everything as the Mother, I think Maharaji meant us to use every detail of life as grist for the mill of our spiritual development. Every experience is a mirror reflecting where we are in our consciousness and our work of the moment. In the compassionate embrace of the Mother the layers of old habits, preconceptions, and residues of past experiences can dissolve in the ocean of maternal affection.
