The Mother Divine
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In the Rg Vedic Devi Sukta, the Mother says, mysteriously, “I give birth to my own Father”. Children imitate their mothers. Thus, we would like to mimic the Great Goddess and claim “We have given birth to our own “THE MOTHER”” in cyber-space. But, it would be difficult to say that the present re-birth of The Mother is indeed a product of human labour alone. Quite simply, it isn’t.

In any case, the Bhagavadgita (XVIII.14) tells us that, for every human action, there are five causal conditions: the location, the agent, the various types of instruments or tools, the endeavour or effort, and the Divine (daivam). We have relied a great deal on the Divine to work in ways which, though inscrutable in their operation, are surely discernible in their manifestation.

An untrained sadhak may not be quick to the recognition of an inspiration that comes from above, but he can rely on the tradition of such preparedness for grace and hope for his mortal affairs, if not regularly, at least occasionally, to come ablaze with the divine spark.

This preparedness or staying in wait, in readiness and anticipation for the Touch of God—as Sri Aurobindo writes in the Savitri:
The conscious dolls are pushed a thousand times
And feels the push but not the hand that drives

has been a part of the priceless heritage of India. That is one of the reasons that nothing gets done fast here. Things take time. Remember Leo Tolstoy’s exquisite short story “God sees the Truth but waits”. Unlike other civilizations—drunk with their hubris of do-it-yourself “independence”—quick to rise and quick to fall, the Indian civilization—like Indian metropolitan city-traffic—moves slowly, in humble recognition of our “dependence” on God, the “hand that drives”—the giver of the first push as well as the finishing touch to any work we may undertake.

Speaking of “undertaking”, the initiatives we take forgetting our metaphysical dependence on God the Mother may initially lead to a few fast bucks and fast glory, but the paths of that glory lead but to the grave. Perhaps that is why English word for the burial-manager and the coffin-maker is “undertaker”. Isn’t English a wonderfully spiritual language?!!!.

The peasant of this land depends as much on God for the rain as he does for the strength and fortitude needed to plough. Sages of yore have spoken of the efficacy of grace with greater vigour and keenness than the causality of hard work.

In his introduction to The Autobiography of an Indian Monk by Shri Purohit Swami, W.B. Yeats writes.
“...During the lunch he (Shri Purohit Swami) and I, Sturge Moore, and an attaché from the Egyptian Legation, exceedingly well-read in European literature, discussed his plans and ideas. The attaché, born into a Jewish family that had lived among Mohammedans for generations, seemed more Christian in his point of view than Moore or myself. Presently the attaché said, “Well, I suppose what matters is to do all the good one can.”

“By no means,” said the monk. “If you have the object you may help some few people, but you will have a bankrupt soul. I must do what my Master bids, the responsibility is His.”

This sentence, spoken without any desire to startle, interested me the more because I had heard the like from other Indians. Once when I stayed in Wilfred Blunt’s I talked to an exceedingly religious Mohammedan, kept there that he might not run himself into political trouble in India. He spoke of the coming independence of India, but declared that India would never organise. “There are only three eternal nations, he said, “India, Persia, China; Greece organised and Greece is dead.” I remembered too that an able Indian doctor I met when questioning London Indians about Tagore said of a certain Indian leader. “We do not think him sincere; he taught virtues merely because he thought them necessary to India.” This care for the spontaneity of the soul seems to me Asia at its finest and where it is most different from Europe, the explanation perhaps why it has confronted our moral earnestness and control of Nature with its asceticism and its courtesy.”

This thing about Indian spiritualist’s panache for allowing things to happen by divine intervention, and to cause it, or facilitate it, by not organising things, or not organising them too much, so that the operation of the divine is not blocked out, has been a subject of great interest among the sadhaks. In this conscious reluctance to plan things, and avoid Sankalpa, does the Indian sage coax His Will that needs to be done? The Biblical moola-mantraThe Lord’s Prayer” has this familiar but puzzling line “Thy will be done!” What is the point of telling God, let alone praying to Him that His will be done? I had asked this question to a Jesuit Roman Catholic bhakta. And he gave the most brilliant reply “In case the prayer comes true, we should not think that this happened because we prayed and tried for it to happen, but because it was, Your will, God, not mine (na mama). We pray in advance for the wisdom to remember that.” Thus, one could say, that the puzzling prayer "Thy will be done" means the same as what "namah" means, for the Shastras tell us that "namah" is an abbreviation of "na-mama". Even as we bow down to our Master, when we say or write "tasmai Sri Gurave Namah", we could remember this lesson from the Bible and take that "namaskara" to mean "To that Guru, I say "Thy will be done, not mine".

Those who were close have noticed in Sri Sri Sitaramdas Omkarnath a deep reluctance to follow through sankalpas which would play in his mind for some time; he would share these with the intimate disciples, but would never complain if they did not get properly organized.

Even Swami Vivekananda who was perceived as such a great organizer, depended utterly on God's/Goddesse's will. His master had waited long for the disciple and plainly lived by the will of Mother Kali. When, towards the end of his life, Swamiji sat in Khir Bhavani temple in Kashmir, and ruefully ruminated on devastation of the Divine Mother’s temple by the foreign invaders, he had to be scolded by the Goddess in the form of a cosmic chastisement “Think about it, DO YOU PROTECT ME or DO I PROTECT YOU?”

This tendency of following a higher light in Indian saints has often been characterised by two simultaneous drives: one curtailing the velocity of the impulse to do good and the other insistent upon following inner inspirations and commands. Doing Guru’s work was seen by many as an instrument to get more of the latter.

A typical obsessive philanthropist often and shamelessly asks of an unwavering meditator-sadhak, “If you are a man of God, why aren’t you attending to the immediate concerns of the poor and the underprivileged? How can you lock yourself up in Himalayan caverns while the humanity at large is suffering?” All that the sage has to do is to smile back saying, “Such indeed is God’s will!” And this is by no means an apologia.

A careful study of the workings of saints of this land would reveal that it is only middle-rung saints and public Gurus who get sucked into obsessive huge operations of "doing good to society" and "establishing Dharma Rajya" etc. Sri Sri Sitaramdas Omkarnath used to say "As the Driver wishes, let's see what he has in stock for us, meanwhile we shall follow the Shastric advice a-sankalpaad jaayet kaamanm (win over Desire by not making resolutions).

Returning to the words of Sri Purohit Swami. “If you have the object you may help some few people, but you will have a bankrupt soul. I must do what my Master bids, the responsibility is His.” We find in this a greater emphasis being laid on furnishing the immeasurable well of divine blessing while squandering one’s charitable impulse. Thus the reluctance or the studied silence of several saints of this land is far from being a sign of moral indigence, it is in fact a practice of vigilance retained to inspire greater good.

Let us all submit ourselves to the intelligence that is beyond and above us, and tread with caution depending as Sri Purohit Swami did, and WB Yeats so perceptively recognised, on the Master’s biddings, as the Master depended on the Mother’s biddings. We shall be able to manage the e-journal The Mother, if we let ourselves be managed by Our Master, who let Himself be managed, in turn, by His Master.

When, once, in the 1960s, there was a huge gathering of dignitaries and devotees to felicitate Sri Sri Thakur Sitaramdas Omkarnath, in Kolkata, and famous scholars and intellectuals gave speeches to extol his contribution to society and philosophy, Sri Sri Thakur humbly, but firmly, gratefully but protestingly, replied by simply reciting one verse from his own longer poem:
“Say “Victory”—Jai Jai—to Him, if you have to sing “victory” to anyone,
To that Supreme Pursha, Purushottama, who plays the flute.
This frail little empty bamboo pipe! Can it make music, can it emit any sound?
Unless He, the flute-player, does not breathe all the melodies into it”?

We bring you the August-October issue of The Mother. You may have noticed newer contributions which speak of an unstinting support that several leaders of Sanatana Dharma are offering to this Dharma Patrika. We are grateful to all the readers for spreading the word. You can do more by simply clicking. The links below each article can be clicked for facebook like or share (you must have a facebook account), google+ (you must have a gmail account) or tweet (you must have a twitter account)

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Raj Supe (Kinkar Vishwashreyananda)
The Editor