Mom of Us All

Our neighbor’s automobile door was badly scratched. The householder, a dentist, had sandpapered the broken space on the driver-side door, however that had solely served to spotlight the necessity for the entire door to be repainted. The little boy I used to be at the moment, usually inattentive to considerations about vehicles, couldn’t assist however discover the massive blemish on what was in any other case a spic-and-span, upper-middle-class Nineteen Sixties car.

One morning my good friend and I had been merrily enjoying on the street. Rapidly the dentist’s household erupted from their home: father, mom, and the 2 older daughters, who jogged my memory of Cinderella’s stepsisters in Disney’s animated function.

They referred to as us and requested us if we had, perchance, broken their automobile. My good friend was fast to vanish. “I’ve nothing to do with it,” he mentioned, and in a second he was gone.

I, too, wished to go, however the household took benefit of my sluggish decision-making by cornering me and unleashing a sequence of accusations.

“I noticed you do it, on the bicycle of… (adopted by the title of a woman I didn’t know)!”

“We all know that you simply did it, and you must cease mendacity about it!”

“Simply confess, and all the things will likely be OK!”

Ultimately I confessed to the offense. Their animosity melted, they usually grew to become the soul of kindness. My worry was gone. I went house and forgot all about it.

That night, nevertheless, the dentist rang our doorbell. He got here to assert the cash for his automobile restore! My father was a bit cross with me, not due to the alleged mischief I had been making, however as a result of I had failed to inform him about it.

That omission, after all, had not been intentional. Since I had not dedicated the crime, I had merely forgotten about it. In any case, my father paid for the harm, and that appeared to be the top of the matter.

Some years later, nevertheless, it got here up once more throughout a second of calm dialog with my mom. Such shut, casual events arose generally. I used to be mendacity on the sofa and he or she was sitting beside me.

“Have been you actually the one who broken the dentist’s automobile again then?” she requested out of the blue.

“No, I wasn’t,” I responded.

“I by no means thought you had been,” she answered. “He merely didn’t need to pay for that costly automobile restore himself.”

And that was actually the top of the matter!

This dialog stands out among the many many reminiscences I’ve of my mom. There have been no classes connected to it. She didn’t speak in regards to the elementary unreliability of human nature or issues like that. Nor did she attempt to tune in to how I felt about the way in which these neighbors had harassed me. She calmly confirmed some intuitive information of who I used to be, thus giving me a sense of security and happiness.

This trifling childhood tragedy got here to thoughts once I re-read a chapter from Swami Kriyananda’s e-book, The Hindu Approach of Awakening. I’ll in all probability learn that chapter, “The Divine Mom,” many instances over. In it, Swami relates an expertise that he had together with his personal mom:

After I was solely 9 years previous, the physician advisable that I be despatched away to high school in Switzerland for my well being. Our household lived in Romania—a universe away, it appeared to me. I had grown up talking English, German, and Romanian, however no French, which was the language of my new setting. I used to be homesick, and desperately sad.

After which, after a number of months, Mom came around me. I first noticed her strolling up the road from the prepare station, her very stride demonstrating her eagerness to be once more with me. Oh, what pleasure I felt! Even as we speak, that flash of reminiscence brings tears to my eyes.

From reminiscences like these, we are able to really develop a revolutionary, new method to God: extract all the things associated to motherhood from our personal life experiences and make it the primary focus of our devotion. On this course of, we should transcend the ups and downs that are inclined to afflict each human relationship and meditate on the golden nucleus: unconditional love. Visualize this love in ways in which that enchantment to you, let it develop into your Divine, your actual Mom. Regularly she’s going to emerge from the dream realm of your unconscious thoughts; she’s going to enlarge your perceptions of actuality, because the restricted sources of your little self will likely be augmented by the infinite sources of your personal higher Self. She’s going to remodel your consciousness and alter your life as no particular person on earth may ever do.

It might take some effort. Paramhansa Yogananda, in his Autobiography of a Yogi, relates how he processed the traumatic lack of his earthly mom on the age of 11. For years he stormed the gates of Heaven, earlier than She appeared to offer him phrases of ultimate, definitive therapeutic:

Many instances have I fed thee with milk
From the breasts of many moms.
This time, the loving black eyes of your mom,
Although misplaced for a short while,
Have been nobody else however I, My very Self.
All the time have I cherished you, ever shall I really like you.

For hundreds of years, our relationship with God has been troubled by threats of everlasting damnation, of authentic sin, of imprisonment and spiritual constrictions. Now Yogananda is providing us a brand new, much more luminous possibility: a relationship that’s not one between a convict and his judges, however somewhat between a baby and his Cosmic Mom.

This new method might effectively have been an important guideline that Swami Kriyananda realized from his Guru, and he’s passing it on to all those that really feel in tune together with his discipleship. It’s the core precept on which he constructed Ananda Sangha.

After Swamiji had completed writing his chapter on Divine Mom, he printed it and introduced it to the Temple of Gentle, right here at Ananda Assisi, to offer one among his most memorable satsangs ever. He spoke in Italian in regards to the specialness of motherhood in nature: how a mom suffers to offer beginning after which enters a circulate of giving that’s her true nature. He wasn’t idealizing human moms. He was considering the essence of motherhood itself.

At a sure level, within the circulate of enthusiasm, Swami appeared to neglect us, his viewers; he spoke on to Her, his Divine Mom, on phrases extra intimate than all of us had been accustomed to. However his phrases and the tone of his voice epitomized an method to God that’s open for all of us to discover:

I’ve given my life to you, he mentioned, all the things I’m, all the things I’ve carried out. You can not reject me. You MUST come!

Unique Submit: July 9, 2023 / anandaeurope.org