Conversations with
the Divine Mother of the Universe
“If you think the Infinite is impersonal, then you have not met Her.” – Fred LaMotte
In 2002 when I had the idea to write my first book, The Mystic Christ, I asked Amma to tell me if I should do this. She said yes. Then came Soft Moon Shining which is a book of devotional poetry to the Divine Mother and, again, I asked if it was a good idea to publish this book and, again, she said yes. When the third book came along, Finding God’s Love, I asked her if I had her approval to publish any number of books about the Divine Mother and again, she said yes. I thought a blanket approval would save having to bother her each time I wrote a book. Therefore, Amma, who is omniscient, has given her approval to the writing of this book.
When I first met Amma in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1988, I had previously been following the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj for about ten years. I was practicing self-inquiry and neti-neti (discrimination) and was fortunate enough, by the grace of the Beloved, to have some non-dual experiences.
It was Amma who put me on the path of bhakti or devotion to the Beloved the first time I met her. At my first encounter with Amma, I explained that I had been a follower of the non-dual path and that I regarded Ramana Maharshi as my guru and did she have any suggestions for my practice? She looked in my eyes for maybe five seconds as though scanning or reading a book. She told me that the practice of jnana or non-duality was dry like eating stones and therefore difficult to traverse. She advised me to learn to love God and to have actual tears for God. This was a shock to me. I had come to believe the standard non-duality doctrine that there was only one Self and so there were no individual persons and there were no gods and goddesses. There is only the one Self.
The venue was a large, white tent in the mountains above Santa Fe, New Mexico. At the second meeting with Amma, which was the following morning, I arrived early to get a seat on the front row. There were approximately 30 people attending due to the fact that she was not known in the US and it was a weekday morning when many people were at their jobs.
There was an isle up the center of the tent with a short peetham or sitting platform at the head of it. She was elevated perhaps a foot off the ground. She arrived walking toward the front of the tent, beaming and touching hands with those who were standing next to the isle. She had a soft, other-worldly smile that seemed to radiate or express a deep inner bliss. She was, in fact, love incarnate.
She sat down on the platform and looked first to my left and then slowly she scanned the crowd moving her head to my right. She looked directly at me and that’s when it happened. Suddenly, I was not just looking at Amma’s eyes, I was looking through her eyes and I was seeing and, more importantly, experiencing the Divine Mother of the Universe. This completely blew my socks off!
Information and awareness were cascading into me like a waterfall. I was understanding intuitively that Amma was really a mask that the Divine Mother had donned in order to communicate with us earthlings. I understood that anywhere love and compassion were being expressed there was the direct presence of the Divine Mother. Furthermore, I was seeing clearly that the Divine Mother had created the entire universe as an act of devotion to the Absolute – the same Self I had been pursuing in my quest for non-duality.
The universe was artistic, poetic, musical, theatrical – it was all art – it was all art! Divinely inspired art. I wondered how much love it had taken to motivate her, compel her, to create the entire universe as an offering. It was beyond anything I had ever considered.
I was seeing without doubt that the Divine Mother was the primal devotee. In this way, Amma was showing me how to proceed with her instructions to learn to cry to God with tears of bliss. I began my bhakti practices by visualizing the Divine Mother in a Mother Mary form with long white robes trimmed in turquoise. Over the following 30 years she changed forms in my meditations twice more but that is a story for another telling.
This is how Amma teaches. All of these experiences and the unfolding of love for the Divine Mother which occurred in the following years under Amma’s tutelage, and by her grace, are described in detail in your author’s spiritual autobiographical book Into the Mystic.
The purpose for Conversations is to explore a path for increasing happiness and decreasing suffering. It is your author’s firm conviction that there is nothing happier than loving the Divine Mother (or the Beloved in any other form) and that this love is the eventual solution to all mental and emotional suffering as well as the end of wars and all social strife. Divine love is the nectar of immortality. It is the boundless ocean of bliss that waits at the core of every being. It is the ultimate cure for all the suffering and miseries of human existence. However:
It is something that must be felt
to be understood.
Your author has a burning desire to communicate this love or, at least, to convey the possibility of this love to any who care to listen.
Therefore, it is hoped that the words and intent in this book will foster a sense of closeness and kindle an awareness of accessibility to the Divine Mother. We want to develop the feeling of the Mother’s immanence and to become absorbed in a sense of intimacy with the Mother who sees all of our thoughts and knows all of our actions. She is always with us and ready to listen.
In other words, it is your author’s desire to communicate to whomever wishes to listen, the light and love of his own experience and relationship with the Divine Mother. Your author is now 33 years along in having stepped into the river of love that flows between himself and the Divine Mother. This would not have occurred had it not been for Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi), your author’s guru, who is the very incarnation of the Divine Mother. It is solely by Amma’s grace that this book exists. It took Amma to pull out her Bic (lighter) and light the fuse.
The Divine Mother is my best friend. She is as real and as close and as accessible as any human person could be. When this life comes to an end, there will be only the Divine Mother and another play begins. Everything else comes and goes but the Divine Mother does not. She is eternal. I wish that I could express how deeply I love her and how blissful that love is and how I feel her love for me but I know words can never do this. So, the best I can do is say, “Walk down this path and do this and that and you will find her and experience her love and bliss directly.”
As previously stated, I regard Amma, my guru, as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. And not just any incarnation, but the most powerful incarnation of the Divine Mother ever to appear on this earth. In the history of the world, no one has done as much for so many in such a short amount of time. Amma is an exceedingly powerful and radiant beacon of love and compassion. Reading the biography of Mata Amritanandamayi a.k.a. Amma is a wonderful insight into the being of the Divine Mother. The biography is available on Amazon® (do a search for Mata Amritanandamayi a Biography). In addition, it can be purchased here: www.ammashop.com.
Love is the medium that connects us to the Divine Mother and so developing love or devotion for the Mother is what establishes and then enlarges our conduit of communication. When we feel Her love for us, we know that we have connected. The content of these “conversations” is a road map.
The topics discussed herein are simply things to contemplate and by so doing, we may begin to feel the exquisite tidal flow of bliss and well-being that is the very essence of the Divine Mother. Truly, it is something one must feel to understand and we must make an effort to feel it. It is well worth it to venture forward and it is your author’s hope that the pages in this book will be an encouragement to walk down the path of love for and with the Divine Mother of the Universe.
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