Ananda Sangha of Portland--God as the Divine Mother by Swami Kriyananda

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God as the Divine Mother
A talk given by J. Donald Walters (Swami Kriyananda) at New Renaissance Bookshop, Portland, Oregon, January 12, 1996.

Part I | Part II | Part III

in our culture today don’t have much awareness of the Mother aspect of God. I didn’t know it existed until I read Autobiography of a Yogi back in 1948. I was so moved by the book that I took the next bus from New York to Los Angeles to meet Yogananda. He was lecturing at the Hollywood Church at the time, but when I went there, they said his appointments were booked solid for the next two months.

I felt pretty bleak about this, and was standing there sadly wondering what to do next. I suppose I needed to learn humility, because until then the doors had opened easily for me in everything I’d tried to do. It was good karma, perhaps, but here was the one thing I really wanted, and the doors seemed to be closed. I thought, “Maybe I’m not ready,” which was a novel thought for me at that time!

Then I decided, “I’ll just meditate, pray, and wait until I can see him.” Just as I was about to walk out of the church, the secretary who was arranging the appointments came running up to me and said, “Since you’ve come such a long distance, I’ll ask the Master if he can fit you into his schedule.”

Master agreed to see me. When I went into his interview room, he said to me, “I want you to know that I didn’t see you because you’ve come from such a long distance. There was a lady here last week who came from Sweden, and I didn’t feel to see her. I will see people only if Divine Mother tells me to, and Divine Mother told me to see you.” This was my first personal experience with the concept of God as Divine Mother.

As I think back, I wonder whether a saint would have said, “I will ask the Heavenly Father if I should see you.” Somehow the Mother aspect of God is more personal. You have confidence in the mother, whereas the father has more to do with law, justice—he’s a bit more removed. Yogananda used to say, “When you pray to God as the Mother, pray, ‘Naughty or good, I am still your child. You must receive me.’”

Someone introduced our topic today as “God in the Form of Mother,” but I would like to correct that thought. The Mother aspect of God can indeed be visualized as having a form, because we need form before we can reach the formless state. But really, God has no gender; God is not literally a mother. When people manifest any aspect of human nature, it isn’t necessarily that those people are like that. You see a girl smiling sweetly, and you think, “How sweet she is!” Two minutes later she could be in a rage. What we manifest is not our own self. It’s an aspect of a consciousness that’s there, and, just like a cloud in the sky, it passes. People can be sweet or harsh, but in every case, they manifest something that is not their own.

Yogananda made a very interesting statement in Autobiography of a Yogi that most people gloss over. He said, “Thoughts are universally, not individually, rooted.” That is to say, whatever level of consciousness you’re on, that kind of consciousness will manifest through your thoughts. You are the product of your actions, attitudes, and the things that you’ve developed during this life and many previous lifetimes. You are the product of all of that, and yet you are none of those things. You aren’t jealous and vindictive, or kind and forgiving. Those are qualities that are coming through you, perhaps, because you’ve opened yourself up to those aspects of a much greater consciousness.

It’s good to keep this in mind for the basic reason that, if we want to realize who we are, we have to go beyond the ego. The ego is our friend and our foe, depending on how we use it. It’s our friend if we say, “I want to grow spiritually. I want to get out of this ignorance and out of my human capacity for suffering. I want to find a state of divine consciousness.”

One of the great mistakes that we find in this country today is victim consciousness. This leads to the kind of thinking that says, “I am the product of my environment, a product of the way I was treated as a child, of the way my boss treats me.” The problem here is that it puts the blame on other people. We need to realize that we have a choice: We can develop the attitudes that will keep us immune to the storms of life, or the attitudes that allow us to fall subject to those storms. It’s like saying, “Here I am in a house, but there’s a storm outside. I don’t like storms because they make me unhappy, and I’ll open the windows to prove it.” The other attitude is to close the windows and make sure you’re comfortable within.

It seems quite obvious that we have control only over the way we react to circumstances. Essentially all spiritual teachings say this: You need to develop those attitudes that render you immune to adverse conditions, no matter how life treats you. There are some people who have had tremendous adversity in life, and yet somehow they come out as heroes and heroines.

For example, sometimes other people can hurt you very deeply. What will your reaction be? If you hate in return, does this make you happy? Is hatred a solution? You may get even, but I don’t think you’ll feel happy even if you do. You suffer when you hate, but you’re happy when you love. Therefore, strictly in your own self-interest, you should love. It’s the only thing that makes sense, because otherwise you lose twice—you’re hurt by others, then you hurt yourself by hating. Why not give the lie to their negative attitude and say, “I love you anyway.”

When you are in a giving mode, you grow. But when you are receiving egoically, with great concern over how people are treating you, you contract and suffer. To put it on the bluntest level possible—you aren’t that important to other people that they should think that much about you anyway. Why not just say, “I am who I am, and I choose to be happy.” Nobody can make you happy except yourself. How others treat you may feel good, but that’s not making you happy. If you can say, “I am complete in myself. It doesn’t matter how people treat me,” then you can begin to find unshakeable happiness.

One great help in doing this is to think of God as somebody to share all your thoughts with. Because we’re human, we spend a lot of time thinking about other people—what they said, how they treated us. Why not have the thought that you’re relating to someone who can’t possibly let you down? Why not relate first and foremost to God? God is your own Self, and knows and loves you better than any person possibly could.

People make a mistake in their concept of God. When I meet self-proclaimed atheists, I don’t accept that this is really what they believe. What they’re rejecting are definitions of God that have been dumped on them. They say, “I can’t believe that God is a policeman up there judging me, or that He is just a human being when I see this creation with hundreds of billions of galaxies. It just doesn’t make sense.”

But it does make sense to think of an impersonal consciousness, or, taking it down to a more personal level, of the source of those things that make you happy. You do feel better when you love, when you try to include other people’s happiness in your own. These things are fundamental to human nature. They can’t be different for one person, or even for beings on other planets, because all of creation is part of the same consciousness.

Yogananda gave us a beautiful definition of spiritual vision: “Center everywhere, circumference nowhere.” Our understanding has evolved from the time when everybody thought the Earth was the center of the universe, to now when people think the universe doesn’t have a center at all. The next point of spiritual evolution will inevitably be the realization that every atom is the center of the universe. From any perspective you take, you can understand everything. If you want to look at the universe as an artist, you can explain everything in artistic terms. If you want to think of it as a scientist would, you can explain it from that center.

You are the center of the universe—each one of you. We need to learn how to relate to that center within us, and in other people. We need to realize that each person is a center of equal importance, so that we don’t become self-centered and shrink down. You can take a period on any page, shrink it for the next thousand years, and still you won’t be able to reach the point where it has become nothing. It can’t become non-existent. It can become infinitesimal and shrink down to the size of the smallest electron, but it cannot cease to exist. You cannot cease to exist. You are a part of that eternal, omnipresent consciousness.

Continued in Part II