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

(continued from Part I)

What happens when you limit your sensitivity and compassion? You become smaller in your own consciousness by being selfish, and you suffer. Just as people hate to go to prison, they also don’t like being in an ego because it’s confining. When the ego thinks only of its own happiness, it becomes its own enemy. But when you think expansively and realize that this little center that is your ego is the same center that is in all, in every atom, then you raise your consciousness from the human level to the divine.

In thinking of ourselves as this little dot of ego, we are taking a gyanic, or discriminative, approach. If you want to go according to the philosophy of Vedanta, you think, “I am God. I am that Infinite consciousness.” There’s also truth and inspiration in this approach, but somehow it tends to be cold. I’ve noticed from years of living in India that many swamis who go by this philosophy become egotistical. They have too much of the consciousness that says, “I am everywhere.” The ego in that way is an obstacle. If you use the ego to say, “I want to find liberation. I want to get out of this suffering,” that’s good.

This is what we have over the lower animals, who in some ways are more spiritual than we, at least in their intuitive flow. Mankind has reached the point where we begin to say, “I don’t like to suffer,” whereas animals don’t yet know that they’re suffering. We have sufficient awareness to say, “I want to know how to get out of it,” though it may take us a long time to reach that point. Most people think, “If I can only get this or change that one thing, then I’ll be happy.”

Much of modern self-help is on that level. It’s as though you’re in a little room of the mind, and you’re suffering because of some complex you’re trying to overcome. You read a book that tells you how to get out of that room, how to overcome that complex, and you feel good. You’re no longer bothered by that problem, but after a while you look around and find that you’re just in another room. You go on from room to room, but that’s not growth—it’s just change. You need to get out of that building altogether. That can only be done by divine awakening and awareness on a soul level, not by the intellect or self-help systems.

The truth is that without God’s help it’s not possible for the ego to get rid of itself. One good way to draw God’s help is to talk to Him in an “I and Thou” relationship. It’s not that God is separate from you—God is you. The only difference is, you aren’t God. Do you see the distinction? The ocean can say, “I’m the wave,” but the wave can’t say, “I’m the whole ocean.” The ocean sees that it’s all those waves, whereas the wave is still small. It can’t say, “I, as a wave, am the whole ocean.” It has to take gradual steps and say, “I am that salt water of which the whole ocean is composed.” It’s hard to affirm, “I am God,” and then go into the bathroom in the morning, look into the mirror, and say “This is God.” (laughter) It doesn’t quite work somehow, though it’s true.

God is your own higher Self, but it helps us to visualize Him with a form. In a very real sense God is neither father nor mother, but in another and broader sense He is both father and mother—and beloved, and friend, and anything you want Him to be. Even if all of us here define God as mother, it still will be a different image to each person in this room. It can’t be otherwise. There may be a particular image of that infinite consciousness that everybody worships, but even so, it will mean something different to each person according to his or her training and life experiences.

Just as a home might mean something comfortable to a person who has been brought up in a typical way, it might mean something altogether different to somebody from an orphanage. The words we use are only symbols. But behind those symbols, we can have a personal relationship with God in which we confide more, trust more, and feel unconditionally loved and accepted.

Whatever way that we try to define God will be limited. Once I met somebody who was trying to persuade me to join his church. I replied to him that there are many ways of approaching God, but this man wouldn’t buy it. So finally I said, “There’s one thing we both have to accept. However each of us defines God, we’re both wrong.” He couldn’t refute that, so he had to let it go. We are wrong. How can we be right? How can this little mind conceive of something so vast, that has created hundreds of billions of galaxies and all the little microbes and bacteria? Everything is a part of that consciousness.

There was a disciple of Yogananda who kept asking him to give him samadhi, cosmic consciousness. He kept after him until finally one day Yogananda looked at him very intently and said, “Could you take it, if I gave it to you?” The disciple stood there for a moment, then looked down and said, “No.”

Omnipresence is no joke. It takes a lot of deep meditation and great loyalty to find the path that is right for you. You won’t get it by frittering your time away and flitting from one flower to another. After reading Autobiography of a Yogi and meeting Yogananda fifty years ago, I haven’t for one moment had the question, “Is this my path?” It is. That question was settled fifty years ago, and I don’t have to ask it again. We need that kind of loyalty to what is the right thing for us.

But in our relationship with God, it’s a lot easier to love God in human terms, and especially to love God as that which is nearest and dearest—the Mother. To most human beings this mother aspect is the most precious because you feel with the Divine Mother that, no matter what you do, She still loves you. She won’t judge you. No matter who you are, She’s your friend. She’s on your side and will always forgive you.

Certainly all of us err at one time or another. You don’t want to feel guilty in the sense of guilt-ridden, but you do have to accept the fact if you’ve made a mistake. Otherwise you’re going to go out and do the same thing all over again. What makes things spiritually wrong? It’s not that society defines it as such, but because your own nature tells you it’s wrong.

Here’s a simple example: If at a party I see that there’s not enough cake for everybody, am I going to rush in there and get mine? Most people might think that way, and they may feel good in the short run. But there’s something inside that says, “It would have been nicer to share it, or let somebody else have it.” As we grow more sensitive over many incarnations, we reach the point where we find happiness comes not from getting the cake for ourselves, but from seeing that somebody else got it. As we grow spiritually we want to include the happiness of other people in our own, even to the extent of not wanting it for ourselves, but wanting it for them. You find there’s real freedom in realizing that nothing outside yourself makes you happy, but that your happiness is something that you can carry with you into sleep, into work—all the time.

All of this ties in with that expression of God that we call the Mother aspect. In human nature basically two things rule us—reason and feeling. In most of the world today there’s been altogether too much use of the reason and not much use of feeling. We think that in order to be scientific, we must exclude feeling, because it prejudices our mind. But, in truth, feeling is the only thing that gives you real understanding. People make the mistake of confusing feeling with emotion. Emotion does confuse the understanding; likes and dislikes confuse the understanding. They’re like waves on the sea. When you’ve got waves, you can’t see the moon reflected clearly in the water. But when the water is calm, then we see the undistorted reflection.

Now if it weren’t for our feeling aspect, we couldn’t achieve true understanding. Reason by itself is an inadequate tool—it can show you a hundred directions to follow, and they all make good sense. What is it that finally tells you which direction to take? Feeling. Be suspicious of too much use of the intellect, because ultimately it’s your intuition that gives you the real answers.

Those scientists who go only by reason are the lesser scientists who do minor experiments, or sweep up the pieces from the great discoveries that others have made. But great scientists go more by feeling and intuition, or as Einstein put it, “the sense of mystical awe.” For instance, Einstein perceived the Theory of Relativity in a flash, and then had to spend ten years working it out so that he could explain it to others. Many great scientists have had this experience.

I read an interesting book recently by George Abell called Talks with Great Composers. Abell lived in a time when he was able to have interviews with major composers and ask them about the creative process. Brahms, for example, said that only minor composers create out of their own minds, but that great composers receive. They hold their minds up in a state of openness to allow inspiration to come to them. We need to understand that in any area inspiration comes through receptivity and intuition. When you intuitively feel what is right, you know; you don’t have to think anymore. Of a thousand choices you simply know the right one.

But remember, intuition is not just another level of ignorance; intuition is soul knowledge. A lot of people think they have intuition, but it’s just emotions. Intuition is calm feeling. Thousands of years ago Patanjali gave the classic definition of yoga: “yogas chitta vritti nirodha,” that is, “Yoga is the neutralization of the vortices of feeling.” Chitta is the feeling aspect of consciousness. When that feeling is disturbed, as it is in most human beings, they don’t perceive things clearly, because their likes and dislikes influence them.

Women tend to go more by feeling, and men more by reason. In the last analysis, we aren’t women or men, but are influenced by the cosmic feminine or masculine principles working through our bodies. Whether man or woman, intuitive people have a strong feminine quality in them because they go more by the feeling of the heart. They consult that feeling, and then they know what to do. Usually, however, women are more intuitive than men, especially when tuning in to other people.

Many times, for example, a man will ask his wife what she thinks about a new business partner. She may say, “I don’t know, but I don’t feel good about him.” The man says, “Oh, you and your intuition.” But frequently it turns out after a few years that she was right, and the person proves untrustworthy. It’s not safe to say you’re infallible with intuition, but do listen to it. If you have an intuitive feeling about something, go more by that, and increasingly you will be guided in the right direction.

When it comes to looking at the heights to which we can aspire, I think that the Mother aspect of God is not only beautiful and inspiring, but I would go so far as to say that it is essential at this time in our evolution. Our whole society has become too bound hand and foot with reason. It needs more feeling and love. The thought that you understand a thing by not feeling, that you’re being scientific and facing the truth if you’re cold, is wrong. You don’t face truth that way because truth itself is love.

It’s only when you can develop the heart quality that you are able to perceive things as they really are. It’s only when you empathize with others and don’t judge them from afar that you can truly understand them. You don’t want to stand outside the window of life looking in and not be touched by what’s going on. You want to go into the building and find out what’s really happening there. You want to be involved, not with agitated emotions, but sensitively. Empathize with the people you meet, know them from inside, and try to feel what their aspirations are. Each one of us is unique and extraordinarily complex.

I was recently reading a book by the great English novelist, Jane Austen. I was fascinated by her analysis of human motivation because it showed that each person’s actions were driven by hidden desires, and underneath those there were still other motives. You go down this ladder, and finally you find there’s really no bottom to the basement. But the interesting thing was that in her heroes and heroines there wasn’t hidden motivation. The difference was that they were clear.

I finally got to the point where I was tired of looking at people on the basis of ego-motivation, because basically we’re united by one thing. The ego unites us on a certain level, but we’re all really united by the fact that we aspire to goodness, and to the spiritual potential we have inside.

There’s a strange but beautiful story about John Dillinger, who was called Public Enemy #1. He died in a police shoot-out, and by his body they found a note saying, “I’ve been much misunderstood. In this body beats a very loving heart.” Even Dillinger, who was full of hate and violence, believed in his own basic goodness, because it exists in everybody. The worst Mafia gangster has God inside—he just needs to work harder to uncover it. We all have that aspiration to become who we know we really are. For a time we may think we’ll get power by killing people, or get happiness by becoming rich, but bit by bit over incarnations we weed away those false goals, because we find they don’t give us what we really want.

When you can get out of the ego and out of the thoughts “I must have this, or do that, or achieve this recognition,” then you realize, “I’m complete in myself.” When you can reach that point—and it doesn’t come except by meditation—then you suddenly find, “Now I know who I really am.” It’s like peeling an onion. The onion isn’t completely peeled until there’s nothing left. Think of yourselves as an onion, if you like, because you have to peel away all those false self-definitions.

Now divine grace is very important to this process, because if you’re trying to scramble out of a well, you need somebody to help pull you out. You need somebody who is out of that confined consciousness to bring you to a sense of freedom. Otherwise you just struggle backwards and forwards, and you never get out. By loving God, you allow grace to enter into your life.

Continued in Part III