Bhimaraju Prasada Rao (hereafter called Visitor) was a frequent visitor to Jillellamudi while he was working in Chirala. Now he is stationed in Cuttack. He was unable to come to Jillellamudi and, in fact, visit any place in this area itself. Even when he desired to come, somehow it did not materialize. Today (9.8.1967) he was able to come. And he left in the evening. He asked Amma: “It seems you wept when Pothukuchi Ravi died. And you seem to have said: ‘I perform marriage as I do a funeral!’ Amma responded.
Amma : Even now what is there to deny? We leave the corpse and return. We can also calmly do all the rituals connected with it. But his sheer goodness makes me grieve. In fact, I get tears whenever or wherever I perceive goodness. Surely, I earlier also said: None can make me shed tears by abusing or attacking me. But they make me cry because of their goodness.
Visitor: How does your shedding tears arise? They say your tears should not fall on earth!
Amma : It is only my tears which are there on this earth. Not just one tear but numerous, countless of my tears fell on this earth. If those tears never fell, you could never have drinking water to quench your thirst. Sorrow is not something that lands you in difficulties. How can you say that I don’t have some things, when they say that I am not this or that? There is sorrow. There is happiness, joy. I am a renouncer, an enjoyer, a patient. I am all of them.
Visitor : Does even the Supreme Being have all these?
Amma : You mean that they are all beyond him? Or, are they different, separate from him? If they are beyond or separate from him, man is a great being. Then what is the need for him? He can sit in a corner; that’s enough.
From where do all these things arise? Did he himself create them? As I said, if he creates them himself, why the Supreme Being before him? Indeed, he cannot even drink water when he wishes to drink! He cannot even gulp whenever he fancies!……
Visitor : In that case, what is the state of the Supreme Being?
Amma: The state in which nothing can exist without the presence of His being.
Visitor : What then is the Supreme Being, Paramatma?
Amma: The one who exists and without whose Being nothing exists. The Supreme Being who has become everything. (Conversation No. 20)
I must confess that when I read this talk (kindly suggested to me by Sri T.S. Sastry) it was so disarmingly simple that I felt it did not create any problem in translation. I was massively deceived. This is one of the subtlest conversations – and addresses the external paradoxes which baffle the best brains. For instance death. What is the fact? As factual, real as a funeral. Both are events of Amma, the Great equalizer of Paradoxes. Equating celebration of marriage and death! Both are contexts of sorrow. The gaiety of marital celebration is as much sorrow as a funeral. Isn’t this strange?
One therefore confronts sorrow as also joy. Can’t we choose one and reject another? Yes, we can. Or, rather, there is no choice. It seems there is. Why does Amma grieve? Yes, she can withstand the funeral. But what she cannot resist is goodness. One has to contemplate the astounding revelation: abusing her or attacking her has no effect. What a state of Being! Discovering “goodness” makes her cry. Aren’t these tears a deterrent to sorrow? Anandamayi Amma: she is full of joy and these are ananda bashpa-tears of joy. There is no transcendence of sorrow: it is the raw material which generates joy.
Tears Amma sheds are – though generated from a context of sorrow – so cosmically effective that she affirms: “If I don’t shed tears you wouldn’t even have water to quench your thirst!” “It is my tears that are there on earth in all their fullness and benediction as water!” Moreover, what is there that is not Amma and what can be there outside her? We cannot even gulp and cannot drink unless she creates thirst?
All this leads to the conclusion: there is nothing that exists without Her being. Even the sorrow that sorrow is. Perhaps, eliminating sorrow – apart from being impossible – is also extinguishing joy. ‘Goodness’ is balancing, taming sorrow to yield joy. Terminating it? Suicidal.