WE often find that when a Self Realised one assumes the attitude of perfect silence, the mind of the devotees is also stilled by an inner alchemy. When we listen to a spirited discourse, our thoughts are stirred by a new force. But rarely do we experience the overcoming of the mind by a stillness when the Wise One speaks. This is what we find in the case of Mother. Both when She manifests the depths of Peace which is her nature and when she utters a crisp reply to a query, the mind of the questioner is suddenly denuded of its narrow bounds that had maintained the turbulence of thoughts and doubts for so long and the mind is lost in its own infinite expanse.
The technique of breaking down the fossilised forms of misconceptions that fill the common man’s mind has been exemplified already by the philosophical observation neti neti (not this: not this). Alan Watts writes in his book The Way of Zen” that the virtue of Sunyavada of Nagarjuna is not to be found in the thought content of his argument. It is only to be valued for the effect of such a method of attack; it demolishes all restrictions of the thinking mind till finally the original nature of Mind manifests itself in their stead. While Nagarjuna employed the method of systematic and patient demolition of every form of thought successively. Mother’s cryptic sayings give a paralysing shock to the very quality of the mind of being distorted into petty fixed patterns of ignorance. Not only do her statements accomplish this task at the moment of hearing them: they dig themselves in at the root of the very phenomenon of mechanically accepting systems of thoughts. Whenever these ignorant forms of ideas crop up. the sayings of Mother cause them to short-circuit’ as it were, and break their bones. Her sayings are alive and conscious in this sense. Like them, or dislike them, accept them or reject them, but they do their work in your mind all the same. Often this is disconcerting but there it is all the same. Discomfited we are, often unceremoniously, in our efforts to build up pleasant illusions about ourselves and our notions by the subtle presence of Mother’s sayings deep in our mind, nearer to the core of our being. They never allow us to sink into complacency regarding our spiritual state, originality. wisdom and all other forms of vanity. Reject them blindly and you are sure to listen to the murmurs of your own conscience that you are rejecting your own chances. The more vehemently you criticise them and contradict them the more deeply you are caught. It is like the soft mud of the village of Jillillamudi. The more you try to pull up your leg, the deeper does the other go down. The more you try not to slip, the more readily you slip. When someone complained to Mother that he slipped in the mud on his way. Mother quipped that the very aim of his journey was to slip into her presence!
Take Mother’s definition of advaita for example. It is recognising all as One. The one that is ALL. the one that cannot be comprehended is Advaita.”
When someone asked her what she has to say of Vedanta, she replied “Vedanta is not what can be spoken of: (When discussed) it is what neither the speaker nor the listener understands, wordly affairs, atleast the speaker knows what he talks about”. Such are her words regarding God
“He is formless because all forms are His.
He is nameless because all names are His.
He is without attributes because all attributes are His.” Such is her defintion of the word ‘Mother
“The Infinite, Eternal Basis of Existence. The one which is All; the one which has no beginning and no end; the one which is the Beginning and the End.”
To quote all illustrations is to compose a book of her sayings.