Suppose you are in the hands of a cruel-most police-man who is on the point of handcuffing you and taking you away to the dark cellar , where suspects are dealt with.He calls a carriage, and with tears you are made to get in it. When all of a sudden, by Mother’s Grace, your College Principal motors in and shouts out his ,” Hallo, where are you going ? ” What a joy would you feel ! You are saved. What a blissful and peace-and-protection-showering joy !
This was in fact the experience of the Founder, in college in Poona [ Pune ]. He had been to the Railway station to see off someone at the 3 p.m.Express. He was then seized by a detective who called out the nearest police. The Founder was suspected to be a Bengali seditious youth. The boy pleaded innocence and offered worldly resistance to his being shoved in with force, into a carriage.He was shown a photograph, in which a young boy’s face was quite similar. Just then, when the boy was on the point of being pushed into carriage , in came the motor of the Principal in the station yard. He stood guarantee and both returned to the students quarters. This is an instance of how Mother was, as it were , protecting Her child, wherever he went. The greater psychologically important experience was however this. At the gate of the quarters , he saw his college friend, who was, in a confused , anxious and hurried manner , making his way towards the station because he had a dream in the daytime nap, and saw the whole scene which took place at the Railway station and his friend in the clutches of the police.
Founder says God is giving us proofs and protections so often, but we are all hopeless and ungrateful idiots.
The Founder began to see things as one would see on several scattered square blocks at sixes and sevens being arranged properly to form a complete and perfectly beautiful toy picture. He felt thrills after thrills, the like of which he never had before . What was being manifested in him was the reappearance of the nectar flow. We often have some scattered facts appearing as a independent facts by themselves , with no continuity and lots of gaps and so many small connecting links missing . As time passes and things take greater shape and development , we begin to see the continuity.
Mother, in 1932, through the mouth-piece of the Founder of Mai-ism in an independent course , although towards the same end , declared more forcefully, the indispensable need of a religion for the whole world to be happy under changed circumstances. The full-fledged man, the brief-holder, does not beg through crying and creating pity, nor does he rest contended with expressing his desires softly and mildly, looking into the face of others and ascertaining their pleasure or displeasure . He is not for saying, ” I atleast believe thus and like this. You go your way.” The man with every emphasis that he can command comes forth, claims his right to be heard and further demands his legitimate place in the midst of others and his sisters and brothers :
” Well, we are all unhappy. We have tried every means. Believe my Mother’s word. You can’t be happy without religion. A religion to be most efficient requires to be UNIVERSAL and much more simplified and based on fundamental undeniable Universal truths alone. Here, Mother being moved with pity, offers to the world , a Universal religion of God as Mother, Mother of all, propitiable with living the life of Love, Service, Devotion and Self-Surrender . Ye that find this universal religion to be appealing to you, take it up. Mother is there to guide you, protect you, save you and emancipate you. ”
The religious progress of the world is less than even an ant’s pace and that is so because we altogether forget the opposing and the undoing forces. We have altogether wrong ideas and wrong similes.We think mechanically in a routine manner and that is why we wonder why so much of the highest exertions of all the supremely powerful religious souls have not apparently borne fruit. The most patent argument against religion coming from the most intelligent ( but not religious ) persons is ,” So many have come on this world . The world has remained the very same conglomerate of all wickedness, selfishness, vice, pain, sorrow and misery. “ The Founder’s answer to all of them is : ” The world would have been much worse than what you see now , were it not for the showers of God’s Grace from time to time “. There is no end to wickedness.
Our basis to judge and weigh the results of religiosity improving exertions and Divine Grace is fallacious. We take this vast Universe as a consolidated concentrated indivisible unit, whereas , the results are to be seen in the amelioration and even salvation of individuals. The caravan of the world passes on, but individuals are saved.
There is something like a precise stage of maturity for the world to receive a certain truth to be able to appreciate it and imbibe it. And we are looking at the matter under reference with that point in view; the maturity and the convenience for an undertaking and the favourableness and easiness expected for the success of an undertaking.
Mother thought the highest work of presenting the religious ideal of Mother – and – child relationship before the world , was more than satisfactorily done through Paramahamsa , actually living that life . He had done more than enough, to be further entrusted with additional work.
Swami Vivekananda had to do a good deal of clearing the ground, full of misunderstandings, prejudices, superstitions, well-froggisms and so many antagonistic forces and factors before true religiosity could take root. He found the world to be still immature for launching anew moment with the stamping of a religion.Seriousness was not there, and on the contrary abuse was possible. ” The sentimentality of the devotee was as its highest. Some would fall into partial trances accompanied with the contortions of the body, whenever there was any exiting cause, such as devotional music. Many of them practically gave up the exercise of their common sense and reasoning faculty and waited in suspense for some miraculous manifestation of Paramahamsa’s divine power.” Swami Vivekananda foresaw the baneful effect of such meaningless emotion and set himself to stem the tide. ” People feigned a good deal. It was discovered that these effusions were , in some cases, feigned and the result of rehearsals at home. ”
The first need of India had to be first served and perhaps, therefore the Motherhood of God was temporarily shelved and he preached Adwaitism.
Here I should make it clear, what I mean by a belief in the Motherhood of God and ‘ Mother’s Child ‘. In general loose twist-able sense , everyone is Mother’s child. I don’t mean that , when I say Paramahamsa was Mother’s child. Our being the Upasaka of Brahma and not minding Brahma being called Mother , just as we call Brahma a Father, a Friend, or a Saviour or a Guru, is not to be taken as the same thing as being a believer of Motherhood. Again the Upasana of God’s Maya or Shakti is not to be taken as the Upasana of Motherhood. No jumbling and no winding up and closing up and snubbing down the controversial point with a hurried stamping of ‘ All the same ‘. No assumption of a part for the whole or vice versa. God’s something is not the same thing as God. ” God as Mother ” in words with a picture before you, only about Creator-ship, Rulership and Disposership of the Universe or Universes , is not to be taken as ” Belief in the Motherhood of God .”
The test is approach to God, as a child to Mother. You may have some reverence and worshipfulness for all the conceptions and Incarnations and all religions and religious Founders. All that is very nice But the question of question is,” When you are in every hardship, with no hopes of your being saved , when you are on the last stage of drowning, — why, to be expressly clear — when you are inhaling and exhaling your last breath, what is your God and relationship at that moment ? In what form, of what conception, and of what relationship with you ? If your approach then is that of a child to Mother, then alone you are a believer of the Motherhood of God and you are a Mother’s child. ” As what “, do you shout during your hours of weeping and drowningness, ‘ as your last refuge ‘ – is the test.
EXTRACT FROM THE BOOK : MAI-ISM AUTHOR : MAI SWARUP MAI MARKAND [ EDITIONS : 1952 & 2007 ], PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY UNIVERSAL MAI-ISM TRUST, MAI NIWAS, SARASWATI ROAD END, SANTA CRUZ WEST, MUMBAI 400054 INDIA
God as Mother and Father in MAIISM AND HINDUISM 