A being of wisdom, power and delight,
Even as a mother draws her child to her arms,
Took to her breast Nature and world and soul.
Sri Aurobindo
Savitri, Book III, Canto II, page 312.
The Mother, Human and Divine
In our human frailty we regard the Divine Mother as mother only, forgetting that she is also divine. We are apt to seize exclusively the last term of the great Name and ignore the other term which is equally important. We demand from her the same reactions of motherly love that we expect from a human mother. Our love for her is human, human in the ignorant way – full of passion and craving, hunger for appropriation, considering her as nothing else than food for our egoistic desires.
She is the mother indeed, but the Divine Mother. She wishes us to come to her in the divine way and not in the human way. For it is in the divine way that we rise to our highest and deepest stature, receive her fully and integrally, and enjoy the plenitude of the delight in her Grace. A human way ties us down to the littlenesses and smallnesses of the human feeling. The human approach is, more often than not, that of a spoilt child. If there is one drop of true love at the bottom of the heart, the amount of ignorance and turbidity in which that is sunk is colossal. The dirt smears us and is cast upon the object of our love too.
And yet she is the mother in being the Divine. She is divine not in the sense that she is afar and aloof, cold and indifferent like the transcendent Brahman. Indeed, the Divine Mother is more motherly than the human mother can be. The human mother is only a faint echo, a far-off shadow, at times a travesty of the true Mother in the archetypal world.
The Divine Mother even in being transcendent leans down to our human dimensions, becomes one of us, is within us as our own self and with us as our comrade and guide. She takes us by the hand and, if only we allow it, teaches us how to transcend the little humanity we are made of and grow into her own nature and substance through the miracle of her love – if our love responds to it adequately.
It is only by remembering her twofold truth, the two arms of her love with which she enfolds us and cherishes us, that we can hope to be her true children.
Nolini Kanta Gupta
1974 – from the Mother Abides