Late one August afternoon in 1991, Andrew Harvey and I were invited to hear a talk at the New Camaldoli monastery in Big Sur, California. The speaker was Father Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk and author who’d devoted his life to founding a Christian-Hindu ashram in South India, and to a rapprochement among the world’s mystic traditions. Knowing Father Bede from his writings, I was taken aback upon entering the small chapel by his otherworldly beauty, gaunt as an El Greco saint, snowy-haired in a saffron robe. In flawless Oxbridge tones, Father Bede proceeded to speak for an hour on a topic that didn’t interest me much—prayer in daily life, I think—then he turned, unexpectedly, to a recent experience that had shattered his own spiritual life.
Seated outside his ashram hut one morning, Father Bede told us, he had suddenly been knocked to the ground by an unseen force while he was praying. Frightened, the eighty-four-year-old monk managed to crawl to his bed, where he remained for a week in a semiconscious state, attended to by a team of doctors unable to diagnose his condition. Finally, after ten days, the doctors gave up hope and Father Bede was given his last rites. A short time later, as he lay there dying, a voice came to him with a message. “Remember the Mother,” the voice said. Father Bede recovered shortly thereafter.
I found this confession extraordinary. Here was one of the great mystic pioneers of our time, a devout Christian who’d spent the past fifty years working toward spiritual reform, admitting a major oversight in his faith. “It is the Mother,” Father Bede went on to say, who animates the whole of creation. It is the Mother whose grace is so sorely needed by the church, to help it enfold a suffering world, to quiet its fundamentalism, to dissolve its bureaucracies, and to heal our ailing planet.
After the talk was finished, Andrew and I sat on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. The sun had nearly set behind a bank of golden clouds. We watched as the light played on the dark water, but felt no need to speak. “All of this is the Mother,” I thought, remembering what Father Bede had said. I imagined us floating in her glass belly, gazing out onto a magical world of fantastic colors, shapes, and adornments, being given an experience of what a moment in her body might feel like, the rapture of it. The boulders jutting up from the black water, the eucalyptus trees, the gulls and pelicans and seals squalling in the increasing dark: all these things revealed themselves to me as part of her in that moment. This wasn’t metaphorical thinking but a tangible presence, a sensory suffusion. I was breathing her—being carried inside her breath; the world appeared to expand and contract with the movement of my own lungs. When Andrew left, I stayed there for a long time, staring out into this natural heaven.
I started this book with a simple question: How does a person choose to respond when confronted with incomprehensible things, aspects of reality we can’t fathom—the transcendental, the unearthly, the ineffable? Do we withdraw to our familiar corners, closing our eyes to evidence of the unseen world, or open ourselves to mystery and the overwhelming evidence of how little we actually know? This is, indeed, the most important choice any of us will make in a lifetime: question or withdraw, reveal or conceal, venture out or stay fixed in our views, denying what we are afraid to explore. “The saint is one who knows that every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis,” Aldous Huxley wrote. “For at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decision—to choose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness and the way that leads towards light and life.” Stepping through the door that Mother had opened, moving toward this invisible realm, I had chosen life and light. When I made that choice, my worldview was transformed. Today, I’m no longer as cynical about using the word “God,” either, since it doesn’t matter what we call it. As long as we admit that this power is there or, if we haven’t glimpsed it ourselves, are willing to be shown.
“The greatest scientists are humble because they are used to what they cannot see,” Mother Meera tells us. “And because what they are discovering is revealing mystery after mystery to them.” Humility and wonder go hand in hand. Without humility, the willingness to be shown, the world goes flat, predictable, wrong. The mind holds sway, the spirit sags, and the mystical passes us by without notice. We shrink to fit into what we’re not afraid of; life comes to seem far smaller than it is. We forget that we’re children of this great Mother, floating inside her miraculous belly. Far from being unscientific, this awareness is “the sower of all true science,” as Albert Einstein affirmed. “The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical,” the father of relativity believed. “He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”
There are signs and wonders, if we keep our eyes open. Creation is a field of light.