On the evening of August 24, 1984, I arrived in the nondescript village of Thalheim, a German hamlet outside Frankfurt, during a stopover from New York to India. My travel companion, Andrew Harvey, had suggested that we start our journey here with a visit to someone he was eager to see. As his guest, I hadn’t inquired further, and now, as we made our way through the quiet streets, past lace-curtained windows and garden gnomes, patrolling perfectly manicured lawns, I felt jet-lagged, unanchored, and clueless as to why we were there.
Herbert, the burly, bespectacled German who’d picked us up at the airport, backed into the driveway and turned off the ignition. He instructed us to leave our bags outside and to enter the house without making a sound. Darshan had already begun, Herbert told us. I had no idea what he meant.
We tiptoed into the small foyer and closed the door behind ourselves. No sooner had I slipped off my shoes—following Andrew’s lead—than my ears were filled with a strange buzzing sound like a swarm of bees or static on the radio. I rubbed my ears, but the whirring continued, breaking the otherwise eerie silence. I glanced at Andrew, who grinned at me, nodded his head, and gestured for me to follow him up the stairs.
Then I saw her. Peeking over the banister, I noticed a tiny Indian woman wearing a vermilion sari, seated on a chair, eyes closed, holding the head of a kneeling child between her hands. Her dark face was serene, her shoulders slightly hunched as she touched the boy’s temples, the two frozen in a strange tableau. Neither of them moved a muscle. Finally, the young woman opened her eyes, released his head, and sat back, gazing straight into the boy’s eyes. Her expression was fierce and unwavering, her head rocking slightly forward and back as she examined the boy for a few more seconds, then lowered her eyes, gazing down at her hands. The boy touched his forehead to the ground and returned to his chair, making way for an old woman, who hobbled to the carpet and knelt with difficulty, the whole process beginning again.
I was mesmerized by the sight of her. I knew immediately, without knowing how I knew, that this woman was unlike anyone I’d seen before—qualitatively different—as if she belonged to another species. I recognized viscerally, not rationally, as one would acknowledge a taste or a smell, that she was something other. Her stillness, her silence, the curve of her shoulders in silhouette, or, more than that, the atmosphere that surrounded her, reminded me of something enormous and ancient, like a mountain.
I sat down on the stairs and closed my eyes. Immediately, the background of my inner vision turned orange-gold and I felt myself sinking into a kind of trance, my body heavy, my head light. Against this glowing background, the woman appeared, floating above me in slow motion, then bouncing me through space like a seal with a ball. I was aware of being somewhere beyond myself, observing from an odd remove as she soared back and forth, teasing me, pulling me further and further from my ordinary mind.
The Baal Shem Tov, a Hasidic master who lived three hundred years ago in Poland, compared his first spiritual experience to turning around and stepping out the back door of his mind. At seven-thirty P.M. on that summer night, I stepped through the back door of my own. With no preparation whatsoever, I was shaken to the core, changed—in a matter of seconds—from a man who believed he knew the world to a person aware that he knew next to nothing.
Andrew touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes. The space in front of the woman was empty; it was my turn—she was waiting for me. I was tempted to stand up and run down the stairs. Instead, I managed to get to my feet and kneel down in front of her. Feeling awkward and ridiculous, I lowered my head, and her fingers came to rest on my temples, gripping my skull like a vise. Without intending to, my hands found her feet through the folds of her sari—they were cold and small as a child’s—and I touched them as she held my head, focusing on the threads of gold in her hem. Aside from the embarrassment of kneeling in front of another person for the first time in my life, I felt nothing as I waited for her to finish. I did my best not to breathe too loudly and counted the seconds until it was over.
Finally, she released my head, I sat back on my heels and looked into her dark eyes. Her face was blank and expressionless. The irises—which nearly filled the entire oval, like a cat’s—flicked back and forth as she stared at me. I had the sense that she was actually doing something with her gaze, focused with such intensity, as if she were boring through a wall. It took every ounce of my strength not to look away. Finally, she lowered her eyes and I returned to my place on the stairs.
The woman remained seated a minute more. When no one else came forward, she stood—bringing the small group to our feet—and made her way slowly up the stairs, eyes lowered to the ground, followed by the female attendant who had been seated at her side.
The small house emptied within a few minutes. Andrew led me down the narrow staircase to the basement kitchen and told me to wait there. My head was in turmoil; no sooner was I alone than I began to deconstruct my experience on the stairs. I was stressed, exhausted, hallucinating. I’d been influenced by Andrew’s poetic descriptions of spiritual life in his native India. I was swept up by the strangeness of seeing this woman holding other people’s heads in silence. I ticked off a list of rational explanations for what had happened. Andrew then poked his head through the doorway. “Mother Meera will see you now.”
I followed him nervously up the stairs. The woman was standing in the foyer, flanked by her smiling companion, who introduced herself as Adilakshmi. Mother Meera was barely five feet tall and avoided making direct eye contact, a well-worn sweater around her shoulders. I tried to talk but my mind went blank. Luckily, Andrew came to the rescue. He told them I’d just arrived from America and was going through a very hard time in life. “Mother,” he said, “Mark has no spiritual life. He’s been diagnosed with a terrible illness. Will you help him, please?”
My cheeks burned with embarrassment. I was angry at Andrew for telling my secrets. I looked at Mother Meera, and our eyes met. She turned to Adilakshmi and said something in her native language. Her voice was deep and gravelly and didn’t fit her appearance at all.
“Mother says you will sleep tonight!” Adilakshmi told me cheerfully in her singsong English. I managed to thank Mother Meera for allowing me to stay in her house. She looked at me and said, “You are welcome.” Then she turned and climbed back up the stairs to her private apartment.
My first night in Thalheim, in a room directly under Mother Meera’s quarters, I slept for fifteen hours. It was a sleep unlike any that I had experienced, dominated by graphic, vivid dreams. Mother Meera appeared as she had on the stairs, floating around in various costumes, changing color, shape, and size. First, she was pink and stroked my head gently, cradling me against her soft breast. After that, she turned a demonic red with bulging eyes, protruding fangs, and gnarly claws like a bird of prey’s. There was blood dripping from the side of her mouth as she savagely tore at my belly, ripping my entrails out with her talons. In the dream, I screamed and clutched my stomach, struggling to protect myself, but finally surrendered to her fury. Mother Meera continued to attack me until I was left gutted, floating in midair, like a doll with its stuffing torn out.
When I woke up, Andrew had his arm around me and I was crying like a baby. He sat with me while I sobbed for a long time, curled up under the blanket. A grief no therapist had come close to detecting had been released, the hardness in my solar plexus pouring out in spasms. Afterward, I took the first easy breath that I could remember, and felt as light and clean and fresh as a child.
That afternoon, Andrew and I walked in the woods above Thalheim, following a footpath that bordered a pasture dotted with grazing cows. Afterglow from my morning ordeal had left me feeling wonderful. We sat on a bench overlooking the valley, and Andrew proceeded to fill me in on the highlights of Mother Meera’s story. The daughter of illiterate farmers, she’d been born Kamala Reddy in the South Indian village of Chandepalle on Christmas Day 1960. An introverted child, Kamala was also independent and fearless. “She was never close to her family,” said Andrew. “Sometimes, she’d wander into the forest at night by herself. They’d find her sitting under a tree.” Kamala was afflicted with strange physical symptoms as well. “No one knew what to do to help her,” he told me. “She would run these high fevers and scream out in pain.” Since Chandepalle had no local doctor, Kamala’s parents were left with no choice but to watch their daughter carefully and pray that she would recover from these episodes.
The most serious “illness” came shortly after her sixth birthday, when, with no warning whatsoever, Kamala appeared to lose consciousness for an entire day. Terrified that she’d fallen into a coma, the family made offerings to the gods to save her. At last, the girl awoke from her trance, but it would be years before Kamala revealed what had actually happened to her that day, Andrew told me. Not until a gentleman neighbor named Venkat Reddy (no relation) noticed the girl’s unusual presence, and became her first confidant and devotee, did Kamala begin to describe the nature of her spiritual episodes. “She told Mr. Reddy that this experience was her first immersion in samadhi,” Andrew said, explaining that samadhi is a state of intense concentration regarded as “the final stage of union with the Divine.” A tiny percentage of advanced yogis and mystics attain samadhi after a lifetime of practice and devotion, he told me. Kamala had reached this enlightened state spontaneously, at the age of six.
“In India, it’s common knowledge that rare individuals come into the world fully conscious of their divinity,” Andrew went on. As an agnostic, I admitted to not being quite sure what he meant by “divinity.” “Think of it this way: If creation is a spectrum of being, as physicists and mystics tell us, with the lower life-forms at one end and human geniuses at the other, individuals like Mother Meera exist at the farthest point of this spectrum. They are spiritual geniuses of the highest order. In India, we call them the avatar, meaning of divine descent. Not that they descend from heaven, but that heaven, or God consciousness, descends fully realized with them. Mother knew who she was when she was born.” Andrew explained that every avatar comes into the world with a unique mission from God. “That’s why they call them divine incarnations. Christ came to teach brotherly love. Buddha came to teach the end of suffering. Mother Meera is here for a different reason.”
“What is that?” I asked. But Andrew had said enough. We sat on the bench for a long time, gazing out at the peaceful vista. A spotted eagle swooped overhead. A fawn and its mother nosed through the sorghum grass. An enormous red bull dozed alone in its pasture. In the distance, Andrew pointed to a pair of brightly dressed figures strolling along the lane that bordered the outskirts of Thalheim. It was Mother Meera and Adilakshmi on their way to the cemetery to visit Mr. Reddy’s grave. Both of them were carrying flowers.
In the days that followed, I watched Mother Meera like a hawk, waiting for some misstep, some indication that she was not the enlightened being Andrew claimed she was. But I could find no evidence that she was a fake. Whether giving darshan or walking to the bank, she was the same—self-contained, modest, and strangely noble, like a peasant queen.
She terrified me.
Outside of darshan, I did my best to avoid meeting her on the stairs or in the garden. When I crossed her path, I looked away and couldn’t speak. To make matters even more confusing, Mother Meera did not act like a guru. She did not spend her days on a dais surrounded by flowers, having her feet oiled. As Andrew had explained, she gave no formal discourses; nor did she dispense advice. She made no rules, created no dogma, belonged to no religion, allowed no ashram to form around her. When people wished to dedicate their lives to her, Mother Meera would tell them to go home and keep the faith that they were born into, and return for darshan when they wanted her help. Apparently, Catholic priests and rabbis came to visit. Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, atheists were all welcome—and Mother Meera never asked for anything in return. During the day, she was always working, mixing cement, hauling bricks, hammering shingles on the roof, sweeping the porch, watering flowers. Completely ordinary except for this strange silence that seemed to surround her.
I convinced myself that Mother Meera was some kind of lusus naturae, a freak of nature, like those people with enlarged pineal glands who reportedly move iron carvings through glass with their fingertips. There was no doubt that she was extraordinary. What I did question was the outlandish claim that she was a divine incarnation, or avatar, in conscious communication with God. As a nonbeliever and skeptic, I had a lifelong aversion to credulousness, taking things on faith, or believing in anything I had not experienced myself. I made an agreement with myself that if Mother Meera really was the spiritual genius Andrew claimed, a representative of a higher order, that I could be as skeptical as I pleased and the truth would win out anyway.
On the day we left for India, Andrew asked Mother for a private darshan to bless us on our trip. She came downstairs in her work clothes, sat on her chair, then took our heads in her hands, staring for longer than usual into our eyes. Afterward, she stood up and said, “Have a safe journey.”
Andrew left me alone in the room. There were two portraits behind Mother Meera’s chair, one hanging to either side: a photograph of her as a teenager with a large red kumkum dot on her forehead; and a painting of Mr. Reddy, round-cheeked and smiling in his white Nehru cap. I stared at the images for a long time, then had the unexpected impulse to lay my head on the cushion where Mother Meera had been resting her feet. After making sure that no one was coming, I knelt down quickly in front of her chair and placed my forehead on the white pillow. Immediately, my ears were filled with the same electric, buzzing sound I’d heard when we’d first entered Mother’s house. I stayed there for a long time, listening. “Show me who you are,” I said inwardly. “I need proof.”
When I lifted my head from the cushion, my skin was burning.
How do you respond when your mind encounters phenomena it can’t seem to explain? The uncanny, the mystical, the otherworldly? What is the intelligent response when your once-solid wall of reason cracks, offering glimpes of an unseen world, a dimension you did not know existed? Scientists confront these shocks of the real on a regular basis, of course, when the windows of perception—what they take to be reality—are shattered in the laboratory or through the lens of a telescope; when the mysterious secrets of this little-known universe suddenly reveal themselves. Similarly, mystics throughout the ages, conducting experiments in expanded consciousness, have reported that what we perceive through our physical senses, and take to be reality, is a tiny sliver of what actually exists in the quantum field through which we are moving. Just as peering through a microscope or telescope opens our eyes to the infinitesimal or cosmic picture, the presence of enlightened mystics is said to reveal a landscape both intimate and unfamiliar, a luminous realm akin to our everyday world but foreign, too, with its own extrasensory coordinates. In her classic study Mysticism, the scholar Evelyn Underhill tells us why these rare individuals ought to be treated with the same respect we reserve for people of science. “Mystics are the pioneers of the spiritual world,” she writes, “[and] should claim from us the same attention that we give to other explorers of countries in which we are not competent to adventure ourselves.”
Since meeting Mother Meera three decades ago, and spending time with other spiritual masters, I’ve come to agree with this view unequivocally. I’ve seen and felt too many inexplicable things not to understand how little I actually know. This is indeed the most important choice a person makes in a lifetime: To open our eyes to the unseen world or screw them shut in denial or fear? To kill spiritual experience with cynical logic or remain curious, flexible, willing to learn—aware that we comprehend a tiny fraction of what there is to be known—in the way that scientists, adventurers, and artists are called to? In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke described this perennial challenge:
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us. To have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called “spirit-world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.
When I admitted to Mother Meera, a few years back, that I don’t believe in miracles, she smiled and said, “What appears miraculous to man is logical in the eyes of God.” This echoed a conversation I had with Spyros Sathi (the Daskalos), one of the greatest Christian mystics of modern times. “Orthodox science today knows very little about life,” the eighty-year-old Cypriot told me. “You call such incidents miracles. No. They are phenomena occurring within the mercy of the absolute superintelligence we call God.” Perhaps. The questions nevertheless remain: How is an ordinary person to understand descriptions of a world we know so little about? How are we to make sense of (or peace with) the existence of divine reality, if such a thing truly exists? What are we to make of Mother Meera and her kind, individuals who palpably transmit a numinous, transformative power? In order to tell Mother Meera’s story, and address these mysterious questions, I’ve taken the empirical approach pioneered by Christopher Isherwood in his biography of Ramakrishna, the renowned nineteenth-century saint. “This is the story of a phenomenon,” the novelist warned. “I only ask that you approach him with the same open-minded curiosity you might feel about any highly unusual human being, a Julius Caesar, a Catherine of Siena, a Leonardo. Dismiss from your mind, as far as you are able, such categories as holy unholy, sane insane, wise foolish, pure impure, positive negative, useful useless. Just say to yourself as you read: this, too, is humanly possible.”
A few provisos before we begin. In writing about Mother Meera, I’ve avoided interpretation wherever possible, allowing the facts to speak for themselves, and included only those things I can back up firsthand, was told by Mother Meera herself, or learned from reliable sources within her intimate circle. I’ve been faithful to terminology commonly used to describe who Mother Meera is and what she is doing—terms such as “avatar,” “Paramatman Light,” and “Supramental consciousness,” which may strike the reader as strange at first but will soon become familiar. Every spiritual personality comes into the world with her or his unique identity, and this cultural background affects their work in the world as well as how we see them. Mother Meera is no exception and I did not want to denude her story of foreign terms and details for the sake of Westernization. The peculiarities of a holy person’s life are part of their paradoxical existence, higher consciousness shining through a unique human form with particular habits, tics, and contradictions—just like every one of us. As Mother Meera explains in this book, it is this intersection between the divine and the human, embodied by the incarnation, that points us to the truth of our own godly nature. Keep in mind that although Mother Meera is an Indian woman from a Hindu family, her spiritual power transcends culture. The force coming through her is no more Indian than E=mc2 is German physics.
Still, as a South Indian woman of a certain age who hails from a traditional background, Mother Meera—an extreme introvert—resists invitations to engage in intimate self-revelation. I’ve never met anyone less besotted by the precious details of what makes her herself. When an acquaintance of mine asked Mother what she sees when she looks in a mirror, her reply confirmed this (“What I see is not interesting to me”). It is extremely challenging to write about someone so devoid of self-cherishing, I quickly learned. As a journalist, I’ve interviewed a wide range of difficult people—politicians, movie stars, global scoundrels, hermits, visionaries, and actual legends—but no one a fraction as elusive as Mother Meera. The private details included here—Mother’s pet peeves, her least favorite foods, her relationship to the physical body and emotions—are offered less for idle interest than to give the reader a keyhole view into the personal experience of a self-proclaimed avatar, and how this God-in-a-body thing works.
When I asked Mother Meera for permission to write this book, I admitted that there must be many others more qualified than a guru-phobic, nonbelieving Jew from New York City. She didn’t seem the least bit concerned. “Write the book you want,” she said. “Some will believe. Others will not. Leave the rest to God.”
That is what I’ve decided to do.