Preface

In 1966, 1 received initiation into the Divine Mother tradition of India, as practiced by the extraordinary adepts of Mother Wisdom, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Sarada Devi, who lived in nineteenth-century Bengal. I was attracted to this radiant couple by an amazing document, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, first published in English in 1942. Here I first encountered God, or Ultimate Reality, addressed and experienced as Mother. Having been raised in the environment of Jewish-Christian culture, where the root metaphor for approaching the Divine is masculine, my immediate response was surprised delight at the naturalness and evident power of the feminine metaphor.

Almost thirty years ago, when I was in my early twenties, the seed of Ramakrishna's mystical intimacy with the Mother of the Universe was transmitted to me in the traditional Hindu ceremony of initiation, conducted by Swami Nikhilananda, a direct disciple of Sarada Devi, the fully enlightened wife and powerful successor of Ramakrishna. Embraced within this fresh, vibrant lineage of spiritual transmission, I was presented directly with the Wisdom Goddess and with modes of contemplation most suited to appreciating and communing with her. Now I can approach and envision the Great Goddess naturally, as if I had been raised since childhood in the Divine Mother tradition of Bengal, which centers around the beautiful black Warrior of Wisdom, the sword-bearing Kali of the
noble Tantra not destructive and dark, but blissful and brilliant.

I retain a Western sensibility about language and meaning, which I have tried to infuse into this book of visionary encounters with Mother Reality. This may permit the astonishing world of the Goddess to be more accessable and hopefully more inspiring to readers of English worldwide, many of whom live within cultures governed primarily by masculine metaphors for Divinity and by masculine attitudes toward reality.

Authentic acquaintance with this ancient, living stream of Goddess Wisdom will provide much-needed resources for the nontraditional, secular culture called the modern world. Mother Reality remains tender, playful, open, creative, unconventional, and indefinable. She is fundamentally the open space beyond religion, which I call timeless awareness. She stands always outside frameworks. Yet her unitive wisdom also presents a way to harmonize genuine religious and cultural traditions which advance rival claims. Mother loves A her children equally.

What is presented in Mother of the Universe are the visionary hymns of Ramprasad Sen from eighteenth-century Bengal. I have not worked from the original Bengali text. Selected from English translations by Jadunath Sinha of the two hundred fifty extant songs of Ramprasad, these one hundred twenty-six expanded versions have gradually unfolded over the last twelve years. The Bengali verses are shorthand, as lyrics always are. My contemplative versions represent an articulated literary form, designed not to be sung but recited aloud, thereby retaining a sense of the oral tradition which these poems represent. Rather than using scholarly footnotes, the expanded poems themselves contain commentary on the esoteric Mother Wisdom of India and, more particularly, on the tantric tradition of Bengal, which has its roots in both Buddhism and Hinduism.

These are spontaneous songs, sung over two hundred years ago by Ramprasad, an intense lover of the Goddess. More than sacred offerings to the Mother of the Universe, these are direct encounters with Mother Reality. Their startling imagery and naked honesty belong to Ramprasad. My expansions have added nothing that diverges from his spirit.

Understood from a deeper perspective, it was the Goddess who sang these revolutionary songs through her precocious child, Ramprasad, in order to awaken the entire world to the teaching of Mother Wisdom–invisible to linear thinking, far beyond theology. The energy of these ecstatic hymns is still enlivening and completely contemporary. Their function continues. As Ramprasad sings to those involved in spiritual cultivation: "If you find farming difficult, please bring my poems with you."

Mother of the Universe presents, through the vivid mode of Goddess worship, the Mother Wisdom which is always unitive, never divisive. These pages do not introduce some philosophical or literary alternative but unveil the living force which exists at the very heart of awareness as the upward flowing power of liberation and illumination called Mother Kundalini. These poems are existential inquiry. They are Goddess energy.

Ramprasad's tantric songs represent the actual experiences of a great adept. They can now be experienced anew by sensitive readers of modern times, not as romantic glimpses into some ancient era or exotic culture but as openings into the global civilization of the near future. By her very nature, Mother is always global, always indivisible, always revolutionary. This book can serve as a nondoctrinal, nonofficial scripture of the Goddess. We can drink deep from Mother Wisdom through the practice of oral recitation. Each song opens unique channels in the subde body. The poems travel within us as we travel within the poems. There is no repetition here, although there is mutual resemblance and mutual illumination. Each mystic hymn represents a new encounter, a new gift from Mother. As Ramprasad sings: "Dive with abandon into her mystery and discover a new gem every moment.

As scriptural manifestation, these poems deserve concentrated rather than just casual reading. By assimilating one of these visions each day for one hundred twenty-six days, one could make an intimate meditation retreat with the Goddess in the midst of one's daily responsibilities, which is precisely the nonseparative mode of contemplative practice she favors. Ramprasad sings: "Ordinary existence in the heart of the extended family is the supreme worship beyond worship which perceives Mother Reality as every being, every situation, every breath."

Reading aloud, alone or with friends, produces the effect of chanting and permits her teaching to be absorbed more directly by the entire being. With melodious voices, may we welcome Goddess Wisdom to manifest more and more openly at the heart of contemporary world culture-purifying, healing, harmonizing, and enlightening. With Ramprasad, we cry out to everyone her secret mantra, Ma! Ma! Ma!



Everyone is babbling about what happens after death

Everyone is babbling about what happens after death.
Superstitious villagers insist we become
peculiar wandering spirits,
while simple religious hearts assume our goal
to be sweet heavenly existence.
Lovers long to play in eternal companionship with Divinity,
while mystics strive
to merge comptetely with Divine Reality.
Scriptures of radical wisdom maintain
that the apparent soul is like space within a jar.
When death shatters our earthen vessel,
only the open space of awareness remains.
Who is there to unify with whom?

This intoxicated poet who belongs to Goddess Kali
knows all opinion to be void of substance.
Mother's mystery eludes
every earnest practitioner or philosopher
who assumes negative or positive energy
to be substantial or real.
This mirror mind and rainbow body
are her marvelous play
through the transparent medium of her elements.
After death, her dancing elements flow on,
and simply Mother remains.

The singer of this liberating song
laughs loud and long:
"We will be in the end
what we were in the beginning,
clear bubbles forming and dissolving
in the stream of timeless Mother Wisdom."



Why is Mother Kali so radiantly Black?

Why is Mother Kali so radiantly black?
Because she is so powerful,
even mentioning her name destroys delusion.
Because she is so beautiful,
Lord Shiva, Conqueror of Death,
lies blissfully vanquished
beneath her red-soled feet.

There are subtle hues of blackness,
but her bright complexion
is the mystery that is utterly black,
overwhelmingly black, wonderfully black.
When she awakens in the lotus shrine
within the heart's secret cave,
her blackness becomes the mystic illumination
that causes the twelve-petal blossom there
to glow more intensely than golden embers.

Her lovely form is the incomparable Kali-black,
blacker than the King of Death.
Whoever gazes upon this radiant blackness
falls eternally in love
and feels no attraction to any other,
discovering everywhere only her.

This poet sighs deeply:
"Where is this brilliant Lady,
this Black Light beyond luminosity?
Though I have never seen her,
simply hearing her name,
the mind becomes absorbed completely
in her astonishing reality.
Om Kali! Om Kali! Om Kali!"