November 2020
Editorial
The Vedanta Kesari
10
S
Mother Knows Best
wami Vivekananda accepting Kali as the Divine Mother who creates and sustains this universe, was a very significant moment in his life. It was also a moment of immense joy to his guru Sri Ramakrishna, who was training him to be Mother’s instrument for uplifting mankind into higher levels of consciousness. This acceptance soon matured into a wholehearted surrender to the Mother’s will, and Swamiji became the perfect instrument to impart Sri Ramakrishna’s great mantras of self-surrender: Naham naham, tuhu tuhu, ‘Not I, not I, but thou, O Lord’ and Ami yantra, tumi yantri, ‘I am the instrument, you are the operator.’ We find repeated references to this spirit of surrender in Swamiji’s letters, where he declares: “Mother knows best”, “To work I have the right. Mother knows the rest”, “Mother knows what will come next”, “Never mind, ‘Mother’ knows what is best for us. She will show the way”, “’Mother’ knows best, and we obey”, “for me the ‘Mother’ is my protection and refuge”.
Whether it was his plans for the future, or some events in his life, or his concerns about the monastic order he had set-up and was guiding, he saw their unfoldment as the will of the Divine Mother. He also knew that not syncing with Her will, only meant trouble: “Mother is doing Her own work; … Alone and drifting about in the will-current of the Mother has been my whole life. The moment I have tried to break this, that moment I have been hurt. Her will be done!” But what exactly does surrendering to the Divine Mother mean? An example may explain it: When a mother is giving a nice scrubbing bath to her child, he howls in discomfort and pain. At times, the mother even spanks him when he resists being cleaned of all the dirt
that he has picked up playing in the ground. Though chided and beaten, the sobbing child still clings to his mother and surrenders to her will, because he knows that only she gives him unstinting love and protection. Similarly, the Divine Mother too cleanses the mirror of our heart so that we can see Her true reflection in it. Wholeheartedly submitting to this painful cleansing, is taking refuge in Her. In a letter to h i s di sc i pl e, Si ster Nivedi t a, Swam i Vivekananda writes, “I only know this much: So long as you serve ‘Mother’ with a whole heart, She will be your guide. … Friends or foes, they are all instruments in Her hands to help us work out our own Karma, through pleasure or pain.” Thus, people around us and even nature become tools to scrub off the dirt of ignorance enveloping our mind and ego. Truly, as Swamiji says, “nothing that happens is against us”.
How to attain this state of complete resignation to the will of Divine Mother? We should begin with disciplining our senses, serving people unselfishly, and performing our family and social duties with excellence, detachment, and an enterprising spirit. These man-making actions will give our ‘I’, the individual sense, a strong positive character. This character-strength will deepen our conviction in our innate divinity and draw us towards spiritual practices. When all our energies are channelised into sadhana, our mind becomes pure and our higher intellect and powers of intuition are awakened. These higher faculties will enable us to perceive the visible universe as “God differentiated and made manifest.” Perfect self-surrender is to accept Mother’s will as it manifests through our family members, friends, foes, and all people and situations we meet — as modelled by the pious weaver in Sri Ramakrishna’s parable ‘By the Will of Rama’.
