Healing the Heart of the World
Since the age of six, I had a deep yearning within me to have a direct experience of God or Christ like the Christian mystics. Because I had been raised a Catholic, I had been exposed to the saints through stories and pictures, called holy cards. I had great devotion to the Virgin Mary, and found the lives of St. Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Avila especially compelling and inspiring. Their rapturous faces, as portrayed in holy cards, appeared infused with some kind of divine light. Unlike my preteen friends, who idolized famous movie stars or musicians like Elvis Presley, I had innocent desires to have the animals and birds lovingly approach me like they did St. Francis. There was no doubt in my young mind that the straight path to experiencing God was to become a Catholic nun and to give up worldly desires altogether. After high school, I joined a strict cloistered order of Carmelite nuns. One day while praying deeply, I had a mystical experience of God as divine light. I was in a state of bliss, kneeling on the hard wooden floor of my room, unable to move from my spot even though my superior called out to me to do so. I did not want to leave that state of joy, so when the sister superior could not rouse me immediately with her command, she thought me totally disobedient. Unbeknownst to me, the mother superior called my father and had him come and take me back home that very day because she thought I might be showing signs of madness. At the time of this event, I was not aware that Christian mystics through the ages had been given a very hard time by Church authorities and that many almost lost their lives to the Inquisition. My summary dismissal left me psychologically shipwrecked in one shame-filled moment. Naturally, my family viewed me as a failure and an embarrassment. Intensely feeling their judgment and incapacity to understand mystic states triggered five tormented years of the dark night of the soul. My Inner Light went out. Even though I continued to pray and read all kinds of spiritual books, it was like eating straw and sand. My soul cried out in agony to recapture that living experience. In my youth, I believed and trusted religious authority to know the answers and to do what was best for my soul, but this experience left me cynical and quite cautious of any kind of religious authority. I eventually married, divorced, and spent twenty pain-filled experimental years trying to live the materialistic values of the world. In 1967 I finished graduate school with a Masters of Fine Arts degree. Trying to live as a classically trained artist according to the prevailing materialist values led only to deep depression and a sense of psychic fragmentation. By 1978, out of desperation, I once again turned to meditation and tried to experience God on my own terms without the intervention of outer authorities. Then in 1979 I experienced an even more profound and life-changing mystical experience of light and the evolution of human consciousness. This inner revelation radically changed the direction of my life. Ten years later, this experience became the inspirational motivation for writing my first book, Drawing the Light from Within: Keys to Awaken Your Creative Power, first published by Simon & Schuster. As years faded one into the other, I visited a number of men and women who were considered living saints. I was introduced to the woman Indian saint named Anandi Ma and attended a retreat with Pir Vilayat Khan, the great Sufi master. They say that when you are ready, the teacher finds you. In June of 1987, friends told me that an Indian saint named Ammachi was visiting California as part of her first world tour. As I recall, it was a warm summer night in Sausalito, California, where I was living at the time. The calm San Francisco bay glowed with the fiery orange of the setting sun, and the air was perfumed with the intoxicating smell of wild honeysuckle. I arrived at the small Presbyterian church high on a hill overlooking the bay and nervously sat cross-legged on the hard wooden floor with perhaps a hundred other people. Ammachi came into the church dressed in a simple white sari and accompanied by a few of her students, who were also dressed in white. She sat down in a chair, and as people went up to her, she hugged each one, kissed them on the cheek, and gave them a chocolate Hershey's Kiss. My mental state was agitated, skeptical, and impatient, and my body could barely tolerate sitting on the hard wooden floor. My only "holy" thought was, "I hope this line of people moves quickly so I can get my hug and leave." Needless to say, when I did go up to get her hug, I felt no infusion of divine grace. It would take 11 years before I would loosen my skepticism and open my heart to the infusion of Ammachi's unconditional love. Each ensuing year found me going back to her for her blessing. No longer were there small groups of people. As word spread about her unique hugs, the intimate groups grew into thousands. Although I considered myself a sincere spiritual seeker, I was highly skeptical around embodied spiritual teachers. A number of my friends and acquaintances had experienced sexual and psychological abuse by spiritual leaders from various Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and New Age sects. The newspaper reports of scandals from TV ministers and others only increased my skepticism and cynicism. By 1989, I was drawn to becoming a student of kriya yoga as taught by Paramahansa Yogananda. Because I harbored a deep fear of being abused by an embodied spiritual teacher, I felt safe with Yogananda; he was no longer was in the body. In his now-famous book Autobiography of a Yogi were many stories of his own mystical experiences of God as light, which confirmed for me the authenticity of my own mystical experiences and necessity of finding the divine within oneself. Yogananda had a great devotion to God as Divine Mother, and it fired my longing for a relationship to the feminine face of God. I began to pray more and more to the Divine Mother. During this period, I received in meditation the direct inspiration from the Divine Mother to write my second book, Mandala: Luminous Symbols for Healing, published by Quest Books in 1995. At the time, I did not connect Ammachi with this inspiration. However, during this period I continued seeing Ammachi each year and began to get spiritual experiences from her. Through her grace, my soul once again was able to recapture a living experience of God. These experiences only fired my thirst for an embodied teacher like Yogananda was to his early disciples. By 1997, I could no longer resist my deepest desire, and so Ammachi became for me the embodied teacher my heart had been seeking. Many people have asked me how I came to write Ammachi's authorized biography. In January of 1998, I decided it was time for me to write a third book, and began in earnest working on several book ideas, but although I wrote continuously for six months and prayed each day to be inspired, the sacred muse was utterly unresponsive. Many trees have to give up their lives for any book to go into print, and as a result, I have always felt a deep spiritual and ecological accountability. Therefore, I could only be satisfied with a book I knew to be truly inspired and beneficial to humanity. One morning in the middle of June, while deeply meditating, I once more desperately pleaded to God to inspire me with the writing. And then it happened! Ammachi's face came clearly into my mind and the sacred muse made it known beyond a doubt that this was the story I was to write. Because Ammachi was no longer in the San Francisco Bay area, I flew to where she was on tour in Chicago to ask her permission. It was there that Ammachi gave me her verbal permission and blessing to write her story and interview her close disciples. Miraculously, within a period of four months, all doors opened to make this happen, including getting an agent and securing William Morrow/HarperCollins as the New York publisher. Then, on December 31, 1998, I embarked on a three-month pilgrimage to India to learn more about Ammachi and to interview the people, and to visit her charities and the places where her life first unfolded. During those three months, I traveled with Ammachi for thousands of miles throughout India. From firsthand experience in India, I learned that Ammachi is much more than a simple hugging saint. Millions of Indians revere Ammachi as a great saint and sage, a Christ-like figure. Ammachi grew up in poverty and suffered from extreme physical, gender, and religious abuse. She says that her mission is to give unconditional love and compassion to all suffering souls. She has been traveling the world since 1987, hugging millions of people each year. At the young age of 47, Ammachi has become world renowned as a great religious and humanitarian leader. Judith Cornell, Ph.D., is an international seminar leader and speaker. She will be appearing at East West Bookshop May 30 ([206] 523-3726; <ewbookshop@qwest.net>), Lynnwood’s Embassy Suites Hotel (with Ammachi) May 31 ([800] 628-0611), Unity of Bellevue June 1 (Keven: [425] 747-5950), and Stonehouse Growth Center June 2 ([425] 889-5106). You may contact Dr. Cornell at (415) 485-9767, <ommandala@aol.com>, or <http://www.mandala-universe.com/>. |
The path that eventually led to my meeting and writing the biography of Sri Mata Amritanandamayi, simply known as Ammachi (the "hugging saint") was neither straight nor easy.