Moments with Mother

I’ve always been very over-awed to be in Mother’s Presence and found it hard to speak, found it hard to do anything, but of course any indication that I should do something was you know, total instant acceptance on my part.

I had been very quickly on tour with the Sahaja Yogis and saw Shri Mataji in person in India. That was my first tour. The next place I went to was to New York, which was for the first time that the whole North American collective had a puja, to Shri Krishna, Deity of the Vishudhi chakra, with Mother together. They all gathered and the Canadians came and we were with Her out in New Jersey, and then in New York. So after She spoke to me and said ‘Would you like to come to Europe? We’re going on to Europe for the tour?’

Well on the flight from New York to England there was a really lovely hostess, a beautiful Indian lady. It was an Air India flight and we were sitting with Mother and we were all in economy in those days. We were sitting next to Her, Paul Henwood and myself, and I was trying to keep myself to be the thinnest i could be. So the attendant, this lady, came along and she said there’s something about you, I know you, or something and Shri Mataji smiled and She said “Yes I’m a teacher from india and these are two of my disciples”. And my lid lifted right up you know. I guess it was understood previously, but to hear from Mother, to introduce me as a disciple, to somebody was you know, important. I think by then I was over the initial shock, and I really recognized that this Holy stream of Energy and great Wisdom, was an unprecedented Spiritual capacity in my understanding, a Guru of higher incarnation, and so just to be called a disciple by Her in public was you know for me a big deal.

Also it was actually on that flight, we were two Australians as it was who were traveling with Mother and sitting with Her, we were both called Paul, and a little She started to talk about Paul in the bible and said basically this fellow was, i don’t know how, to put it politely, but he wasn’t correct, he wasn’t right, he had not met Christ, was a Roman, persecuted Christians and She just started to tick off all things that were wrong, about this poor fellow, and therefore the Christian religion. And so being being brought up as a Christian, as a catholic, and having all this conditioning, troubled me. Although it wasn’t common, I knew nobody in Sahaja Yoga at that time with another spiritual different name, but I asked Shri Mother… “ perhaps it might be a good idea to change our names?” because she was definitely giving Paul a thumbs down.

And so She said “yes that’s a good idea” She said … “we’ll call you Pavan”. Which She subsequently said to me that it means Auspicious. I was not courageous around Shri Mother to question or ask anything, so i just sat on the new name for a while, and yogis told me it meant the Wind God, father of Hanuman. The wind had already figured largely to me in Perth and also at a time in the Grampians which was where I felt I had a real connection to the Wind. So we were flying at that time, and I’ve also had this experience at the time just prior to realization of this wind coming into the room. (So had I heard what it meant from Shri Mataji, and that was “Auspicious”. To me Auspicious means Pleasing to God) and so yeah it was, it’s felt very nice to me. But I didn’t push it publicly or in the collectivety of Sahaja yogis. And it wasn’t until later that somebody from Australia was talking with Shri Mataji and mentioned me about something, and She said that they should all call me Pavan, and so it’s stuck.

Yes about my birthday, funnily enough because i’ve been a Seeker i’ve looked at a lot of things including astrology and also regards teachers from india, and I had looked at a some other gurus and so on, and somehow stories would come to me about these different people, paths, gurus etc, on the way and usually they were not good stories. (One girl I met for instance had a sister who was absolutely devastated by her encounter with one teacher, and his very expensive meditation methodology). And so I had no doubt that they were in some way not kosher, or deceitful, or mercenary etc and as one of the things that I’ve been into was astrology and numerology and so on and so i thought well they should at least have an auspicious birthday and it turned out that Shri Mataji was born on the equinox, 21 March, which the date when I was born. So much later you know at some stage this came up in conversation. We were in Sydney and at a Chinese restaurant and one of the other yogis mentioned he’d been born in 1951 and I sparked up.

I said “Shri Mother, I too, I was born in 1951”. She said “what is your birthday?” so I said “it’s the same as yours”, and She looked down a bit and She looked up and She said … “ I don’t envy you a bit – a life of trials.” and I knew what She was talking about, but I couldn’t talk it down at all, because I was you know in the most heavenly place possible, but yes it was it was a point that helped me recognize Her dramatically in the first step, that you know She had this most auspicious family and father, and place, time and setting for a birth, and everything else. You know when something’s right it just resonates with the whole of your being and you don’t necessarily need the data and the information, but as it comes in you see that everything fits and everything is absolutely right, and everything is correct and you don’t hear any dissonance with the truth. It just is.

So um whenever Shri Mataji spoke to me I was always you know attentive. But She didn’t address me too much in terms of personal things. I think one thing She said which would probably be of interest to the yogis, She said to me once personally, She said “Shri Ganesha will take you to the heart, and Hanuman will take you the rest of the way.” This was a very important statement to me, that went to the heart of my Seeking. So I think I took it at that first time, as the suggestion that i should be more proactive and you know get more cranked up proactively with things and so that was advice I tried to take to heart and you know get involved, and be more productive. (But this also spoke, more importantly to the Ascent, and becoming.)

So of Humanity, I think the Australians have always had a special place with Shri Mataji. I know going early on some of the tours, we’d been the first there, almost the ground breakers. Australia as a continent, under the Southern Cross, relates directly to the first chakra, the Mooladhara, and to the innocent deity of Shri Ganesha, and to Mars, and the start of the astrological year, and Aries. And it seemed that because Australians had a less complicated and overlaid view of things, they were able to, I guess, consistent with the base (down under) chakra be ‘down to Earth’ practical etc , and also be able to just see with wisdom, another one.

Well I mentioned before, in that emotional way, that I was humbled just before coming to Sahaja Yoga, I’ve had a lot of success and you know i was considered something of a shining light in the industry I was in, and so on, but everything had fallen apart in my life like business, relationships, all sorts of things, so I realised that um actually it’s not a bad state to be to be empty, and to be humble. And so each time Shri Mataji asked me to do something, I just had faith that it would be okay, and typically that just meant dropping off, not a lot of posessions, a few things, and going somewhere for Sahaja Yoga. And typically on the rebound after from that, coming back from each of those adventures, you know I’d have this marvelous green patch of business, and new client consulting success, and so on, and everything would suddenly come to me in a flurry. I realised much earlier that I always had after 1983 what I needed, absolutely had what I needed, and you know I never had cause to doubt, or to concern, or petition Mother.

I did have one interesting thing happened in Hong Kong. I was living in Hong Kong, and i’ve been to a program at this place called the Charter House which was a new building, a brand new hotel, and getting out of the taxi out front of the hotel somehow my wallet had come out of my pocket, and a fair amount of money had come out of it, about 500 odd dollars lost and I was due to fly back to Australia. So when I discovered my wallet was kind of gone, I went back up there and I found it in the street. The money was missing, and I admit I thought oh well that’s not terribly fair, here I’m doing our Sahaj Yoga work, (whether or not it was my fault I had dropped my wallet, and I had done lost 500, and you know, gosh). So I thought you know, oh well, whatever it is it is, you know, I didn’t know how to explain it or whatever, but anyway I had to fly back to Australia just after that. And so I went to the airport to fly out. So when I got to the HK airport, at that time still on Kowloon Island, and Cathay said “look apologies, we’ve overbooked the flight, if you want to, and can, come back tomorrow, and don’t mind, we’ll give you an upgrade to business, and we’ll give you five hundred dollars for making that decision. OK?” I said no worries. And then they said, but if you hang around, you might have to wait here, but we might be able to upgrade you and get you home tonight, but we won’t know until the last minute, is that okay?” All of which all just happened on that night. So I was given the $500 and finally a first-class ticket back to Sydney with Cathay that night. So I really laughed and thought well “you know my petition was heard”. So you know in that sense I’ve never doubted that there will always be enough. So having said that you know the country, times, people in business, and living collectively, with other people etc, we have been through plenty of economic undulations and so on, but when you’ve had a taste of success and you found it hollow, then it’s no longer about materiality, it’s not about only gratification, at that level. So in fact you know it’s I think, if your focus is there, the Divine supports you, that’s as simple as it gets, it might put you to some testing sometimes, but yeah.

Well I think the most that we can be is a good instrument. I think that’s the best we can be. We can be a tool for the Divine and ultimately realize our own divinity, so I think surrender is just the end of story, first, and last, surrender is the story, and if you get clear direction from Shri Mataji to your own request, to do something, to me that was as Peter said before, it’s a no-brainer. There’s no question of going or not going. It’s great joy to go, and i’ve had that experience, where at different times in different roles, I mean when Mother first formed the trustees ship here, she made me a trustee, and so on, and so on, you feel and know you’re on that magic carpet. You’ve got the Divine attention on you, and everything is just you know, you say pick up your chair and walk, and they do. You know everything works out, so you have that Divine support and um so there was no question of not going. I have always felt, beyond receiving it myself, that there’s only one thing to be achieved, and that is to share the experience and to help work it out in the World.

I had one experience when I hadn’t been in Sahaja long, a dream and it was very very profound. I dreamt I was like Rip Van Winkle, I woke up and I’ve been asleep, I was under this tree, this vast tree, and I was covered in twigs and branches and everything and you know it was uh it was a revelation that I’ve been asleep for a very long time and this tree had grown and it manifested and had been spread out and done everything and I had this overwhelming sense of loss that i hadn’t seen it. I hadn’t been part of it. I hadn’t participated, and it was a sense of grief that was so strong, and it stayed with me for days it was like ah, it was like an unreal experience. So anytime anything came up that gave me a nudge to say ‘this is not right’, because in spite of my humble demeanor, I can get quite cross with people. So anytime i had that that notion that I’m either gonna react, you know I’m either gonna smack somebody in the mouth, or run away, I’d be, I was held in check by this experience, that I’d had, which is … ‘whatever you do, do not cut yourself off from the Reality of this, in spite of the appearances, in spite of the collective, or by the leadership, in spite of dramas that are unfolding or anything that you can think of, you to the core know what this is, and so do not cut yourself off’.

I think that if you’re a yogi, it’s a journey of course as everybody will say, but at different times um you’ll go through something, you’ll fail personally, others will fail, you’ll have doubts. Whatever it is, and there begins a rebuilding of your spiritual edifice – so it does for me, so what happens to me is, I sort of dismantle everything and then I put it back together again “no this is you, you do know, you have had, that is right, that is correct, that’s it” and so you can check that on vibrations, yes, okay, and so when there’s been doubts or they’ve been big issues and big problems, um you have to stay the course, there’s no there’s no other game in town, as i’ve often said to people. Once you start working on yourself, on your spiritual Ascent, because that’s really the only game in town, once you seriously set out on the great Journey Quest – What are you going to do? Are you going to tangent, and go off, and go away? I think you know maybe in other lifetimes I’ve done that, and I’ve had that experience, where, don’t do it again, you know don’t go there.

I was gratified early to hear that Shri Mataji said and reiterated my own understanding that there is a God the Father transcendent Sadashiva and there is God immanent as Mother, and therefore God the Father is to be aspired to, and God the Mother will take you on that journey, She’ll cleanse you, She’ll nourish you, She’ll purify you, She’ll perfect you, She’ll correct you, and She’ll ultimately take you into the Presence and then the Unity of the Divine Father, and that’s really what we have, where we’re headed for.

When I first got my realisation in Perth that’s true, Shri Mataji wasn’t there, it was just a video and yet I had no doubt at all this was remotely, this was the Lady, this was you know, it just came to me completely, so in that experience I didn’t think that I was going to see much difference in being with Shri Mataji in person. So the first time a saw Her, it was in India in person, and She was across, She was taking lunch, and it was a group of yogis there. It was basically in this large area yard, more like a grove, and Shri Mataji was nonchalantly you know taking Her food, and as soon as I saw Her there, physically my chakras went mad, I was pinging, and ringing, and you know and i suddenly got the realisation that there is a lot of difference being in Her physical Presence. So you can know another on the subtle, and we do know Mother on this level, but also being in Her company or presence, was going to be different. And so i wasn’t expecting that, I was expecting it to be the same, because I felt that we knew Her based on subtle.

So I would say to people who are you know saying ‘oh I never saw Her, I never met Her’ and yet She’s as accessible now as She was then and the fact that there is always available, there’s all these recordings, all these videos, and there’s any amount of photos that really transmit to you Her essence.

So the real essence of who Shri Mataji is not about anything external, it’s about Shri Mataji is internal, and She’s within you. She’s your divine Mother, within us She is your Kundalini Power, and She knows you intimately, She’s been with you forever, and therefore She’s going to take you, you know, where you want to go.

So if you’re a Seeker, if you’re seeking the Divine, and I think everybody is a seeker potentially, and I think that Divinity is intrinsic, and hopefully it will be all made available to everybody over time. I hope there’s not going to be a line drawn in the universe somewhere, and you know people are lost, but um I just felt Her immediately, via video and via the picture and via my intuition and my new vibrational awareness uh immediately.

And if you’re not feeling the Presence and Vibrations, you should just jump into it and work on yourself until you do. I really can’t say for anybody else, i just know that for me, it was a super profound experience. And yet you know, I’ve also seen people come to programs, and have very profound experiences first up, walk out the door and not seen them again, so I’m at a bit of a loss to explain something that for me was so obviously new and interesting, and for other people as either you know, whatever it is, something else.

I realized that whilst we talked to people about spontaneous self-realisation, it’s a very progressive and ongoing thing, virtually an evolutionary thing and whilst we can facilitate evolution, you know it’s not an instantaneous thing. Everything works out over time, me and everybody else in Sahaj, so some of the people involved who were difficult, and I think the Collective supported me. There were people who you know, who I had immense regard for, who were there from the earliest. B. (Boghdan) was a good example, when at one stage I was ready to split, to up and go, you know, and somehow innocently moved, he just swanned up alongside me, and arm around my shoulders and we wandered off to you know to buy, you know a make believe coca-cola, (CampaCola) you know and things like that, but the Collective I think, that’s the other answer to that question,

Where would you find Mother now? You’ll find Her in the Collective. And when you put your attention towards Her. The fact is that, when we do sit down, and we do put our attention on vibrations, or we watch a video of Her. And the person who picks the tape what was heard that night, that’s from beyond relative time, both the decision, and the messages and energy…

So you will find Mother in the moment, and in the Collective, and I don’t mean that you should only hang out, and be a groupie, ah that’s not an appropriate term, but you know you shouldn’t be just a fundamentalist, or a die-hard.

Your expected to keep and develop your discretion, but when the Collective is together, and Mothers talks are on, and that type of thing, there Mother is definitely manifesting. And the decisions even by those people who think they know whatever they think, you know, in spite of ourselves, we get looked after and in spite of ourselves the right thing works out and even things that appear adverse are very character building you know.

You do have to expand your sense of self to encompass uh larger and larger um spheres of concern and interest, because if you diminish, and I think Peter said it before “if you don’t meditate you start to diminish instead of flowering and unfolding and evolving and being instrumental, you start to disappear.”

So Mother is very much here, and it sounds grandiose, but She is here. And as an incarnation’s work, as Christ is here, because they’ve worked it out in their lifetime, they’ve come on Earth, they’ve had enough impact and influence on Humanity, to work out their chakra, of their situation.