What Amma taught me
Most of us are here trying to get the universe to notice us, and we don't even know it. We gather up riches or give them away, we commit amazing or terrible acts, we seek out comfort or seek to escape the comfort we have, we build dams against suffering, we try to make the world a better place than it was when we found it … and there is still this emptiness, this hole in us in the shape of something we can't quite identify. You do all of this, you carve out your own improbable epic, and in the end it seems to matter so little.
So you go to Amma, because maybe she will understand this gaping loneliness and help to ease it just a little. You go and find all these wonderful and sometimes flakey people, and you're particularly amazed because of the diversity – the rich and the poor, the black and white, the sick and the perfectly well. And you lie in her arms. No matter who you are, you lie in her arms and believe that the universe is listening to you.
Which, of course, it is. Don't you feel like an idiot not knowing that? It's what Rilke meant when he wrote:
Yes — the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
And now you know, being what you are, in your comfortable smallness, you know the universe is listening. It demands nothing of you, which is maddening. It knows no fear and no revenge, which is equally maddening. It asks you to be here for as long as you can, and then it asks you to go on. What matters more than to be witness to this, to the divine in the real, wings that beat the dull pedestrian air?
When you are alone, when you are lost, remember what the universe said to you, what it whispered in your ear as it held you close: My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling.