Talks Excerpt 503. Swamiji says: Devi or the ‘Divine Mother’ is none other than Brahman Itself.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji

Sri Ramanuja [the ‘father’ of Vishishtadvaita] was a great man. He held on to God and God alone. He was a great man – nay, a great Incarnation. Do you know why they called him Shesha? Shesha carried the weight of Lord Vishnu with his creation. He was the basis. God came first then the Shesha. Yet the Shesha carried the Lord and his Creation.

When you give a public talk, you must first offer the whole talk to your deity.

Devi or the Divine Mother is none other than Brahman Itself. You will find that Devi worship, when rightly understood, is not separate. There is a kind of experience in Devi worship which is felt by the devotees, it is softness, love, compassion. This is also felt to a certain extent by the worshippers of Sri Krishna.

Hindus do not realise that death itself is a kind of Shakti [power]. You may see a stone and think that there is no shakti there. But imagine the shakti if even one atom of it was split. This shakti is none other than Brahman. Shakti herself is formless, attributeless and nameless. If anything, she is called the Eternal One.

Nowhere in the scriptures is this Divine Mother’s presence more clearly demonstrated than in the Devi Mahatmyam. God is Omnipresent, Omniscient and Omnipotent. This embodiment cannot be thought of. Out of Him manifested this Maha Kali with thousands of legs and hands. She destroyed Madhu and Kaitabha, the first obstructions to creativity. Later on this concept was given to man: that That which embodies Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence, time past, present and future, also takes us to the formless.

The free-to-read or download, 396-page Flipbook version of Swamiji’s biography is available by clicking HERE. If you’d prefer the PDF version, please click HERE.

These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.