Given below is a brief information on
Gopal Ma, the saint who Mothered God and from whose life i got a better
understanding of the Life of Harbans Ma.
Early Years
Aghormani was born in 1822 in Kamarhati, a
northern suburb of Calcutta. As per the prevalent social custom, she was
married at the age of nine. Her wedding was the first and the last time she saw
her husband - he died before the marriage was consummated, leaving her a widow
of fourteen years of age. However, she was initiated by her husband’s family
guru and was given the ‘Gopala mantra’, establishing the child Krishna as her
Chosen Deity. Since Aghormani was born with natural spiritual tendencies; she
plunged whole-heartedly into intense austerities and worship in order to have
the vision of her Ishta. Thus, the love and attention that Aghormani would have
given to her husband and children were diverted towards her beloved Gopala.
Aghormani lived a sheltered life of a
typical Brahmin widow, in the tiny room located in a corner of a temple-complex
of Govinda Datta in Kamarhati, on the bank of the Ganga. Her elder brother was
a priest of the Radha-Madhav temple. The holy atmosphere of the beautiful
temple fascinated her pure mind. This tiny room with bare necessities, where
she did intense spiritual practices, was her abode for almost her entire life.
She hardly moved from that room - except for a pilgrimage with her landlady.
Sister Nivedita wrote about her room, "Her little room was absolutely
without comforts. The handful of parched rice and sugarcandy formed her only
store. But the place was spotlessly clean, washed constantly by the Ganga water
of her own sturdy carrying. And in a niche in near hand, lay an old copy of the
Ramayana, and her great horn spectacles, and the little white bag containing
her beads. On those beads Gopaler Ma had become a saint! Hour after hour, day
after day, for how many years, had she sat, day and night, absorbed in
them!"
Spititual Practices
Thus, placed in an environment which was
extremely conducive for leading a life devoted to spiritual pursuits,
undisturbed by the din and bustle of the world, her latent devotional
sentiments gradually blossomed forth and she plunged into repeating Gopala’s
name oblivious of day and night. That tender love, which had so long remained
dormant within and had not found any suitable outlet for expression, now welled
up in torrents of tears and made her almost sleepless. Her daily routine was a
uniform round of prayer and service which she followed with unabated zeal for
thirty long years in the solitude of her room. She used to get up at two in the
morning and ceaselessly did her japa throughout the day and night with small
intervals for meals and rest as well as for the morning and midday services of
Sri Radha- Madhava in the temple. She had to face many pecuniary difficulties;
so much so that she had to weave sacred threads and sell them to support
herself. But no hardships could dissuade her from maintaining the strict
routine of her daily spiritual practices. Writes one biographer of Sri Ramakrishna,
"Lest her telling of beads get disrupted, she used to use her left hand
for cooking while her right hand remained busy with her rosary." Suffering
and tenderness, aches and ecstasies of her motherly loving heart were her only
companions over all these years.
Meeting with Ramakrishna
The fame of Sri Ramakrishna as a
God-intoxicated saint had by 1880’s spread far and wide; hence Aghormani Devi
felt an urge to meet him. One autumn afternoon in 1884, accompanied by the
devoted widow of Govinda Datta, she went to Dakshineshwar. She was now about
sixtytwo, fourteen years older than the Master and had already done severe
austerities; therefore, her mind was completely occupied by Gopala, the child
Krishna. Sri Ramakrishna welcomed them cordially, made them seated in his room
and sang a few devotional songs for them. He could easily gauge the depth of
devotion of the two ladies. Later he remarked about them, "Ah! How
beautiful is the expression of their face and eyes! They are, as if were
floating on the current of the love of God. Their eyes are full of the intense
love of God." He saw them off in his characteristic affectionate manner
and asked them to come again. It was not a routine courteous invitation. The
magnet was pulling the iron to itself. Aghormani felt a strong desire to visit
the Master at the earliest opportunity. A few days later she again visited
Dakshineshwar with some stale sweets purchased from a wayside shop. With great
hesitation, she offered the sweets to the Master who savored them and said,
"Well, you need not spend money for sweets. Prepare sweetened coconut
balls and vegetable curries cooked by your own hand." Aghormani’s visits
to Dakshineshwar now became very frequent. Her fascination for the Master,
however, was a little shadowed by the puzzle why the Master talked to her
mostly about food and not on spiritual matters. Sometime, she resolved not to
go to him again but every time she found herself automatically dragged in the
direction of Dakshineshwar. Thus, during the next three or four months she
regularly visited Sri Ramakrishna, always carrying some of her culinary
preparations, and the Master ate them praising, "Ah, how deliciously
cooked! It is, as it were, very nectar." She always returned to Kamarhati
with a tingle of joy lingering in her heart with an irresistible yearning for
the next visit.
Was Sri Ramakrishna her beloved Gopal?
Time thus rolled on and Aghormani was
basking in the soothing presence of the Master. Her ardent longings brought
about a spirit of complete self-surrender in her. Slowly, the time to reap the
fruits of her intense tapasya was approaching.
It was the beautiful morning of the spring of 1885. Following her regular routine, she had just completed her japam, and to her great astonishment, she found Sri Ramakrisha sitting to her left side, smiling sweetly, with his right hand clenched. In utter curiosity, she tried to touch him but found that Sri Ramakrishna’s form had disappeared and in its place appeared the real Gopala - a child ten months old crawling towards her and begging for butter while fixing his bewitching gaze on her! In the words of Aghormani, "I was so surprised! I cried in excess of joy and said to him, ‘Alas! I am a poor widow. Where shall I get butter for you, my child?’ But Gopala would not listen. ‘Give me something to eat,’ he
What a blissful experience! She was
clasping her Chosen Ideal in flesh and blood! She realized that Sri Ramakishna
had granted her this boon, and he was none other than the Gopala she had been
meditating upon for the last three decades. Ecstatic, completely oblivious of
the outer surroundings, totally absorbed in the thoughts of the Master, she
reached his room, crying frantically "Gopala, Gopala." As soon as
Aghormani sat down in the Master’s room, the Master, over-powered by Samadhi, readily
sat on her lap like an infant. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she began to
feed the Master with the delicacies she had brought with her. After a while the
Master regained normal consciousness and returned to his bedstead. The blessed
Aghormani began to dance in joy, since she was transported into the realm of
Gopala. In that state she said, "Gopala is now on my lap. Oh! Now he has
entered your body. Ah! He has come out again. Come my darling; come to your
poor mother." Sri Ramakrishna expressed great joy at this wonderful state
of Gopaler-Ma, stroked her body and brought her to normal consciousness. He fed
her sumptuously and in the evening sent her back to Kamarhati. After this
incident, she was addressed by Sri Ramakrishna and others as Gopaler-Ma
(Gopala’s mother), as, she actually became the blessed mother of Gopala and
enjoyed perennial bliss in mystic communion with the child Krishna.
Sri Ramakrishna used to praise Gopaler-Ma
for her devotion. Once, pointing to her, he said to those present in his room,
"Ah! There is nothing inside this body but God. He fills it through and
through." On another occasion he commented, "During Krishna’s
incarnation she was a fruit-seller of Vrindavan and she would feed Gopala the
sweet fruits."
Visions of Gopala
On her return journey too, she visualized
baby Krishna resting in her arms. Reaching her room, she started telling her
beads, but her Chosen Deity, for whom she had practised japa and meditation all
her life, was playing besides her, pestering and demanding various things and
snatching her rosary. To calm him down, she tried to make him sleep by
caressing him, but he complained that the pillow was too hard! Gopala also
assisted her in collecting the firewood. The mother with a heart overflowing
with love, sometimes fondled the child and sometimes rebuked him for his
naughtiness. Thus a divine sport continued in the sacred temple- garden of
Kamarhati - a phenomenon so rare in this age! Gopaler-Ma’s life is the
verification of the Hindu scriptural truth that God can be attained by Vatsalya
Bhava, worshiping Him as a child. With a pure mind and one-pointed devotion,
she could raise her consciousness to such a state that she could actually feel
the living presence of her object of worship. She was convinced and the Master
too assented that he was none other than her Gopala.
For about two months Gopaler-Ma had
unbroken communion with her Gopala, after which the frequency of her visions
decreased. She complained to the Master, who consoled her by assuring that in
Kaliyuga, it would be impossible for a person to sustain the body with one’s
mind attuned to the highest plane of superconsciousness. Gradually she felt the
presence of Gopala in everything and a radical change was observed in this
orthodox woman. All the distinction between high and low, the touchable and
untouchable and all the scrupulousness in the matter of food and rituals
vanished altogether from her mind. Later she could receive a ‘foreigner’ like
Nivedita without the least hesitation and even lived with her till her end.
Gopaler-Ma was thus transformed into a saint radiating bliss and joy, and she
continued to inspire people with her devotion, purity, sweetness and
simplicity.
Modern man, inclined to be skeptical and
scientific, has great difficulty in accepting as real such experiences as
Gopaler-ma's. However, from the traditional Hindu point of view, there are much
finer states of consciousness than the one in which we experience the sense world,
and this has been substantiated again and again by the experiences of saints
and seers. When the mind is pure and saturated with Spirit, such high states of
consciousness are possible. Gopaler-ma meditated on her beloved Gopala so much
that her mind became very pure. As a result, she entered the superconscious
realm, and wherever her eyes fell, she saw Gopala. In this realm of mystical
experience, verbal expression, mental cognition, and intellectual reasoning do
not function. The only consciousness is the direct consciousness of God.
Sri Ramakrishna once
shared "The Brahmani of Kamarhati (Gopal Ma) sees many visions. She lives
all by herself in a lonely room in a garden on the bank of the Ganga. She
spends her time in Japa. Gopala sleeps with her. It is not imagination, but
fact. She saw that Gopala's palms were red. He walks with her. She suckles Him
at her breast. They talk to each other." When Narendra (later Swami
Vivekananda) heard this story, he wept.
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