Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati: Don't Ask Why--Just Do Something!

interview

ANDREW COHEN: We're living in a unique time in the history of our planet, a unique time in the history of our species. The experts are telling us that, as a result of globalization, overpopulation, grinding poverty, destruction of the natural environment, pollution, not to mention the spread of weapons of mass destruction, if we don't turn things around very quickly, we are going to enter what evolutionary theorist Duane Elgin calls "an evolutionary dark age." Indeed, some are saying that we've already reached the point of no return. What I wanted to speak with you about was not so much the specific work you're doing—although I'm personally very inspired by your example—but rather, as a spiritual activist whose very life is a clear expression of a passionate response to the overwhelming pain and suffering that occurs on a daily basis in this world, what do you advise is the most appropriate way to respond to this crisis that we're in the midst of?

MA JAYA: The kali yuga [dark age] is like a huge swarm of curses. And the world, needs one word, and that word is awareness. If you live and act in a state of ignorance, then who will take care of the children's children? Where will they run? Where will their feet step? I cannot be separated from my work. I am my work and my work is me. I am privileged to have an orphanage in the thick of the jungle in Uganda. I have two hundred children there. If I did not have that awareness and my chelas [disciples], who know that my whole path is a path of service, did not have that awareness, perhaps these children wouldn't eat. Certainly they would have suffered more, due to AIDS. So it's all connected, like a gigantic lotus, and the very core of the lotus is awareness. I go all over the world touching people with AIDS. It's about awareness.

You talk about the environment; you talk about the world. I'm sixty years old; I've been serving for thirty years. I have never, ever felt such pain as I do now about the environment. The rainforests are gone. I believe your magazine can reach the people who need the most awareness—and that's not the average guy, but the spiritual leader. You're reaching the seekers, and that's fine, too. But I want to talk to the leaders. Those are the ones who have to open their doors.

I was a delegate for the United Nations, for spiritual leaders, at the Peace Summit last summer. And it shocked me. There was a seminar about poverty that I was asked to attend. It was about the hungry, about the needy. And a Hindu stood up and began to scream at a Catholic priest that the Christians stole their religion. This was in the papers—this is real. I stood there in shock, . And the priest turned around and said, "You had no religion to steal!" And I stood up and said, "Excuse me. Have any of you ever seen the light go out in a child who had nothing to eat and just gave in to death?" And that kind of stopped it. The need to be right—and they're not right, but they think they are—takes away the awareness on an earth that's going nowhere and going nowhere very, very quickly. I've seen too much, Andrew. I've seen too much, and the world has never been in as much chaos. If I can go to a seminar on poverty at the U.N. and find two religions fighting, what's happening? We each owe this world of ours, this magnificent, beautiful world of ours. We must take care of her.

AC: I know you're a trustee of the Parliament of the World's Religions.

MJ: Yes, and if the spiritual leaders don't go there and don't touch these problems, we're going to lose everything. There's going to be nothing. Followers quit following, you know. People get disillusioned. But what if everybody took a small speck of this earth and made it their own, by taking care of whatever is on that speck, whatever is in front of them? What if other leaders said, "Well, let me take a town and support them. Let me take a block. Let me take a house. Let me take a person." You know, automatically, you start the fertilization of your own earth with love. So when you say you admire my work—I don't want to be admired. I want to be copied. In any way, however one has the ability.

I've been here at my ashram in Florida for twenty-five years. I have leaders coming. I have Muslims, I have Christians, I have Jews, I have Hindus. And I say to them, "What are you doing? How much can you pray? Take those hands that you hold together in a pranam [gesture of reverence] and do something. Caress a child." That's my message. Do something. Start with exactly what is in front of you. The ability to take care of another human being in a sincere way enables a very small part of the earth, that which is in front of you, to shift, to change. I believe that with all my heart, because if we can't take care of each other as human beings, how are we going to take care of the earth?

Andrew, we're sharing now. You want something, not just for your magazine—you want something for the world. I do too. I want something so badly it brings tears to my eyes. I can taste it. And in this moment, both of us are aware. What's going to happen? As soon as I'm finished speaking to you, I'm going to retake my vows to serve even more. Because what I speak, I must do. I walk the talk. And maybe, who knows? Maybe you're going to get interested in helping somebody with AIDS.

AC: What would you say to the individual who says, "I can't bear to face it. What you're asking for is so psychologically and emotionally and spiritually overwhelming that I just can't bear to face it. Even when I do begin to face it, I can't stay with it because it's too much to bear."

MJ: It's so overwhelming that one is like a deer in a headlight. You can barely look at it. So what I would say is start very small. Start very small. See how it feels to take care of one thing and let it nurture. Let it grow. Yes, you get overwhelmed. But I have such passion about what could be done! And if we go down, we go down—but we go down trying. We go down knowing we did not waste our love and our life. If you waste your love and your life, what's going to happen? Put it toward something. Is it a human being? Is it a forest in Brazil? My grandson studied in Argentina. He says, "Ma, you don't understand the destruction that's there." It's all over the world, and it's right in front of us. When I came back from Africa, I saw that half an hour away from where I am in Florida, there are people living in little tin huts. So, it's all over the world, but we need to stop a moment and look at what's right in front of us and take care of it. And if we get overwhelmed, there is the solace that we've given something. We've given birth to a moment of love.

AC: I spoke to Roshi Bernie Glassman about this the other day. He speaks a lot about "bearing witness," being able to just face directly into the crisis without any preconceived ideas about how one should respond to it. He says that out of bearing witness, just being willing to bear it directly, an appropriate or right response is going to occur. That takes a lot of courage.

MJ: It takes courage. But does it really take courage to become who we are? Is it really a courageous thing to be in that moment? That moment brings liberation. That moment brings enlightenment.
AC: How is it that bearing witness in this way brings enlightenment?
MJ: Bearing witness is another term for awareness. If you are physically in this moment—because you are in this moment—you can't avoid the hardship. Because you are in this moment, as the hardship is in front of you, so is the movement to help fix it. It's the same moment. There is the reaction to the moment and the action. Not tomorrow. In the same moment. So as you bear witness to your own breath, you're looking around you. You can do it right this second, and you can see, "Look what I notice!" And whatever you're looking at becomes bigger and more magnified, and as you bear witness, you become more magnified. And you have the tools to fix it, even if it's ever so slightly.

AC: And what would you call that tool?

MJ: I would call it the great awareness of the moment. It's a great awareness. Why is it great? Because not only is everything in front of you being taken care of, no matter how overwhelming—because you start very small—but guess what? You're returning to the core. You're returning to, as Swami Nityananda taught me, whence you have come.

AC: What is the relationship between awareness and compassion?

MJ: With awareness, you grow detached, and all of a sudden, it's not about you. Then a huge well, a huge well of compassion flows through you. When you are aware, you realize that attachment has no place in your life.

AC: Because?

MJ: When you are aware, you know that everything that we have is impermanent. Swami Nityananda taught me about chidakash, the heart space over the head. And I go to this space. In this space, I disappear. It's not about me. And therefore, compassion, which I've always prided myself with having, begins to flow even more, and I realize, "My God! I could have had a billion times more." Awareness leads to detachment, which leads to the utmost compassion. And when I say "detachment," it doesn't mean not caring. In fact, on the contrary, it means caring in a bigger, more beautiful, more profound way.

AC: Awareness leads to detachment, but what's the relationship, then, between detachment and compassion?

MJ: Because it's not about me. I must have compassion for other human beings in this place of detachment. I only know how to speak of my own experience. I get a call that there's a young girl with full-blown AIDS on the street who just gave birth. She's in the street. She's calling for Ma. I go to the street. I had a personal tragedy that day. Okay? What am I giving? What's left for me to give? How can I look at this child? Her pain adheres to my pain. Therefore, I go to the place of detachment. It is not about me. And I am there for a young girl, without judgment. Compassion can only be given without judgment—without judgment, because it's not about me. And I hold her close to my breast until the ambulance comes and takes her. In that moment, I have disappeared because I'm not in my own pain. And if I don't have pain, I am so wide open to hers that the compassion flows.

AC: The reason I'm asking you this question is that some people are afraid of detachment, because they're afraid that if they allow themselves to experience detachment, then they're not going to care.

MJ: I know that. Most people are afraid of detachment. But I'm living it. Not only am I living it, thousands of my students are living it. I have a small ashram in California, and they have a program called "Under the Bridges and on the Streets," and they feed thousands of people each month. Because they are detached, what they see fuels them to go on and serve even more.

Okay, I have another story. It's not going to be pretty. So just hear what I have to say.

AC: I'm listening.

MJ: I have a young child. I've had her about six years. This child was a beautiful young girl. And her father forced her to drink Drano.

AC: Oh my God.

MJ: I warned you. If I did not go to the place of detachment, do you think I could have walked into that room a few days after that happened? I needed to go to where I was not attached. And the compassion flowed. I've had her for about six years, and now she goes to school. She has no face. A beautiful child, and now she's dying. From attachment comes what? Anger. So how would I be able to help this child?

AC: How old is she now?

MJ: Thirteen. This is detachment. Does it mean I don't love them? I could tell you stories to make your hair curl. All because of what? People's attachment. "I am attached to my space. I have my white picket fence. I have my husband, my children. I see it on TV, but I don't want to go look at it." And I'm saying, "Be detached, and take care of girls like Melissa whose father poured Drano down her throat." If I was attached, I could never in a million years do what I'm doing. I would collapse if I was attached. I would fall into my own pool of self-pity.

AC: There's a mystery in this because—as you've been saying, and many great masters have spoken about this—it's through letting go that we find love and care.

MJ: Exactly. And boy, is it scary. It's frightening. When you let go, the true compassion of love emerges because you are living exactly in the moment. All of a sudden, your children are close to you, your lovers are close to you, because you do not have your claws in their necks. I do not own you. I enjoy you. And I do not look back to see who is taking my love. That is the greatest mystery. I think that's by far a greater mystery than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Because you actually have to do something with your own being.

AC: What do you mean?

MJ: You actually have to do something with your own being in order to do something for somebody else's being. You can't just run in and rage, "That son of a bitch gave that child Drano!" and leave the kid there without any hope. So you have to say, "I can get past this. I can be detached enough to look at this." First of all, you have to look at it, and then, you have to take care of the situation. It's not shirking any kind of responsibility, and that's the mystery. And somebody's going to come back next lifetime full of love because they weren't left to die alone in agony and pain. The mystery is that every one of us, I don't care who you are, every one of us has the ability to be detached and take care of what has to be taken care of.

AC: What is the source of your passion and compassion?

MJ: Well, my mother, who died in Coney Island Hospital in a charity ward, really showed me how to take care of people. One day I said to her, "Mama, why are you suffering so much?" One breast removed, the other breast removed, the kidney removed, the lung removed—this was in the late '40s. She turned to me and slapped me, and she said, "Don't you ever ask why!" And so I looked right at her, and I said, "Why?" So she laughed and slapped me again. She said, "Because nobody's going to answer you. Who's going to give you an answer?" And I remembered that all my life. And I teach that. Instead of asking why, just do. We all are capable of doing. I'm not on a soapbox. If I was on a soapbox, I wouldn't have time to accomplish everything I've accomplished in my life. You see, I want change. I want to see a change in a child's eyes that are misted over with pain. I know that if we help one human being, it's going to touch the world. It has to. I may not know how, but I know it will. I'm doing, and everybody with me is also doing. It's been incredible to see how many children are growing, not because just one person cares, but because I've taught many to care. And if I died this second, this day, I have coming after me many, many children, students, and chelas who care. I'm not going to hide. I'm not going to just bear witness. I'm from Brooklyn. I'll go down fighting.