I was being whirled into this cosmic flux

I still have this wonderful image of Shri Mataji standing by a sofa in one of the sahaja yogi’s houses, and pointing at some hand-drawn diagram of the chakras and explaining it to us and having my first footsoak sitting in front of Shri Mataji. One of the Sahaja Yogis brought a basin of salty water and Shri Mataji was working on me with limes. The amazing thing was that I allowed it all to happen, because my background had been twelve years in a Methodist school, plus at that time I was a newly qualified aerospace engineer just out of college, with all that skepticism. Whatever Mother did during those sessions cleared me out quite a lot because the next time I met Her in Caxton Hall I experienced spiritual ecstasy.

There were relatively few people in the room. At each program, She would sit down and close Her eyes and those who were Sahaja Yogis would also close their eyes. But I would always watch what was going on, still being rather curious. On this particular day, which was the 8th of April 1978, I was watching Shri Mataji very closely and She opened Her eyes and looked straight at me. And then something very amazing happened.

She just gazed at me and I felt as though I was being pulled into Her eyes. The next thing I knew, I was being whirled into this cosmic flux, going back through time and experiencing all those things that I had studied in history whizzing past me. It is truly hard to describe. I distinctly saw/heard/smelt/felt certain objects like a sabre-tooth tiger, the universe, planets, etc., until it came back to “the beginning.” And then there was nothing, just nothing. And, in the middle of this nothingness was Shri Mataji.

It just encompassed me, this complete silence which was like a thick transparent sphere of silence. I was feeling complete love and compassion flowing out of me, and I was in tune with everything. All of nature, all of life was living and breathing with me. My every gesture made ripples and waves in this completely interlinked creation. All this lasted for three days and nights, where I was in a perpetual state of ecstasy. It is impossible to describe.

Now the interesting thing is that after I had this experience, I went back home and wrote a letter to Mother, just apologizing for having not known who She is. And the next time when I went down to London, which was the following weekend, Shri Mataji came up on stage and looked straight at me and said: “Bala, that was a beautiful letter you wrote me.” And then She told the people that I had had a very special experience and after the meeting She invited me to Her home.