[The following is a kind of summary report to date about a question I have had on the matter of that which has many names, some even forbidden to write or utter. It is also a kind of validation of thought or suspicion I have had from an early age pointing to a oneness or unity of which I am a very small part.
Just to punctuate a point in time. The experiment and inquiry continue.]
Unified Cosmos: Philosophical, Mystical, and Scientific Perspectives?
Throughout history, a diverse array of thinkers has posited that an underlying oneness governs the universe, consciousness, and matter. This concept, often referred to as the unus mundus or a "unified world," suggests that the apparent multiplicity of our reality emerges from a single, foundational source.
Foundational Philosophical Perspectives
Early Western and Eastern traditions laid the groundwork for this discourse through rational and metaphysical inquiry:
Giordano Bruno envisioned an Infinite Universe, an animate and eternal cosmos where infinite worlds manifest a divine unity through both matter and soul.
Plotinus described The One as a transcendent, indivisible source beyond all categories, from which all reality emanates.
Baruch Spinoza argued for a single Substance (God/Nature), viewing all individual entities merely as interdependent "modes" of one infinite reality.
Adi Shankara and Laozi provided Eastern parallels; Shankara’s Brahman represents a non-dual consciousness where the individual self and the world’s plurality are seen as illusions (maya). Laozi’s Tao is an ineffable "way" that harmonizes opposites in a dynamic cosmic flow.
Psychological and Existential Evolutions
In more modern contexts, the focus shifted toward how this unity is perceived or experienced by the human subject:
Carl Jung used the term Unus Mundus to describe a pre-dualistic wholeness that links the psyche and matter, manifesting through synchronicity in a "psychoid" realm.
Martin Heidegger explored Being (Sein) as the ontological "presencing" that underlies all things, disclosed specifically through human awareness without requiring total fusion between the individual and the whole.
Paul Tillich and Ralph Waldo Emerson looked toward the "Ground of Being" and the "Over-Soul," respectively, emphasizing an existential foundation or an immanent universal spirit uniting humanity with the divine.
Contemporary Syntheses and Scientific Inquiry
The discussion has recently expanded to include anecdotal "data" and quantum physics:
Colin Wilson synthesized these traditions by asserting a unified consciousness reinvested in all living forms . He proposed "Faculty X"—a heightened state of perception—as the means to access this cosmic mind and escape "robot" subjectivity.
The Penrose-Hameroff "Orch OR" theory attempts to bridge the gap between matter and mind through science. By suggesting that consciousness arises from quantum processes in brain microtubules, it posits a "proto-conscious" fabric of spacetime. This modernizes the ancient quest for oneness by seeking a testable, physical link between subjective awareness and objective reality.
While these thinkers differ in their methods—ranging from Plotinus’s pure rationalism to Jung’s clinical observation and Penrose’s quantum biology—they converge on the central theme that reality is a singular, interconnected whole.
25.02.26 Addition
Sri Anandamayi Ma (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5F7b7dwyvo)
She's not the only one in the world of other-consensual reality . . . consciousness is one word to label the notion, and we are just sparks in its wholeness, or infinite oneness.
Presentation with the assistance of TurboScribe, a precis of which is this (saves reading or listening to the whole thing) and comports with the above re quantum consciousness, etc.:
[Niels] Bohr's personal diary, examined after his death, contains this entry. Met an Indian holy woman today. She asked me to explain quantum superposition.
I did. The observer effect, wave-particle duality, the measurement problem. When I finished, she smiled and said, so your science has finally discovered what we've known for 5,000 years.
Consciousness collapses possibility into actuality. The observer creates the observed. You are the universe observing itself.
Link
Transcription
Calcutta, 1926. A prestigious gathering of India's greatest spiritual masters and scholars. In the corner sits a young woman, no more than 30 years old, draped in a simple white sari.
She's smiling, always smiling, but there's something about her eyes that makes seasoned yogis uncomfortable. A famous pundit decides to test her. He recites a complex Sanskrit verse from an obscure Upanishad, deliberately changing one word to see if she'll notice.
She laughs, that mysterious, childlike laugh witnesses could never quite describe, and corrects him. Then she recites the entire Upanishad, from memory, in perfect Sanskrit. But here's what made everyone in that room fall silent.
This woman had never studied Sanskrit. She'd received barely any formal education. She couldn't even read or write fluently in her native Bengali.
When asked how she knew these ancient texts, she gave an answer that would echo through the decades. I don't know them. I simply am them.
Her name was Anandamayi Ma. And what happened next is one of the most documented yet inexplicable spiritual phenomena of the modern age. The child who wasn't there.
Let me take you back to April 30, 1896. A small village called Chiora in East Bengal, now Bangladesh. A baby girl is born during a violent thunderstorm, and the midwife notices something strange immediately.
The infant doesn't cry. She smiles. For the first three years of her life, the child, named Nirmala Sundari, meaning immaculate beauty, barely speaks.
Her parents grow worried. But those who look into her eyes report something unsettling. It's as if no one is home.
Or rather, as if everyone is home. Her mother later testified to researchers, and this is documented in Bithika Mukherjee's Life and Teachings of Sri Anandamayi Ma. The child would sometimes become completely still, hardly breathing, her eyes fixed on something no one else could see.
During these states, her body would become rigid, impossible to move, yet warm and alive. What was she seeing? When Nirmala was five, a neighbor found her standing alone in a field at midnight, surrounded by a soft, golden light. The neighbor ran to get others.
By the time they returned, the light was gone, but the child remained in that same spot, unmoving, her eyes reflecting starlight that shouldn't have been visible on that cloudy night. She was brought home. When she finally returned to normal consciousness, she couldn't, or wouldn't, explain where she'd been.
The marriage that wasn't. At 13, following the customs of that time and place, Nirmala was married to a young man named Ramani Mohan Chakravarti, who worked as a clerk. But here's where the story takes its first truly mysterious turn.
n their wedding night, according to multiple testimonies documented in Mother As Revealed To Me, by her disciple Baiji, something impossible happened. When Ramani approached his young bride, he was suddenly seized by an overwhelming spiritual experience. He saw her not as a woman, but as the Divine Mother of the Universe, Shakti herself, radiating such power and purity that the very thought of physical intimacy became absurd, even blasphemous.
For their entire marriage, which lasted until Ramani's death in 1938, they never consummated their union. But it wasn't a marriage of frustration or denial. Ramani himself became one of her first disciples, often saying, I didn't marry a woman.
I married God. Yet the mystery deepens. For the first few years of their marriage, Nirmala lived as a normal young housewife.
She cooked, cleaned, served her husband's family. But those who observed her closely noticed something peculiar. She seemed to be performing these tasks from somewhere else, as if her body was a puppet and the puppeteer was only partially paying attention.
The initiation from no one. Shabag, Dhaka, 1922. Nirmala is now 26 years old.
One night, without warning, without any guru, without any external teacher, she begins what witnesses would later call self-initiation. For five hours, her body moves through yoga postures she'd never learned. Her hands form madras, sacred gestures, that take yogis decades to master.
Sanskrit mantras pour from her lips, mantras she'd never heard. And her body contorts into positions that should have broken bones but instead radiated an eerie grace. Her husband watches, terrified and mesmerized.
When it's over, she opens her eyes and says simply, today, this body has received all the initiations it will ever need. The Divine Mother has initiated herself. Dr. Gopinath Kaviraj, one of India's greatest Sanskrit scholars and philosophers, investigated this incident extensively.
His conclusion, published in his letters and documented in Anandamayi Ma, The Mother Bliss Incarnate, by Atmananda, was stark. What I witnessed in Mother cannot be explained by any known psychological or physiological framework. She appears to be a conscious descent of the Divine into human form.
But the question haunts. If she initiated herself, who was the initiator and who was initiated? The body that defied death. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as word of this mysterious woman spread, people began gathering around her.
And they witnessed things that defied explanation. Let me share just three documented incidents, all verified by multiple eyewitnesses. The poison incident, 1924 a jealous woman, believing Anandamayi Ma was bewitching her husband, mixed deadly nightshade into food meant for Ma.
Multiple witnesses, including two doctors, watched as Ma ate the poisoned food. Within an hour, everyone knew something was wrong. Ma's disciples were panicking.
But Ma simply smiled and said, This body is watching the poison trying to work. But it cannot. The consciousness in this form is too awake for death to enter.
She experienced no symptoms. The doctors couldn't explain it. The poisoner confessed days later, consumed by guilt.
The fire walk, 1927 at an ashram in Dehradun, a ritual fire had been prepared. A log collapsed, sending embers across the path Ma was walking. Barefoot, she walked directly through the burning coals, slowly, deliberately, as if in meditation.
Her feet showed no burns, no blisters, not even ash. When disciples asked how this was possible, she gave one of her most cryptic answers. When you know you are not the body, the body cannot be harmed by what harms bodies.
The levitation testimony, 1932 Malita Mashman, a German journalist and later author, came to India as a skeptic. She was granted a private audience with Anandamayi Ma in Varanasi. In her written testimony, submitted to the Society for Psychical Research in London, she describes sitting alone with Ma in a small room.
As Ma entered meditation, Mashman claims she clearly saw Ma's body rise approximately six inches off the ground and remain suspended for nearly ten minutes. Mashman was so disturbed by what she witnessed that she left India immediately, refusing to write about the incident for 15 years. When she finally did, she wrote, I saw it.
I don't believe it. But I saw it. The strange feeding.
Here's something that haunted everyone who spent extended time with Ma. Her relationship with food. Left to herself, Anandamayi Ma simply wouldn't eat.
For days. Sometimes weeks. It wasn't fasting in any traditional sense.
She didn't appear hungry. Her energy never flagged. Her eyes remained bright.
But her body seemed to have simply forgotten that it needed sustenance. Doctors who examined her found this medically impossible. The human body cannot function without food.
Yet hers did. Eventually, disciples had to be assigned to literally hand-feed her, like a child, reminding her to chew and swallow. Even then, she would sometimes stop mid-bite, her consciousness appearing to have drifted to some other realm entirely.
When asked about this, she explained, and this testimony is recorded in dozens of sources, including Gurupriya Devi's, Sri Sri Ma Anandamayi. This body eats when you remind it to eat. It sleeps when you tell it to sleep.
It is like a musical instrument that plays when someone touches the strings. But the instrument itself has no needs. Psychiatrists called it dissociation.
Skeptics called it performance. But how do you perform not eating for two weeks while maintaining perfect health and teaching 12 hours a day? The teachings that changed with each listener. Now here's where Anandamayi Ma becomes truly mysterious, more mysterious, perhaps, than any other spiritual teacher in recorded history.
She had no fixed doctrine. No systematic philosophy. No organization of teachings.
Ask her the same question three times, you'd get three different answers. Ask her how to reach God, and she might tell you to chant names, or sit in silence, or serve the poor, or go on pilgrimage, or simply laugh. But here's what's extraordinary.
Each person who came to her felt they received exactly the teaching they needed. Not what they wanted, what they needed. Paramahansa Yogananda met her in 1935.
Their encounter is documented in Autobiography of a Yogi. He asked her profound questions about yoga and consciousness. She answered with such technical precision about the chakras and kundalini that Yogananda, himself a master, was astonished.
The very next day, a poor, illiterate farmer came to her with a simple question. Mother, how can I remember God while plowing my field? She told him, sing to your oxen as if they are God. When you rest, thank the earth as if she is God.
When you're thirsty, drink water as if you're drinking God. That's all. That's everything.
The farmer left enlightened. Yogananda left mystified. How did she know exactly what each person needed to hear? The core teaching hidden in Paradox.
If you study Anandamayi Ma's thousands of recorded conversations, and yes, disciples recorded everything, a pattern emerges. Not a teaching, exactly, but a way of being that she pointed to again and again. She called it, Keala.
A Bengali word meaning, spontaneous divine will, or, the play of consciousness. Here's what she meant, though she'd probably laugh at my attempt to explain it. You are not the doer of your actions.
You never were. Your sense of being a separate individual making choices is the cosmic joke. There is only one actor, playing all the parts.
When you truly realize this, not intellectually, but in the marrow of your being, you become like she was. A clear instrument through which the divine plays. But, and this is crucial, this wasn't passivity.
It wasn't fatalism. She told the independence leader Kamala Nehru, Javaharlal Nehru's wife, documented in their correspondence preserved in the Anandamayi Ma archives, Work as if everything depends on you. Know that nothing depends on you.
Both are simultaneously true. She encouraged intense spiritual practice while insisting there was nowhere to go and nothing to achieve. She advocated devotion to God while teaching that you are God.
She prescribed specific techniques while saying all techniques are ultimately unnecessary. Every statement contained its own contradiction. Every answer revealed a deeper question.
The practical impossibilities. Let me give you the methods she actually taught, when pressed for something concrete. But I warn you, they're deceptively simple and almost impossibly difficult.
The Nama Sankirtan method. She emphasized constant repetition of God's name, any name you felt drawn to. But not mechanical repetition.
Each utterance had to be as if you were calling out to a beloved who was lost in a crowd. Desperate. Yearning.
Alive. She said, call him as a drowning person calls for help. The lungful of water urgency, that's the requirement.
The witness practice. Throughout your day, no matter what you're doing, maintain a part of your awareness that simply watches. Not judges.
Just watches. Who is eating? Who is working? Who is thinking? Keep asking. Keep watching.
She warned this could be dangerous. Some who do this practice intensely find that their sense of personal identity begins to dissolve. If you're not ready for that dissolution, stay with simpler methods.
The laughter sadhana. This was uniquely hers. She taught that divine joy, ananda, is your natural state.
Fake it until you make it. Laugh for no reason. Smile at nothing.
At first, it's forced. Then something shifts. Then you realize the joy was there all along, buried under seriousness.
Students found this the most difficult practice of all. It's easy to meditate seriously. It's incredibly hard to laugh yourself into enlightenment.
The service without serving. Work. Serve.
Hope. But inside, know that you're doing nothing. The divine mother is serving herself through this body-mind instrument.
You're just watching it happen. Be simultaneously engaged and detached, she'd say. Like an actress playing a role.
Fully committed to the character. Fully aware it's a play. The encounters that shook scientists.
By the 1940s, Anandamayi Ma's fame had spread worldwide. Scientists, psychologists, and researchers began attempting to study her. Every single one left baffled.
Dr. Alexander Cannon, a British psychiatrist and hypnotherapist, arrived in 1946 determined to prove Ma was either a fraud or suffering from dissociative identity disorder. He received permission to observe her for three months. His conclusion, published in The Science of Hypnotism, I have examined thousands of cases of multiple personality and dissociation.
Sri Anandamayi Ma is something else entirely. Her states of consciousness are not compartmentalized. They're layered.
She appears to operate simultaneously on multiple levels of awareness. When you speak to her, you have the eerie sensation that she's fully present with you, while simultaneously present somewhere, or everywhere, else. Modern psychology has no framework for this.
Then there was the incident with Niels Bohr. Yes, that Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, father of quantum mechanics. In 1952, Bohr visited India for a physics conference.
A colleague, knowing Bohr's interest in Eastern philosophy, arranged a meeting with Anandamayi Ma. The meeting was brief, barely 20 minutes. No recording exists.
But Bohr's personal diary, examined after his death, contains this entry. Met an Indian holy woman today. She asked me to explain quantum superposition.
I did. The observer effect, wave-particle duality, the measurement problem. When I finished, she smiled and said, so your science has finally discovered what we've known for 5,000 years.
Consciousness collapses possibility into actuality. The observer creates the observed. You are the universe observing itself.
Then she laughed. I couldn't speak. How did an uneducated village woman articulate in 30 seconds what took me 30 years to understand? The prophecies no one talks about.
Here's something most biographies of Anandamayi Ma gloss over or omit entirely. She made predictions. Dozens of them.
And they were disturbingly accurate. In 1938, she told her husband Romani, this body will remain in form, but you have completed your work. Soon you'll be free.
He died three months later. In 1947, she told disciples to vacate a particular ashram in what was about to become Pakistan. The borders will change, she said.
Much blood will flow. Leave now. They left two weeks before the partition of India, which no one at that ashram knew was coming.
In 1963, she met a young man named Atmananda, who would become one of her primary biographers. Before he'd even told her his name, she said, you've come to write about this body. You'll complete three books before you die.
The third will remain unpublished in your lifetime. He did write three books. The third was published two years after his death in 1985.
But the most chilling prediction, recorded by multiple witnesses in 1980, was this. A Western devotee asked her about the future of spirituality in the coming century. Ma became very still.
That particular stillness witnesses described as, the room holds its breath, stillness. Then she said, a time is coming when technology will allow consciousness to speak directly to consciousness, across vast distances, instantaneously. This will be both a great danger and a great opportunity.
Many will mistake information for wisdom, connection for communion. But some, some will use these tools to spread light. The mother works through everything, even machines.
In 1980, the internet as we know it didn't exist. Yet she seemed to describe it perfectly, including its spiritual dangers and possibilities. The death that wasn't.
August 27, 1982. Dharad in India. Anandamayi Ma is 86 years old.
For days, she's been in and out of what doctors call consciousness, but what looked more like she was practicing leaving. Her disciples are gathered, many weeping. At 8.25 p.m., several witnesses report the same phenomenon.
The room fills with a fragrance that has no earthly source. Roses, jasmine, and something else. Something sweet and indefinable that makes everyone present feel simultaneously sorrowful and ecstatic.
Ma opens her eyes one last time. According to multiple testimonies, including one from Dr. Nalini Sil who was present as her physician, Ma smiles and says, I'm going to my eternal home. But understand, I'm not going anywhere because I was never here.
The play is ending. The actor removes the costume. But the consciousness remains, always.
Her breathing stops. Her heart stops. But here's the strange part documented in Dr. Sil's medical report.
Her body remained warm for three hours. No rigor mortis. No pallor.
Her face maintained what witnesses called a living quality for nearly 12 hours after clinical death. The attending doctors had no explanation. One wrote, it was as if the life force was reluctant to fully leave, or as if the boundary between life and death was somehow permeable in her case.
The mystery that remains. Today, nearly 40 years after her Mahasamadhi, conscious death, Anandamayi Ma remains an enigma that refuses simple categorization. Was she enlightened? Every scholar says yes.
Was she divine? Her devotees say yes without hesitation. Was she mentally ill? Every psychiatrist who examined her said no. She showed none of the markers of pathology, only unprecedented mental health.
Was she a guru? Not in any traditional sense. She initiated no one formally. She created no systematic teaching.
She appointed no successor. So what was she? Perhaps the best answer comes from her own words, spoken to Melita Mashman during that same encounter in 1932. People ask me who I am.
I tell them, I am whatever you see in me. If you see God, I am God. If you see a woman, I am a woman.
If you see a friend, I am a friend. If you see nothing, I am nothing. The mirror reflects what stands before it.
This body-mind is simply an unclouded mirror. But mirrors don't laugh spontaneously at jokes no one told. Mirrors don't survive poison.
Mirrors don't levitate. Mirrors don't predict the future or quote scriptures they never read. Unless the mirror is so clear, so utterly transparent, that what we're seeing isn't the mirror at all.
We're seeing our own divine nature reflected back at us. The nature we forgot we had. The final teaching.
I want to leave you with one last story, from Swami Vijnananda, a French disciple who spent decades with Ma. It's recounted in his book, Anandamay Ma, La Vidane Unsurrire, Life in a Smile. A famous philosopher came to Ma in 1970 with the ultimate question, Mother, what is the quickest way to God? Ma looked at him for a long time.
Then she started laughing, that mysterious, childlike laugh. She laughed so hard tears rolled down her face. She laughed for five full minutes while the philosopher sat there, confused and increasingly uncomfortable.
Finally, when she could speak, she said, My child, you are asking God the quickest way to reach God. Don't you see the humor? The seeker is the sought. The journey is the destination.
You are already there. You have always been there. The entire quest is God playing hide and seek with himself.
Then she leaned forward and whispered, But don't tell anyone. If everyone knew, the play would end. And the mother loves to play.
The philosopher left enlightened, not because he understood her words, but because something in her laughter, in her eyes, in her absolute delight at the cosmic joke, broke through the wall of his seeking. He realized, She's not showing us how to reach God. She's showing us that we never left.
The invitation. Somewhere in India right now, there's a small ashram where her photograph hangs. Devotees still gather.
They still sing the bhajans she loved. They still practice the simple methods she taught. But the question remains, hovering like incense smoke in that sacred space.
Was Anandamayi Ma a human who became divine? Or was she the divine pretending, very convincingly, to be human? Perhaps the answer lies not in studying her life, but in daring to live as if the same consciousness that animated her is also animating you. Right now, reading these words, what if she was right? What if you are already home, already whole, already divine, just temporarily convinced of your own limitations? What if the only difference between you and Anandamayi Ma is that she remembered who she was, and you've temporarily forgotten? The mirror is still reflecting. The question is, are you ready to see what it shows? The mystery continues.
The laughter echoes. And somewhere, perhaps, she's still smiling at the cosmic joke we call separation.
__________
* The statement is a condensation of interactions with several of those AI chatbots that seem to proliferate nowadays and are, unfairly, maligned. They can be useful in sorting through lots of stuff.
