November 27, 2005

Mirra the occultist

"I was a downright atheist. Up to the age of twenty,- the very idea of God made me furious." Hearing Mirra, God in his heaven must have laughed in his beard.
He had other ideas about this young lady who said, "I believed in nothing but what I could touch and see." Mirra's hands were now to touch immaterial things, and the eyes she had so meticulously trained were now to become doors through which world after world would come bursting into sight.
God was ready with his cataract.
The floodgates were to be unlocked by Theon.
The rush of experiences would have swept anybody else off his feet. But Mirra was a young woman with both her feet on the ground. Mother told Satprem, "I don't think there's anyone more materialistic than I was, with my practical common sense and positivism.... The explanations I asked were always down-to-earth, and it seemed obvious to me that there's no need of any mystery, nothing of the sort -- you explain things materially."
Indeed, if you want inner experiences without becoming unbalanced, you need to stand on a solid base. Mirra was well equipped. "I had the most solid base -- no imaginings, no mystical atavism: my mother was very much an unbeliever and so was my father. Consequently, it was very good from an atavistic viewpoint -- positivism, materialism." But she did have a rare thing. "Only this: from my infancy, a will-to-perfection in any field whatever. A will-to-perfection and the sense of a limitless consciousness -- no end to one's own progress, or to one's capacity or to ones scope. This from my infancy." She had also another thing from her infancy, remember? "The feeling of a Light above the head, which began when I was very young, at the age of five, along with a will-to-perfection. The will-to-perfection... oh, whatever I did had always to be the best I could do."
However, at the same time, the outward person" could easily have said, 'God? What's this foolishness! He does not exist.' Mentally, an absolute refusal to believe in a 'God'."
This refusal stemmed from a sort of misunderstanding. "Up to the age of twenty-five or so, I knew of no other God than the God of religions, the God as men have made him, and I would not have him at any price. I denied his existence, but with the certainty that if such a God did exist, -- I detested him."
But the real God -- the Divine -- could no longer bear this estrangement from that rebellious Sweetness. "My return to the Divine came about through Theon, when I was first told, 'The Divine is within, there,"' Mother tapped her breast. "Then at once I felt, 'Yes, this is it."'
Who was Theon, that mysterious person? How did Mirra come to know about him and his teaching?
It was from Louis M. Themanlys, Matteo's college friend, that Mirra first heard about Theon and the Cosmic Philosophy. Sujata Nahar MIRRA THE OCCULTIST

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