On Sunday, May 12, 2019, in honor of Mother’s Day and the fiftieth anniversary of Play of Consciousness, the SYDA Foundation held a satsang with Gurumayi via live video stream. Gurumayi gave the title for this satsang: “Love Is Timeless.”
It was an event that strung together one beautiful moment after another, and those who participated would later share how profound and transformative their experience of it had been—how Gurumayi’s grace, Gurumayi’s teachings, Gurumayi’s music had pierced through the walls around their hearts, so that love, timeless love, could stream like rivulets through their being. When Gurumayi’s exquisite poem, A Mother’s Pride, was read aloud, there was hardly a dry eye in Shri Nilaya.
There was one moment in the course of this satsang that stood out as especially representative of the Guru-disciple relationship, and of the cycle of giving and receiving that supports this relationship. The disciple in this situation was a seventeen-month-old baby. He was sitting with his mother at the front of Shri Nilaya, just before Gurumayi.
As the satsang was coming to its conclusion and Asa Siegel, the host, was giving his closing remarks, the baby stood up. His little legs were clearly still learning how to hold up his body—how to carry his immense energy, his enthusiasm.
Nonetheless, there was a certainty to the baby’s movement as he walked over to a young woman seated nearby and started tugging at the bangles she was wearing. Eventually, with her help and her happy assent, he slipped one of them off her wrist and claimed it as his own.
At that moment, he looked up at Gurumayi. And Gurumayi looked back at him, the love in her eyes such that even the memory of it, months and likely years on, would be enough to stir one’s heart.
Then the little boy, with his arms outstretched, his fingers tight around the bangle, walked toward Gurumayi and made his offering.
This child, it is important to note, had not yet been taught about making offerings to the Guru. But in that moment of awakening—as his baby ears picked up on the words of Gurumayi’s poem for Mother’s Day, as he listened to Swami Ishwarananda speak about Baba Muktananda writing Play of Consciousness, as he was drenched in the sweet strains of the chant and rejoicing to be in the company of Gurumayi, in the company of the sangham—he was directed by a kind of knowledge that was innate. He knew he had to give of himself; he knew he had to make an offering to Gurumayi, to express tangibly the love that was flowing forth from within him. And so he brought forward the bangle.
Age was irrelevant in that moment. The little boy was following the mandate, the impulse, of his heart.