Women's Status under the Mother's Lodge
There is one aspect of the Mother's Ideal which will require 'volumes to do justice to and that is the uplift of the left half of the creature known as Man.
Under the Mother's Ideal these prospect is Raising of the down-trodden (helpless poor), down-ridden (weaker sex) and depressed (aborigines and untouchables).
Nearly half the world has been confined to darkness under civilized suppression, subordination or hypocritical adoration (so also a significant portion in eternal ignorance and condemnation as aborigines or untouchables). It would be topsy-turvying matters to establish the sameness of man and woman without the psychological study of the sex (or the equality of the untouchables with others without raising them at least to the minimum standard of external and internal purity), but if the spirit of love and service is extended to them, a good deal of distance and discontent will surely disappear.
Till now man has included woman. Brotherhood and Fatherhood of God have acted as contraceptives to the ideals of Sisterhood and Motherhood of God and the development of the head without heart has been responsible for the ocean of miseries that has almost drowned the human world. Woman's question has seldom received an equally thoughtful and independent consideration. Women have been denominated as “Rib creatures”. “Temptations” and “Hell gates”. Women have been mere morsels of food for the starving man and have been subjected to subjugation by man and condemnation by religion. Under the Mother's Lodge Idea] the unification of man and woman is a great spiritualising force.
Most of the religious teachers have made a short work of the question of the spiritual uplift of the sister sex, by either declaring them almost incapacitated for or inimical to religiosity or at the best, offering them the husband God and pampering them with praises here and there.
The present civilization while discovering and spreading more intimate knowledge about the very important part woman plays in the happy and efficient working of the universe, has only driven woman to be manlike and has planted venomous seeds of competition, discontent and distrust.
Mother's Lodge crowns woman-folk with sanctified sisterhood and recognizes the priority of their claim for all humane considerations, for it is the duty of every devotee of Mother to develop seeing every woman to be a reflection of Mother.
Mother's Lodge Ideal wants its members and others to concentrate their though feeling and action in a particular groove.
1. Delimit your God as little as possible. The heavier the embellishments of mythology, history. traditions, rituals and conventional notions, the more belittled and the more unapproachable and the more narrowed, your God is made.
2. The said adornments and adjuncts are very necessary at one stage and very obstructive at another. Wisdom is needed to see when and which way the balance goes. They are invaluable but should not be indispensable.
3. God is neither a wrathful tyrant, nor the heartless Judge nor a Jailor. Nor is God a foreign element. God is a parent, Father or Mother. Preferably not a severe Father but a loving Mother.
God as Father has often been compared to a loving Mother to give an idea of his Love. Some to express intensity state that God loves like so many Mothers, put together. Is there not some truth if one states it is only thoughtless or selfish obstinacy of man that vehemently opposes tooth and nail any such inclination of a devotee as of worshiping God as Mother? God is sexless Ir God can be and has been called Father till now, why debarred from being addressed and worshiped as Mother !!
4 Every one of us is under the direct protection and guidance of God. Our talks of superiority and inferiority, etc., are only our pigmy prattlings.
5. Relation of man to man must be many times much better than now and must be every religion's first concern.
6. Religion should not be superstition or mysticism but a precise perfect science of living based on physical, ethical and divine knowledge and experience.
7. Religion must be dealt with, as experience of life on all planes and must be lived out and must be open to all for understanding and adoption, just like any scientific attainment.
8. Religious preachers are not to de God's Lawyers but God's witnesses or witnesses of experience narrated under religion.
9. Religion must be constructive and progressive and ever open to a little accommodation in its superficial crusts.
10. Religion must have a definite form and must not be an idealistic, incomprehensible, chaos-creating, airy, something like a huge Conglomerate of any constituents any how consolidated and there must be a recognized method for necessary pruning of the Religion from age to age.
Universal Religion can be only as the influence, force and field of a Universal God. Such God cannot have His chosen people, churches, scriptures, ceremonies, pilgrimage places, tribes, nations, races and so on. Any individual religion with all its delimiting paraphernalia of particular customs, creeds, beliefs, etc., cannot lay pretensions to being a universal religion. Nor on the other hand can any religion be a recipe of a few ideals, beliefs, conduct rules and opinions, if it has to have a body and a soul, and to have the influence and the building and moulding potential force of a religion.
A universal religion can be the religion of a Universal Father or a Universal Mother alone, if God is considered in human relationship with man. As it is, the world has not known a religion or an institute centered round a Universal Father or Mother.
It is no use arguing that the God of every religion is believed by its followers to be the God of whole mankind, for if that idea had at all been there, practically accepted, history would not have been a sad tale of shamless-ness, tyranny, brutality and warfare.
The religious ideal which can suit the modern world is one that can take the whole of humanity in its embrace, which can respect and give a free play to Conscience, Reason, Experience and Science, which would allow every man to live well and teach letting others live well, which will ensure a perfect freedom for every soul to work out its own salvation in its own way, which will teach maintaining sense of proportion and proper valuation of essentials and non-essentials of a religion, which would develop the faculty of judging all actions and actors, not by their positional values, but by the tests of the fundamental truths they satisfy, which would guide without intimidation and mental enslavement, which would make one free from the poison of the over-consciousness of superiority and inferiority of man to man, and lastly which would develop the spirit of practical sisterhood and brotherhood in the daily routine of life.
What the world really needs now is a Universal Religion. A practical living evolutionizing religion cannot be satisfactory by being a big druggist's store-house which can boast of there being no ingredient anywhere else that is not there in tons. Religion has to serve Doctoring. To be cured, we need not have something we never heard of, but the exact efficacious prescription.
Under the Mother's Lodge Ideal, a man is a believer of God or he is not, a man is on the path of God or he is not. A man is acting in obedience to the Divine Laws or he is not. A man is posing his individuality over the world and others or is not. A man is the lover and servant of the whole creation or he is not. A man is watchfully controlling his desires, thoughts and actions or is not. That is the main consideration of classification if at all any classification is necessary. The Mother's Lodge judges a man by his religiosity and not religion.
Under the Mother's Ideal there is no Eastern or Western spirituality nor Christian or Mohamedan religiosity. None is restricted to the particular methods prescribed in a particular religion. The whole religious world is his. All religions are his. He may resort to any refuge and any remedy for the purpose of his evolution. He is in the Imperial Service of the Universal Mother. He is welcome at any of the Royal palaces of His Mother's sons, provided he is sincere and welcomes any guests from the Royal House of any of his Mother's sons, without the slightest childish notion or delusion as of Imperial Service being superior to a provincial service.
In the circumstances, the Ideal of the Universal Mother offers itself, not as a religion, but in advance of anything that would carry with it, the gigantic spiritual force (from Mother), as an institute of Ideals and beliefs, just like a pilot toy Engine, before the locomotive Engine is fitted up and forwarded to the world for working out the salvation of the world, shattered due to internal dissensions.
The Lodge. A Miniature
Mother's Lodge is naturally only a miniature. The real Mother's Lodge is the Universe itself. The Miniature Lodge too was for long but a snail house for the Founder which he carried on his back wherever he went. It is neither that the members of the Lodge are the only devotees of Mother nor that they are the only recipients of Mother's Grace.
The Founder
The Founder as he has so often expressed in Mother's Lodge meetings is neither an adviser nora debater, neither a mystic nor a blind follower of any of the old schools.
He is simply a dead wood pointer of Mother, roarer of Mother's Existence, and hawker of Her all Powerful Grace as capable of conferring Perfection, without the indispensability of the non-essentials of any religion.
For all religious questionings, his first and last answer is “ Ask your Mother yourself.”
There is nothing more natural than to propitiate Love (Mother), with Love (to Her children), to get again Love (Oneness with Her and Her children).
Mother's Ideal opens out an evolutionary line of action which dispenses away with all non-essentials and superstitions and priest-craft slaveries passing under the name of religion, as it promises the final-most religious success on perfection of merely four things, viz., Love to Mother, Love to mankind, Love to all other beings and renunciation or unconditional surrender to Her Divine Will, the latter three being mere amplifications of Love to Mother.
In the field of devotion, Mother's Ideal says, “ Practise feeling that you are a child. A child whom Mother could not but accept however wicked. You automatically get confidence, you regain your innocence, purity and sincerity, and you raise yourself above world-wormness, sexuality and selfishness. You are off your cares, time is eternity for you, and life is lightened. Be Mother's child and Her lap shall be thrilling and throbbing to have you on itself.”
We that have no fitness, we that are failures, we that are forsaken, we that have no hope, we that cannot pursue the path of salvation without going through the experience of enjoyment, we that need control, we that are perplexed in the whirl-pools of delusion, we that on being sick are simply gagged and let loose in a large medicine hall, we that are desirous of being made to evolve by some outside sympathetic agency that would disregard our own ignorance created unwillingness, we that wish our pettiest efforts being praised and biggest blunders belittled, we that claim from others and Almighty the benign attitude of forgiveness and benevolence in spite of our ingratitude.
Such we! Where shall we find our Refuge ? If not in the Lotus Feet of the Merciful Mother ?
Blessed be Her name! Clarified be Her conception ! Universalized be the outlook of Her devotees ! In showers fall Her grace on all Her wayward children desirous of being reclaimed !
Mother Bless All
Mother ! Bless me before I begin what follows, after this recapitulation of the Ideals of the Mother's Lodge.
Bless me through the blessings of my Parents in Heaven.
Thou wilt find my mother PRABHALAKSHMI, an Inspiration-Fountain of innocence, virtue, purity and devotion, in the Regions of Lord Shree Krishna.
Thou wilt find my father Ratanlālbhāi, an inexhaustible mine of highest imagination, subtlest thoughtfulness, and broadest all-angled outlook, absorbed in search of the best remedy as to how to make the world happy, in the regions of Lord Buddha.
MOTHER BLESS ALL
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