Amma's cosmic squeeze

My journey into the arms of Amma the hugging saint reminded me that humans are far more than neurologically programmed DNA machines.

By Erik Davis

Read more: Spirituality, Life

July 19, 2007 | The Mata Amritanandamayi Center is a cluster of gardens, ponds and institutional buildings nestled in the dry and rolling hills of Castro Valley, a rural area that lies about an hour east of San Francisco. For most of the year, it serves as the sleepy North American outpost for the empire of good works that surround the superstar Indian guru it's named after, who is best known as Amma. But twice a year, the Mother herself sweeps through, and the place is transformed. For a couple of weeks, thousands of devotees come to sing and meditate and stand in Disneyland-worthy lines to receive Amma's signature blessing: a great big bear hug.

I show up a little after noon, and Amma has already been at it for hours. Scores of devotees wait in line, while hundreds more mill about the center's large meeting hall. Charitable booths lie on one side of the space, with a well-stuffed shop of clothes, books and geegaws on the other. Roughly two-thirds of the folks are white, with the rest largely South Asian; like Amma, most are wearing white. The hugging saint herself, a full-bodied woman as brown as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is plopped down in a comfy, low-key thronelike thing at the foot of the large stage that lies at the far end of the hall. Amma is embracing her flock, many of whom believe that she is literally a goddess.

Years of spiritual tourism have taught me that the magic often lies with the devotees rather than the object of devotion, and the scene before me is deeply charming -- the spiritual equivalent of comfort food, like a sweet rice pudding scented with rose water. The endless flow of huggees are first asked to kneel, remove any glasses, and mop up their sweaty brows with a Kleenex before being guided into the enveloping embrace of the Mother. After half a minute or so, the devotees are plucked out of Amma's arms, and the guru hands them flower petals, sacred ashes or maybe a foil-wrapped Hershey's kiss.

While I am waiting for an audience with Amma herself, I speak with Swami Dayamrita, the orange-robed manager of the Castro Valley ashram. We stand crammed together just to the side of Amma's nest. A sober, no-nonsense fellow, Dayamrita hails from the southern Indian state of Kerala, where Amma was born to a Dalit fisherman's family in 1954 and where her principal Indian ashram now lies. Kerala is a traditional center of tantra and goddess worship, but it is also a progressive and well-educated state with a strong, if waning, left-wing culture. As a young man, Dayamrita was an atheist and a filmmaker, and he decided to shoot a damning exposé about his region's most famous god-person.

While following Amma about he witnessed an event that has since become central to Amma lore. When her village ashram was just starting out, a local leper came in for a hug. Amma embraced him and, in her mad compassion, licked his sores and sucked the pus out of his wounds, which she then covered with sacred ash. "That changed my whole life," the swami says. "Poor or sick, it doesn't matter, she embraces them. Shingles, chicken pox, infectious diseases -- she does not get them. Only love is exchanged."

Dayamrita gets a call on his cell and departs. Then another fellow in orange robes squeezes through, his hippie glasses and windblown black hair calling to mind a mid-'70s Jerry Garcia. He is Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri, aka "Big Swami," Amma's most senior disciple and her main translator, and he collects my questions with an amusingly world-weary, businesslike air.

I ask Amma what she's doing with all this hugging stuff. Big Swami puts the question into Malayalam for his guru, who is in the midst of double-hugging two Indian teens wearing Izod shirts. Amma launches into her response immediately, with twinkling eyes and a toothy, infectious smile. As she speaks I realize that, Kali or not, she is definitely a firecracker.

"What's happening here cannot be described," she says. "It is true communion, pure love that flows, flows like a river. It is pure subjective experience. It's like somebody trying to explain about drumming. You cannot explain with words. In order to really understand, you have to play a drum or listen to it. It's a direct experience, a real meeting between hearts. It's like looking in a mirror and cleaning your face."

The guru-speak continues. "I'm trying to awaken true motherhood in people, in men and women, because that is lacking in today's world. Today there are two types of poverty. The first is a lack of basic necessities. The second is a lack of love and compassion. As far as I am concerned, the second is more important because if there is love and compassion then the first kind can be taken care of."

Though she'll play the role of the divine Goddess, Amma's own vibe is informal, earthy and rather spunky. The shoulders on her plain white sari are smudged with the sweat and tears of thousands of strangers, but she seems completely comfortable soaking up the effluence of emotions and desires swimming her way.

"Today people are willing to die for religion, but no one lives in the central truth of religion," she goes on. "Religion is just the outer shell. The fruit is spirituality. People look at the outer shell and don't realize the spiritual essence. Spirituality is not different from a worldly life. Spirituality shows how to lead a happy life in the world, to minimize problems and maximize happiness. It is like an instruction manual. What is wrong if you get more happiness from spirituality than worldly pleasures?"

It's a great question, one that today's increasingly arrogant atheists have yet to answer. If humans are nothing more than neurologically programmed DNA machines, why not run sacred applications that bring happiness and meaning and active compassion? I start to ask another question, but Big Swami is through. "OK, that's all," he says and departs.

Then it's my turn for some subjective experience. I'm a Californian, so I'm down with hugs, but it is rare to meet a master. As a VIP for the day, I get an E ticket that enables me to skip the hours-long line. I feel kind of lame about taking cuts, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the wait, as is so often the case in this world of desire, amplifies the fun. But there I am, a minute later, headlocked by a perfumed lady who maybe, just maybe, is the mother of the universe.

She rubs my back with her hand as she mumbles into my right ear, a string of syllables I first take to be some esoteric mantra but that gradually reveal themselves to be the homeliest of addresses: "Darling, darling, darling, darling..." I receive no shivering blasts of shakti, the feminine energy cultivated by yogis and sought by devotees. But a warm, childlike nostalgia seeps into my heart, and I have some vague sense of being in the middle of the ocean at night. Then I'm back in the light of the day with a smiling Indian lady handing me a chocolate. I almost immediately reach for my pad to take notes, but Rob Sidon, Amma's press person, sees me and suggests I "turn off my computer." So I do.

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Innocuous and intimate, the hug is a brilliant gesture for a reputed saint to make -- a cosmic download about compassion and connection delivered in a package that's about as challenging and exotic as a Hershey's kiss. Amma is not the only one to have embraced the activist power of the hug -- last year, Juan Mann's "Free Hugs" campaign rode the viral spread of a YouTube video into the hearts of millions, while peace organizers recently staged a "Jerusalem Hug" that surrounded the walls of the benighted old city with thousands of people holding hands.

But Amma hugs on a truly global scale, exhibiting a spiritual athleticism that boggles the mind. As the loudspeakers that surround the main meeting hall of the M.A. Center are happy to announce, Amma has hugged more than 26 million people. During her massive 50th birthday celebration in 2003, which was inaugurated by the Indian President Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Amma cranked through a stadium full of devotees for 21 hours straight while a scoreboard racked up numbers well into the five figures.

Next page: Westerners lining up for their hug have no understanding of how their guru plays in modern India's "fundamentalist" circles