Interview with BBC Radio Broadcast, London, 17 March 1980

Lady interviewer: Vibratory awareness. Now I need to place you in collective consciousness, the second birth. The places we call the hippy trend in the 60’s with yellow roads and the solemn gurus. After those days going strong and today a new book is published to claim yet another new dawn to call as phrases from its present out [unsure].
The book is called The Advent and it deals with the vibratory awareness available through something called Sahaja Yoga. It has been in congress [unsure] and written by Gregoire de Kalbermatten of the Swiss diplomatic corp. Based in London and press-launched in India House to the Indian High Commissioner and to the founder of Sahaja Yoga, Her Holiness Mataji Nirmala Devi. And it’s very true and he set out to meet the lady who was not yet vibrating the sample [unsure].

Second interviewer: The London flat where lives Her Holiness Mataji Nirmala Devi [inaudible] has been redecorated with tapestries and traditional Indian wood carvings. I removed my shoes and have been sitting. In the living room was introduced to Shri Mataji, which means Mother. She’s a plump middle-aged woman dressed in a sari, intelligent from birth in mid-life. Here over the tea and Indian sweets, we discussed how to achieve vibratory awareness.

And here comes the difficult part: in a debate lasting several hours, She parried all my objections to her thoughtless awareness and evolution releasing with simple question: how is it done? The answer, it seems, is Sahaja Yoga, the releasing of the potential in every human being to conceive their spiritual integration.
I sat on an armchair, palms upwards, and Mataji made these curious passes over my hand — in fact various parts of my head — in an effort to encourage my natural vital force to spring from within me. She claimed that she could see it; I certainly couldn’t.
She told me I had sinus trouble, which is true, and liver problems which, as far as I know is not. I did feel relaxed, peaceful, and positive. Shri Mataji explained the benefits of vibratory awareness.

[The interviewer presents an extract from Shri Mataji’s interview.]
“You’ll get complete integration of your mental, physical and emotional being. Secondly, your mental, emotional, physical being is completely benefited because you get connected with the main source. For example, if you are going by a car and if your petrol is finished, then you built up a tension. But if you are connected to a source from where the energy is all the time coming, all your mental, physical, emotional energy is coming from one source, and if that is opened out, in the medical terminology if you can master your parasympathetic nervous system, then there is no problem coming.
And all the time you are little dynamic or lethargic.
Must be- potential from [inaudible], you don’t feel tired and you are absolutely relaxed. The tensions are lost and your diseases, physical diseases disappear, emotional problems disappear and you become a very normal person.

Interviewer: This sounds absolutely marvellous! I mean, if it’s truly prone to be easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?
Shri Mataji: It’s the easiest thing, people don’t want to do. You see, if I tell people to stand on their heads they will be very happy. They’ll pay money for that if I tell them to stand on their heads, you see. People don’t want to do easy things because that challenges their ego.
Interviewer: Do you charge for your knowledge?
Shri Mataji: Not at all! How can you pay for love? How can you pay a single pie for God’s love? It’s not proper. “

[The interviewer resumes his monologue.]
But all of this is quite hard to swallow. And so I was surprised to learn that the movement and the several [inaudible] in Indian and British [inaudible] is endorsed by the Indian High Commission and claimed to assist the Indian Government. But Mataji is not the first Indian guru who claims to give increased awareness, accompanied by impenetrable religious or psychological jargon.

Yoga itself is quite acceptable these days. But how is Shri Mataji’s new method different from all the others? When it gets proven to be an expensive nonsense?

[Extract of Shri Mataji]:
“Some of them are robbers, some of them are fakes, some are enterprisers. I agree entirely that it’s false. But if there is such a thing, an export working of good people, there must be something genuine also because if you find so many fake people, then everything fake must have some genuine basis and there must be something genuine. The only trouble is how to go about it? How do you find out the reality? In your proper understanding, what you have to find out, what is an experience, all that you must know, you must be very strict about it, and then only you can find out. But if you are naïve, they can make money out of you. Why not? That’s how they are. The world is like that.

Interviewer: So, why then should I or anyone else listen to that [?] that You have something to offer?
Shri Mataji: You see, because I don’t want you to believe, as I have told you. You don’t have to believe into anything. You have to experience it. The point is of experience. You don’t have to believe into it at all. There is no need to believe but you should also deny everything. Keep your eyes open just like you would to any knowledge. But to say that this is a new idea, it’s not true because this has been there. You are your own guru. Everybody has said that your guru, is within you. Only thing, it has just to be awakened. I’m not a guru. I’m just a Mother.

Interviewer: Her Holiness Mataji Nirmala Devi.