Whether a dream had offered him a vision or that, in his wisdom, he had just simply known, Sh. Prasad Rao Salve told his daughter years before that her life would hold great things. The key he said was “en masse realization.”Looking at the embattled world of the twentieth century, he knew that is what people needed real change! He taught his daughter well and fully, of religions, of human nature, of the hypocrisies and foibles of mankind. Her mother taught her to speak only the truth.
“My parents knew why I was on this Earth. When I was small, I used to tell my father that it was my desire that, like the stars in the sky, many people on Earth should also shine and spread the light of God,” says Shri Mataji.
There might be only one magnolia in the forest, but the traveller will know it is there. Though hidden from sight, its sweet fragrance is everywhere. That scent which permeates the forest is love. In its purity, it announces itself. And slowly, that is how it was for Shri Mataji.
Even in childhood, Shri Mataji’s interests were extraordinary – the great people of world, the spiritual and the virtuous. She preferred these biographies to the usual textbooks of school. It was not a surprise then, at age seven, that her father saw it fit to make the journey, taking her to the ashram of Mahatma Gandhi. It was 1930 and a great man of the world was at hand. And he was only some seventy miles away.
Gandhi took the young Shri Mataji to his heart, affectionately calling Her Nepali, a reference to her Nepalese features. Gandhi was a man who could recognize the wisdom within a child, but India was in a time of emergency and the emergency that Gandhi was called to was essentially political. However, the emergency that the Holy Mother was to address in the years that followed was of the spirit.
“ My life continued. All the time, my inner being was still seeking for the ways and methods of giving en masse realization.” But her father had cautioned Her. “Before you develop this technique, do not talk about religion,” he said. ‚Let no one know that you know anything about it because they will not understand.”
“I was seeking a way of doing this,” She remembers, “working it out inside myself. Through my own style of meditation, I was working out all the permutations and combinations. When I met a person, I would see what problems that person had, how they could overcome them. In that way, I would try to study that person internally. Somehow or other, I knew I must open the seventh chakra.”