Gopaler Ma

Gopaler Ma (translation: Mother of Gopala, an epithet for Sri Krishna; 1822 – 8 July 1906) was a devotee and a householder disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, the saint and mystic from Bengal. Her birth name was Aghoremani Devi, but she came to be known as Gopaler Ma among the devotees of Sri Ramakrishna, owing to her intense motherly love for Sri Ramakrishna as "Gopala" or baby Krishna. She was famous for her divine visions of Lord Krishna as a baby and her devotion to the ideals of Sri Ramakrishna. In her later years, she was very close to Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita. She spent the last few years of her life with Sister Nivedita.

Early life Aghoremani Devi was born of a Brahmin family in the year 1822 in the village called Kamarhati near Calcutta. According to the then prevailing customs, she was married when she was only nine years old but became a widow soon after her marriage, even before her marriage was consummated, when she was only fourteen years of age. As a widow she stayed in the house of Nilmadhav Bandopadhyaya, her brother, who was a priest in the temple of Krishna in Kamarhati. She was initiated into the spiritual life by the family guru of her husband's family and had the child Krishna as her personal deity. While frequenting the temple she was acquainted with the wife of Govinda Chandra Dutta, the proprietress, who provided her with a small room in the temple garden on the bank of the river Ganga. She sold her jewelry and husband's property and invested the sum of rupees five hundred She spent next thirty years of her life in that small room and led a very austere life. Her daily routine consisted of waking up at two in the morning, completing the ablutions and continuing spiritual practices till eight in the morning. She would then work in the adjacent temple of Krishna, also called the temple of Radha Madhava. Her entire day was spent in spiritual practices in some form or another through meditation, japam or repetition of the sacred mantra, and service to her chosen ideal of baby Krishna. She followed this routine from 1852 to about 1883. There were distinct changes in her behavioral pattern, as she became restless for the visions when the initial frenzy had subsided. irrespective of their religious affiliations, have been explained in an account of Gopaler Ma, that the rational explanation for such divine visions are that there are finer states of consciousness, which are breached when the mind is pure and tranquil. With the degree of purity achieved by Gopaler Ma through her spiritual practices, she could enter into that realm of super consciousness available only to the mystics around the world. In this realm of mystical experience, verbal expression, mental cognition, and intellectual reasoning do not function. The only consciousness is the direct consciousness of God. Swami Vivekananda had a very lofty opinion about the devotion of Gopaler Ma, and he even told his American and English disciples, that Gopaler Ma represented an era of ancient Indian ideals of purity and devotion which was fast disappearing. She had a special relationship with Swami Vivekananda, whom she referred to as "Naren". Swami Vivekananda had sent two women disciples to her for initiation.

Aftermath

After the death of Sri Ramakrishna in 1886, Gopaler Ma used to visit the Baranagar Math and Alambazar Math, but generally stayed in her room in the garden house and continued her spiritual practices. In 1887, she, though devoid of conventional education, had surprised the devotees in the house of Balaram Bose in 1887, when she responded to their queries on abstract spiritual ideas. She claimed that the responses came from Gopala.