I Am the Born, I Am the Unborn: Maya and the Divine Mother

On a Sunday morning at the Ramakrishna Monastery in Trabuco Canyon, California, a swami reaches for one of the oldest images in the Vedantic toolkit: a rope lying in a dark room that a frightened traveler swears is a snake. Swami Sarvadevananda, speaking on November 1, 2026, built his lecture around a line he attributed to the Devi Upanishad, in which the Goddess, the divine Mother, declares her own nature: "I am the born, I am the unborn." The talk, published as a 55-minute video, presses a question that is at once metaphysical and deeply personal. If everything we can see is birth, growth, maturity and death, what is the unchanging thing behind it, and how does the unchanging ever seem to change? His answer moves through Brahman, the rope and the snake, the three gunas as tinted lenses, and a reframing of maya as the living power of the Mother rather than a flat illusion.

What Is the Unchanging Behind a Changing World?

The lecture opens with an inventory of change. Trees come up, people are born, plants push through soil, and then everything finishes. The swami asks the room to take that inventory seriously. If life were nothing but a mass of change ending in a void, why would anyone weep, laugh, dance, or bother with school? The question assumes that human beings are looking for something that does not move, and the swami's claim is that the search itself points to a truth.

That truth, in Vedanta, is Brahman. Swami Sarvadevananda describes it in a short string of negations: "Birthless, deathless, endless, beginningless, changeless, timeless." Then he gives the positive side in the classic formula of sat, chit, ananda, which he renders as isness, consciousness, and bliss, "absolute joy." The point is not that Brahman is a remote object somewhere beyond the sky. It is the reality that is present in every moment, the ground that is never absent.

He ties this directly to the individual. Behind the "changing all body mind complex," he says, there is the atman, the unchanging self. That is the source of the hope he describes, the sense that "I don't die with the death of the body." Everything that rises and falls, the waves, ripples and bubbles of experience, rests on a foundation that does not rise and fall. Around the 3:22 mark he states it plainly: there is light behind, there is joy behind, and that joy permeates everywhere.

How Can the Unchanging Appear to Change?

Here the lecture turns to the hard question, which the swami openly admits is still unresolved for most listeners. If Brahman is one, without a second, why does a second seem to arrive? And who made that possible? Vedanta's answer is maya, and the swami's first move is to clear away a misunderstanding about what maya does.

His central image is the rope in the darkness. You see something coiled on the ground and your heart jumps. You feel the fear, you react, you run. The experience is entirely real in its effects. But when you bring a flashlight, you discover that there was never a snake at all, only a rope. The swami puts it this way, around the 5:52 mark: "It is a rope only. Oh when you get frightened it was rope. When you came out to see that it is no snake that's also rope. It was before rope after rope."

The lesson he draws is precise. The fear and the physical reaction are not fake. What is wrong is the interpretation, the reading that turns a rope into a snake. Maya, in this picture, is not a lie told by a demon. It is a misreading that operates through our sensory experience. The reality underneath has not changed at all. It has only been mistaken.

Why Does the World Feel So Real? The 3D Glasses and the Ride

To explain how a misreading can feel so total, the swami turns to a modern example he calls his favorite. Put on 3D glasses at a movie, he says, and the screen becomes a world. A snake seems to strike at you, and you pull back in your seat even though you know you are in a theater. Take the glasses off and the room is simply a room, with a screen showing light and shadow. The experience was real while you wore the lenses. The projection was never what it seemed.

He extends the image to a ride at Universal Studios, where a chair rocks, a screen fills with stars, and within minutes you feel as though you are rocketing through space. "The conception is so real," he says. "It is more than real of our daily life." If human technology can produce such convincing experiences, he argues, then the power that projects an entire cosmos must be vastly greater. The magic we are under, in his telling, is not a trick of a clever machine. It is a cosmic magic whose scale we can hardly register from inside it.

What Are the Three Gunas, and Why Do They Look Like Lenses?

The lenses in the swami's analogy are the three gunas of classical Indian thought: sattva, rajas and tamas. He describes them as the glass through which the manifold universe is seen, and his description is vivid and specific. Sattva is the transparent quality, which gives a clearer view of reality. Rajas is a covering with a red tint, which makes everything look red. Tamas is deep darkness, in which nothing behind can be seen at all.

"Sata quality is transparent quality. It gives you the view of the reality more closely. Rajas is a covering with a red color something showing you everything red. Damas is deep darkness. You cannot see anything what is behind." (Swami Sarvadevananda, Ramakrishna Monastery lecture, Trabuco Canyon, November 1, 2026; around the 9:17 mark)

He then makes the claim that gives the metaphor its weight: these three in permutation and combination have created the whole universe. The gunas are not presented as objects inside the world. They are the way the world is colored for the one who perceives it. Wear them and you see horror, joy, a tiger, a storm. Remove them and the same reality is seen without the tint. This is why the swami keeps returning to the phrase "experience is real but reality is" something else: the experience has force, but the reality it points to does not depend on which lens is in place.

Maya or Mahamaya: Is the World an Illusion or the Mother's Power?

This is the part of the lecture where the swami makes his most distinctive move. The non-dual tradition of Vedanta calls the power of appearance maya. But devotees of the Mother, he says, call it mahamaya, the great maya, and he insists that the difference matters. "No no no it is not maya. It is mahamaya. It is the great mother. It is the great mother divine mother. It is a power."

The image he uses is the ocean. The ocean is calm and serene, and then it swells. That swelling is a power that was already embedded in the ocean, and it turns potential into motion. In the same way, he says, the power inside Brahman becomes kinetic, and the whole manifestation of the cosmos begins. Maya, in this reading, is not a counterfeit reality set against the real one. It is the creative capacity of the real itself, the force that makes "one into the many," which the swami describes as the Mother's own wish.

Around the 10:10 mark he describes the worship side of this understanding. When people practice Mother worship, they speak of maya, but he wants listeners to hear that the word names the cosmic power that creates stars, galaxies, the physical universe, the mental universe, and even what we imagine as heaven. That power, he says, is the Mother.

Are Brahman and Shakti Two Things?

To explain why the unmanifest and the manifest are not separate, the swami offers an analogy from music, which will matter to anyone who has sat with a singer. Imagine a person of great musical talent sitting quietly in a room. You do not yet know that talent exists. Only when the person begins to sing does the talent come out, and it is not something stored in a pocket and taken out now and then. It is springing from the heart and becoming audible. "It is not two things," he says.

In his terms, Brahman is the transcendental reality, the unmanifest, and Shakti is the power that manifests it. Hinduism's images of Shiva and Shakti are, for the swami, a physical representation of this philosophy: the still ground and the dynamic power that is never truly apart from it. The Mother is not a second god standing beside the first. She is the way the one reality shows itself as the many.

The swami also contrasts this with traditions that set up a parallel contesting force against God. He notes that in dualistic religions one usually creates another force to oppose the divine. The Vedantic view he presents has no rival. The transcript of this portion is cut short, but the thrust is clear: maya is the Mother's power working inside a single reality, not an opponent.

What Does It Mean to Live Inside This Understanding?

The lecture does not end in abstraction. The swami returns again and again to the practical consequence. If there is light behind the dark and joy behind the sorrow, then the fearful snake and the frightening tiger can be seen for what they are without denying the fear. He points to the Bhagavad Gita's teaching to take refuge in the divine, and he describes the small ego as the one that fights and struggles, mistaking its wealth, body, and mind for the whole of who it is. The invitation is to find the bigger self, the consciousness that does not change even as everything passes through it.

That is the spine of the talk and the reason it holds up beyond a single Sunday. It gives a way to hold experience without being crushed by it: feel the fear, feel the joy, and keep asking what lens is in place and what is underneath.

Where to go from here

The full lecture, "I am the Born, I am the Unborn," is available on the Ramakrishna Monastery's YouTube channel, and it rewards listening from start to finish, especially the rope-and-snake passage and the sections on maya and Shakti. For the monastery's upcoming talks and activities, visit the Ramakrishna Monastery website at ramakrishnamonastery.org. The Vedanta Society of Southern California, of which the Ramakrishna Monastery is a branch, maintains information about the Trabuco Canyon monastery at vedanta.org/trabuco-canyon-monastery.

If you want to continue on your own, begin with the question the swami started with: when you notice something changing in your life, what is it that notices the change? Stay with that question, and the lecture's central image of the flashlight may begin to make sense from the inside.