Daya Mata and the Tick-Tock Clock

The brain gets imprinted when you least expect it. If I’m quiet I can still hear the tick-tock of my childhood alarm clock. It was one of those round things on legs that get up and run after people in cartoons. The alarm clanging was so deafening, you learned to wake up five minutes early so you could turn it off before the firehouse sent out a hook and ladder truck. You had to wind it up every night and then try to sleep while it went TICK-TOCK, TICK-TOCK, TICK-TOCK all night long. My mother bought it for me at Woolworth’s when I turned eleven so I could get myself to school. Actually, what she expected me to do was rear myself once I turned eleven so she could get a few hours of sleep. I don’t blame my mother. If I had to work as hard as she did, I would have abandoned my children when they turned ten. As I mentioned, certain things get burned into your brains when you’re not paying attention, such as in when you’re sleeping through the clock tick-tock. Many years passed and I was able to totally forget about the clock when I had the honor of speaking to Daya Mata, the head of all Self Realization Fellowship temples in the United States. The subject of discussion, naturally, was meditation. People had many questions about the processes and manifestations experienced during Kriya Yoga. When it was my turn in line, I asked her if one of the sounds of the Universe one might hear during the depth of meditation was a steady background tick-tock, tick-tock. She pondered for a minute and then said she had never heard of that phenomena. Clearly, she was raised by lullabies, not wind-up clocks. I’m going to start a list of Extraordinary Things that I have experienced in my life. Meeting Daya Mata was one of them. Being the only person in the audience for whom she had no answer was probably even better.