If perfection is accomplished at the most minuscule level, with the infinite patience and forbearance of the Divine Mother, with purity, selflessness, utmost devotion and intensity, then Mahalakshmi is pleased.

If we wish to invoke her, then we need to fulfil the sthapana by establishing Maheshvari, Mahasarasvati and Mahakali. While realizing that these are not separate entities but an integral whole, emanations of the same Divine Mother. She indulges our misunderstandings and childish simplifications, and yet, somehow, in the wisdom of Sanatana Dharma, these aspects of her formless form and infinite finite were caught.

These forms are not any limitation on her, for she is infinitely beyond any form. And yet, these images are come in our collective consciousness as some deep expression of her truth. For the Hindu in exalting the nirakaar, the formless, did not deprecate the sakaar, the form. The Mother then is as exalted in her status as Shiva, the ineffable, the transcendental.

What is needed now is just that one drop of gold in our midst, that one drop of utmost purity of Mahalakshmi, if we can but sustain her presence. For she is not a goddess of money and gold coins as is often depicted in our pictures. If it were so, we would be contradicting our own spirituality and denying her highest truth.

Mahalakshmi represents the Divine Power and Godhead of true prosperity, nay opulence, that comes only when all the conditions for her descent are fulfilled. For even if she appears where there may be squalor of thought or feeling, she will move on swiftly, leaving a nation or region far poorer and desolate than before she manifested.

Nor is she antagonistic to Mahasarasvati as ignorantly depicted in some ethnic and humorous or not so humorous stories. That one may either have wisdom or her blessings of wealth. Nor does she diminish by sharing but thrives on a generosity of spirit that is entirely surrendered to her and her prakatan on earth.

While she is alluring with mesmerizing beauty, while she can let men go crazy in their pursuit of her, she yet loves the one who loves her not for secondary gains but for her own sake. Without any subterfuge or deceptive trickery.

Until now, her instruments of money and riches are controlled by the asura, the forces of falsehood. To free these powers from the clutches of the undivine hordes is the sadhana for the yogi of the future.

That one drop of purity among us that can transform the world, such that the world has not seen, that is what we await and prepare for. Sri Aurobindo said it beautifully, “One man’s perfection can yet save the world.” And the means for that, when it happens, will be through the Divine Mother, her true prosperity which multiplies and multiplies of its own and needs no other to help invest or divest its holdings.

She is thus loved by the Vaishya, the entrepreneur, the businessman, the trader, the shopkeeper, who wishes to create a corporate body for her to establish in. And for that the businessman has to prepare conditions of integrity, cleanliness, harmony, generosity, humility and sincerity without the slightest attachment to the proceeds. And has to manage it as a trustee manages an entity which does not belong to him, with utmost devotion without expecting any gain but the joy of serving the Divine or the Beloved.

The detail of the ledger and the books managed with conscientiousness and constant invocation, not a penny wasted unnecessarily. Not an iota disrespected. Not a single paise hoarded when it needs to reinvested for her.

For Mahalaskhmi looks at it all, the perfection, the vision, the surrender, the creativity and the joy in the yogi and disciple who serves her as a purohit, a priest in her temple of earth. For sannyasa is not her ideal, though it might prepare for her advent. For extreme self-abnegation and self-indulgent poverty and escapism do not humor her. She likes her children who are of her while yet living intensely in the world. Who did not run to the Himalayas at the slightest opportunity because it was easy but treated the community and the nation and all life as her field of yoga.

Nor for her the ostentatiousness that comes out of superficial living, the cheap displays of the nouveau riche, or the crude and the gross. But the true opulence of living, that seeps into everything we do, in thought, speech, feeling and action.

If the world is a poor place today, it is so because we have not yet prepared it for the descent of Mahalakshmi. Empires have come and gone, and their riches slipped away. But that divine bindu, that is self-regenerative, how many of us create the conditions for it? If we invoke her as our highest realization of the Divine Mother, as a unity of all the four emanations in one, fulfilling the other three, while yet intimately one with them, it can only be if we see her as the anandmayi, the chaitanyamayi, the satyamayi parame. The Satchitananda in living, dynamic action, whose will is immediately effective, whose vision instantly fulfilled, whose bliss is her rain of bounty on all her creation.

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