Thousands of Suns, painting by Mantradevi based on Yogananda’s chant. See more of Mantradevi’s art.

Out of emotion or sentiment, people are prone to make Divine Mother so humanly personal as to become small. The Divine Mother is beyond form and beyond human sentiment. Yogananda used to sing a chant:

Who tells me Thou art dark, oh my Mother Divine?
Thousands of suns and moons from Thy body do shine.

That song is more than just a devotional chant, but a deep teaching (and also a play on words). He explained that Divine Mother is worshiped in Bengal as Kali, who has dark skin. The chant is lightheartedly asking the rhetorical question “who says that you are limited to that dark form that we worship?” The response is that Divine Mother’s ‘form’ is the entire universe: all suns, moons, galaxies—everything. She cannot be limited to any form by our human ways of worship.

~ Nayaswami Devarshi

Further Resources

• Who Is Divine Mother? by Swami Kriyananda