Ma and What Is

Ma was born in a culture that was seeped with ancient religions and so they put a strong religious spin on things. That's the only way they could explain someone like her.

But the "God" Ma talks about is not "some stern guy up there" concept, but an omniscient, universal, impersonal consciousness or essence that energizes everything and holds everything together. 

In the course of my search and travels I have had the privilege to closely approach quite a few extraordinary beings - Tibetans, Sufis, Hindu gurus and Zen masters, many of whom left a deep imprint in my heart....  Anandamayi Ma was and remains the embodiment of transcendence, the living proof of the actual existence of a transcendental reality. 'Extraordinary,' 'superhuman,' 'divine'... I still feel today that no adjective is big enough to describe her presence, particularly when I met her, in the full blossom of her radiance.  I could barely believe that such a being could walk the earth in a human form. -Arnaud Desjardins.

By the way, Ma didn't try to start any religious movement or even act as anyone's guru. She said that people should stick to whatever religious belief they had grown comfortable with.  This includes Christians, Jews, and the profusion of religions around the world.

Even though she had almost no education and seldom read anything, from some inner knowledge she was intimately familiar with the people and percepts of many religions. When she took part in various religious ceremonies, she could repeat in detail the things that were part of the varied rituals. This was just one of her many inexplicable abilities.

With kind of a "all roads lead to Rome," perspective she saw the core issue with religions as not being the superiority of one over another but people's inability to stay focused on the precepts of their particular religion.