Book excerpt: Seeing the radiant face of Ma Anandamayi and hearing her laughter you guess that she is an incarnation of Joy. Touched by the caress of Her glance you know that her heart is overflowing with love for all beings. Listening to Her teaching so simple and clear you understand that She is in possession of all Wisdom. But one cannot say whether it is Joy, Love or Wisdom that is the source of all this for with Her all therr are inextricably and indissolubly mingled one coluld not exist without the others. The joy which Ma anandmayi lives is not that which we know in worldly life, where pleasure and pain, hope, regret and disillusionment, attraction and repulsion follow on each other's heels, born one of another. Nor is it an egocentric calm of stoic rigidity that erects around itself an rampart of indifference. Hers is an overflowing, irrepressible joy that expresses itself in gaiety, that knows no obstacles, because it is deeply rooted in the Absolute, beyond the dualities of good and evil, of 'I' and 'not-I', of pleasant and unpleasant, because its unshakable base is Love and Wisdom.