In the pantheon of Hindoo festivities two nights stand apart. One is Moh Ratri and the other is Maha Ratri. Moh Ratri translates as the night of illusion, in English. It happened when Krishna was born in a prison house and was transported to a place of safety at a distance of 5 miles, across the river Jamuna, in the dead hours of the night. The veil of illusion was so complete that no body had an inkling of what had transpired. Moh Ratri is nowadays celebrated as Krishna Janmashtmi. Maha Ratri, which in English means the great night, refers to the night of Shiv's wedding to Shiva. Since Shiva is reified shakti; in a way, it is a night when Shiv is infused with the shakti of Shiva. Therefore, after being united with Shiva, Shiv is worshipped as Maha Shiv. Without Shiva, the same Shiv is reduced to a shav (corpse). Maha Ratri is celebrated as Maha Shiv Ratri.
Broadly speaking there are two types of laity: literalists who go by the book and metaphorists who don't like to see a tree without a Dryad inhabiting it. Literalists are generally seen to gravitate towards ritualism, ultimately. A symbolic act gets somewhere morphed into a rite, and then rituals take it upon themselves to uphold it. There is nothing unusual in the use of symbols though. Symbols are unavoidable. Even words are nothing more than symbols. But words can't deliver a present, they have ability only to represent it. If I type the word apple here, it only represents an apple. It is not going to make a present of an apple to me. So the problem arises when a literalist forgets that a symbol is not an end in itself. It is just a signpost. But make no mistake, it is a live signpost. It should be allowed to breathe.
Only then it can conceptualize what is otherwise abstract or incomprehensible. One must remember that meaning is always larger than the symbol. The asterisk (*) here may be used to represent a star which is humongously bigger than this symbol. Symbols are, hence, signals; live signals, not substitutes. They are like the finger pointing towards the moon, not the moon itself. And therein come the metaphorists. In matters spiritual, we can name them Bodhisattvas, at large. Baba Muktananda once told the story of a Shiv Yogi. He was denied entry into a Shiv temple for he came from the so-called low caste. Undaunted, he went to the beach, made a lingam of sand, put a bunch of flowers over it and sat before it in meditation.
It was revealed to him that it was not imperative for him to worship the outward lingam as the real lingam was an integral part of him, in the form of the spinal column which sustains the spinal cord inside it. The abstract version of the spinal cord is referred to by the yogis as the sushumna nadi. Perhaps because he was at an advanced stage of sadhna, he did not need any outer symbol to meditate upon. It should, however, not be construed from this that it was for the first time that such a revelation had come to somebody. Revelations have been happening always, at all sorts of periods, but of course, not to all sorts of people. Therefore, to pass on the knowledge to others, it becomes imperative to make use of a coded language. The symbol works like modern day time capsules that are buried deep in the earth for the benefit of posterity.
Just like it is with parables, symbols are meant to remind people in a hands-on way of something that is different from the promise of its surface. This helps people in breaking their conditioned responses, enabling them to puzzle over them and figure out for themselves what they really mean. After all, gold pay streaks are not seen on the surface; they are found deep in the veins of the earth. Etymologically speaking, lingam is a Sanskrit word which means a sign. It also means the mool prakriti, Root Nature, or the Cosmic Power. You must have seen that the most sought after article for the worship of lingam is a bel leaf. Why? Well, because it is trifoliolate. Every leaf is made up of three leaflets. They represent the triune power of Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesh. In a way the leaf symbolizes the Cosmic Power.
The phallic appellation applied to the lingam is a recent development, borrowed from Freud and nurtured by his adherents. If what they say has any substance in it, how are they going to explain the presence of the ophidian? How did it get coiled up round the lingam? What is the serpent doing there with no garden of Eden in sight? Anyone having a nodding aquaintance with yoga can easily vouch for the kundalini lying coiled at the base of the sushumna, like a serpent. Meditating on the lingam means meditating on the sushumna, to awaken the Cosmic Power of kundalini, which lies asleep in the root chakra or muladhar. When the kundalini is aroused, it sends its emissaries, the light photons, to the brain, sometimes in a stream like flow, sometimes like a streak of lightening, sometimes leapfrogging and sometimes crawling like ants. They turn the brain into a powerhouse of light.
In yogic parlance, this process is named the ascent of kundalini to meet her spouse, Lord Shiv. Mool Prakriti, or, the Cosmic Power ascends up the sushumna to seek union with Purusha, that is, the Absolute. It is said that she had been lying asleep at the base of the sushumna because of the veils of illusion wrapped around her. As she stirs up, she tears through these veils, called the chakras, gets purer and purer succeedingly, and finally merges into the ocean of pure light in the sahasrar, at the seventh chakra. This is how Shiv weds Shiva, his shakti. According to the adage shubham iti shivam, that is, whatever is benevolent is Shiv, benevolence gets wedded to shakti, that is, strength. This underlines the fact that to be effectively benevolent, one has to be strong as well.
The union takes place because sushumna serves as a bridge between Shiv and Shiva, his shakti. Sushumna is a Sanskrit word which means beautiful. As a column of light she really looks gorgeous. Yogis have sung paens in her honor. Many hymns have been written in her praise. She is so bewitching, many sadhaks won't like to lose their identity by immersing themselves in the ocean of satchidananda. They spurn even moksha, saying they don't need it. The Shiv Yogi I talked about before, was such a sadhak. He became so much enamoured of meditating on sushumna, that the seven-node baton that he always carried with him as his trademark, began to reverberate with the sound of om namah shivaya, his mantra of choice. His disciples meditated on his baton which had become a symbol of sushumna nadi for them.
By now it must have become apparent why Hindoos solemnize their marriages walking around the flame of fire seven times. For them, the flame is a replica of the sushumna nadi and the seven circles denote the seven chakras that kundalini traverses before she finally consummates her search. In the temples of Shiv you must have noticed that people circumambulate the lingam seven times so that their wishes are answered. My point in writing this article is to explain the story behind the story of rituals. There is nothing wrong in observing rituals if they are done with proper understanding. Because then they won't remain mechanical, I mean lifeless like a machine; they will become vibrant, that is, full of life. Therefore, the need is to get transformed on the inside. Then there will be no need to do cosmetic surgery from the outside. Once one gets strong from the inside, outer events tune themselves to the inner rhythm.
Here, I would like to introduce you to the story of Maharshi Dadhich. It is a story from Hindoo mythology. You know in mythology, fact and fiction combine to create a fantasy. If in the process, the meaning is not lost, the story is said to be a success. It is such a story. Once upon a time, a battle raged between the gods and the demons. The demons had an upper hand, so the gods rushed to Brahma for help. Brahma advised them to go to sage Dadhich and beg him to part with his merudand, that is, the backbone. Dadhich, though himself a fakir, never disappointed anybody, as an almsgiver. He willingly donated his merudand to the gods, who made a formidable weapon, called vajra, out of it. With the help of vajra, which means hard and strong, the gods defeated the demons. As you can see the story is a spiritual allegory. Let me now explain it:
Gods and demons are symbolic of the forces of Good and Evil. The battleground is inside everybody, where the battle is always raging between these two opposing forces. We are always trying to do our best but sometimes we do end up making a mess, of course to our chagrin. Man is, by nature, a very noble creature and fortunate too. How ? You see only man has the wherewithal to meditate. Without meditation it is never possible to achieve superconsciousness. Even a highly developed intellect cannot break the barriers of consciousness to achieve superconsciosness. Consciousness is defined by body-mind and is therefore problem oriented. Each solution will come up with fresh problems. Superconsciousness is another name for soul consciousness. It is solution oriented.
Since, without meditation it is not possible to break away from body consciousness, man remains prone to making mistakes. From the Maharshi's example it is amply clear that it is the merudand that comes to our help in our times of crises. You see the axis of the earth on which it moves, is also called merudand. The earth's very support is the merudand, and so is it our body's and our life's support too. Literally speaking, merudand means gold-staff. Pace Einstein's energy equation, on the spiritual plane, sushumna is an avtar of merudand. Sushumna is of the color of gold. With the blessings of our sushumna, we can pull ourselves out of the quagmire we have managed to push ourselves into. Since sushumna and spine are interchangeable, we can safely say that the inner strength corresponds to developing a stronger spine. That is why we have such phrases as a spineless man for a namby-pamby guy and a spined man for the redoubtable one. A spined man is like vajra, that is hard and strong. By hard, however, is meant a state of determination, in which one is capable of taking hard decisions.
Obviously, all this boils down to making the sushumna strong. You see our energy level dips every time we open our eyes or mouth, move our fingers or imagination, love one or hate another. Besides these activities, there is a huge leakage of energy from the background gossip going on incessantly, that doesn't stop even in sleep. We average about fifty thousand thoughts in twenty four hours, which is increasing everyday because of the shortening of the attention span, induced by fast computers and cell phones. And look, the only source of energy intake is the food we eat! Unfortunately, it can provide us with only the physical component of energy, whereas we need emotional, intellectual, and spiritual energies as well. Obviously we run ourselves on a depleted supply of benevolent energies.
This recurring deficit of benevolent energies makes us bite the bullet of negative energies. We succumb to all sorts of negativities in our behaviour. What do you think, the newspapers are splashed with every morning? News of benevolent energies? You will have to search with a powerful magnifying glass for one. Recently a University of Massachusetts researcher Robert Feldman published his study on reflexive lying in the Journal of Basic And Applied Psychology. He found out that in a short span of 10 minutes his subjects told an average of 2.96 false things. Civilizations flourish on the backbone of integrity. Decadence starts when commercialism takes over, because commerce is preoccupied with profit and loss, not morality and ethics.
An overview of the global behavioral graph is enough to show that perversion of thought has become the norm of the day. Why do we have to resort to lying, let us ask ourselves. Is it not to show ourselves in a better light in public life, than what we know in private, we are in? Aren't we pressing the wrong button to show us in the right image? If we are convinced of our veracity, where is the need to look different. And if we think we are not upto the mark, let us work on ourselves, instead of indulging in petty tricks and gimmicks to look what we know so well we are not. If we sincerely wish to arrest and reverse the trend, we need to cherish our sushumna. When we meditate on sushumna, all energies realign themselves and start flowing into it. The upshot is that sushumna grows stronger by the day.
With the emergence of a strong sushumna, we can make up the deficit in energy budget. Yes, a strong sushumna facilitates the bonding of Shiv with his shakti. Benevolence gets fortified with strength. Since the leakage of energy is stopped to a large extent, we build surplus energy reserves of benevolence. We become strong from the inside. Now we don't need to run from pillar to post in fruitless pursuits. According to Sri Ramakrishna, kanchan and kamini, that is, lucre and lassie, are the two foot soldiers of maya, well-known for tempting people to commit all sorts of stupidities. A fully lit sushumna with humdinger reserves of benevolent energy is a surefire deterrent to these brazen pillagers. So dear readers, it will do us a lot of good if we celebrate Maha Shiv Ratri each night of the day, on each day of our life. However, we can do special puja on the 14th night of krishna paksha in the month of Phalgun, so that symbolism lives on.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
Broadly speaking there are two types of laity: literalists who go by the book and metaphorists who don't like to see a tree without a Dryad inhabiting it. Literalists are generally seen to gravitate towards ritualism, ultimately. A symbolic act gets somewhere morphed into a rite, and then rituals take it upon themselves to uphold it. There is nothing unusual in the use of symbols though. Symbols are unavoidable. Even words are nothing more than symbols. But words can't deliver a present, they have ability only to represent it. If I type the word apple here, it only represents an apple. It is not going to make a present of an apple to me. So the problem arises when a literalist forgets that a symbol is not an end in itself. It is just a signpost. But make no mistake, it is a live signpost. It should be allowed to breathe.
Only then it can conceptualize what is otherwise abstract or incomprehensible. One must remember that meaning is always larger than the symbol. The asterisk (*) here may be used to represent a star which is humongously bigger than this symbol. Symbols are, hence, signals; live signals, not substitutes. They are like the finger pointing towards the moon, not the moon itself. And therein come the metaphorists. In matters spiritual, we can name them Bodhisattvas, at large. Baba Muktananda once told the story of a Shiv Yogi. He was denied entry into a Shiv temple for he came from the so-called low caste. Undaunted, he went to the beach, made a lingam of sand, put a bunch of flowers over it and sat before it in meditation.
It was revealed to him that it was not imperative for him to worship the outward lingam as the real lingam was an integral part of him, in the form of the spinal column which sustains the spinal cord inside it. The abstract version of the spinal cord is referred to by the yogis as the sushumna nadi. Perhaps because he was at an advanced stage of sadhna, he did not need any outer symbol to meditate upon. It should, however, not be construed from this that it was for the first time that such a revelation had come to somebody. Revelations have been happening always, at all sorts of periods, but of course, not to all sorts of people. Therefore, to pass on the knowledge to others, it becomes imperative to make use of a coded language. The symbol works like modern day time capsules that are buried deep in the earth for the benefit of posterity.
Just like it is with parables, symbols are meant to remind people in a hands-on way of something that is different from the promise of its surface. This helps people in breaking their conditioned responses, enabling them to puzzle over them and figure out for themselves what they really mean. After all, gold pay streaks are not seen on the surface; they are found deep in the veins of the earth. Etymologically speaking, lingam is a Sanskrit word which means a sign. It also means the mool prakriti, Root Nature, or the Cosmic Power. You must have seen that the most sought after article for the worship of lingam is a bel leaf. Why? Well, because it is trifoliolate. Every leaf is made up of three leaflets. They represent the triune power of Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesh. In a way the leaf symbolizes the Cosmic Power.
The phallic appellation applied to the lingam is a recent development, borrowed from Freud and nurtured by his adherents. If what they say has any substance in it, how are they going to explain the presence of the ophidian? How did it get coiled up round the lingam? What is the serpent doing there with no garden of Eden in sight? Anyone having a nodding aquaintance with yoga can easily vouch for the kundalini lying coiled at the base of the sushumna, like a serpent. Meditating on the lingam means meditating on the sushumna, to awaken the Cosmic Power of kundalini, which lies asleep in the root chakra or muladhar. When the kundalini is aroused, it sends its emissaries, the light photons, to the brain, sometimes in a stream like flow, sometimes like a streak of lightening, sometimes leapfrogging and sometimes crawling like ants. They turn the brain into a powerhouse of light.
In yogic parlance, this process is named the ascent of kundalini to meet her spouse, Lord Shiv. Mool Prakriti, or, the Cosmic Power ascends up the sushumna to seek union with Purusha, that is, the Absolute. It is said that she had been lying asleep at the base of the sushumna because of the veils of illusion wrapped around her. As she stirs up, she tears through these veils, called the chakras, gets purer and purer succeedingly, and finally merges into the ocean of pure light in the sahasrar, at the seventh chakra. This is how Shiv weds Shiva, his shakti. According to the adage shubham iti shivam, that is, whatever is benevolent is Shiv, benevolence gets wedded to shakti, that is, strength. This underlines the fact that to be effectively benevolent, one has to be strong as well.
The union takes place because sushumna serves as a bridge between Shiv and Shiva, his shakti. Sushumna is a Sanskrit word which means beautiful. As a column of light she really looks gorgeous. Yogis have sung paens in her honor. Many hymns have been written in her praise. She is so bewitching, many sadhaks won't like to lose their identity by immersing themselves in the ocean of satchidananda. They spurn even moksha, saying they don't need it. The Shiv Yogi I talked about before, was such a sadhak. He became so much enamoured of meditating on sushumna, that the seven-node baton that he always carried with him as his trademark, began to reverberate with the sound of om namah shivaya, his mantra of choice. His disciples meditated on his baton which had become a symbol of sushumna nadi for them.
By now it must have become apparent why Hindoos solemnize their marriages walking around the flame of fire seven times. For them, the flame is a replica of the sushumna nadi and the seven circles denote the seven chakras that kundalini traverses before she finally consummates her search. In the temples of Shiv you must have noticed that people circumambulate the lingam seven times so that their wishes are answered. My point in writing this article is to explain the story behind the story of rituals. There is nothing wrong in observing rituals if they are done with proper understanding. Because then they won't remain mechanical, I mean lifeless like a machine; they will become vibrant, that is, full of life. Therefore, the need is to get transformed on the inside. Then there will be no need to do cosmetic surgery from the outside. Once one gets strong from the inside, outer events tune themselves to the inner rhythm.
Here, I would like to introduce you to the story of Maharshi Dadhich. It is a story from Hindoo mythology. You know in mythology, fact and fiction combine to create a fantasy. If in the process, the meaning is not lost, the story is said to be a success. It is such a story. Once upon a time, a battle raged between the gods and the demons. The demons had an upper hand, so the gods rushed to Brahma for help. Brahma advised them to go to sage Dadhich and beg him to part with his merudand, that is, the backbone. Dadhich, though himself a fakir, never disappointed anybody, as an almsgiver. He willingly donated his merudand to the gods, who made a formidable weapon, called vajra, out of it. With the help of vajra, which means hard and strong, the gods defeated the demons. As you can see the story is a spiritual allegory. Let me now explain it:
Gods and demons are symbolic of the forces of Good and Evil. The battleground is inside everybody, where the battle is always raging between these two opposing forces. We are always trying to do our best but sometimes we do end up making a mess, of course to our chagrin. Man is, by nature, a very noble creature and fortunate too. How ? You see only man has the wherewithal to meditate. Without meditation it is never possible to achieve superconsciousness. Even a highly developed intellect cannot break the barriers of consciousness to achieve superconsciosness. Consciousness is defined by body-mind and is therefore problem oriented. Each solution will come up with fresh problems. Superconsciousness is another name for soul consciousness. It is solution oriented.
Since, without meditation it is not possible to break away from body consciousness, man remains prone to making mistakes. From the Maharshi's example it is amply clear that it is the merudand that comes to our help in our times of crises. You see the axis of the earth on which it moves, is also called merudand. The earth's very support is the merudand, and so is it our body's and our life's support too. Literally speaking, merudand means gold-staff. Pace Einstein's energy equation, on the spiritual plane, sushumna is an avtar of merudand. Sushumna is of the color of gold. With the blessings of our sushumna, we can pull ourselves out of the quagmire we have managed to push ourselves into. Since sushumna and spine are interchangeable, we can safely say that the inner strength corresponds to developing a stronger spine. That is why we have such phrases as a spineless man for a namby-pamby guy and a spined man for the redoubtable one. A spined man is like vajra, that is hard and strong. By hard, however, is meant a state of determination, in which one is capable of taking hard decisions.
Obviously, all this boils down to making the sushumna strong. You see our energy level dips every time we open our eyes or mouth, move our fingers or imagination, love one or hate another. Besides these activities, there is a huge leakage of energy from the background gossip going on incessantly, that doesn't stop even in sleep. We average about fifty thousand thoughts in twenty four hours, which is increasing everyday because of the shortening of the attention span, induced by fast computers and cell phones. And look, the only source of energy intake is the food we eat! Unfortunately, it can provide us with only the physical component of energy, whereas we need emotional, intellectual, and spiritual energies as well. Obviously we run ourselves on a depleted supply of benevolent energies.
This recurring deficit of benevolent energies makes us bite the bullet of negative energies. We succumb to all sorts of negativities in our behaviour. What do you think, the newspapers are splashed with every morning? News of benevolent energies? You will have to search with a powerful magnifying glass for one. Recently a University of Massachusetts researcher Robert Feldman published his study on reflexive lying in the Journal of Basic And Applied Psychology. He found out that in a short span of 10 minutes his subjects told an average of 2.96 false things. Civilizations flourish on the backbone of integrity. Decadence starts when commercialism takes over, because commerce is preoccupied with profit and loss, not morality and ethics.
An overview of the global behavioral graph is enough to show that perversion of thought has become the norm of the day. Why do we have to resort to lying, let us ask ourselves. Is it not to show ourselves in a better light in public life, than what we know in private, we are in? Aren't we pressing the wrong button to show us in the right image? If we are convinced of our veracity, where is the need to look different. And if we think we are not upto the mark, let us work on ourselves, instead of indulging in petty tricks and gimmicks to look what we know so well we are not. If we sincerely wish to arrest and reverse the trend, we need to cherish our sushumna. When we meditate on sushumna, all energies realign themselves and start flowing into it. The upshot is that sushumna grows stronger by the day.
With the emergence of a strong sushumna, we can make up the deficit in energy budget. Yes, a strong sushumna facilitates the bonding of Shiv with his shakti. Benevolence gets fortified with strength. Since the leakage of energy is stopped to a large extent, we build surplus energy reserves of benevolence. We become strong from the inside. Now we don't need to run from pillar to post in fruitless pursuits. According to Sri Ramakrishna, kanchan and kamini, that is, lucre and lassie, are the two foot soldiers of maya, well-known for tempting people to commit all sorts of stupidities. A fully lit sushumna with humdinger reserves of benevolent energy is a surefire deterrent to these brazen pillagers. So dear readers, it will do us a lot of good if we celebrate Maha Shiv Ratri each night of the day, on each day of our life. However, we can do special puja on the 14th night of krishna paksha in the month of Phalgun, so that symbolism lives on.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
