Within the lap of these virgin mountains
Deep inside a cave in the Himalayan foothills
Resides here a sacred shrine
Of Lord Shiva Yogishwara
A great saint had once meditated here
In the depths of this silent Gufa
Now lit up with a few oil lamps
Now home to the Lord and a few rodents
I am an offering of love and devotion
I am an offering pure and sublime
I reside here close to this sacred Linga
Awaiting the moment of release
In the early morning hours this winter
The priest comes and beholds
This divine form of the Lord
Ready to be bathed in Holy water
The sacred sprinkles touch the Lord
These pure waters of the Ganges
Flow down the smooth stone of this Linga
Taking me with it in its silent waves.
I leave behind this sacred home
My last home before I journey down
This silent rivulet reaches on
To the great Ganges flowing outside this cave door
Sweet syllables proclaim this freedom
Divine verses lift my earthly veil
Divine fragrance is my boat
As I float down to the Ganges beyond
Bright light breaks the darkness
As the waters make their way out
The cold gushing waters free my soul
I am on my way to my heavenly abode
I have lived with this earthly shrine
I have meditated to this divine fire
I am now one with the supreme being
Complete, enlightened, blessed.
12 comments:
The exterior of vilva reminds me
Of hard human skulls
The skulls of slaves
Used thus in Siri Fort's foundation
Once upon a time
In medieval Delhi
During Khilji ruler's reign...
Since time immemorial
Hindus perform kapal kriya
Of their dead placed on pyre
Break the skull with a bamboo
To allow the soul to escape
From the soft brain...
And similarly they break the vilva
In offering to Shiva the Bhootnath
To release the water
Contained within its soft core
To flow to the sea with Ganga...
Maybe they understood better
The formless and mute Creator
And his mysterious style
Of communication with the seeker...
Lovelyyyy....
Krishna says He wants nothing
From His devotees
Except spiritual connection
For there remains nothing material
For Him to achieve
In space, earth and underground
The three worlds...
To the wise ancients
The compound vilva leaf also
Reflected these three worlds
Just as the exterior of its fruit
Its soft pulpy matter
And the juice held within it did
Like the three-in-one God
Represented by Shivlingam...
And like a teacher or a guru
Another example was seen
In the form of a coconut fruit...
Excellent!
Shri Subramanian ji, While visiting Kolkata on tour in the Seventies, and having 'nothing' to do one day, 'I' had the opportunity to enjoy watching the face of a swimmer, (in a lake close to where 'I' was staying).. He was just floating on the surface, while in 'padmasan' the 'lotus pose', with his eyes closed... He was just bobbing up and down with the waves set up by the wind towards one end of the lake, lost in 'sadhana'...
During those 5-10 minutes, while 'I' watched him, 'I' too experienced the state of bliss that perhaps he was experiencing, and thus 'I' could feel some sort of communication between our minds :)
'I' can thus now experience a similar state of mind any time when 'I' see leaves bobbing up and down on the surface of water/ flowing with the river water,,,or even otherwise, like 'I' read Kavitha in this post, thinking about that event :) And, human brain is funny for mention of just one word can take you on 'a red herring chase', maybe :)
I wish i would get the luck to watch someone in deep sadhana. I dont know if i will have the kind of patience required to slow down my life for this. I have great difficulty in accommodating yoga into my schedule given my impatience.
What would happen to those minds who dont think that much? Where would they spend their time when their social networks dont care for them anymore, when they dont hold a job, when they realize that they wasted their life doing almost nothing, and the fear of death looms over their head?
With all this energy, i still hold this fear...
How peaceful it would be for an man in sadhana to give up every thing, not just the material comforts but also his fears of living with the unknown and not having anything familiar to cling onto... isnt that the real problem?
Kavitha, Although 'I' am not that typical Patanjali-like yogi whose modern day version perhaps is Baba Ramdev,,, however what impressed 'me' most was reading in the Gita (in the early Eighties) that anybody could reach Him, irrespective of one's belief, sex, caste etc!!! 'I' could thus come to believe that yoga simply means fusion of any and every physical form with a common component called soul, the Krishna within!!!
And, also it's Him who is not generally allowing a given individual, or every Tom, Dick and Harry, to feel His close presence! Thus, outwardly, one appears like a musk-deer to go from one location to another in search of the 'Truth', although one might repeat 'Satyam Shivm Sunderam", ie, (immortal) Shiva alone is beautiful and He alone is the Truth!
Shiva thus represents the Supreme Soul whose image (temporary) Krishna is!!! And, Krishna is within everyone, maybe thanks to illusion, like a reflection in a mirror that at least shows my face, which in fact is an index of my mind that needs 'sadhana' that is 'control'!
And God or Absolute Truth being zero, theoretically, He can be reached only through a state of 'no thoughts' in mind, or at least close to Him through minimum thoughts!!!
And this state can perhaps be seen reflected in the form of peaceful countenance (maybe for short time in the beginning)...as it is generally reflected on the face of say Buddha's idol,,,and hence the importance of 'murti-puja', or 'idol-worship', but generally perhaps 'we' get distracted by the 'material beauty' (that's related with Venus, while one is supposed to look for the neutral aspect of the Three-in-one)...
Words, however, fail to convey a realisation and hence one reads how Ramakrishna Paramhansa needed to touch the forehead of Vivekanand, like Nandi blessing with his feet for one to realise the Truth while overcoming the fear and apparently 'wrong' beliefs or predisposition of mind!!!
Best wishes!
Kavitha, There is a saying carried forth since time immemorial, to the effect, that 'we' are so tuned to the external world that 'we' generally pay attention only when the words come from a 'renowned Guru', although knowledge and wisdom might already be available locally...
Therefore, 'I' would like to add a quote from Gautam Buddha (that 'coincidentally' appeared in 'my' newspaper on the 21st April, under 'Meditation & Wisdom'):
"There is no meditation without wisdom, and there is no wisdom without meditation. When a man has both meditation and wisdom, he is indeed close to nirvana."
Kavitha, 'I' thought 'I' had reached some other web log by mistake!
Good luck!
Nah! I just changed the look of my blog, thought it would be a refreshing change.
"Old order changes yielding place to new." Change in the appearance of the exterior is thus understood as 'natural', as it is evident in the growth of a newly born to maturity! However, the spirit, or the essence doesn't change and the wise ancients, therefore, reached the conclusion that that which doesn't change with (apparent) time is the 'Truth', and because God or immortal Shiva the All Knowing is related with zero time it never changes and was thus called 'Absolute Truth'...
Interestingly, in the 'Hindu' mythology, Vishnu is indicated as the origin of Brahma. For, in symbolic or graphic language Brahma is depicted seated on a lotus flower that had evolved from Vishnu's navel! [One can thus imagine the unborn child in mother's womb as the image of Brahma in the making! And possibility of molten rocks in original earth's womb acting as the source of evolution of our sun even, while present day 'scientists' believe moon to have evolved from earth itself]...
And, on earth, one gets to see the beautiful lotus flower high above the surface of water, having its root in mud. Maybe, thus one could imagine our Sun (source of white light,(or say Ma Gouri), or Brahma's consort Saraswati, in white sari with stringed instrument Veena in hand),,,and, Vishnu as the mud, which in human life is, however, treated as the dirty thing that one washes away daily from one's body and garments too. And the Gita says all faults arise from lack of knowledge...and since olden day, in 'nature cure', mud packs are used for treatment of certain physical ailments!...
Maybe one needs to read the message in one of Natraj Shiva's hand, in Abhaya Mudra, and try to seek His blessings and grant fearlessness to our minds!
Perhaps it’s well known that words can’t explain a realization, as it is also expressed in the saying, “The taste of the pudding lies in eating”… And we heard often from our parents (‘luckily’ born and brought up in the Himalayan region, or ‘Devbhumi’) in our dialect, to the effect, “Without oneself dying, one can’t see the heaven.” Where, heaven is the imaginary abode of the Supreme Soul, a dot - (say like a microorganism that demonstrates the capability of a life form to perform the task assigned to it, irrespective of its physical size, i.e., material in fact is immaterial in so far as the drama on earth is concerned!) – or a formless being that, believably being ‘perfect’, or knower of the Absolute Truth, is capable of reflecting the Self as innumerable other images, (that reflect hierarchy in all its aspects from species to species, and so on, which maybe understood as 3-D projections on ‘silver screens’/ PC Monitors in our world), which fill the entire infinite universal void…
However, unfortunately for us ‘inferior souls’ we are all ‘imperfect’, some of course already at high levels could become closer to It through ‘yogic exercises’, for an apparent 3-D image gets developed along three numbers of axes, called ‘physical’, ‘mental’, and ‘spiritual’ by Yogis. And the numeral ‘3’ symbolically represents ‘Om’, the energy that reflects the three-in-one physical God, called by ‘Hindus’as ‘Treyambakeshwar’ or Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh, represented symbolically in physical form by a ‘shivlingam’, as a model of EARTH (immortal Shiva to a ‘Hindu’, physically representing gravity at its centre, which is indicated as the abode of Nadbindu the source of ‘Om’), as part of Mahashiva, i.e., the solar system, in which our Sun represents the physical ‘Brahma’ (and ‘brahmastra’ means hydrogen bombs that explode within its core). And in the overall system, the poisonous planet Venus represents Neelkantha Shiva’s ‘blue throat’ (the abode of planet Venus or Shukra’s essence), while Sun’s essence lies at the ‘solar plexus’ in the middle! And so on, the other members of the solar system correspond to different ‘vital organs’ within the body of Mahashiva, whose model human beings also are…
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