A Sweet Smile of Sublime Beauty

It was the first glimpse I caught of her, she appeared settled on the sacred seat within the sanctum of the Kanchi temple. Kamakshi Amman smiled back at me in quiet demeanor. My thoughts flew off my mind as my eyes rolled over every aspect of the sanctum, taking her form in. Her face smeared with sandal wood housed the most beautiful smile and her eyes gazed straight back at me.

My heart welled up with emotions, my mind rested blankly in a void, and I just gazed back at her. We have known each other for a while now, our relationship has evolved in quiet silence. She is everything to me and she had called me back to Kanchipuram again unexpectedly, as I drove down the geriatric folks of my family to her doorstep. I wasn’t going to miss this for anything. The corporate world could wait a day for me, for when she called, every body would wait. It was a crazy day, with a customer visit lined up in the afternoon, I had taken the chance. She had called and I found myself hitting the highway to Kanchipuram with an eye on the time to reach my workplace by lunch. It was a crazy schedule but the heart clearly ruled the mind as I sped up the road to reach her world.

I stared back at those divine eyes, they spoke to me in their silence. I observed her chamber, she was warm even in the distance that separated her from me. I was simply speechless feeling every moment of the void in my head. With emotions welling up in my heart I just took every bit of her into myself. I had been blessed to witness her “vishwaroopa darshanam”, a glorious view of her I had never seen before, a form she blesses us with once every year. She oozed with charm, beauty flowed through every part of her being as she stared back at me, I recollected the sweet verses of the Soundarya Lahari. Oh yes, she was every bit an ocean of beauty, of compassion, and of warmth and unconditional love.

The emotions I feel towards her, are those I would never be able to feel towards anybody else. There is so much love for her that wells up when I see her. I know she is there, welcoming in the warmth of the lamp light that brightens her face. She had called me, and I had dashed to her door step, quite literally to learn what it is to love her again, to feel the divine grace envelop me as I stood there mesmerized by her beauty. The chamber was different today for a cow stood at the ardha mandapa with her calf cozy at her feet. The cow stared back at me quite comfortable with strangers around her. There was no one in the chamber, just the divine mother and me, and we connected in silence, in emotions, in strange love that left me detached from the rest of the world. Nothing mattered, expect her. Nothing was important except her. Nothing existed except her. Nothing drove me to such a level of intense love except her. Nothing was more powerful than the void that hung inside my head. Was this what I felt, unconditional love, sweet surrender, a crazy sense of freedom from every aspect of my life. I felt freedom for those few minutes, when no one mattered, because no one existed, I was and she was and nothing else was.

I looked at her feeling a deep sense of bliss. The state of overpowering intense love and a blank mind was hard to come by, I was there at this moment, a tremendous sense of peace draped my being. This is what I called freedom, I belonged no where, I belonged to no one, and yet I was hers to own. I knew no time for she was all that stood. I felt no desire or attachment for she was all the truth I knew. Such depth of freedom and detachment from the bonded world around me made me realize just how much no one owned me. I was alone here, without rules, without any sense of connection to what I thought was the universe around me. I knew then that I am a potent drop of intense love in her ocean of beauty reflected in that divine smile on her sacred face, in pure sublime union with the Goddess.

I am her, she is me and that is the only truth I behold.

When Lord Jagannathan Entered My Life

I am not completely aware of Krishna consciousness, and neither have I spent too much time trying to understand Vaishnavism. Maybe its time to start. Krishna made his intriguing presence felt when I started to learn more about Kali and Tantra. Thanks to my son's die hard concentration and irresistible attraction to Little Krishna, Lord Jagannatha grew on me subconsciously while I sat through repeated serials of the Divine boy on television. I found myself falling for that child, for that little village of Brindavan and all his companions, Balarama, Madhu and Subhala. With my son's new found emotions gripped by these imaginary beings who ruled his head day in and day out, I came to realize subconsciously that they were as real to me as they were to him. 

The Lord sends his messages in strange ways and in each way, I found myself sinking into a pool of deep emotion of Love, call it Bhakti, call it what ever you like. An email fell into my mailbox, with a picture of Krishna/Kali and a question - Guess who this is? With that started my next hunt, what is the Krishna association with Kali. J C Joshi's innumerable comments came flashing back to me. His whole volume of belief left behind as pearls of wisdom with the comments of my various blogs echoed back in my head well after his physical body turned history. Who really is Jagannatha?

I penned my last paragraph of a book I plan to publish sometime in the near future and realized that I, who assumed herself to be a great follower of Shiva and Shakti, had given a lot of attention to Jagannatha unconsciously in my story. I sat back to think of all the temples I had visited, it was Tirupati that had overwhelmed me the most and make me weep profusely, every time without fail. The atmosphere, the energy, the silence inside the sanctum, and his form left me in a pool full of tears. The last visit of taking my son there had proved fatal in this divine love affair. But somehow, the form that stuck in my head as the divine Krishna is Jagannatha. From that little child I would love to cuddle to the divine lover, Krishna conquers my mind in every form. 

And then he played his divine trick again in a dream, and the Ras Lila enveloped my thoughts, divine love in the eyes of the "knower" can make the emotional doer do a lot of things. A line from Sri M's book echoed in my head, when it comes to Jagannatha, we take the form  of the divine lover, that's the only state of consciousness one can reach. And in the dream he came, as a singer of divine song, as the one who plays sweet notes in his flute. A face so gentle, so handsome and yet distant beckoning me to come forward and touch him, experience him. The intoxicating sounds of his beeja mantra echoed inside my head, his searching eyes oozed the emotion of warmth, the emotion of longing, the emotion that beckoned me to just accept everything he wanted, thoughtlessly, helplessly, completely emotionally. 

I stood on the floor, in our world, my thoughts caught in his web as the beeja mantra echoed on, I could feel the weakness in my knees. I could barely hold myself for a surge of energy just headed upwards towards my heart, towards my head and I felt myself swoon in sheer bliss as I felt my consciousness fade from the real world. I clung on crying out for help - Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya - O Vasudeva, O Shankara! Hold me, for I am unable to hold myself. 

I realized how difficult it was for me to come back to the real world that minute. 

Conquest of the Astha Siddhis

It has been cooking for a while in the mind and I am taking my time to connect the dots. Spiritualism is great fun when it comes with puzzles that make the grey cells work harder. I have had the general idea that the offering of aarti, dhoop and naivedya are connected to the conquest of the great Siddhis, a thought that once popped up in my mind may be after reading about it somewhere but the truth of it is that it refuses to go. 

A small puzzle fell into my path when I chanced upon a book that was a biography of the Mahaperivar of Sringeri, who sows the seeds of this quest in his composition of the Pancopacara Puja. In his prayer, he offers fire, water, sandal wood, flowers, and incense to the supreme in the form of the five great elements. This sounds like regular puja, but for some reason I didnt feel like stopping at it. 

Each offering is initiated by a sacred syllable followed by the object of offering towards the supreme power as it manifests in nature. At the same time each syllable in isolation didn’t make any sense until it struck me that the puja essentially starts with Lam - which is the bija mantra of Muladhara Chakra. And there started the next quest. Each syllable personifies the chakras within our being through which the Kundalini rises. 

It soon became clear that the passage to conquer the elements of nature was through the process of offering with the recitation of the divine syllables with bhakti. I cannot explain this but for some reason it made sense that the conquest of the elements was linked to the conquest of the siddhis as a result of the rise of the Kundalini within oneself. And why is that? Let’s take each siddhis and study it. 

Anima: The power to reduce to the size of an atom
Mahima: The power to expand to an infinitely large size
Garima: The power to be infinitely heavy
Laghima: The power to be almost weightless
Prapti: The power to have unrestricted access to any place
Prakamya: The power to realize what one desires
Istva: The power to conquer
Vastva: The power to subjugate all.

If we look at each of these attributes, the 5 great elements of water, space, earth, fire, and air have exactly these qualities - one or more if not all. Could this be the sacred spell that the great Shankaracharyas tried to tell the masses towards spiritual growth? 

Further to this is the other form of worship which is the Panchayatana puja, popularized by the Shankaras where an aspirant could worship all the 5 sacred Gods within a framework, they being Ganesha - representing the water element, Vishnu - representing the space element, Siva - representing the earth element, Devi - representing the fire element and Surya - representing the air element. 

The great Shankaracharyas tried to convey to the lesser mortals a far greater truth that can only be realized by the experience of puja - panchayatana or pancopacara puja, with devotion and love. How amazing is this truth that with the help of a sacred act of ritual worship we can offer certain offerings of divine acceptance to access certain chakras within ourselves and render us capable of realizing the great elements that at some point we will be able to move/live/experience them when we have attained the capability of the great siddhis that allow us to move from one element to the other with ease, in short conquering them. 

Does the performance of the sacred ritual of puja with deep devotion enable us to conquer these elements and therefore enable us to move up the spiritual ladder... it’s a good thought to think about. The discovery of this thought is baffling and will keep me excited for a good time to come but I wonder about the "how". Will I ever get the success of seeing it work on myself in this lifetime... no idea. 

When The Divine Guru Guides Us

Srinivasan looked around the room; the odor of sandal wood and incense was strong and a little lamp stood by the pictures of many Gods who smiled down at him. He sat back at the astrologer's office, observing a small room that had many mysteries enveloped in the stacks of papers and books that lay there gathering dust. It felt like he was at the office of Chitragupta, waiting to know his intermediate fate... in bits to make any amends before the final call. 

In front of him sat the astrologer, rolling his fingers over his horoscope, looking up books and adjusting his spectacles. Srinivasan wondered about this mysterious diagram that the astrologer looked through, these magic squares that could transform his life for good or for bad. 

He reflected on his life this far, on the various situations and circumstances that it was built up of, about the kinds of people who were part of it and had an impact on him to be the way he had turned out today. Were they all incidental or were they all part of a larger phenomenon... a science whose interpretation was currently being done by a man who he didn’t know but for some reason trusted that he would get his math right. 

The man looked up, through his glasses and uttered a few words. His answers were short and his predictions clear. 

"This year is not good for you, there will be trouble, in fact it has already started and it will get over next year about the same time..."

Srinivasan's heart sank again, on one side were his emotions asking all the Gods present in the room on what wrong he had done. And then his mind took over, it must have been something really nasty he had done in his previous birth, maybe that is why they say "Be good, if you can’t do better than that". Yet, he had to prepare himself for all the eventualities that would hit him in the days to come whether he was responsible for them or not. 

Srinivas felt pain in his heart, to think that he would have to put up with any calamities that he would face given that plenty of such events had already passed by in his life and he had not felt very good about them. Yet he knew that cursing the Gods or the lesser stars or his fate was not the method to tide over these difficult times. He had to find himself a better solution. Fate always had its way, and the planets always seemed to have theirs, and people will be people... In fact he often laughed at how the events unfolded as they set him up for a human trial, how totally strange and yet logical were these twists and turns that he had by now begun to understand not just how the world around him works, but how the superior world of greater beings make use of the world around him and forces a different perception. How weirdly strange and yet so creative were the events that had made an impact on him to change himself just a bit into being either someone else or just made him a lot more defensive. 

Srinivasan breathed hard and long, staring at the little paper that had a scribble of the squares of his horoscope that made up his universe. This little diagram was leading him up a dance, a difficult one where he soon realized that the people he interacted with were just a bunch of worthless pawns whose default temperaments were being made use of to create deeper, complex circumstances through which he had to wade... wisely... to save himself through lesser impact. 

The ancient rule of fate, is a far more serious affair back home in India, and much as he adapted to the changing world, somethings were too far deep to throw away. The only path left for him was to turn to his divine Guru to lead him through this jungle of messed up temperaments. 

-*-*-

It had been 8 months, things were not looking up for Srinivas and as he pushed back a few really deep pitfalls, he decided to still hold strong. He learned hard and well with time, there were two things he was going to do. 

One was never to curse the Gods or his Guru, instead he remembered that moment of deep anguish when he hid away from all humanity for half an hour and cried his heart out in pain as he waded through one gruesome event that hit his conscience real hard, a strong wakeup call on how men had fallen in conscience and how the world had so drastically changed around him, and yet he was strong in the head that he would not blame anyone for it. He cried out to Lord Shiva, to his Guru, to help him through this pain... he cried like a baby, waiting for his Supreme Lord to pick him up and help him walk again. 

The second thing he learned to do was be silent through the bad time. He waited in silence, not ruffling anyone's feathers, not opinionating, no showing his anger or frustration, not reacting to anything... and he felt it was half the battle won. But he also realized that it killed his confidence when he had to react to situation and he didn’t have the wisdom to detect how much and how far he could go without getting a hit in return. But yet, he chose the wisdom to keep silent and aloof from the world till these horrible times were gone. 

It was difficult because he decided he wouldn't be like them, he wouldn’t succumb. He would not be diplomatic to please the worthless, or lie or be political and try to please the world around him. This was him and he was not going to change that. He only sensed deep aversion towards the world of people outside... around him... 

It was mentally tiring, it sapped most of his energy, he almost began to look at everyone as a potential suspect who had come into his world to mess with him and upset his tranquility. He realized his worst fear, he now almost trusted no one, he stood so alone that anyone who came by, appeared more like a potential problem than a person he would love to be happy with. While he didn’t choose to please or upset any, he also realized a strong sense of being a complete misfit in the middle of these people, he almost felt they were a different species, built with a temperament totally different from his. He hastily retreated back into his safe haven, his land where only his Great Lord Shiva reigned, and his Guru showed him the path to the divine. 

Was this detachment he wondered, when he was mentally forsaking the world outside and going inwards because he trusted no one else except these two superior beings, who were now not just his Teacher, they were his everything... every role applied on this... parent, friend... everything. 

-*-*-

Srinivas realized that being himself was not helping him too much at this time, being someone else was not something he could pull off with ease and he detested the very idea. But he felt safe, when he looked at the larger picture, with love, patience, and most of all Bhakti and undivided, complete surrender to the Lord and his Master, to deliver him from this mesh of illusions and perceptions within which he was locked - this samsara. He wanted the ultimate freedom, he was ready for the ultimate surrender and these troubled times were a journey for him to learn the art of spiritual progress. 

He reflected on the line, "Forgive them Lord, for they don’t know what they are doing". It just made so much sense. He learned the art of compassion, of forgiveness. He learned to let go.  

Shiva Rudra - Tribute to the Red Eyed Lord

Lord Shiva Rudra along the Narmada

Rudra, the red eyed, gentle and fiery represents warmth and protection. Rudra, the red eyed shines through anything in the material world. Rudra the red eyed makes His presence felt no matter how uncanny the reality around. Rudra the red eyed, is there to be experienced if we try hard enough.

Fire is not as dangerous as it appears, Rudra is not as scary as he appears, Bhairava is not as violent as he is pictured. He is real, subtle and present in the pulse of life. What do I mean when I say this?

Rudra Shiva is not a treasure hunt or a well of information that once discovered is realized. No he is none of this. Rudra Shiva is the eye of life, the awakening being within myself, the consciousness, the fire of my soul, that has just started to burn. Rudra, the sound, brings vibration and heat of a higher kind, energy and life of a different nature, that needs to awaken, and mature with time. Rudra is vibration that if contemplated upon persistently reveals its nature slowly. Rudra, is the constant within us, the beat of the heart, the silenced thoughts that disappear to give way to pleasant imagination and high emotion when the Lord appears deep within the subconscious to be experienced. Rudra, is the light within, the sound energy within that silences all worry that clouds the imagination.

Rudra is that pulse within, you have it and I. We just need to try and He is there waiting to be awakened. Rudra is the blessing, he is the warmth and the fearlessness that makes us feel that this world, this maya is really quite trivial. Rudra is the subconscious that opens the inner world to us. Those ideas, those thoughts that I dont own, and those feelings that melt my heart pouring into tears that well out of my eyes, are these not an external expression of this awakening within myself?

My subconscious, the purity within me is where the Lord resides, as Bhikshatana, as Annapurni Mata, as Shankara, as Trayambaka, as Rudra. These are not just names attached with mythological stories, these are not just presentations of the Lord in human form, these are the very nature and energy of the supreme force Himself. And what if they appear within the vision of the subconscious to just bless the being, the human being, the limited human being that knows none, understands none, but fears all.

I am a speck in this ocean, I am a drop of life, and I am the 8th element, asleep lost and clouded in maya, I am part of Ashtamurti Shiva.

Om Bhavaya, Om Sarvaya, Om Isana, Om Tatpurusha, Om Rudra, Om Ughra, Om Bheema, Om Mahati, Om Paramaeshwar, the eight formed Lord, who represents the elements of water, fire, wind, ether, earth, sun, moon and my mind, O Sadayojata, O Sadashiva, the Lord of all the directions, the single pulse of energy that guides this world, O red eyed Rudra, I bow to you humbly for granting me this vision. The single energy center, the red eyed Lord, so clear and pure, so warm and enveloping, why then are you feared? Why then are you called terrific, why then are you considered so violent when all I can see is tenderness in your glowing eyes!

Om Rudraya devaya Namaha|

I bow to the Lord of the devas, to Rudra, to the creator of spiritual sound, that is involked in his names, the spiritual energy that vibrates within my being when I contemplate on his name. This devotion looks so small, so meak, so insignificant in front of your greatness, your form. To the fiery Lord of Love, warmth and peace, I bow humbly, and surrender to your presence deep within my subconscious, my real world, my core, that vibrates with the name of Rudra Trayambaka Shiva.

To see the sun, the moon and fire is one thing, but to feel the presence of the three eyed Lord Rudra is yet another. The core of red, the eye of light, the eye of life, the eye of fiery energy, the eye of divinity is in eternal abstraction, hard to explain but fulfilling and overwhelming to experience. Its the feeling of heightened emotion that results in heavy droplets of tears, that flow out like pearls falling through space, enhancing the bliss within so high that the minds knows nothing else. This awakens pulsating heat within the heart, heat that stays giving warmth of a flame that can beat the external cold without cover. This is ecstacy, this is emotion, this is beyond logic of the known kind, this is beyond blind faith, this is pure love, this is real.

Rudraya Devaya Namaha||

Photo courtesy: Creative commons - flickr.com