Showing posts with label virasaivism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label virasaivism. Show all posts

9.16.2011

Search for the real Guru

I have had many people ask me whether I have a guru, whether I have been initiated, and whether I have had spiritually uplifting experiences. While I can sense their curiosity, it has not been very easy to answer these questions. I understand that we all want to know "the path", we want to learn it fast and we are not ready to be careful about treading this path. There is hunger to want to know, in some people its a lot more intense.

I have been initiated into Shiva worship in the traditional Brahmanical order. While having studied quite a few of the influential paths of Shaivism, namely the cults of Aghories, Tantriks and Virashaivas I have come to understand them as a whole as well as individually. I respect them and their methods though I might not necessarily take to the path myself until that Sadhana is a must for my own salvation with no other alternative. There are disturbing elements in each of these paths when observed in their unadulterated potency and its for our mind to accept the ways of the world or reject it and face repercussions both good or bad.

But Sadhana typically starts with the initiation from a Guru. They say we shouldn't search for him but he will come on his own to us. Well, does the waiting get tough then? That's probably the time we resort to following self proclaimed Gurus in today's world and hope to find peace in their teachings. What's missing in such cases is the personal attention we want in these cases. What we don’t realize is, when we are not "ready" the Guru will never come. Preparation for a Guru is most important to get started. 

The first Guru we come in contact with in our lifetimes are our parents. They set the ball rolling giving us insight into the prescribed path that we would most probably take through our lives and seldom change it. And hence the first initiation has begun. There is no ritual in particular except for the male child maybe. Our search for the next Guru begins when we come to the age of understanding life. We want to dive deeper and understand the science better, of what is possible within our capacity.

The typical route from here is the confused path of ritual worship - a disciplined methodology of dos and don’t with no reasoning to explain why. While on one side the heart encourages this, the mind looks for logical reasoning which might not be immediately apparent. The questions arise and sure enough they don’t have convincing answers. Do we at this point hang on to the path or change or give up and look for the undefined universal God?

In my opinion understanding ritual worship is like learning a language. We don’t understand the nuances of grammar or the idiosyncrasies, yet we hold on to it hoping we will make good masters of it some day. We do not reject language because we didn’t attempt to learn it.

In my personal experience and understanding, at this stage its good to hold on to ritual worship and follow it consistently even if we don’t understand it initially. Its up to us to read up and dig deep to understand what we are doing, rather than doing it mechanically and feel like a parrot reciting mantra. We most often expect someone else to teach us the meaning and do not find a reasonable Guru to explain this vast science; we have little time to do this on our own.

If we do this right, there is a good chance of attaining a spiritual high at this point, reaching a level of sublime experience with the supreme in a small way and getting enchanted by the turn of events in our lives. This is probably the time we are taking to prepare ourselves for the Guru's arrival into our lives. Following the ritual path is a must to go to the next step, but it is effective only when we approach it with Bhakti rather than mechanical action with no comprehension of what we are doing.

The next misconception is that the Guru will show up in human form and speak to us in a language we speak in. Thats where we make the biggest mistake. The first criteria of eligibility towards getting a Guru, is that we in our individual capacity are prepared to be a pupil.

The true pupil has single pointed intense faith in a path with no room for deviation. This path is well understood by him/her and not a result of mass teaching of the community they belong to. At this stage, the pupil is ready to disassociate from the community [herd culture] and walk towards the lonely path of self realization. The pupil understands detachment as a reality, and though they might be in the midst of people, they move towards looking at them with detached compassion rather than possessive love and expectations. This feeling of course is not as overwhelming in the beginning as it is at the end of this path, but the pupil gets to feel the crux of what is expected. The pupil has now decided while living in the middle of this chaos, they don’t quite belong to it anymore and the journey towards understanding the inner self now becomes a breathing reality. The pupil is ready to surrender to the supreme force.

In the silence of their mind, in the void of their being and in complete surrender, the pupil awaits the arrival of the Guru. If luck has it, the Guru will be present in human form at that time. The gyana of the way ahead is mostly transmitted through touch or sight or in silence but never through speech as sound is a lesser path of communication. If the Guru is not physically present, the gyana is arrived at in the mind. It just happens, and the pupil is subconsciously directed by the power of the thoughts they harbor in the mind. This is when the pupil transitions from religion to spiritualism. From here on ritual has no value, it has led the pupil to the doors of the master.

The Guru appears in the subtle world of their mind to direct them and lead them in their path. The path is never easy and surely has no room for personal bias. It can test the pupil through tough times, with unhappy experiences to force the pupil to detach from what is around them or it could be through comfort as well. Either way, the pupil realizes that what is around them in the exterior world doesn’t matter any more - both good and bad. They have now learned to accept all the twists and turns in their lives.

One of the most mysterious forms of experiencing the presence of a Guru in a "non human form" is the sculptural depiction of Adi Shankaracharya at Kedarnath. While to most people it might have looked like a symbolic representation of his Dandam, this form of his hand holding the sacred symbol of the Shankara, is believed to appear in the mind's eye when a pupil worships this Guru. 


In this search for the supreme, when the Guru accepts us as an eligible pupil and the divine education begins, this experience is far more overwhelming than any other we may have experienced before in our lifetimes. It is potent, magical, and mysterious and strictly rule driven and supersedes all the scientific theories we have come across so far. This is a different reality, unexplored and excitable on a different plane. The Guru transforms into a God like being and leads the way, while we - the pupil - pick up the reins of Bhakti and ride on this path to supreme bliss.
 

10.18.2010

The Rebel Saints of Shaivism



History has showcased many types of Bhaktas who have searched for Lord Shiva through their lives. They have taken to different schools of thought and within Shaivism itself we see these variants. While the Pasupatas live in silence and mysterious solitude, the aghoris lead a esoteric lifestyle too far to fathom. 

And then there are the popular saints who have defined Shaivism for the ordered society. While Kannappa Nayanar and Karraikkal Ammaiyar found place in the list of 63 Nayanars, Adi Shankaracharya rephrased the laws of divine worship to the society we know today and this tradition has come down to us as accepted, agreeable and conformist to today's social principles. There are the other great poets and mystic writers like Sundarar, Thirugnanasambandar, Thirumular and Manikkavachakar who turned their love for Lord Shiva into divine rhythmic poetry and defined the Shaiva Siddhantas and continued to propagate worship as we know it.

Few have lived in our times, rekindling the laws of spiritualism during their lives. While Paramacharya Sri Chandrasekhar Swamigal brought back the joys of good living, humility and renunciation to the throne of the Shankara at Kanchi Mutt, Ramana Maharishi keeps the fire growing at Thiruvannamalai. And so Shaivism was defined, while Lord Shiva himself defines the truth of the self without the presence or the need of ordered society, we, who are within this system have tried to tame the wild side of Shaivism into the claws of social acceptance.

Little do we know that there was a movement of Shaivism that rocked the social landscape around the 11th century A.D. and this firey sect came to life as the Virashaivas more commonly known as the Lingayats. Few have been taught the path of spiritualism re-described by this sect for these great Kannada poets of the Virashaiva sect preached Shaivism without social rules or discrimination towards the weaker sex. Unlike the Brahmana order where women do not hold equal seat as men, in the Virashaiva order, Lord Shiva is accessible to all. Gender didn’t matter and society was always scorned for its hypocritical ways.

The Vachanas of Basavanna, Mahadeviakka and Allama Prabhu have resounded through the ages, bringing rebellion into conformist lifestyle. I am a rebel, and as I understand the suffering of these great saints in a small way, and I have come to love them for their thirst for the real truth. I remain speechless as I realize how much they have lived their lives fighting society and its many rules and finally have found freedom in the power of Shiva Bhakti.

Lord Shiva played with their minds, he was the unattainable supreme power to some and the elicit lover to some others. They lived their lives in the perennial game of hide and seek, looking for the Lord everywhere within and beyond. They defied the rules of ordered living, scorned at society for its misguided rules and even reduced the achievements of great tantriks and siddhas to ash.

This sect of great gurus, these super saints in their own right, describe spiritualism to be a lonely road beyond the powers of occult worship and warn of self destructive egoism with every candy bar of siddhis achieved. They awaken us to the fact that yoga gets us a superior body, alchemy achieves superior metal, knowledge and vedas give us superior control over a beautiful string of words, tantra achieves superior physical love but the spirit of Shiva Bhakta is scarcely available in any of these methods.

Quoting from "Speaking of Siva" translated by A.K.Ramanujan [Page 147]

The Vachana of Allama Prabhu goes as follows...

With your alchemies,
you achieve metals,
but no essence.

With all your manifold yogas,
you achieve
a body, but no spirit.

With your speeches and arguments
you build chains of words
but cannot define the spirit.

If you say
you and I are one,
you were me
but I was not you.
 

Drastic though this school of thought may sound to the ordered social environment we live in, I would believe this is meant for superior souls who have already been blessed with spiritual insight. For the lesser mortals like me who still struggle with the basics of spiritualism, siddhis and perfect yoga seem miles away in my list of spiritual achievements. Where does one like me go in search of the Lord in this vast spiritual landscape where every powerful thought I conquered only raises another question on my beliefs formed so far? 

Photo courtesy:
Talking to God in the Mother Tongue
A.K. Ramanujan