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. 

The Paradox in Nirvikalpa Samadhi

Everyone wants to reach the state of perfection, of course perfection at the moment continues to be a relative term and in the nuances of human behavior there is a very thin line separating one level of perfection from the other. 

The sacred doctrines describe the ultimate state of consciousness, the state of Nirvikalpa Samadhi as the perfect state. This state describes the merging of the self with Atman such that there is no individual self left. With heightened bhakti and complete love for the supreme this state is very possible to achieve as proven by a few men who have walked the earth. 

But what is this state, how do we describe a person who has achieved it. The most popularly understood approach to reach this state is when the Bhakta doesn't connect with the world around them any more, be it in mind or in body. From the social perspective, they have traveled so far into themselves that the world outside, the maya as we may call it, hardly matters to them any more. From the physical sustenance perspective, the physical body becomes so perfect that its mortal desires are either addressed internally by the body or killed purely by the evolution of the being. 

Lets take the case of self sustenance, it is the ability of the physical body to secrete Amrit within the head region and taste it frequently thus killing any external desire or dependency on food and water. And any other desire be it of the body or mind automatically dies, because the energies have been successfully channelized towards the single source of all bliss - realization of the Atman. 

And so we toil and toil hard, to reach that level of perfection, may be if not in this life we take the next and the next to get it right. We often resort to resignation than try to realize whether this path is ever possible. And with every chance we take, divinity shows the passage in rather strange ways to keep us continuously believing that we are getting there. 

But no one really told us what the rule book holds when we achieve it, the perfect state. We would almost love to be immortal. live for as long as we wished and enjoyed the fruits of living with the associated powers to get us health, wealth and happiness. But did we ever know that when a person really reaches this state, they no longer crave for that human body within which they live! The very body that we have been trying to "perfect" for all these years, centuries and lives is now something we want to or more importantly need to discard in order to move to the next level of highest spiritual endeavor. 

How contradictory this turns out to be that we struggled so much on something we ultimately choose to discard. It is the liberation from the ultimate maya, this human state that we need to achieve and Nirvikalpa Samadhi is that unreachable state that we need to get to. The human state is that last physical thing that we have to give up before we move it to the realm of the supreme. 

The thought still blows my mind! What are the great Gods really trying to teach us!