Navratri: The Worship of Mahadevi (Continued)

Calcutta, where the Durga Puja is very famous and people begin to prepare for it a month before, is also the place of Marxists. The Marxists say, “What is there; let the Puja go on.” They have all heart and soul for this performance of Durga Puja in the centre of Calcutta, and outside the premises where the worship is going on, they sell the works of Karl Marx. Whatever it is, let Karl Marx be there, but inside him there is something operating, transcending him. And so, finally, what man thinks is not the final judgement of things. All political and administrative dogmas and pronouncements have something behind them which compels them to think in that manner. We have democracies, plutocracies, aristocracies, tyrannies, monarchies. We have peace and war. We have everything in this historical process of the universe. But all this is not finally an original thought contemplated by the human being. He is forced to move in this direction by the requirement of cosmic forces. History is a movement of forces in the cosmic structure, which manifests itself as human, political and historical procession.

There is, therefore, something that remains which is still not properly understood. When we say that God created the world, that ununderstood mystery is the mystery of the relationship between God and his Shakti—Rudra-Shakti, Siva-Shakti, Brahma-Shakti and Vishnu-Shakti. It cannot be understood. Actually speaking, if we dispassionately judge phenomena, one cannot understand what the relationship between a man and a woman is. Though we think that everything is clear, it is not clear. It will become more and more unclear when we probe deeper and deeper in the phenomenon called this duality of the sexes. It cannot be understood unless you transcend both these things. You have to cease to be a man and cease to be a woman; then you will know what the relationship is between you. As a man, as a woman, this relationship cannot be understood because you are one party. One party cannot judge another party. Therefore, human beings are not in a position to adequately understand this mystery, because who are human beings? They are either men or women. They think only in terms of their social relationship; and the connection between Siva and Shakti or Narayana and Vishnu, etc. is not a social connection. It is impossible to understand what connection it is. The fourth section of the first chapter of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad begins by placing a great enigma placed before us. Ātmaivedam agra ᾱsīt puruṣavidhaḥ: The Cosmic Person, as it were, existed in the beginning. This is the concept of the personality of God as is prevalent in Christianity, for instance, and also in the Vaishnava and the Saiva doctrines in India. God is a person.

But we have to carefully understand the meaning of the word ‘person’. It is not a human person; it is The Person, Mahapurusha, the Purusha Sukta’s great divinity, and Purushottama, in the language of the Bhagavadgita. This Original Being, which has become the Creator as well as the created, has also brought out an eternal problem between the relation of cause and effect, to the chagrin of all philosophers right from the beginning. Even today we cannot know how an effect comes from a cause. If the effect is totally outside the cause, we cannot say it has any connection with the cause. If it has a vital relationship, inseparably, with the cause, then there is no such thing as an independent effect at all; only the cause is there. Either way, we cannot know what has happened. The cause has not produced the effect if the effect is inseparable, in a sense, from itself. Clay has not produced the pot. Though we can carry water in a pot, we cannot carry water in clay. So there is a difference between the clay and the pot. Is there not a difference? Yes; but what is the difference? If we break the pot, it will become the original substance from which it came.

So we do not know whether there was a cause for this universe or whether this world has really come as an effect from this cause. Who created it and how did it come? The conclusion of the Nasadiya Sukta of the Veda is: “He Who created it may know it or not.” The poet says, laughingly, as it were, “Perhaps He Himself does not know how He created it.” Ya va veda, ya va na veda: He may know, or He may not know.

Such is the difficulty in understanding the facts of life. We are floating on the surface of wisdom as wiseacres, imagining that we are great philosophers and scientists—neither of which we really are. If we go into the depths of things, even a philosopher ceases to be a philosopher in his bedroom, in his kitchen and in his bathroom. He becomes a poor nothing. He forgets all of his wisdom because of the little pinpricks of real life that seem to pursue him like a creditor wherever he goes. And the scientist knows that he knows nothing finally because he landed on the conclusion that unless he knows himself as an inseparable ingredient in the process of observation, he will not know anything. So what does the scientist—who is a materialist, as they say—finally tell us? Know yourself and you will know all the universe, because you are involved in the very process of your trying to understand this universe which is the object of your perception, observation.

Thus, no one can understand who this Shakti is. In the great prayer the gods offered, as we have it in the Devi Mahatmaya—Namo Devi, Maha Devi—everything is told about her. I do not know whether to use the word ‘her’. It is a defect of language. It is not a woman. How can you regard God’s alienation of Himself as an other than what He is, for the purpose of this apparent creation, as a woman? As you will appreciate, there is no such thing as a woman or a man in this world. They are certain functional features manifested by the requirement of this interaction of cosmic forces, one related to the other, as I mentioned earlier. Impersonality rules the cosmos, and this is the meaning of the so-called differentiation of Siva and Shakti. God is dancing; sometimes we say Shakti is dancing. We do not know who is dancing on whom. In some pictures or portraits we see Kali dancing on Siva’s chest. Why is she dancing on Siva? How is it? It is the power of the cosmos dancing on its rootedness in the Absolute. Indescribable is this phenomenon.

Shakti worship—Devi worship, Durga Puja—is not a female deity’s worship, as some people wrongly imagine. Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati are not females like women that we see in the world. We would describe this very Shakti as is portrayed to us in the Devi Mahatmya: Narasimhi, Rudrani, Kumari, and all sorts of names. She appeared as Skanda with spear in hand, as Narasimha with roaring lion’s mouth, as Vishnu with Sudarshana in hand, as Rudra with Pasupata in hand. Can we call that great being a woman? Man has always counterposed before him this difficulty of having something opposed to him, and so is the case with woman also. This idea has to be shed before we become true worshippers of this great divinity. Otherwise it becomes a kind of Tantric cult and a ritual which may take us to any place, like a firecracker that bursts during Divali. It may burst in the sky, or may burst our face; anything can happen.

Tantra, which is at the back of Navratri Puja, is not a cult by itself. It is the basic explanation behind every activity that takes place in this universe. Even the littlest activity of ours is explicable only in terms of what Tantra describes as the meaning of life; but we are not supposed to understand this meaning merely by snapping our fingers. Dynamite is a powerful force. It can burst open rocks and mountains, and it can also burst open our own heads if we do not handle it properly. It will turn upon us.

Therefore, this is a very, very meaningful and highly significant spiritual occasion provided to us, and not merely religious in the ordinary sense of the term, where we rise to the occasion of contemplating God in all His power in any form whatsoever in which it reveals itself and whatever form it takes—as beauty to the eyes, sonorous music to the ears, fragrance to the nose, sweetness to the tongue, softness to the touch, and intellectual exaltation for a literary genius; all this is Shakti operating. Therefore, during this Navratri occasion it is imperative on the part of an ardent seeker and worshipper of the divinity to be benefited by this worship and not merely pass through it as a kind of routine for nine days. “It has been done for so many years and now, this year, we will do it, and make a noise, and then the whole thing ends.” That is not so. Religious observances have their spiritual import, as we know very well. They are deeply significant as divine occasions provided for us to rise to that occasion now and then for the purpose of accelerating the progress of our soul towards its destination.

Thus, in our worship, what do we worship? God as He is, and God as He appears—God as the cause, God as the effect; God as the male principle, God as the female principle; God as the positive and the negative. Worship is many a time considered as an act of the soul, with no connection with the body. It is Shakti worship, Tantra Sadhana, that tells us that we should not commit this mistake. There are levels of reality, degrees of expression of God Himself, and we have to rise from the lower level to the higher level. We cannot cut off our connection with the lower level, imagining that we are on the top, because everyone is conscious of one’s being in the body. This bodily consciousness has to be transmuted, not severed. Otherwise, the soul will writhe in agony that it has lost a part of itself, and the result would be not yogic attainment but miserable rebirth. The body is not to be discarded; it has to be transmuted into a subtler energy. Molecule becomes atom, atom becomes electron, electron becomes electric force, and it becomes the space-time continuum, or whatever we call it. We do not reject the molecule for the sake of the finer essences, because they are the transmuted forms of the very things which we saw with our physical eyes—a solid object.

In spiritual practice, in Tantra Sadhana, there is no abandoning anything, no rejecting anything. We cannot reject Shakti and catch hold of Siva. That is not possible. It is like abandoning creation for the sake of the Creator. Not so is the case, says the Purusha Sukta. He is the creation. Tasmādvirāḍajāyata: From Him only everything comes.

Spiritual aspiration is an integrated march of the whole that we are, the body-mind-spirit complex, towards that total whole which is Siva-Shakti, Ardhanarishvara, Mahapurusha, Purushottama, Parabrahman, which is the All, the source of power and power itself, that great glory. We can call it only glory. Unable to say what it is, the poet of the Purusha Sukta says, “What can I call Thee? Thou art great glory.” God, or whatever we call this great mystery, is great glory. Shakti, or whatever we call this mystery, is great glory. The universe, or whatever we may call it, is great glory. The whole of life is a great miracle and a wondrous glory. Its worship it is that we are engaged in during this holy occasion of blessed Navratri of Adhyashakti: Mahadurga, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati. May that grace be upon us all.