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Makar Sankranti Blessings
I’m sending Makar Sankranti blessings to all of you.
INITIATION BY THE FIVE GURUS
Initiation by the Five Gurus
Guru Dattatreya
A small troop of children followed me to a shaded area in the rocks where the barber would practice his art on my scalp as I considered my options. Should I make break for it and run? How far was it to the main road? How could I escape?
But, hold on. I wasn’t a condemned man walking slowly towards the gallows clinging to his one hopeless fantasy of freedom. It was only a haircut. Drop your attachments, I said to myself.
The barber handed me a small mirror in a rusty frame so that I could watch the clumps of hair fall from my head. The children giggled as they watched him shave my beard and then my scalp with his open blade. He smiled as I felt my smooth cranium, with one short tuft of hair remaining on the top back of my head. “Guru Ji,” he said, giving it a slight tug.
Hari Puri Baba had assembled four other sadhus in the ashram’s puja room. The room was dark and it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. The walls were covered with rotting photos of awe-inspiring sadhus and posters of Indian gods and goddesses. Straw mats were spread on the floor and a few sticks of incense burned on an altar housing several deities and a few small Shiva lingas. Amar Puri Baba placed a bundle in front of Hari Puri Baba consisting of an ochre dhoti, a coconut, a rudraksha seed strung on the janeu string of the twice born, and two strips of white cloth that serve as a lingoti. Raghunath Puri, Silverbeard, a tall sadhu with long arms, directed me to sit down facing Hari Puri Baba.
Pandit Shesh Narayan entered the room with a brazier burning with red coals from the havan between two iron tongs. The pandit, Hari Puri Baba and I formed a triangle, with the brazier in the middle and the room started to fill with smoke.
With his eyes turned upward, the pandit intoned a river of mantra, magic syllables that flowed out of his mouth. I understood that he was invoking the great powers of the universe. At the end of each verse, each vedic sloka, he would toss fragrant powders onto the glowing coals, pronouncing “Svaha!” consecrating the offerings in the name of the fire deity’s wife.
I watched the white smoke rise from the coals, carrying the sacrifice of these sacred syllables to the gods. He dripped holy water into my right hand, then rice, flower petals, and more water, all the while intoning mantras. When he had completed the ritual, he took a large brass bowl, a katori, from the altar and commanded me in English to drink from it. The greenish liquid looked and smelled very strange. continue reading…
Renuka Mata Darshan
Renuka Mata Darshan
The Mother Renuka in Mahurgarh is a head. A glimmering orange sindhur moonrock egg, head. Way too naïve to be benign. Almost cartoon-like, something I would never expect, I felt like I had come into the presence of the dark side of Howdy-Doody. Did I say dark? The inner recesses of the sanctum sanctorum was dark, lit only by flickering butter lamps making the thick stone walls black with grease. The space suggested by the confining black walls lacked definition. Enigma is black, as is the Mother Renuka before she is covered in a surface of orange vermillion and mustard seed oil. Her eyes (windows of the soul) are an attachment, black onyx with painted white ringed corneas. The only natural mark on the great Egg-Stone, the Mother’s signature, is an opening into the stone, Her mouth. For, among the Mothers, what issues from their wombs exits from their mouths. The world is born from the Mouth of the Mother, and it retreats into Her Mouth. Her Names are fifty-one, a reflection of the fifty-one syllables, worn around her neck in a garland.
Was she ammonite? Did she have a fossilized kundalini snake coiled in a circle, inside of her blackness, frozen forever in potential, resembling the Matrix of the World? Constantly pushed and jostled by the ever surging crowd of devotees, I looked around. Could these raven haired tribal women awash to their toes in primitive silver ornaments be having thoughts like these, I wondered. How could they, as they held each other’s skirts forming an unbroken chain, and sought proximity to the Stone with a Mouth? Pulled by some force. And then, from time to time, one would break the chain, scream and shake and rip out her hair and collapse with a painful sounding thud on the stone floor, writhing in trance.
It was obvious that she was most likely possessed by a not-so-benign spirit. Otherwise, why all the thrashing about? The screaming and the violence. The look of terror in their faces. Thank gods Hari Puri Baba wasn’t like that. I’d have hated to make such a fool of myself in front of all those nice people. It was enough just to stand out as a foreigner.
Not that I was securely in my body at that moment. Bells clanged, mantras intoned by priests echoed off the black walls, women broke their bangles, smeared their vermilion third eyes, and screamed, and everyone shouted out sacred slogans, praises of The Mother. Hari Puri Baba wiggled inside of me. Be good, I said to myself, meaning that body-mind shell that also had my baba as an occupant. .
“Did you have darshan of both mothers?” the priest asked me on my return to Dattatreya’s dhuni. He referred to both Anasuya, the mother of Dattatreya, as well as Renuka. I had gone to the Mother Anasuya’s Temple after visiting Renuka.
I hadn’t been aware that the Renuka Temple, on that twin hill facing us, is considered one of the most powerful shakti-piths in all India and a magnet for worshippers of the Goddess in one of her most powerful forms. Many who came were tantriks. I was told that the temple was considered by many to be one of Three in Maharashtra.
Dattatreya is thought by many to be Lord of Tantra, and Renuka is among the most worshipped Goddesses by tantriks. Many of the tantras and tantrik texts are attributed to Dattatreya, who is certainly not the property of any one sect. Many of the different sects of tantriks and yogis attribute their origins to Dattatreya.
Baba’s answers to questions on evolution.
How would you briefly define Science?
A modern methodology based on a linear logic, in which man’s ideas and representations of the world are tested to conform to his experience of it; the results being accepted by the authoritative peer group of linear logicians.
How would you briefly define Hinduism?
A non-ideological grouping of people originally of the greater Indian subcontinent based on family, family origins connected to specific clans, “sacred” geography, and the resulting family traditions.
How would you briefly define Evolution?
A scientific theory describing a linear development of the world from the ultimately simple to the complex as a means of adaptation to change brought about by the linear progression of time.
