Posts Tagged ‘Goddess’
Three Goddesses & Tantra
Those who use the knowledge of the Black Goddess to grow the ego, often obtain worldly power, but who uses it to make the ego transparent, obtains liberation.
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.
Tantric Goddess, Mother Renuka
Tantric Goddess, Mother Renuka
Mother Renuka is an incarnation of the Great God Shiva’s consort, Parvati, the Lady of the Mountain. She was born out of the fire of a sacrifice performed at a Prayag Kumbh Mela in the Treta Age by the rishi-sage Agastya, and coming of age, married the rishi-sage Jamadagni. She reflects a complement to Mother Lakshmi, the Earth Mother, who is the consort of the God Vishnu, The Maintainer. While Mother Lakshmi is Fecundity and Her daughter, Prosperity, Renuka is Enigma and Her daughter, Transformation.
Two main stories about Mother Renuka find their telling, performance, and appearance in folk arts wherever there are devotees of this mother. They are both tales from which the Traditions of the Mysteries, Tantra, and Magic find a surface reflection. For many tantriks and other devotees, these stories are a hook, a beginning, that take the adept into deep subterranean caverns, below the surface of the world.
In the first story, the virtuous Renuka’s husband, rishi-sage Jamadagni questions her thought-chastity. Angry at her response, he orders his sons in then order of their age to kill their mother. They refuse their father, all except the youngest son, Parshuram, Axe-wielder, who happened to be an incarnation of God Vishnu. Following the order of his father without hesitation, he lopped off his mother’s head with his handy axe.
Seeing his son in such a distraught state, having committed such an atrocious act, he offered Parshuram a boon, a wish, as a reward for his unswerving duty to his father. With salty tears running down his face, the fourteen year old boy told his father that he wanted his mother back. “That’s it?” his father questioned him. “No Victory Over Enemies, World Empire, Victory Over The Gods, or Immortality? You name it!” Parshuram was never one to mince his words. He was a very serious character, didn’t joke around; he was all business. “No, give me my mother back,” he said.
For Jamadagni, the Knower of All Things, this was not a major problem. Taking care that her head was in exactly the right position, facing straight forward on the shoulders of her headless body (for once attached, the head would be fixed permanently in that posture), he fastened his wife’s head back on her body and she came back to life. continue reading…
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Baba answers regarding numbers in Initiation Video
from FACEBOOK 11 June 2010
In the moral universe, or the Christian/Jewish/Muslim monotheist universe one might assign Maya as an obstacle or even an evil.
Yes, we transcend Maya, but we don’t SHUN Her, we honor and worship Her. Ma as Maya, the Matrix, the World Mother, is indeed Measure, and we worship Her singing “Mother, you are so astounding, let me count the ways…” I see the numbers as reflections of Her manifestation, not with specific meanings, but as reflections of many different things that bear RESEMBLANCE to each other. For example, but not limited to by any means, 3 gunas, 5 elements, 9 planets, 12 houses, 15 days of the moon, and vowels (Shiva’s shaktis), 50 or 51 syllables, 9X12=108 the Universe reflected as the night sky, Brahmanda – the egg of Brahma, and the “mathematics” of 1 +1 = 11, Shiva and Shakti, Gaurishankar. Let me count the ways, Auspicious One! Oh, 1008, just add another Egg in the middle of things. The syllable Ma lives in that Sacred Geography where the Cosmic Unmanifest meets the World, she holds the power, potential, and possibility to manifest the world by her personality of Limitation. Shiva as pure bliss, Ananda, is reflected in the World as “feeling,” bliss, suffering, any feeling. Shiva as Eternity, is reflected in the world, through the prism of Limitation as time, the ticking clock. His omniscience, All-Knowing is reflected as knowledge, and then further, in our age, to information. Things are not equal in the Universe, the INDIVIDUAL on whom the influence of Jupiter falls is not equal to Jupiter. The path of the Sannyasi, the renunciate, the yogi, or even the seeker, is to turn the world upside down, and return to Shiva, or the source, or the nothingness, or whatever you want to call it.
It’s not that it’s important to count, nobody is counting, we are observing and witnessing, and we notice RESEMBLANCE in the world. The more we observe resemblance, the more we see that it is Speech. A sacred Speech. Not just us in India, anywhere one can see the sky. It’s a speech that may require interpretation, but has no connection with fickle ideologies of man. Ideology, in fact, stands in the way of observation, it replaces observation. In effect ideology says: “Don’t believe what you see, believe what we tell you. Think about this with linear reasoning.” So we incorporate this “speech” in our Theater of Analogy, in our cloning of the world on our little stage, what the world categorizes as Ritual.
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