The Eternal Feminine

Dr Alok Pandey

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Introduction

Dedicated to Her, who in Her present embodiment as Mother Mirra,
is known to us and revealed by Sri Aurobindo as the Mother.

The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided
that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence.
The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates.
But something of her ways can be seen and felt through her embodiments and the more seizable because more defined and
limited temperament and action of the goddess forms in whom
she consents to be manifest to her creatures.[1]

Let us begin with an invocation to the Divine Mother, as revealed in Savitri.

A being of wisdom, power and delight,
Even as a mother draws her child to her arms,
Took to her breast Nature and world and soul….
For one was there supreme behind the God.
A Mother Might brooded upon the world;
A Consciousness revealed its marvellous front
Transcending all that is, denying none:
Imperishable above our fallen heads
He felt a rapturous and unstumbling Force.
The undying Truth appeared, the enduring Power
Of all that here is made and then destroyed,
The Mother of all godheads and all strengths
Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme…
A burning Love from white spiritual founts
Annulled the sorrow of the ignorant depths;
Suffering was lost in her immortal smile.
A Life from beyond grew conqueror here of death;
To err no more was natural to mind;
Wrong could not come where all was light and love.
The Formless and the Formed were joined in her:
Immensity was exceeded by a look,
A Face revealed the crowded Infinite.
Incarnating inexpressibly in her limbs
The boundless joy the blind world-forces seek,
Her body of beauty mooned the seas of bliss.
At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,
In their slow round the cycles turn to her call;
Alone her hands can change Time’s dragon base.
Hers is the mystery the Night conceals;
The spirit’s alchemist energy is hers;
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she,
A power of silence in the depths of God;
She is the Force, the inevitable Word,
The magnet of our difficult ascent,
The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,
The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,
The joy that beckons from the impossible,
The Might of all that never yet came down.
All Nature dumbly calls to her alone
To heal with her feet the aching throb of life
And break the seals on the dim soul of man
And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things.
All here shall be one day her sweetness’ home,
All contraries prepare her harmony;
Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes;
In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell,
Her clasp shall turn to ecstasy our pain.
Our self shall be one self with all through her.[2]

Preface

India is a land of myths, legends and fables. The fabric of Indian life is woven through these very tales that have nourished the spiritual hunger of its people. They have described India’s core values, its very soul. Once the soul was awakened, and the inner being prepared, through the countless seers and sages, the legends and stories, it was then that a wise and mighty nation was given a holistic identity through its seer-kings. Its boundaries were safeguarded by mighty warriors, many of whom, like Parashurama, Rama, Krishna, Bhisma, Drona, Arjuna, Ajatshatru, Vikramaditya, were also yogis.

Such is the stamp they have impressed upon the minds and hearts of the Indian people that thousands of years, including the darkest period of foreign rule, have not been able to efface it. Stories of their exploits continue to inspire us and are even enacted worldwide. As civilisation grew, new meanings were discovered, new layers unravelled, new elements added to the old narratives, but never have these stories been discarded. They continue to engage and interest mankind because of their depth, profundity, vastness, and universal appeal. In this book, a short selection has been presented, and highlights the tremendous role that women played, and continue to play, as equals of men in the shaping of a civilisation.

Though the dark ages of mankind saw them being relegated to a secondary and subordinate position, either as someone who had to obey the man, fulfil his wishes and demands, or worse, as commodities of pleasure and marketing, the cycle of Time is turning and we are approaching a New Age when the eternal feminine is rising and dawning upon the horizons like the goddess Usha, who the rishis first aspired for.

Though her glory has been sung in the Vedas and the Tantras, our more modern interpretations of Vedanta as otherworldly scriptures that regard life as an illusion gave too much prominence to the masculine principle of creation, the Iswara, the Deva, the Purusha. But the Deva without Devi is powerless, the Purusha without Prakriti is helpless, the Iswara without His Shakti is a silent witness who can neither intervene nor help our evolutionary journey.

This rejection of the Shakti, the Eternal Feminine, was the main reason for India’s downfall, a subtle truth pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, to whom it was given to revive this forgotten Shakti. He did this in a threefold manner:

First, he invoked the Shakti of Mother India through his Bande Mataram, an English-language newspaper and Durga Stotra (Hymn to Durga), thereby awakening the very soul of India, one day to lead us to independence and the heights of future glory.

Second, as an Avatara of the New Age, he placed the Divine Mother at the forefront of yoga, stepping behind to watch over the larger lines while the Mother would see to the finer details of the New Creation. What is meant by this expression is that the old creation based itself upon the mind and hence has division as its governing principle whereas the New Creation bases itself on an all-comprehensive Divine Truth beyond the mind and hence, has unity in diversity as its governing principle.

Finally, while he withdrew from the range and limits of earthly sight, he placed his epic mantric poem Savitri, a legend and a symbol from the Vedic times, in the hands of humanity. By doing so, he not only indicated that it is the feminine power that will hold the key to the New Age, he also corrected the imbalance of an exclusively male-centric approach in life as well as in philosophy. Most importantly, he linked the ancient dawn of the Vedic age to the aspirations of today, opening doors into the future.

The ancient forms have been taken up primarily because they are archetypes that will always remain relevant. Thus, for example, we can see an archetype of Durga in the valorous women who fought for India’s freedom. This would include figures as diverse as Sister Nivedita, Joan of Arc, Rani Lakshmibai, Durgesh Nandini. Gargi would be the archetype of true women’s liberation and Sita an archetype of strength, one who endures, and does not succumb to self-pity.

Many of the ancient characters we find in myths and legends are archetypes that are found everywhere, furthering their perennial appeal and importance. Countless are the forms of the Divine Mother that humans have worshipped through the ages, some celestial and others more seizable in her human vibhutis. This book is a tribute to Her as she has manifested from time to time, in numerous forms.

But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth:
The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.
In our thinking’s close and narrow lamp-lit house
The vanity of our shut mortal mind
Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;
But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;
Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.
In our hypnosis by one luminous point
We see not what small figure of her we hold;
We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,
We share not her immortal liberty.
Thus is it even with the seer and sage;
For still the human limits the divine:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,
Breathe her divine illimitable air,
Her simple vast supremacy confess,
Dare to surrender to her absolute.
Then the Unmanifest reflects his form
In the still mind as in a living glass;
The timeless Ray descends into our hearts
And we are rapt into eternity.
For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.
A thousand icons they have made of her
And find her in the idols they adore;
But she remains herself and infinite.[3]

Decoding Myths and Legends

CHAPTER 1
Myths and Legends: Holistic View

A tendency of the modern mind is to deconstruct Reality encoded in myths and legends. The logic of it is that by doing so they can uncover the truths behind them. That in itself is, at best, a myth and at worst, a superstition of the mind. No amount of breakdown and analysis of parts can awaken within us the sense we get when we view the whole. This is true of a humble blade of grass, of the more daring rose as much as of the galaxies and the stars. However, much we may analyse the contents of an ocean, we will never be able to comprehend its vastness, delight, beauty and magnanimity unless we gaze at it, behold it with our intuitive eye, and eventually, dare to plunge into it.

For everything comprises two elements — quantity and quality. Quantity is something that is measurable and can be analysed but quality is subjective, intrinsic and not subject to analysis or measure. We can, of course, try to define quality and, to that extent, make it seem more objective.

But this effort to define, though necessary for clarity of mind, should not be considered a substitute for the real experience of coming into contact with the truth that the quality embodies. Thus, we have to understand the total truth of things through a combination of the quantitative and the qualitative aspects.

There is, of course, a third aspect behind these two which perhaps cannot be spoken of — the aspect of Consciousness that has assumed different quantities and qualities and yet is essentially the same everywhere.

In fact, after we have deconstructed the different phenomenal aspects of Reality as we perceive it, the last barrier that stands is Consciousness. One cannot deconstruct it by virtue of its very nature. It is One and Infinite, as the sages say. We can identify with it and understand something of it, as is reflected in our mental mirrors, provided the mirror itself is clean and the glass free of the stains of conditioning.

Symbolic representation of Reality

It is with this background that we delve into the nature of things, but when it comes to myths and legends, this becomes more obvious. To start with, most of us try to understand a myth from the lens of our present mentality. This is to decontextualise it. It is not necessary that the ancients thought, felt and experienced life the same way we do today. Their value systems need not be the same and hence cannot be comprehended accurately by us with our present values.

Besides, the same value itself shifts and clothes itself in different forms with the passage of time. To judge and evaluate a myth through the lens of our modern upbringing is not only unfair but also very misleading. This is a common and frequent occurrence when we try to probe and understand the myths of any country that is not ours.

Instead of deconstructing and decontextualising a myth, we need to decode it. Decoding implies that a myth is a symbolic story. Its characters and the storyline itself are representative of some reality that is not easy to verbalise. Hence, the person has taken not just poetic liberty but used a story to give out subtle and salient truths through the use of symbols. The person has perhaps even tried to evoke certain emotions, to awaken certain impulses, through the use of images just as a painter may try to do.

The painting is like an open door for us to enter the painter’s consciousness. Similarly, a myth is like another door opening into the author’s consciousness. But for that, we have to steer clear of all preconceived notions. The mirror of our mind must be clean and receptive so that the deeper reality contained in the myth may reveal or reflect itself in the mind. While deconstruction often destroys the intrinsic value of the myth by taking away its very soul, the act of decoding gives it a universal value that is applicable for all times to come.

Let us take the example of a dissection of a body part by part to understand its functions. It is a deconstruction, in a sense. But when one has unravelled the body and analysed and understood its physicality, one has missed the most important thing — the soul that is left behind, animates the body. The physical body is an instrument, a vehicle, to express the deeper soul. But when we decode the body, we understand how each organ is symbolic of some deeper reality, at once psychological and occult, thereby enabling us to understand not only the how but also the why behind its functioning.

Many layers of a myth

In practical terms, it means that a myth has at least three layers to it. The first is of course the visible outer body, the story. This story itself is modified over time, just as the human body undergoes changes. However, there are two kinds of modifications that take place, one that preserves the basic truth of the myth and hence keeps some essential continuity with its central thought, at least to a large extent. Thus, for example, we have the two prominent versions, among many, of the Ramayana, Valmiki’s Ramayana which is the original one and its later version by Tulsidas.

Although both details and style differ in the two versions, the essential story remains the same; the fundamental truth is also undisturbed. It is just the approaches that are different. While Valmiki seems to approach the personality, life and times of Lord Rama from great spiritual heights, Tulsidas’ Ramayana approaches it from a deeper psychic heart. They beautifully complement each other. But there are now newer versions of the story being written and screened where the author is not at all in sympathy with the times or the character and has often given his own unique twist to suit his ideological or political purpose.

Take for example this twist that since all history is written by victors, Ramayana too suffers this distortion. The next logical step is that Ravana was actually the good guy, the hero of the plot, whereas it was Rama who was the actual villain. So too with the Mahabharata, where we see some intellectual versions that suddenly turn Krishna and the Pandavas into villains while extolling the Kauravas and Karna and the rest.

One can only laugh at the puerile and motivated thinking of such readings that take almost a malicious interest in distorting history. To start with, neither Valmiki nor Vyasa, leave aside Tulsidas and many others, were court philosophers appointed by the victors and had no reason or business to distort history. If at all, they were seers and revered in the plot itself. Secondly, if we take a closer look at the characters, we will discover, sometimes to our moral dismay that the story is not black and white as the modern mind would like to portray it. There are many shades of grey through which the characters and the actual narrative move and evolve. That is one reason why these great scriptures have endured the rub of time since they are closely woven with the psychological fabric of our life where there is no clear division between black and white but there are shades of grey through which we evolve towards the truth of our being.

It is in fact, as the Bhagavad Gita itself affirms about Sri Krishna’s mission, about the evolutionary march of mankind, about a stage in the collective advance of mankind rather than a simple moral science book preaching us about the dos and don’ts. The word often used is dharma, which is the term used to denote this evolutionary struggle that runs as the central theme of this plot, and not moral or ethical, a term that is at best its intellectual and modern distortion in an alien language.

One may even say that if one does not understand dharma then it is difficult to decipher these epics. Often the modern readers are not in sympathy with this profound term because they have lost contact with it, and tend to turn these wonderful epics merely into stories with social and moral themes. Naturally when the stories do not neatly fit into these definitions then all kinds of explanations are built either to justify or to denounce the epic! This is so because we have failed to decode the real sense of the word and we cannot unless we sympathise with the times and life of the people as it was organised then. That is why the elaborate explanations given by intellectuals trained in foreign universities break down with the first proper scrutiny by someone who has delved into the spirit of these scriptures.

Physical and psychological dimensions of an epic

The story exists at a symbolic and psychological level as well. But this is not the usual psychology that we are accustomed to reading today. These ‘spiritual psychologists’ or yogis, who wrote these enduring epics were not satisfied with superficial explanations of human behaviour nor content with simply erecting a theoretical construct around human life.

We see these constructs and theories frequently, often built by studying pathological human behaviour. But even those who study ‘normal’ human behaviour are content with studying it on the surface rather than diving deep within it to discover new possibilities and the hidden capacities of nature. To put it briefly, while much of modern psychology tends to be a projection and derivative of the subnormal and the abnormal, ancient wisdom derived its truths from the supernormal and the a-normal.

The physical story becomes a nucleus, a pedestal for the author to launch into a depiction of human nature in all its varieties and shades. That is how the epics become universal in their quality and contemporary in their appeal. The characters we find in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, for that matter even in the Iliad and the Odyssey are archetypes that continue to exist within us, driving us towards the heights and abysses of human nature. But this psychology, in the Indian setting, was also a means of cultural transmission, a means to inspire the generations to come with the highest thoughts and possibilities of mankind. It had little to do with outer customs, dress codes and other paraphernalia which were symbolic of those times and had much more to do with the thoughts, feelings and actions of a group of humanity.

Myths became a means to portray and present before man a living Ideal which can become a force multiplier much more than any mere abstract idealism can do. We should be like Rama in strength and courage, like Bhishma in will and statesmanship, like Arjuna in skill and power of concentration, like Karna in generosity, like Abhimanyu in sacrifice and so on.

There are female personalities who place before us the ideal feminine. Draupadi, the powerful empress who brought down an empire to uphold the dignity of a woman, Sita who was a warrior in the outer as well as the inner life, her forgiving, patient and gentle demeanour, despite her suffering. Savitri, steadfast in love and wisdom, who by the strength of her tapasya took on Death itself as her opponent and won.

We need these characters to inspire us even today. They are greatness personified. It may be mentioned here that Indians always strived for greatness and revered it wherever it was found. The Arya, the srestha, the noble is their Ideal. This way, generations after generations were nourished by the sap of idealism and the spirit of sacrifice. It was only when burdened under the reign of alien rulers, with the gradual invasion of escapist philosophies and extreme practices such as asceticism that we drifted away from the Ideal. However, the memory of it is still preserved and continues to haunt us in popular culture, awaiting its hour of revival.

This revival cannot be brought about by vigilantes and self-proclaimed Hindus but by those who live the truth of the Vedas and the Gita, who realise the deep teachings of the Upanishads and use them in their daily thoughts, feelings and actions. Not mechanical customs and rituals but spiritual awakening, not religion and philosophy but living straight from the deeper intuitive heart is what is most needed. And if we do that, we shall find the secret code of the myth unlocked before us and the script self-revealed in the light of a growing intuition and illumination.

Occult mysteries of existence

There is a third layer to the myth. It relates to the occult dimension of our existence. Those who wrote the significant mythologies — the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Bhagawata Purana, etc. — were not just ordinary storytellers. It was not imaginations that they indulged in, nor were they historians in the sense with which it is understood today. They were not interested in merely reporting outer details and the ‘facts’ of appearances which, in any case, are not likely to be an accurate account of events. Even if in some way, someone could record not only what was happening but also what was being spoken during an event, there would be no way of knowing all that was going on in the thoughts and feelings of the characters involved.

Politics has a lot to do with intrigues, scheming and planning, not all of which is visible on the surface. Even the closest of friends may not disclose their secret intent to another, in the course of politics where close kin become sworn enemies unless there is some way to identify with the inner beings of persons involved and know by a secret identity the inner events and the forces moving us that shaped circumstances. It is this fundamental inability that makes all history, whether by an interested or even disinterested party, to some extent questionable. It is not about who wrote it or for whom, it is simply the fact that human consciousness is essentially limited in knowing what goes on in creating any event. It records only the surface details and keeps multiplying it as primary and secondary source materials but through all this painstaking collection of information it keeps circling around the Light of Truth that it can neither see nor touch.

Sometimes, if the historian is sensitive and inwardly developed, he may intuitively feel the warmth of the Light that is trying to shine through the thick garb of circumstances which are merely a clumsy way of expressing that which is hidden behind. The authors of these great and wonderful epics which are believed to be true events by millions of adherents were seers and yogis and had found the way to know the hidden forces that move humanity, events and circumstances. Like Homer and Dante, but on a much greater scale and penetrating greater depths, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are full of beings from various worlds creating panoramic universes where several parallel yet interlacing universes exist within the framework of a story. Those who disregard these stories interposed in the legends as mere imaginations or simply symbols miss out on a whole world that exists beneath our surface awareness and acts upon us — a world that is sealed to our normal vision and experience. These epics, therefore, contain a wealth of direct knowledge about the workings of occult forces often presented as titanic and godly beings and others suchlike. By reading these epics we understand the total mystery of creation.

Spiritual core

However, this is not all. The real value of these epics lies in their divine core and the spiritual substance that runs through the epic nourishing our souls rather than merely informing our minds or stimulating our vital. This spiritual element is what remains in the end as an essence or an aftertaste of the epic.

The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita, and various other shastras bring home profound spiritual truths for mankind. Books such as the Gita beautifully combine spiritual philosophy, spiritual practices as well as spiritual vision and experience. What we still miss is a living example, an embodiment of spiritual reality or its seeking and realisation, a living personality that can inspire rather than instruct. We require a living philosophy that seeps into our very veins rather than it solely awakening the mind, a practice that is brought home merely by the fact that someone lived that way. It is this deeper need of humanity that is fulfilled by these epics and narratives. Not only do they contain profound spiritual philosophy and practice of spiritual truths but above all, they set before us an example of God Himself when He descends clothed in our humanity. It becomes the new standard, the yardstick to be applied to the way one follows it and lives it.

We normally categorise stories based on their essence or rasa as it is called in Indian thought, like that of love, bravery, horror, etc. Or we label them as history or fiction based on whether or not it is true. We also classify them depending upon the subject, such as philosophy, the occult, psychology, science, art, etc. But this is still a divisive vision. When a book combines all these contrasting opposites and much more, we have a grand epic, a story of the human soul, its struggle and battle against forces that oppose and deny its passage, its rise and fall and eventual victory where forces tangible and occult join hands for or against the triumphant march of God in humans. Above all, we see in them the very image of God stepping forward into the play, in its very midst and thereby we can understand something of His ways of working in us. What is hidden is laid bare, the occult and what is concealed stand revealed in the light of the seer-vision. It is this totality that we find in a ‘myth’.

A myth is not fiction nor is it merely a factual truth of appearance. It is rather a superb attempt to reveal a many-sided, layered, multi-dimensional reality as it was revealed to the seers. It addresses at once the heart and the mind, the senses and the soul; the vital and the physical itself get engaged as the myth proceeds. At least that is how most Indian myths and legends, especially the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagawata Purana, and some other Puranas come alive before the consciousness of the reader. Therefore, we need to engage with a myth of such great value as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, not just with our analytical mind but with our entire being. Like any other story, we should not be in a hurry solely to analyse its meaning.

In any well-written story, the meaning discloses itself directly to our inner being. In this sense, it is more like a proverb that may or may not literally be a true statement and yet carries within it a profound truth that is best conveyed through the proverb. But like the proverb, it needs a holistic rather than an analytical mind to arrive at its intrinsic sense. With a myth, there is much more than an intrinsic meaning. Identifying with them through the act of reading we share this vision, and grow into its subtlety and profundity of vision. But analysing it on the surface with its heavy reliance on data and outer images which alone it regards as true, we lose the meaning and the essence of what the myth represents.

Seer-vision and imagination

Thus, we need to approach these myths differently. We need to understand that it is not just a story but one written by a seer. It is how those with a deeper vision of reality saw things and gladly shared their vision with us in words that are easily comprehensible. By reading these mythological tales we come into contact with the characters they contain, we identify our minds with the mind of the seer but above all, we are inspired by the unfolding of the sense of the Divine in our lives. This is their supreme value and contribution to mankind in its multifaceted progress.

Often a myth is not just a tale of the past but a doorway to the future. The seers saw a far-off possibility like that of a scientist gazing through the telescope, spotting a distant star and studying its spectrum and arriving at an understanding of the remote luminous body that our naked eyes do not behold. Yet by revealing to us about the star, the scientist not only brings information useful to the heart but also fires our imagination. This imagination is not a falsehood but is very often a creative energy that can foresee a possibility that has not manifested yet. Have not quite a few of our science fictions become realities with slight modifications? The seers used these various faculties given to us deftly to weave a myth which the analytical mind is only quick to demolish or label as a work of fiction. Yet time cancels our verdicts and while research and their scholars vanish without a trace, the myth and sacred lore survive, return and continue to enlighten and empower the human race!

Latent faculties in man

It is true that our present times, with its excessive stress on what can be beheld by outer senses, the eyes and ears and their limited abilities serve as the sole evidence. Modern science itself has busted this erroneous conception as we realise that there is a whole world that completely escapes and eludes our senses. This world, or possibly these worlds within worlds surround our physical reality. Even what we term as a physical reality is only a fragment that we inadequately grasp through our limited senses. The senses, in this sense, do not reveal reality. They rather hide it by conjuring before us an image that we take to be true. The practice of yoga, however, releases within us certain other latent faculties which we have either lost or are yet to develop.

This is easy to understand if we take the evolutionary process into cognisance. Animals have an instinctive way of knowing things, a way of knowing also present in early humanity, which was closer to the animal state. Red Indians, for instance, can tell the distance and direction of where a sound comes from by simply putting their ears to the ground. Certain tribes can predict physical events as noticed during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami whence certain animals and tribes in the Andaman Islands became aware and took shelter in high uplands much before the technocrats picked up the signals. Some faculties that lie hidden and asleep in our bodies can awaken and show us what we ordinarily do not see. Thus, for example, some people can read accurately even with their eyes completely blindfolded.^[4] How they do it is a mystery, but it is quite possible that they pick up light signals through touch and smell with their brains developed in a way that enables them to read as if it was normal sight.

The seers however had what is generally called subtle sight and subtle hearing in yoga. It was possible in an age when humanity was not going through hyper-rationality — that which has killed not only our imagination but also every other faculty of knowing within us. Imagination and faith are powers given by nature through which we can know things that are beyond the limit of our senses. But in our present times we hardly develop these gifts of nature; if anything, we decry and deride their presence. Even emotions have a way of knowing that reason does not. The heart and love may use dreams, imagination, and almost anything to accomplish its purposes. That the coming together of two hearts may not always result in a happy life together, is no proof that the heart knows not. Even rationally decided and well thought out decisions do not often work out. Mathematical models and convincing statistical analysis too may be proved wrong as time passes by and new observations come into the field. To discard the vision of the rishis merely because it does not conform to our rational notions and possibilities is another kind of dogma that prevents human progress.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who were yogis and seers of the highest order themselves, refer to the story of Sri Krishna in the Bhagawata Purana and reveal the following:

Some say Krishna never lived, he is a myth. They mean on earth; for if Brindavan existed nowhere, the Bhagavat could not have been written.[5]

Sometimes one is led to think that only those things really matter which have never happened; for beside them most historic achievements seem almost pale and ineffective.[6]

Does Brindavan exist anywhere else than on earth?

The whole earth and everything it contains is a kind of concentration, a condensation of something which exists in other worlds invisible to the material eye. Each thing manifested here has its principle, idea, or essence somewhere in the subtler regions. This is an indispensable condition for manifestation. And the importance of the manifestation will always depend on the origin of the thing manifested. In the world of the gods, there is an ideal and harmonious Brindavan of which the earthly Brindavan is but a deformation and a caricature. Those who are developed inwardly, either in their senses or in their minds, perceive these realities which are invisible to the ordinary man and receive their inspiration from them. So the writer or writers of the Bhagavat were certainly in contact with a whole inner world that is well and truly real and existent, where they saw and experienced everything they have described or revealed. Whether Krishna existed or not in a human form, living on earth, is only of very secondary importance (except perhaps from an exclusively historical point of view), for Krishna is a real, living and active being; and his influence has been one of the great factors in the progress and transformation of the earth.[7]

The data that is used to write history is open to interpretation — often the documentation on which it is based is incomplete, the information they supply is poor, and prone to distortion. At best, human history is a long, almost unbroken record of violent aggressions: wars, revolutions, murders, or colonisations. Some of these aggressions and massacres have been adorned with flattering terms and epithets — they have been called religious wars, holy wars, civilising campaigns — but they nonetheless remain acts of greed or vengeance.

Rarely in history do we find the description of a cultural, artistic, or philosophical flowering. That is why, as Sri Aurobindo indicates in the quoted extract above, in the legendary accounts of things which may never have existed on earth, of events which have not been declared authentic by official knowledge, of wonderful individuals whose existence is doubted by the scholars in their dried up wisdom, we find the crystallisation of all the hopes and aspirations of humans, their love of the marvellous, the heroic and the sublime, the description of everything they would like to be and strive to become. That, in essence, is what Sri Aurobindo means in the quoted aphorism.

Mystic key embedded in the story

This brings us to the important point that only a seer can understand the writings of a seer. What we see today, however, is a tendency for the unchaste human mind to deal with these profound works and in doing so, often either throw the baby out with the bathwater or else cover the baby with all kinds of decorative social and psychological garments, often ill-fitting or force-fitted into shape to suit a particular line of interpretation. This itself would not matter so long as the basic premise is kept intact. The basic premise is that, first and foremost, these myths have been written from a spiritual consciousness that is other than a mental or social consciousness.

The mind may think that it can understand spiritual things, but the plain fact is that it cannot do so. At best, it may see some vague shadowy reflection through an obscure and broken glass. It may get a few pieces right here and there but the main body will escape it. Hence the real sense is lost. One needs to feel and reach out for the soul of the epic with an eye to fully comprehend the main body. That must remain intact. Of course, no one can say with any guarantee as to what the seer who wrote the epic had seen, felt and experienced. But in an epic, there are enough luminous hints that provide us with the central theme and the core. It is around this core that the story has been woven and one cannot tamper with that core because that is its soul.

If one has a problem with what the author has written, one can always let one’s creativity run and write another epic with other characters which may become as real to those who read them. Whether or not these characters born out of human imagination, not in touch with deeper profound truths, will endure is something that only time can tell. But as far as the ancient epics go, one has to keep the soul of the epic intact if one wishes to find its secret. To see this soul, it is important that one should have found one’s own soul or at least opened their spiritual domains.

To illustrate, in Valmiki’s story of Lord Rama, Sri Rama is described as an Avatara, a conscious descent and manifestation of the Lord Vishnu in humanity. He arrives somewhere in the middle of a chain of ten Avataras. The one preceding him is Parashuram while the one who follows is Sri Krishna. To the spiritually awakened and intuitive minds, wherein this epic is born, these things were quite tangible and real. The whole story is woven around Lord Rama as an Avatara of Lord Vishnu who is the great preserver of dharma. We are also told that Ravana was a devotee of the Lord,

the being who kept a watch over the gates of Lord Vishnu. He fell due to a curse and one of the purposes of Lord Vishnu to take upon a human body was to redeem Ravana and bring him back to his original place in the celestial world of Lord Vishnu. If we keep these fundamental truths intact then the rest of the story becomes spiritually comprehensible. This core is the secret of the entire myth. Let us see how this decodes the story then:

We all have some divine aspect within us that has fallen from the divine heights. That is our true Home but we have fallen from these heights. Our return journey can take one of two roads. One path that we can traverse is as a devotee of the Lord who is also the guardian of dharma. It is the clasp of love. It will liberate us and restore us to the divine heights from where we fell but the journey will be full of delight. The other path is to wrestle with and seemingly oppose Him. Whatever path you take, whether that of love for the Divine or an opposition to it, you cannot escape His embrace and an eventual merger with Him in the arena of the world.

The first coming together will be through delight, the other through pain and struggle necessitated because of the strong ego that resists. We see an interesting correspondence between the story of Ravana, once an angelic being in the courts of God who falls due to pride and the Christian myth of Lucifer, the angel of Light who falls from Heaven.

The initial cause of the fall is much the same in both myths. They fall because of pride, forgetting that all Glory belongs to God and not to an individual however high his status may be, even if he is right next to God. The fall itself is the wall of pride and ego that creates a separation between God and man, creating the illusion of a separate personality independent of the Creator. It is an illusion since it is impossible for such a thing to come into existence. However, unlike the Christian myth which starts similarly, the Hindu myth has a remarkable ending.

While Ravana has forgotten his origin, Lord Vishnu has not. The Divine descends upon earth to redeem the fallen by His infinite Grace. But this Grace is not limited to a group of faithful followers who subscribe to a fixed and formal belief system. It reaches out even to the ones who revolt and to those who oppose His plan, in fact, they serve His cosmic purpose by opposing the divine plan.

No one has fallen so deep that God’s grace cannot redeem them. Thus, the story of the Ramayana takes a very different hue than what we ordinarily think of as a victory of good over evil. True victory is not merely killing or destroying one Ravana or many like him. True victory is to destroy one’s ego so that he can recognise the Lord and be redeemed by His Grace. Anyone who has walked a spiritual path in earnest can see the profound mystic truth in this story. Even those who have not walked the path can intuitively sense something about the Grace of God, who takes a human form to redeem mankind. That is the reason why the epic has endeared itself to mankind for so long and continues to do so. There are many other stories, each a profound mystic truth which we shall have occasion to return to. But in the absence of this kind of spiritual intelligence one tends to completely disregard this spiritual core as nothing but superstition, a hyperbole, or hagiography.

When the story is read without this mystic key it is reduced either to pulp fiction or a story of a social or civilisational struggle between two racial types. The key is lost and with it the soul. What then remains is merely an outer body, a shell that is filled up with all kinds of human fancy to suit our political ideologies or social theories.

It is with this background that we can now start looking at some of the myths and legends of India, especially with respect to the Eternal Feminine, the Goddess, the Devi.

CHAPTER 2
Devi: Eternal Feminine

Land of rituals and festivals

India has a long list of festivals; indeed, it could well be called a land of festivals. There are festivals and celebrations around a host of events, from the ancient to the recent. Events on the earthly plane are celebrated alongside events on the subtle planes. The physical, the social, the psychological and the occult exist side by side making it almost impossible for an average Indian to discern between these different strands of existence woven inextricably into the very fabric of Indian life.

Looked at from one angle, especially from the perspective of the modern mind, many of these festivals and the celebrations around them appear antiquated — a mass of blind superstitions and rituals. Looked at from another angle, the whole of Indian life, from birth to death and that which comes after seems like a priestly act, a ceaseless worship to various cosmic powers whose origins lie in profound yogic experiences reproduced and verified by countless sages and seers — experiences verifiable if, like a scientist, we fulfil the required conditions and have the patience to study, observe and understand the labours of these cosmic powers within us and in creation.

While it is well understood that since we are a part of creation, any cosmic power involved in the act of creation automatically works within us, yet there is a difference between the two kinds of action, one where we are their automatic instruments and another where we become their conscious instruments. The individual human being, unlike the rest of creation, may draw upon these forces consciously, choose how to use what they bring to us and eventually extend the learnings not merely to outer events but also, more importantly, to the inner psychological and spiritual dimensions of our complex existence. It is this that truly helps a spiritual aspirant.

For the rest, there are festivals and festivities that man’s vital nature loves to indulge in; however, a task is carried out unconsciously in the process. That task is to preserve some profound truths in memory of a race for the generations to come. In this sense, festivals are like a book that documents and preserves an experience that was once of value and still may be, for those who can understand its secret language.

For it is true that the original script of life is now lost and the wisdom received from the past have grown stale or distorted by readings that have enveloped its pristine purity. That is why it is perhaps important for mankind to pass through a phase of disbelief during which they can cast out the encrustations and recover the truths behind rituals and the festivals that carry them. We already witness a movement in this direction wherein there are attempts to understand and justify a ritual or a festival from a certain symbolic perspective. For example, there is an attempt to explain the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata as symbols and archetypes so as to make it contemporary and relevant. Or to take another example, the ritual of praying using the beads in cycles of 108 wherein the figure 108 is explained in a quasi-scientific way to prove its importance. In the process we often lose the spirit while preserving the outer practice.

Interesting though these efforts are, they suffer from a fundamental error, which is to accept the body of ritual and festivity as the main truth and take the lead from there to discover its secret meaning. The effort can only lead us so far since a ritual involves the outer casings of an ethos and to understand its secret core on the basis of this outer body as we find it today is somewhat like trying to understand the soul by a meticulous and anatomical study of the human body. They exist in different dimensions even though they are connected. The only true way to discover its secret is to follow the way that it originated from, by reproducing in oneself the original experience, or at least, the aspiration that gave birth to it. Once we do that, the next logical step is to give a new body to the truth, a form appropriate to the age that we live in.

Spirit and the form

After all, if we accept the ancient Indian formula of life, the form, the body is an ever-changing and temporal reality. It is important, no doubt, but only as a vehicle of the soul within. So, when the vehicle becomes old and rigid, when countless limitations creep into it, nature sheds and discards it while taking care to keep the Spirit alive so that it returns into a new, young and fresh body.

Some may argue against the importance of giving it a new body, but it is important for two reasons. First, that the form and the body express what is formless in essence. The whole universe can justify it, all creation is a simultaneous play of the formless and the form. While for seekers, after liberation from creation, the forms may not be of much value beyond using these practices to help find their own wicket gate to liberation. But for seekers, after the perfection of earthly life, the form carries its own significance and importance for it is only through the form that the Creator pours in His heart full of love, light, beauty, and truth, thereby expressing Himself or Herself.

Secondly, the form is needed for the completeness of the union and communion with the Spirit, the Divine essence so that everything harmoniously combines in us — our very body and our outermost parts must be engaged in the totality of our experience, even the divine experience of life. Yet the body must be suited to the evolving spirit of humans. It is here that we have lagged in our rush towards nirvana. We have completely neglected the outer aspects, which have led to the poverty of outer life while we were busy gathering the inner riches.

The result has been a certain division and disconnect between yoga and life. The yogin turned away from these outer aspects often leaving an unbridgeable gulf between the religious impulse and the spiritual life of man. At most, it was the human intellect that participated, to an extent, in the spiritual pursuit while the vital and physical aspects remained untouched by the fire of the Spirit thereby leaving an entire mass of humanity to remain sunk in the darkness of ignorance and the blind inertia that gives rise to all kinds of superstitions. This connection between the inner and the outer, the spiritual and the religious, especially giving a new body to what we continue to follow as blind rituals is part of the complex work that needs to be addressed. It is in this regard that we can look at some of these festivals.

Spirit and the symbol behind tradition

Traditionally, in India, there are special days attributed to each great goddess. The Hindu mind, fertile in its spiritual creativity, often links these significant days with important celestial events to convey the central meaning behind the celebration. Thus, the day of goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of fullness, plenitude and inner riches is observed on a full moon day which signifies spiritual plenitude.

It is a different matter that under the spell of an asuric maya people now pray to her only for material wealth. In a fair and just society, outer wealth should be in the hands of those who are endowed with inner wealth but this is not what the Asura wants. He wants outer wealth even though his life and nature remain crude and ostentatious.

So too we see the worship of goddess Durga celebrated as the twin victory of the wise and mighty goddess over the demon of greed and lust, celebrated on the tenth day of the moon signifying the fullness of powers that she is armed with. Incidentally, the day is also linked to the felling of Ravana to the divine arrow of Lord Rama. As is well-known in the original story, this felling of Ravana is not just a victory of good over evil but a conversion of evil, its restoration to the original good since before suffering a fall into asuric nature, he was appointed to the service of Lord Vishnu. But his closeness to the Divine fed his ego rather than making him humble.

The story is therefore significant in so many ways since all of us in one sense are beings who have fallen from the divine heights. It is through the arrogance of the mind that we remain fallen whereas humility before the Divine helps us ascend higher.

The day of goddess Saraswati is the day when spring breaks out into manifold splendours. It is literally as if the earth has prayed for and received the light of the sun held within her bosom, bursting forth with offsprings of Light in various colours and forms. Goddess Saraswati is indeed the goddess of learning, who takes hold of the vast Wisdom of Maheshwari that lays down the larger lines of creation and turns it into manifold forms of Knowledge to build a detailed perfection. While the year starts with the day of Saraswati in spring when the earth bursts out in a creative ecstasy and splendour, it ends with Kali on the dark autumn night after which the earth enters the mode of preparing for a new birth. Of all the aspects of the Divine Mother, it is Mahakali who brings about swift transitions, albeit through revolutionary rapid methods, from the old order to the new. That, after all, is Kali’s action. With one stride and the frontal stroke, she slays the past and drinks its poison while with the other stride she opens the doors to a new epoch of time. It is due to this power of the goddess, to change time with a single stride, that she is called Kali (from the word kaal). This is the day of worship of Kali.

The festival of Light, Deepawali, for example, has been celebrated in several ancient cultures. In Japan, it is celebrated in August as the Aomori Nebuta Matsuri. In France, it is celebrated on December 8 to express gratitude to Mother Mary. The Jews celebrate it as Hanukkah. It is also celebrated in various other cultures and countries such as Taiwan, China, Netherlands, England, Thailand, indicating a shared psychological experience in the collective memory of the human race.

While all these festivals are celebrated by lighting lamps at night, there are other festivals related to the sun and the moon which are also sources of light. The Mother referred to Christmas as the ‘day of the return of Light’ which, as we know, is around the time when the sun begins to ascend, making the nights shorter and the days longer.

Closer to us in India, the festival of Lights is celebrated as Deepawali, meaning, a garland of lamps. Since in India there was always an apt way to link festivals to symbolic events on the inner planes and outer life, we see many such linkages with regard to Deepawali as well. It is generally regarded as the day Lord Rama returned to Ayodhya after defeating Ravana and reuniting with his divine consort Sita. Linked to Deepawali is the story of Lord Krishna defeating the King of Hell, Narakasura, thereby releasing the 16,000 feminine energies that were kept captive by him. It is said that at the plea of the women who were hence released, Sri Krishna married them to take them all under his shelter. The entire story is fascinating and quite symbolic.

Just as in the ancient legend of Indra and Vritra, and of Angirasa and the cows (different variants of this story are also found in ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures), the story of Sri Krishna and Narakasura refers to the energies given to earth and man for his upwards ascension which have been usurped by the powers of darkness that rise from the subconscient from time to time in the individual as well as the collective life of humanity. The Asura is one who, despite being bestowed with intelligence, cares for nothing and nobody except his own material gains, expansion of his ambitions and a life of unbridled desires.

All this unfortunately happens with man’s consent who too easily lends himself to the temptations of the Asura and the Rakshasa, inciting him to devour, destroy and live as a selfish brute. One of the works of the Avatara is to release these energies from the captivity of the Asura and make them available for man so that he may have another chance to use them for his ascension. It is this that is referred to in the Gita as liberating the good from the clutches of evil or re-establishing dharma, a new and higher divine order out of the old way of life that had become a source of evil through its misuse.

Both Rama and Krishna established a new and higher order from the old. This new way of life, giving a new form to the eternal, Santana Dharma, consistent with the dawn of a New Age is preceded by an inner and outer struggle between the old ways of life that obstinately resist and the seeds of a New Creation, the possibility of a higher Perfection implanted by the Avatara. Thus, we see Rama establishing a more luminous and rational order amidst the animal-man whereas Krishna opening the way to jivanmukti, freedom in action, as a higher way of life for the arrogant kshatriyas.

The Jains celebrate Deepawali as the day of ascension of Lord Mahavira into the nirvanic silence. Buddhists and Sikhs too celebrate it, Buddhists of a certain region invoke the goddess Lakshmi, a practice common to Hindus and Sikhs to commemorate the release of the tenth and the last of the Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh from Mughal captivity. The day is also observed as the day when Vali, the king endowed with rajo-sattwic qualities surrendered himself to Vamana, the dwarf man signifying the surrender of the ego-self to the growing stride and light of the psychic being in man.

We see, therefore, how Deepawali connects not only different regions of India but also different cultures and religions that took birth in the Light that Mother India holds within her heart. While the significance of many of these festivals is lost now in the rush of materialistic thought that has turned us blind to inner truths in our excessive importance to outer things, the light still shines and can be found by those who care for it. When we liberate this inner light caged within outer rituals, we relive the action of Krishna who released the feminine energies from the grip of the Asura. When we stand like Durga against all that is false and lowly then we celebrate truly the advent of Durga. When we live like Rama, renouncing all personal pleasure for the sake of dharma, taming the animal within us with the light of illumined reason while slaying the demon with the help of higher divine qualities and powers, we relive the victory of Rama by converting the Asura in us to become a bhakta of the Lord.

One God and the many Gods and Goddesses

It may be noted, however, that there are many other gods and goddesses, minor and major, who form a part of the Indian pantheon. This complexity is often daunting for minds that seek an oversimplification of existence. At one level it is simple, the simplest possible. Indian thought and spiritual experience do not regard gods and goddesses as the final and last truth. They are each a power and aspect of the One Infinite Divine. There is but the One alone, ekamevadwitiyam, One without a second, literally meaning the One who alone is and there is none other, as the Vedas put it. But for the purposes of creation, which is essentially a manifestation, the One becomes two as Ishwara and Shakti, Deva or the Supreme Godhead and Devi or the Supreme Mother. The eternal Masculine watches over the creation as its Father, casts the seed in Space and Time and watches it emerge and grow. The eternal Feminine conceives the creation and feeds it with her own body and soul, gives birth to it, nourishes and nurtures it, helps it grow — even allowing each element to go and grow through its unique experience. She keeps a watch over them, responds to every cry and call that rises from this sphere of sorrow, out of anguish, seeking redemption from error and pain.

Indian mysticism recognised this Presence and Power of the eternal Feminine, the Divine Mother, the Shakti and sought ways and means to enter into contact with the Supreme Goddess, Devi either for worldly goods or for the highest spiritual gain. For nothing can happen in the world-play without Her and even the Ishwara cannot grant anything without Her mediation and intervention. Once known, science, spiritual science began to develop around this possibility which has been passed down through generations of yogis as Tantra. These countless gods and goddesses are part of the tantric pantheon and each forms a link in a long and complex chain. Just as in Science, we can speak of One Ultimate Origin, even One Ultimate Force behind every movement of the cosmic play and yet there are a number of forces each with its specific power and function. There is also One Divine Origin of all things and yet, there are countless forces and beings, not just material but also subtle and supraphysical that are part of the complex workings of the cosmos.

It is not an issue of either — or, this or that, but this and that. The One Truth and the many Gods and Goddesses that operate in creation are part of a single complex chain that the ancient mystics tried to explore, and found ways and means to manipulate some of these energies, forces and beings with the help of mantra (power of sound), yantra (geometrical designs) and puja (ritualistic worship).

CHAPTER 3
Mantra

Mantra predominantly focuses on the principle that the first stir of creation is the primal vibration or the primordial sound. It takes place without any medium (since none was there). It expands endlessly in Space which is nothing else but Brahman (the supreme Reality) extending Itself and thereby creating limits out of the limitless. But what we experience here as speech and sound is a much degraded version of this original Power. By refining and purifying this power of speech given to us, we can arrive closer and closer to the primal stir which verges on the Omnipotent.

The mantras too ascend in a hierarchy and it is a grave mistake to club all of them together just because they are in Sanskrit or follow a common poetic metre. The power of a mantra depends upon three things.

First and foremost is the seer who receives it. Its value is contingent upon the heights and widths of consciousness to which the seer himself has ascended. Just as not all scientists who have a common qualification stand at the same level, so too, not all seers and sages are at the same level.

It is the sign of tamas that even the Indian mind has lost these subtle but important distinctions. Some mantras need to be bestowed by a Guru who energises them by the power of spiritual attainment and there are others that are energised through centuries of collective practice and the resultant faith forged in them. An example of the former would be certain beej mantras of tantric rituals. An example of the latter is the sacred syllable OM.

Secondly, the power of a mantra also depends upon the recipient. A mere mechanical japa may draw some lower energies but the great gods and goddesses cannot be drawn this way. They prefer the direct call of the heart, an emotion added to the mantra, a feeling of love and joy as when one is calling one’s beloved with deep longing.

It is this that determines how many times and how often one has to recite a mantra. For a faithful, trusting and longing disciple, even a single utterance may be enough to draw the Presence longed for close to them. For someone of little faith and mechanical utterance full of unclean doings, it is unlikely that any of the great and powerful goddesses are drawn towards them. If they do, it will be to cleanse him off the dross rather than grant material boons. More often than not it will draw vital forces and energies that are rather dangerous for our spiritual development and may even end up possessing the unchaste sadhaka rather than helping him beyond granting some material gifts or vital successes.

Yet these vital successes may very well pave the way towards a failure of his soul now trapped in the lure of worldly success and ambition. Finally, the mantra may spring up spontaneously within one’s heart, in which case, one has to take it as the mantra given to him by the Lord Himself who resides in the heart of all creatures. It could be a word or a string of words or phrases, in any language (for the Divine speaks all languages) which then becomes the individual’s means to connect the individual self with the Divine. A short mantra such as the word Ma is understandably better since it is the easiest to connect with and carries within it the spontaneous feeling that the word evokes.

Here is what the Mother reveals to us about the mantra:

I would very much like to have a ‘true mantra.’

I have a whole stock of mantras; they have all come spontaneously, never from the head. They sprang forth spontaneously, as the Veda is said to have sprung forth.

I don’t know when it began — a very long time ago, before I came here, although some of them came while I was here. But in my case, they were always very short. For example, when Sri Aurobindo was here in his body, at any moment, in any difficulty, for anything, it always came like this: ‘My Lord!’ — simply and spontaneously — ‘My Lord!’ And instantly, the contact was established. But since He left, it has stopped. I can no longer say it, for it would be like saying ‘My Lord, My Lord!’ to myself.

I had a mantra in French before coming to Pondicherry. It was Dieu de bonté et de miséricorde… [God of kindness and mercy], but what it means is usually not understood — it is an entire program, a universal program. I have been repeating this mantra since the beginning of the century; it was the mantra of ascension, of realization. At present, it no longer comes in the same way, it comes rather as a memory. But it was deliberate, you see; I always said Dieu de bonté et de miséricorde, because even then I understood that everything is the Divine and the Divine is in all things and that it is only we who make a distinction between what is or what is not the Divine….

For the moment, of all the formulas or mantras, the one that acts most directly on this body, that seizes all the cells and immediately does this (vibrating motion) is the Sanskrit mantra: OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH.

As soon as I sit for meditation, as soon as I have a quiet minute to concentrate, it always begins with this mantra, and there is a response in the body, in the cells of the body: they all start vibrating….

It rose up from here (Mother indicates the solar plexus), like this: Om Namo Bhagavateh OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH. It was formidable. For the entire quarter of an hour that the meditation lasted, everything was filled with Light! In the deeper tones it was of golden bronze (at the throat level it was almost red) and in the higher tones it was a kind of opaline white light: OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH….

So each one must find something that acts on himself, individually. I am only speaking of the action on the physical plane, because mentally, vitally, in all the inner parts of the being, the aspiration is always, always spontaneous. I am referring only to the physical plane.

The physical seems to be more open to something that is repetitious — for example, the music we play on Sundays, which has three series of combined mantras. The first is that of Chandi, addressed to the universal Mother:

Ya devi sarvabhuteshu matrirupena sansthita

Ya devi sarvabhuteshu shaktirupena sansthita

Ya devi sarvabhuteshu shantirupena sansthita

Namastasyai namastasyai namastasyai namo namah

The second is addressed to Sri Aurobindo (and I believe they have put my name at the end). It incorporates the mantra I was speaking of:

Om namo namah shrimirambikayai Om namo bhagavateh shriaravindaya Om namo namah shrimirambikayai.

And the third is addressed to Sri Aurobindo: ‘Thou art my refuge.’

Shriaravindah sharanam mama.

Each time this music is played, it produces exactly the same effect upon the body. It is strange, as if all the cells were dilating, with a feeling that the body is growing larger… It becomes all dilated, as if swollen with light — with force, a lot of force. And this music seems to form spirals, like luminous ribbons of incense smoke, white (not transparent, literally white) and they rise up and up. I always see the same thing; it begins in the form of a vase, then swells like an amphora and converges higher up to blossom forth like a flower.

So for these mantras, everything depends upon what you want to do with them. I am in favor of a short mantra, especially if you want to make both numerous and spontaneous repetitions — one or two words, three at most. Because you must be able to use them in all cases, when an accident is about to happen, for example. It has to spring up without thinking, without calling: it should issue forth from the being spontaneously, like a reflex, exactly like a reflex. Then the mantra has its full force.

For me, on the days when I have no special preoccupations or difficulties (days I could call normal, when I am normal), everything I do, all the movements of this body, all, all the words I utter, all the gestures I make, are accompanied and upheld by or lined, as it were, with this mantra:

OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH… OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH…

all, all the time, all the time, all the time.

That is the normal state. It creates an atmosphere of an intensity almost more material than the subtle physical; it’s like…almost like the phosphorescent radiations from a medium. And it has a great action, a very great action: it can prevent an accident. And it accompanies you all the time, all the time. But it is up to you to know what you want to do with it. [8]

CHAPTER 4
Yantra

Just as the mantra is the first stir of creation or manifestation, a yantra is a form that represents the Deity who is being evoked. The figure is a symbolic representation. Over centuries, tantric yogis have discovered, formulated and fixed certain figures or geometrical patterns through centuries of practice to invoke the concerned Deities. The patterns and the rituals using certain geometric diagrams and figures have their value but, the faith that the devotee puts in the practice is of much more value. The deities have access to the heart of the devotees and know their intent even if they try to hide it, sometimes even from themselves! They respond to this hidden intent, this faith, this genuine aspiration, the sincerity of the prayer rather than the mechanical formulas which can hardly entice the conscious beings of the higher worlds.

What we need to understand is that all of these examples are symbols. They are the mind’s ways of perceiving and receiving the Infinite, that which is beyond all symbols, sounds and patterns. Yet, they help us in opening up to that which is beyond all else. But the same things can be done, even more effectively, since it is something living rather than mechanical and rule-bound by a sincere and intense aspiration, with or without words, a deep longing, a true need of the Divine in our life. The Divine is not bound by any formula since He is Freedom Itself and if He seems to respond to these practices, it is simply as a concession to our limiting beliefs and the means that we trust will connect us to Him. But in Truth, He hears even the mute prayer of the bird and the beast, the wordless hymn of the plants and responds even to the dumbness of the mountains and the stones. Sri Aurobindo reveals to us some of these truths in His evening talks:

Sri Aurobindo: There are people who say “cow” should not mean “Light”. But what can “herds of the Sun” mean? It can only mean “Rays of solar light”. There are certain life-symbols: e.g. “Mountain” stands for “ascent”, going high up. “Bridge” or “crossing of rivers” is also a symbol from life-surroundings.

Then there are certain symbols that have an inherent appositeness of their own: for instance, Akasha — sky stands for the Eternal Brahman. In any nationality or any culture, “Sky” always indicates the Infinite. “Sun” always stands for the Supramental Light — it is the Sun of knowledge.

Then there are mental symbols; once fixed they become active on their own plane, e.g. “OM”, — Numbers, alphabets, geometrical figures — these have their own interpretations, e.g., the square always indicates to me the Supermind: it is a perfect shape.

Disciple: How did you know that the square is the symbol of the Supermind?

Sri Aurobindo: It might have been already found on the mental plane by somebody or might have come into my mind by some force. I did not pursue its meaning; it indicated to me the Supermind and I was satisfied.

The triangle indicates the world formed by the three lower powers. Another triangle placed with, its apex opposite indicates the three higher plane of being. When the two triangles are superimposed upon each other then a new symbol is found. The ancients indulged in these speculations.

It is also possible that the same reality may seek expression through different symbols, and if you go behind you find it is the same thing which is Infinite and unlimited by the symbol.

Disciple: What do you think of the Tantric sounds “Hring” “Kling” etc.?

Sri Aurobindo: They are not mere sound, there must be some force behind them. The same is true about Mantra Siddhi: three states are represented by “OM” and they can act differently in different men.

Disciple: The numbers being universal, why can’t they be universal symbols?

Sri Aurobindo: They are absolute to the human mind only; they are essential for our way of perceiving. There may be another plane of consciousness where they may not be so absolute, and where “one” may be at the same time “two”. Numbers are the way of perceiving certain unalterable facts on the physical plane. It means that the mind can cut up the Infinite, take one and one and one and then say about each: “this is one”. Physically, there are certain unalterable laws, e.g., going through the door is not possible without opening it, but the contrary of it may exist elsewhere.[9]

CHAPTER 5
Worship

This brings us to the last aspect of these rituals known as puja or worship. The principle of worship is that it is a kind of relationship or bond that we form with the Deity. Worship is a way of forming a bond that connects us to the one who is being worshipped. This link then forges a bond through which the Deity passes on the desired or coveted goods to the devotee. The state of worship, rather than the act, is important and if the state can be cultivated by turning life into a constant prayer, then one can easily dispense with these cumbersome rituals which hardly grab the attention of the beings of the higher worlds.

While it is relatively simpler to draw closer to forces and beings of a vital world, it is far more difficult to call the greater gods and goddesses. They cannot be tied to our mechanical formulas or ritualistic worship. They see the aspiration in the heart, the genuineness of intent, the sincerity of seeking, the earnestness of the call and respond to these under the command of the Supreme, who alone is the One they obey. Sri Aurobindo describes these absolute potencies of God who are moved neither by barter or bribe and have no share in our virtue and vice.

The way the Gods see life and humanity is very different from the way we see and understand it. We have built certain fixed mental constructs of good and bad and force-fit everything into slots. By doing so, the mind feels comfortable since it is unable to handle the infinity that is constantly shifting itself in countless ways. That is the truth of things. That is why if we are to truly know the truth of things in their unfolding (and not just in essence) we have to be sincere in our seeking for it to be revealed to us at each moment, independent of all mental and moral constructions in life.

What may seem good to the human eye may be a surface construct followed mechanically and blindly by a mind that is afraid of change and vastness. Such a mind lives within some small and narrowly fixed dogmas and conventions, which may appeal greatly to human eyes but not to the eye of the Spirit. For example, the Gandhian formula of non-violence. This is what Sri Aurobindo had to say about it:

In Christianity the principle of non-violence is there but it is meant to be practised for religious and spiritual development. It may be partial but it can certainly develop certain types of spiritual temperaments. What one can do is to transform the spirit of violence. But in this practice of Satyagraha it is not transformed. When you insist on such a one-sided principle what happens is that cant, hypocrisy and dishonesty get in and there is no purification at all. Purification can come by the transformation of the impulse of violence, as I said. In that respect the old system in India was much better. The man who had the fighting spirit became the Kshatriya and then the fighting spirit was raised above the ordinary vital influence. The attempt was to spiritualise it. It succeeded in doing what passive resistance cannot and will not achieve. The Kshatriya was the man who would not allow any oppression, who would fight it out and he was the man who would not oppress anybody. That was the ideal.^[10]

In fact, the world often suffers more because we persist in a good that was, rather than in a good that is, and will be. But the good that was once good, becomes evil when it is outdated and stale or pursued mechanically as a soulless ritual.

True worship is when we put our heart and soul into it, when it is done for the joy of remembering the Deity as an act of love and not a transactional business. One cannot barter with the great Gods or bribe and impress them with our show of pomp and passion-play. The great Gods will be honoured much more when we light our inner lamps and fight the devils within, rather than fill the earth with noise and alarm. It is the Titans who indulge in noise and thunder. The Gods often work quietly, veiled by the Light when our being is in peace and silence. Not that they are afraid of the trumpet and the war cry, for they too are powerful and when they lift their hands to smite as Durga and Rudra the force is irresistible. Yet, even when they strike, their heart is ever in a state of benevolent compassion instead of hatred and wrath. The purpose of their stroke is not to frighten but to free us from all fear and anger. They slay the body if needed but save the soul. The Titan, in comparison, tries to slay the soul, which it cannot, while separately holding on to its lusts, anger and fears.

To worship the Gods is, therefore, best done by cultivating within us qualities that they labour to instil and awaken. That is what true worship is. If we can do that, nothing else is necessary. The physical ritual becomes the last act where the body participates in inner adoration and surrender.

True puja or worship is not a rule-bound ritual but a state of devotion, prayer and offering of ourselves at the feet of the Divine, through whatever means, through love, through the body’s work presented as service. The Mother reveals this truth to us in countless ways. For example, while speaking of religious ceremonies, She observes:

Besides, in the invisible world hardly any beings love to be worshipped, except those of the vital. These, as I said, are quite pleased by it. And then, it gives them importance. They are puffed up with pride and feel very happy, and when they can get a herd of people to worship them they are quite satisfied. But if you take real divine beings, this is not at all something they value. They do not like to be worshipped. No, it does not give them any special pleasure at all! Don’t think they are happy, for they have no pride. It is because of pride that a man likes to be worshipped; if a man has no pride he doesn’t like to be worshipped; and if, for instance, they see a good intention or a fine feeling or a movement of unselfishness or enthusiasm, a joy, a spiritual joy, these things have for them an infinitely greater value than prayers and acts of worship and pujas… I assure you what I am telling you is very serious: if you seat a real god in a chair and oblige him to remain there all the while you are doing puja, he may perhaps have a little fun watching you do it, but it certainly gives him no satisfaction. None at all! He does not feel either flattered or happy or glorified by your puja. You must get rid of that idea. There is an entire domain between the spiritual and the material worlds which belongs to vital beings, and it is this domain that is full of all these things, because these beings live upon that, are happy with it, and it immediately gives them importance; and the one who has the greatest number of believers, devotees and worshippers is the happiest and the most puffed up. But how can anyone imagine that the gods could value… The gods — I am speaking of the true gods, even those of the Overmind, though they are still a bit… well, so-so… they seem to have taken on many human defects, but still, despite all that, they really have a higher consciousness — it does not please them at all. An act of true goodness, intelligence, unselfishness or a subtle understanding or a very sincere aspiration are for them infinitely higher than a small religious ceremony. Infinitely! There is no comparison.

Religious ceremony! For example, there are so many of these entities called Kali — who are given, besides, quite terrible appearances — so many are even placed in houses as the family goddess; they are full of a terrible vital force. I knew people who were so frightened of the Kali they had at home that indeed they trembled to make the least mistake, for when catastrophes came they thought it was Kali who sent them! It is a frightful thing, thought. I know them, those entities. I know them very well, but they are vital beings, vital forms which, so to say, are given a form by human thought, and what forms! And to think that men worship such terrible and monstrous things; and what’s more that these poor gods are given, are paid the compliment of believing that it is… From this point of view, it is good that for some time men get out of this religious atmosphere, so full of fear, and this sort of blind, superstitious submission of which the hostile forces have taken a dreadful advantage. The period of denial, positivism, is from this viewpoint quite indispensable in order to free men from superstition. It is only when one comes out of that and the abject submission to monstrous vital forces that one can rise to truly spiritual heights and there become the collaborator and true instrument of the forces of Truth, the real Consciousness, the true Power. One must leave all this far behind before one can climb higher.[11]

CHAPTER 6
New Conception and Form of Worship

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have given this new dharma for the coming age of mankind. They have liberated humans from all outer trappings and fixed creeds and dogmas within which the spirit of an age was getting stifled. Perhaps, the cage was needed when the soul of man was still growing its wings. Some or many still may need it, but for those whose wings have grown, the soul needs all infinity as its home. It must then step out of the prison houses in which we had caged the Gods along with the soul. The mature soul must step out of these trappings of the spirit built by the human mind, and soar into and breath infinity, to dwell in eternity. However, since the body too must participate in the evolutionary movement, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not discard the outer form but ennoble it, raise and uplift it to sublime spiritual heights, breathe new air into it by awakening its soul, without which the outer form is a mere shell.

This is the new dharma of the age that is dawning upon us. What better way than to see what Sri Aurobindo has to say about the worship of the four greatest Cosmic Powers that are at the very peak in the hierarchy of the worlds of mind, life and body standing right at the borders of the Supramental Truth. We can see how this new and greater Consciousness is replacing the old traditional approach with the new one. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother used traditions as well as transcended them. They left each one free to choose according to his or her deeper need and stage of evolution. Together all these approaches combine to form our total engagement with the Divine, a complete and absolute consecration wherein our body, mind and life, all participate in a constant aspiration and prayer, and our entire life becomes a continuous worship of the Divine in the matter.

Idols and images

Some people think that all idolatry and images are a limitation and hence discard them. However, what they miss is that the idol is not outside but within us. Our very conception of the Divine shapes an image within us. Conception too is a form, a form given by the higher regions of the mind to a truly inconceivable truth. An image is a reflection and if the reflection is as close as possible to the truth it tries to reflect, then it can be a great help in our ascension.

An idol is a further crystallisation of this deeper reality, a representation to our senses of the existence of something that far exceeds their hold. Its usefulness, however, is threefold. Firstly, one’s mind needs some kind of a representation to hold on to, to grasp with concentration. The image and idol then become a doorway through which we pass to see the truth it represents. Secondly, it allows our body and outer being to participate in the process of yoga itself. This is why it is said that surrendering to the Guru is the greatest of all surrenders as when we surrender to the Guru, we also allow our outer being and our surface consciousness to participate in the process of sadhana. Thirdly and most importantly, though an image or an idol may look merely like a picture, it can still become a living centre of the forces of the Deity if someone endowed with faith and love can instil the Presence within it. That is how certain places become alive and vibrate with a sacred and powerful divine presence, hence, they are aptly called teertha or power-spots as we know them in modern language. Of course, if we have a photograph instead of a painting or drawing then something of the person automatically comes into it, whereas with a painting or sculpture the Presence has to be instilled by the painter by his devotion and faith or by a priest who knows how to invoke the Deity.

As to the images of gods and goddesses, the Mother reveals to us certain subtle truths:

Are the images we see of Mahasaraswati true?

Oh, Lord! (Laughter) When a very small child tries to make someone’s portrait, does it resemble that person? It is very much like this, sometimes worse! Because the child is frank and sincere, whereas the one who makes the images of the gods is full of fixed notions and preconceived ideas, or else of all that others have said about the subject and of what has been written in the scriptures and what has been seen by people. And so he is bound by all that. At times, from time to time, there are artists who have an inner vision, a great aspiration, a great purity of soul and of vision, who have made things which are reasonably good. But this is extremely rare. And generally, I believe it is almost the opposite.

I have seen some of these forms in the vital and mental worlds, which were truly human creations. There is a force from beyond which manifests. But in these triple worlds of falsehood, truly man has created God in his own image — more or less — and there are beings which manifest in forms which are the result of the formative thought of man. And here, you see, it is truly frightful! I have seen some of these formations… (silence) and all this is so obscure, so incomprehensible, inexpressive…. Some of the gods are more ill-treated than others. For example, that poor Mahakali, you know, what things are done to her!… It is so frightful, it is unimaginable! But this form lives only in a very low world… yes, in the lowest vital; and what it possesses of the original being is something… a reflection so remote from the origin that it is unrecognizable. However, usually, it is this that is attracted by human consciousness. And when an idol is made, you see, and the priest brings down a form — when the ceremony takes place in a regular manner, he puts himself in an inner state of invocation and tries to bring down a form or an emanation of the godhead into the idol in order to give it a power — if the priest is truly a man with a power of invocation, he can succeed. But usually — there are exceptions to everything — but usually these people have been educated in the common ideas according to tradition. And so, when they think of the godhead whom they are invoking, they think of all the attributes and appearances that have been given to it, and the invocation is usually addressed to entities of the vital world or at best to those of the mental world, but not to the Being itself. And it is these small entities which manifest in one idol or another. All these idols in small temples or even in families — some people have their little shrines, you know, in their homes and keep an image of the godhead they worship — these entities manifest in them; sometimes the consequences are rather unfortunate, for these forms are precisely so remote from the original godhead that… they are awkward formations. Some of those Kalis they worship in certain families are veritable monsters![12]

The Mother reveals to us that a photograph is not just a piece of paper for remembrance. It is itself a hub of forces that the person emanates from oneself and when it is done consciously, it can carry something of those forces that the person represents. However, one should be careful in placing and mixing photographs of different people and even spiritual beings which may not necessarily go well as a combined influence. A photograph is an influence and it may pull us in occult ways and in different directions. The modern mind is blind to these occult truths which a seeker on the path to Perfection cannot afford to ignore.

When asked about Her photos, the Mother revealed:

Sweet Mother, when we concentrate on one of your photos — there are many photos, each one with a different expression — does it make a difference for us, the one on which we concentrate?

If you do it purposely, yes, of course. If you choose this photo for a particular reason or that other one for another reason, surely. It has an effect. It is as though you were choosing to concentrate on one aspect of the Mother rather than another; for example, if you choose to concentrate on Mahakali or Mahalakshmi or on Maheshwari, the results will be different. That part of you which answers to these qualities will awaken and become receptive. So, it is the same thing. But somebody who has only one photo, whichever it may be, and concentrates, without choosing this one or that, because he has only one, then it is of no importance which one it is. For the fact of concentrating on the photograph puts one in contact with the Force, and that is what is necessary in the case of everyone who responds automatically.

It is only when the person who concentrates puts a special will, with a special relation, into his concentration that it has an effect. Otherwise the relation is more general, and it is always the expression of the need or the aspiration of the person who concentrates. If he is absolutely neutral, if he does not choose, does not aspire for any particular thing, if he comes like this, like a white page and absolutely neutral, then it is the forces and aspects he needs which will answer to the concentration and perhaps even the person himself will not know what particular things he needs, because very few people are conscious of themselves. They live in a vague feeling, they have a vague aspiration and it is almost unseizable; it is not something organised, coordinated and willed, with a clear vision, for example, of the difficulties one wants to overcome or the capacities one wants to acquire; this, usually, is already the result of a fairly advanced discipline. One must have reflected much, observed much, studied much in order to be able to know exactly what he needs. Otherwise it is something hazy, this impression: one tries to catch it and it escapes… Isn’t that so?[13]

Let us close with these magnificent lines from Savitri that reveal to us the greatness and glory of the Divine Mother who escapes every formula with which we try to bind Her. They reveal to us the ultimate essence of worship is an absolute, total trust and surrender to the Divine knowing that whatever we may understand, whatever way we may try to define and limit, He will always remain beyond all our perceptions and conceptions, Eternal and Infinite.

But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth:
The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.
In our thinking’s close and narrow lamp-lit house
The vanity of our shut mortal mind
Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;
But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;
Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.
In our hypnosis by one luminous point
We see not what small figure of her we hold;
We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,
We share not her immortal liberty.
Thus is it even with the seer and sage;
For still the human limits the divine:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,
Breathe her divine illimitable air,
Her simple vast supremacy confess,
Dare to surrender to her absolute.
Then the Unmanifest reflects his form
In the still mind as in a living glass;
The timeless Ray descends into our hearts
And we are rapt into eternity.
For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.
A thousand icons they have made of her
And find her in the idols they adore;
But she remains herself and infinite.[14]

The Immortal Ones

CHAPTER 7
Festival of Devi

Durga is the Mother’s power of Protection. The lion is the attribute of the Goddess Durga, the conquering and protecting aspect of the Universal Mother.

Sri Aurobindo

Evolutionary struggle as a battle

The Festival of Devi is celebrated in India to mark the victory of the great Goddess Durga over the demon King Mahisasura and his demon cohorts. Though outwardly it seems to be symbolic of the victory of Truth over falsehood, which of course it is, there is much more to it that will help us understand the process of individual and cosmic evolution. The ancient yogis and seers saw the process of rebirth as the evolutionary journey of the human soul.

The soul is the divine essence that has been buried in matter as the seed of divinity. Like a seed that has been placed carefully in the soil so that one day it awakens and grows, the soul arrives at the full fruition of its divine possibilities within the human. Until it reaches mankind, it remains dormant in the lower forms of creation that come prior to man, the animal, plant and material world, much like a seed stays under the soil preparing within to start a new journey upwards one day. With humans comes a point of transition because they have the ability to experience life consciously, and through reflection and contemplation they can enter into some kind of conscious evolution. Before the coming of humans, evolution was an unconscious process. Something is surely happening thence too but it is more like the dissolving of the hard outer crust of the seed.

With the advent of humanity, at least after a certain stage, this hard crust of Ignorance, the denser thick veil, begins to become slightly more amenable to dissolution. At first, this urge for freedom from ignorance takes the form of mental education, a mental seeking to know about oneself and the world around rather than being satisfied with a life of instincts driven by the hunger of various kinds, ‘a hunger that is death’^[15] , as the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says. This hunger, not only for food but for all other kinds of material things, objects and the will to acquire and possess more and more is the sign of this craving desiring self, the great badge of ignorance that all creatures wear. But a time comes when this first formulation of life satisfies us no longer. Man begins to seek something greater, something higher, something that can endure the rub of change and time, something permanent and eternal. It is here that the soul in the human begins to awaken and a new phase of its journey begins.

This journey begins to assume the form of a battle, a battle between the animal state out of which it must emerge and which continues to torment and assail through the various hungers now modified and made worse by the presence of a mind that is at the mercy of the desire-self. The mind adds to the animal appetites a certain perversion with its capacity to deceive and the will towards endless gains. When the powers of the mind freshly awakening in man are at the mercy of the animal appetites, we have the birth of the Rakshasa.

When the mind grows into a sharper intelligence but the heart remains cold and the intellect is used consciously to satisfy the animal appetites, we have the birth of the Asura. It is only when the heart is touched by the ray of love from within and the mind is attracted by a light, however distant and remote from above, that the proper human journey begins. By obeying the soul’s Godward impulsion, the human being grows into the likeness of a god. Becoming one with the cosmic powers of light allows for a participation as an ally of the gods in the cosmic labour to help other souls and creation grow towards Truth, Light, Freedom and Immortality. But this is no easy task. The Rakshasa and the Asura continue to halt his advance, even capturing some of the fields of nature that were conquered by the growing godhead in humanity. This is the well-known devasura sangram, the battle between the gods and the Titans. It is at once an individual and a cosmic battle which Sri Aurobindo points out while revealing The Doctrine of the Mystics:

The soul of man is a world full of beings, a kingdom in which armies clash to help or hinder a supreme conquest, a house where the gods are our guests and which the demons strive to possess; the fullness of its energies and wideness of its being make a seat of sacrifice spread, arranged and purified for a celestial session.[16]

Gods and the Titans

It is against this background that we can understand the story of Goddess Durga slaying the demons along with their king, Mahisasura — the ill-begotten child of the Asura king Rambha and a buffalo-woman. The buffalo is symbolic of an animal type of humanity that is largely tamasic, full of greed and lust. Mahisasura, like almost all Asuras, covets the treasures and kingdoms of the gods. But he eyes it with lust and greed rather than the path which is proper for an ascent towards the kingdom of the gods. The proper path is through a sacrifice or the progressive refining and sublimation, through purification of the animal energies within us. The Asura has none of these qualities. He rises in revolt and wants to storm into the kingdom of heaven not for or through an inner change but for an expansion of his ostentatious empire of lust, domination and control. That is why he is not favoured by the indwelling Universal Godhead Narayana who has to keep the balance of dharma. That is the reason the Asuras eventually lose despite sometimes being on the verge of victory. Sri Aurobindo reveals the subtle difference between these two types of striving:

God and Titan, Deva and Asura, are indeed close kin in their differences; nor could either have been spared in the evolution. Yet do they inhabit opposite poles of a common existence and common nature. The one descends from the light and the infinity, satisfied, to the play; the other ascends from the obscurity and the vagueness, angry, to the struggle. All the acts of the God derive from the universal and tend to the universal. He was born out of a victorious harmony. His qualities join pure and gracious hands and link themselves together naturally and with delight as in the pastoral round of Brindavan, divine Krishna dominating and holding together its perfect circles. To evolve in the sense of the God is to grow in intuition, in light, in joy, in love, in happy mastery; to serve by rule and to rule by service; to be able to be bold and swift and even violent without hurt or wickedness and mild and kindly and even self-indulgent without laxity or vice or weakness; to make a bright and happy whole in oneself and, by sympathy, with mankind and all creatures. And in the end it is to evolve a large impersonal personality and to heighten sympathy into constant experience of world-oneness. For such are the Gods, conscious always of their universality and therefore divine…..

But the Titan will have nothing of all this; it is too great and subtle for his comprehension. His instincts call for a visible, tangible mastery and a sensational domination. How shall he feel sure of his empire unless he can feel something writhing helpless under his heel, — if in agony, so much the better? What is exploitation to him, unless it diminishes the exploited? To be able to coerce, exact, slay, overtly, irresistibly, — it is this that fills him with the sense of glory and dominion. For he is the son of division and the strong flowering of the Ego. To feel the comparative limitation of others is necessary to him that he may imagine himself immeasurable; for he has not the real, self-existent sense of infinity which no outward circumstance can abrogate. Contrast, division, negation of the wills and lives of others are essential to his self-development and self-assertion. The Titan would unify by devouring, not by harmonising; he must conquer and trample what is not himself either out of existence or into subservience so that his own image may stand out stamped upon all things and dominating all his environment.

In Nature, since it started from division and egoism, the Titan had to come first; he is here in us as the elder god, the first ruler of man’s heaven and earth. Then arrives the God and delivers and harmonises. Thus the old legend tells us that the Deva and the Asura laboured together to churn the ocean of life for the supreme draught of immortality, but, once it had been won, Vishnu kept it for the God and defrauded the fiercer and more violent worker. And this seems unjust; for the Asura has the heavier and less grateful portion of the burden. He begins and leads; he goes his way hewing, shaping, planting: the God follows, amends, concludes, reaps. He prepares fiercely and with anguish against a thousand obstacles the force that we shall use: the other enjoys the victory and the delight. And therefore to the great God Shiva the stained and stormy Titan is very dear — Shiva who took for himself the fierce, dark and bitter poison first churned up from the sea of life and left to others the nectar. But the choice that Shiva made with knowledge and from love, the Titans made from darkness and passion — desirous really of something very different and deceived by their stormy egoism. Therefore the award of Vishnu stands; to the God shall fall the crown and the immortality and not, unless he divinise himself, to the proud and strenuous Asura.[17]

Birth of the mighty Goddess

The story of Durga is the story of one such moment in the evolutionary history of the earth. Though this battle takes place on the subtle planes, its repercussions are felt upon the earth and humanity.

Mahisasura performed a tapasya to appease Lord Brahma to get the boon of immortality. Brahma told him that this was not in his hands since he could not change the cosmic law. At best, he could modify some of the conditions therein. We may remember here how Nachiketa is told by Yama, the guardian of the cosmic law, that even the gods know not the secret of the immortality of man. This is so because humans carry the secret within themselves. It is embedded in their secret immortal soul. By finding the soul, the human discovers the first key to immortality, the key that will open the other doors for them that will eventually lead them to physical immortality as well.

Gods know it not because they do not have the psychic being which is a unique grace given to man through which man can directly contact the Supreme. It is man’s secret door in the matter for coming in contact with the Supreme divine who is beyond all Gods. Coming back to the story, the boon of immortality was denied as it was not even in the hands of the cosmic powers to grant it, the demon king chose the next best alternative. He asked that neither a man nor a god may be able to fell him. In doing so, he deliberately underestimated the feminine power. Drunk with pride and the feeling of invulnerability due to the boon, he attacked the heavens and started wreaking havoc upon heaven and earth. The gods could not defeat him and hence they went to Brahma again to seek a way out of the impasse. It was then that Goddess Durga was born with a portion of each god incarnating in her body with all their celestial powers.

While describing the boon that would ensure the birth of the Divine Mother as Savitri, Sri Aurobindo reveals in this exquisitely beautiful passage some hints and glimpses of what this may mean. Though in the passage below, the Master Poet is revealing to us the secret of the Avatara, we feel in it the tremendous moment when the Gods must have come together to give form and shape to the mighty Mother as Durga, the formidable slayer of the demon hordes.

O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.
One shall descend and break the iron Law,
Change Nature’s doom by the lone spirit’s power.
A limitless Mind that can contain the world,
A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms
Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.
All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;
Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth,
Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair,
And in her body as on his homing tree
Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.
A music of griefless things shall weave her charm;
The harps of the Perfect shall attune her voice,
The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,
Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,
Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,
Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.
She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,
Strength shall be with her like a conqueror’s sword
And from her eyes the Eternal’s bliss shall gaze.
A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous hour,
A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;
Nature shall overleap her mortal step;
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.[18]

Mighty ten-armed Goddess

The mighty Mother is born, which means that she takes on a limited form herself. The form depicted in the story of Durga is evidently on the subtle planes where each of her hands represents the power of one of the gods. The Lion is the symbol of quiet power and strength that can tear through the very body of the Asura and repel his advance. She challenges Mahisasura who laughs with pride, not knowing that the nemesis follows hubris. He sends his generals from the demon army who are slain by the mighty ten-armed goddess who is dear to Shiva since she is born of the tremendous energy of Shiva. She comes riding on the lion with a trident in her hand. She is beautiful, strong and radiant, scattering the darkness all around her.

We must note that she is a one-time conquest over Mahisasura; the demon is not limited by a one-time form depicted in the stories. The Titans have as many cosmic powers as the Gods. Even when the form of one particular Titan is destroyed, he assumes another form and looks for human receptacles in whom he can incarnate, wreak havoc and vitiate the earth’s atmosphere with the forces of lust, greed, hate, spite, arrogance, and falsehood, filling human hearts and minds with suffering born out of ignorance and egoism. He creates confusion by throwing upon man the spell and influence of an adverse asuric maya that creates wrong suggestions, wrong thoughts, wrong impulsions thereby ruining man’s life. Each of these gods can send out many emanations out of itself.

For example, the mighty goddess Durga is not only the Divine Mother’s power of Protection but also the presiding Deity over India. It is she whom Sri Aurobindo invoked during the nationalist days to drive away the British and to inspire the countrymen to rise to nobility, courage, wisdom and strength. This beautiful invocation reproduced below has a mantric power in it like the powerful mantras used in certain tantric rituals to invoke aspects and forms of the Divine Mother.

Hymn to Durga

MOTHER DURGA! Rider on the lion, giver of all strength, Mother, beloved of Siva! We, born from thy parts of Power, we the youth of India, are seated here in thy temple.

Listen, O Mother, descend upon earth, make thyself manifest in this land of India.

MOTHER DURGA! From age to age, in life after life, we come down into the human body, do thy work and return to the Home of Delight. Now too we are born, dedicated to thy work. Listen, O Mother, descend upon earth, come to our help.

MOTHER DURGA! Rider on the lion, trident in hand, thy body of beauty armour-clad, Mother, giver of victory, India awaits thee, eager to see the gracious form of thine.

Listen, O Mother, descend upon earth, make thyself manifest in this land of India.

MOTHER DURGA! Giver of force and love and knowledge, terrible art thou in thy own self of might, Mother beautiful and fierce. In the battle of life, in India’s battle, we are warriors commissioned by thee; Mother, give to our heart and mind a titan’s strength, a titan’s energy, to our soul and intelligence a god’s character and knowledge.

MOTHER DURGA! India, world’s noblest race, lay whelmed in darkness. Mother, thou risest on the eastern horizon, the dawn comes with the glow of thy divine limbs scattering the darkness. Spread thy light, Mother, destroy the darkness.

MOTHER DURGA! We are thy children, through thy grace, by thy influence may we become fit for the great work, for the great Ideal. Mother, destroy our smallness, our selfishness, our fear.

MOTHER DURGA! Thou art Kali, naked, garlanded with human heads, sword in hand, thou slayest the Asura. Goddess, do thou slay with thy pitiless cry the enemies who dwell within us, may none remain alive there, not one. May we become pure and spotless, this is our prayer, O Mother, make thyself manifest.

MOTHER DURGA! India lies low in selfishness and fearfulness and littleness. Make us great, make our efforts great, our hearts vast, make us true to our resolve. May we no longer desire the small, void of energy, given to laziness, stricken with fear.

MOTHER DURGA! Extend wide the power of Yoga. We are thy Aryan children, develop in us again the lost teaching, character, strength of intelligence, faith and devotion, force of austerity, power of chastity and true knowledge, bestow all that upon the world. To help mankind, appear, O Mother of the world, dispel all ills.

MOTHER DURGA! Slay the enemy within, then root out all obstacles outside. May the noble heroic mighty Indian race, supreme in love and unity, truth and strength, arts and letters, force and knowledge ever dwell in its holy woodlands, its fertile fields, under its sky-scraping hills, along the banks of its pure-streaming rivers. This is our prayer at the feet of the Mother. Make thyself manifest.

MOTHER DURGA! Enter our bodies in thy Yogic strength. We shall become thy instruments, thy sword slaying all evil, thy lamp dispelling all ignorance. Fulfil this yearning of thy young children, O Mother. Be the master and drive thy instrument, wield thy sword and slay the evil, hold up the lamp and spread the light of knowledge. Make thyself manifest.

MOTHER DURGA! When we possess thee, we shall no longer cast thee away; we shall bind thee to us with the tie of love and devotion. Come, Mother, manifest thyself in our mind and life and body.

Come, Revealer of the hero-path. We shall no longer cast thee away. May our entire life become a ceaseless worship of the Mother, all our acts a continuous service to the Mother, full of love, full of energy. This is our prayer, O Mother, descend upon earth, make thyself manifest in this land of India.[19]

Durga and Kali

If there is any goddess that has cast a deep and enduring influence upon the Indian psyche, it is Durga. We have seen the essence of the story. We can now take a closer look at and discover the pearls of truth, occult wisdom, and yogic and tantric processes that are neatly concealed within the folds of the story. To start with the great and mighty goddess is awesome; to use a modern expression and her very personality evokes a spontaneous adoration, to say the least. Beautiful and terrible, mighty and divine, the virgin goddess is revered, feared, worshipped and loved as a mother in most parts of the country, though she has assumed a special relation and a particular form in West Bengal.

It is this ten-armed form of Durga that most Indians are familiar with, but she is worshipped in other forms as well that resonate with her aspects, powers and personalities that she puts forth for her work. The eastern tantriks worship her as Kali, the dark mother. In the western parts, people pray to her as Vindhyavasini, the mountain goddess. In the northern region she is generally known as Vaishno Devi who resides in the mountains, rides on the lion, slays the Asuras and protects the weak and the good. In the south, she is known as Chamunda, the slayer of the demons, Munda and Chamunda. Besides these, there are other lesser-known forms of the goddess but in and through all these forms she emerges as a pillar of strength, who, on the one hand, is ever ready to strike and slay evil-doers; and on the other hand, is ever ready to support and succour.

According to legend, the earth was overrun by the fury of the demon king, Mahisasura. His name indicates that he can assume the form of a buffalo. Essentially, this indicates that he has the propensities of an animal with a consciousness as obscure and dense as a buffalo’s. On the other hand, the name Durga itself indicates a high, lofty and invincible force, like a fortress or tower of strength. Nevertheless, even the gods are unable to overpower this Titan; he is so impervious to the Light that the gods bring. Emboldened by his growing field of power over earth, the demon launches an attack over the heavens and makes them flee their home. The result is utter chaos and the entire balance of creation is upset since the governing powers of light are hidden and can no more influence the mind and heart of the earth. The lust for power, wealth, women, greed, blind ambition, disrespect for the feminine begins to spread over the earth. The gods are naturally concerned so they approach the great god Shiva to bring him out of his eternal trance. Shiva hears them out and his face becomes red with the Rudra bhava, his destroyer mood that must destroy all that is perverse and evil in creation. Out of the heat of his Raudra Teja, there emerges a feminine form, beautiful, grand and divine. Her limbs scatter light in all directions like the morning glow and her eyes are show the compassion of the strong. The gods hail her birth and each gives some portion of his celestial energy that she holds in each of her ten arms. Then, seated on a lion, with the leonine energy of the force of life, she proceeds to make the mountains her abode.

Soon, the news of her unearthly beauty and the glow of her light spread through the worlds and Mahisasura also comes to know of it. He speeds an emissary to her with the instructions to somehow bring her to his service. Durga responds with an open challenge that she has taken a vow to marry only someone who can defeat her in battle. The demon is surprised at a woman challenging him and the demon clan, who have overthrown the gods and made them outcasts from their own homes. He tries to force her to accompany him but Durga easily overpowers him. Rushing back to his titan king, the demon confesses what he has experienced. Soon, an army of the demon hordes march towards the mountain where Durga resides. One by one, they are slain by the goddess. It is during this battle that she puts forward her form of Kali, the terrible and dark mother who slays the demon hordes relentlessly and even drinks their blood to ensure that not a drop of their ugly demonic force is left to birth a full-blown demon again. The skies are filled with her roar and the gods and demons alike are frightened by her war cry. Finally, Mahisasura himself comes to face the goddess in mortal combat. In a trice, the ten-armed goddess slays him while seated on her lion.

Mahisasura is killed but the energy that has gone towards the destruction of evil and falsehood cannot be easily stopped now. Kali, the terrible goddess, goes on to destroy wherever she sees falsehood, till her raging fire takes the whole creation in her range. The heat of her divine energy of destruction is so fierce that none can bear it, not even the gods. Something must be done and who else but the one from whom this fierce energy has emanated can bring it to a halt. Once again, Shiva is approached. Hearing the plea of the gods, he assumes his benign form once more and stretches himself over Kali’s path, covering creation with his body itself to shield it against the wrath of Kali. No sooner that the great goddess steps on Shiva, dancing in her fierce mood, she realises that she has come too far. Indeed, creation is imperfect, even the gods are imperfect and were she to destroy all that is imperfect then nothing would be left except the first few emanations of the Divine, the high and impeccable gods and the Supreme Himself.

It would mean resuming the effort of creation all over again. She stops with a sight, an image captured in the Indian mind, etched in its very soul. Matching the beneficent mood of Shiva, She too, now assumes the Compassionate look of the world-mother. Behind her fury was the intense and passionate love for the good of the earth. Her destructive mood was not moved by hatred or lust as the demons’ but by the love that throws itself on the battlefield and hurls itself in the mortal struggle and conflict of forces to protect the weak and the right.

It is interesting to note that the Asuras always want to marry the goddess and kill the gods. Basically, the marriage of the Asura and a goddess would mean power and light culminating into an unregenerate and crude nature. This cannot happen since it will upset the law of Truth, the evolutionary law of creation. The Asura must reform himself and become godlike or else his ego must be slain by Kali and Durga before he is made ready. Kali Herself is a form of the Divine Mother when she enters the darkest of darkness to change it. Hers is a heart of fierce and violent love that cannot tolerate any delay in our upward evolution. She would descend and enter the Asura’s home and the lair of evil and slay him according to the terms that he has set.

Thus, the story of Durga and her twin form Kali, assumes universal significance. But, symbolism aside, the great and majestic goddess is a divine energy of strength and beneficence. Earthly beings can come in contact with her through love and devotion, as a child to the mother and receive her help and grace in distress, her protection in times of difficulty and danger. The hands that are ready to smite and slay are also the hands that save and succour. The mighty goddess Kali smites the ego but saves the soul. This too is love, as the Indian thought saw and hence, worshipped Her as the Mother.

Occult significance of the story

The story of Durga and her nine-day long battle with the asuric forces is narrated in the Puranas in a very interesting way that is at once symbolic and suggestive. The demon king assumes the form of a handsome man to woo her but the great goddess cannot be fooled by any maya, asuric or daivic, for she is Mahamaya herself. Ultimately, the demon is slain and his dark energy reabsorbed back into the mighty goddess.

The nine forms of the goddess form an ascending hierarchy, rising from the root chakra at the base of the spine, mooladhara, travelling upwards, gaining strength and force and momentum with each upward gust and impulsion until it reaches the crown and passes beyond uniting with its Lord. In this perfect union of the Divine Self and the Divine Energy awakening in the matter lies the secret of perfection. This image of the perfect union of Shiva and Parvati (daughter of the Mountains) is depicted in the legends of Parvati’s tapasya and the significant image of the Shivalinga. Regarding the Shivalinga, this is what the Mother had to reveal:

The next morning the Mother sent me a huge card illustrating Shiva and Shakti. She had written on it:

This can be taken as one aspect of the collaboration between the Spiritual Power and the Material Nature.[20]

Now, when we look at the nine aspects and their powers, we can immediately connect them to the process of awakening of the Kundalini, the Shakti of the Divine Mother coiled up at the base of the spine submerged in Matter. A quick glance of this can be seen below:

Shailabala: The awakening of the Divine Energy in the matter. For our yoga, it is a new possibility in the matter.

Brahmacharini: Our consciousness and energies become one-pointed towards the Goal.

Chandraghanta: Light dawning upon the mind like the waxing and waning moon.

Kusumanda: Consciousness concentrated with the heat of tapas as an egg holding within it the new birth, the birth of the psychic being in us.

Skandmata: The power born of the dual union of Divine and His Shakti that is the psychic being. It is this who will now become the leader of the march, the priest of the sacrifice, the head chieftain of the army of gods, devasenapati.

Katyayani: The individual who has realised that the soul enters the world-play and battles with the Asura and darkness within and without, assisting the gods in battle and becoming their companion in the cosmic yajna.

Kalaratri: All systems of thought constructs of the mind, of good and evil and dualities of ego-self taken away. The field of nature ridden with limitations and ignorance is completely wiped away and becomes like a clean slate for the Infinite to manifest through finite forms.

Mahagauri: With this clearing of the field of nature is ready to ascend into bright radiant purity of the great Goddess who is the divine consort of Shiva.

Siddhidatri: The Perfection that one discovers when the energy in matter finally meets the Lord and becomes one with Him.

This is the traditional Kundalini Yoga. In Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, the action of the Divine Shakti is from above downwards as a strong descending current transforming our fields of nature in a diviner mould. One of the conversations of the Mother reveals this beautifully:

But then what is this consciousness we feel like a force inside us? For instance, sometimes in meditation it rises, then descends; it’s not fixed anywhere. What is this consciousness?

The Shakti!

Some receive it from above; for others, it rises from below (gesture to the base of the spine). As I once told you, the old system always proceeds from below upwards, while Sri Aurobindo pulls from above downwards. This becomes very clear in meditation (well, in yoga, in yogic experience): for those who follow the old system, it’s invariably the kundalini at the base [of the spine] rising from center to center, center to center, until the lotus (in an ironic tone) bursts open here (gesture at the crown of the head). With Sri Aurobindo, it comes like this (gesture of descending Force) and then settles here (above the head); it enters, and from there it comes down, down, down, everywhere, to the very bottom, and even below the feet — the subconscient — and lower still, the inconscient.

It’s the Shakti. He said, you know (I am still translating it), that the shakti drawn up from below (this is what happens in the individual process) is already what could be called a “veiled” shakti (it has power, but it is veiled). While the Shakti drawn down from above is a PURE Shakti; and if it can be brought down carefully and slowly enough so that it isn’t (how shall I put it?) polluted or, in any case, obscured as it enters matter, then the result is immediately much better. As he has explained, if you start out with this feeling of a great power in yourself (because it’s always a great power no matter where it awakens), there’s inevitably a danger of the ego meddling in. But if it comes pure and you are very careful to keep it pure, not to rush the movement but let it purify as it descends, then half the work is done.[21]

Thus seen at the festival of the mighty Mother, Devi becomes a symbol that reveals important secrets of our inner evolution. There was a time when these secrets had to be safeguarded against misuse and hence preserved in the memory of the race through stories and legends. The uninitiated simply held the story as reminiscent of some event that took place annually but to the initiated, it was replete with deeper meanings. At the same time, the annual celebration was used for creating a state of invocation in the collective consciousness, which in turn brought down these gods and goddesses to re-enact the event in cosmic significance through the cycles of Time. The Mother reveals this secret to us:

You want to know if this has an effect on all identical vibratory modes in the world…. In principle, yes. But the effects may not be immediately visible; in the first place, our field of observation is nothing — materially, what do we know?… Only our immediate surroundings — that’s nothing.

In 1920, for example, I had an experience of that type, which resulted in a symbolic but terrestrial action. It was a vision (I don’t remember enough details to make it interesting) where each nation was represented by a symbolic entity, and there was a certain type of horror — of terror, rather. A certain “will of terror” was trying to manifest in that gathering of all nations. And I was witness to the whole thing. I remember it being a very conscious and rather long and detailed vision with a more intense reality than physical things have (it was in the subtle physical). And after it was over and I had done what needed to be done (I am not saying what because I don’t remember all the details, and without accuracy it loses its value), when I came out of it I could say with TOTAL conviction: “Terror has been overcome in the world.” Of course, it’s not literally true, plenty of people still feel terror, but a certain type of terror was as if UNDERMINED at the foundations. What had already manifested kept on and is gradually being exhausted, but the terror that was trying to increase and dominate the life of nations was stopped cold.

I have had other similar experiences — on Durga’s day, for instance, when Sri Aurobindo was still here (you know, that’s the day when Durga masters an asura; she doesn’t kill him, she masters him). Well, each year one particular type of thing was undermined (and my experiences were never mental: the experience would suddenly come, and AFTERWARDS I would realize it was Durga’s day), and each time I used to tell Sri Aurobindo, “Look — today this (or that) thing has been cut off at the roots.” That’s how it works with the adverse forces — yes, like something being uprooted from the world. Whatever has already spread out keeps going and follows its karma, but the SOURCE is dried up. That’s also what happened (it was in 1904, I believe) when the Asura of Consciousness and Darkness made his surrender and was converted; he told me, “I have millions and millions of emanations, and these will keep on living, but their source has now run dry.” [This seems to refer to the being Mother endowed with a body (in 1906, at Tlemcen), and who went to set up the revolution in China.] How much time will it take to exhaust it all?… We can’t say, but the source has dried up and that is something extremely important. In 1920, that terror was trying to spread all over the world and to become really catastrophic; and then in my inner vision I could see that a whole movement had dried up at its source. This means that little by little, little by little, little by little… the karma is being exhausted.[22]

Unfinished tale

We may note, however. that the slaying of the demon does not destroy the consciousness that stands behind it. By its very nature, consciousness, like energy, cannot be destroyed. It can take new forms, undergo a change or it can be reabsorbed into its Source. This is where we see Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga taking a giant leap over tradition, wherein, he is not content with the slaying of a demon or many demons but by their conversion or dissolution for good. But for this, not only humans but even the gods must collaborate. It is a new game plan, the unique and ultimate divine strategy which the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have attempted. In the course of this new strategy, even the gods must surrender to the Supreme to allow the New Force, the New Consciousness to work unhindered by their cosmic action. Rather, they need to now align with this New Consciousness and help the process of transformation. This is what is revealed in the following words of the Mother:

I had a very interesting experience — it was last year or the year before, I don’t recall, but after I retired to my room upstairs… You know that during pujas these goddesses come all the time — they don’t enter the body and tie themselves to it, but they do come and manifest. Well, this time — I think it must have been for last year’s puja — Durga came (she always arrives a few days in advance and remains in the atmosphere; she is present, like this — gesture as if Durga were walking up and down with Mother). I was in touch with her during my meditations upstairs, and this new Power in the body was in me then as it is in me now, and… (how to put it?) I made her participate in this concept of surrender. What an experience she had, mon petit! An extraordinary experience of the joy of being connected with That. And she declared, ‘From now on, I am a bhakta of the Lord.’

It was beautiful.

This formidable Power, you see — a universal Power, an eternal and formidable Power — well, she had never had such an experience before, she had only experienced her OWN power. She was used to receiving and obeying Commands, but in an automatic way. Then all at once, she felt the Ecstasy of being a conscious instrument.

Truly… it was truly beautiful.[23]

Let us conclude with a wonderful description of the awakening of this Divine Shakti in man revealed in Savitri, which is going to open the doors to an inevitable divine destiny bequeathed to man since his heart first dared death and suffered life. It is this that is symbolised in the legend of Durga, a truth that we can relive within us by undergoing the intended transformation by opening to Her Divine Force, Shakti, and undergoing the desired transformation:

In its deep lotus home her being sat
As if on concentration’s marble seat,
Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds
To make this earthly tenement her house.
As in a flash from a supernal light,
A living image of the original Power,
A face, a form came down into her heart
And made of it its temple and pure abode.
But when its feet had touched the quivering bloom,
A mighty movement rocked the inner space
As if a world were shaken and found its soul:
Out of the Inconscient’s soulless mindless night
A flaming Serpent rose released from sleep.
It rose billowing its coils and stood erect
And climbing mightily, stormily on its way
It touched her centres with its flaming mouth;
As if a fiery kiss had broken their sleep,
They bloomed and laughed surcharged with light and bliss.
Then at the crown it joined the Eternal’s space.
In the flower of the head, in the flower of Matter’s base,
In each divine stronghold and Nature-knot
It held together the mystic stream which joins
The viewless summits with the unseen depths,
The string of forts that make the frail defence
Safeguarding us against the enormous world,
Our lines of self-expression in its Vast.
An image sat of the original Power
Wearing the mighty Mother’s form and face.
Armed, bearer of the weapon and the sign
Whose occult might no magic can imitate,
Manifold yet one she sat, a guardian force:
A saviour gesture stretched her lifted arm,
And symbol of some native cosmic strength,
A sacred beast lay prone below her feet,
A silent flame-eyed mass of living force.
All underwent a high celestial change:
Breaking the black Inconscient’s blind mute wall,
Effacing the circles of the Ignorance,
Powers and divinities burst flaming forth;
Each part of the being trembling with delight
Lay overwhelmed with tides of happiness
And saw her hand in every circumstance
And felt her touch in every limb and cell….
A secret soul behind supporting all
Is master and witness of our ignorant life,
Admits the Person’s look and Nature’s role.
But once the hidden doors are flung apart
Then the veiled king steps out in Nature’s front;
A Light comes down into the Ignorance,
Its heavy painful knot loosens its grasp:
The mind becomes a mastered instrument
And life a hue and figure of the soul.
All happily grows towards knowledge and towards bliss.
A divine Puissance then takes Nature’s place
And pushes the movements of our body and mind;
Possessor of our passionate hopes and dreams,
The beloved despot of our thoughts and acts,
She streams into us with her unbound force,
Into mortal limbs the Immortal’s rapture and power.
An inner law of beauty shapes our lives;
Our words become the natural speech of Truth,
Each thought is a ripple on a sea of Light.
Then sin and virtue leave the cosmic lists;
They struggle no more in our delivered hearts:
Our acts chime with God’s simple natural good
Or serve the rule of a supernal Right.
All moods unlovely, evil and untrue
Forsake their stations in fierce disarray
And hide their shame in the subconscient’s dusk.
Then lifts the mind a cry of victory:
“O soul, my soul, we have created Heaven,
Within we have found the kingdom here of God,
His fortress built in a loud ignorant world.
Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light,
We have turned space into a gulf of peace
And made the body a Capitol of bliss.
What more, what more, if more must still be done?”
In the slow process of the evolving spirit,
In the brief stade between a death and birth
A first perfection’s stage is reached at last;
Out of the wood and stone of our nature’s stuff
A temple is shaped where the high gods could live.
Even if the struggling world is left outside
One man’s perfection still can save the world.
There is won a new proximity to the skies,
A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,
A deep concordat between Truth and Life:
A camp of God is pitched in human time.[24]

CHAPTER 8
Ganga: Purifying Stream

Who is not aware of Ganga, the mighty river flowing from the Himalayas in the north to the Bay of Bengal in India’s east? She is not just a life-giving river but one that has been the cradle of the ancient Indian civilisation. She has nourished not only man’s thirst for life but also, more importantly, man’s thirst for freedom from ignorance, moksha, as is called in India. While the geographical course and the major cities that have grown around her like pilgrim spots are rather well known, what is lesser known is the story of her birth and descent upon earth. Of course, each of the rivers has its own fascinating tale in India but none is so inspiring and as deeply symbolic as that of the river Ganga.

The story goes that once the sage Narad was travelling through worlds when he noticed some deformed beings that were in a state of distress. On enquiry, they revealed that they were Gandharvas, the celestial musicians whose sound body was being deformed by human beings through the disharmony of speech and sound. When asked for the remedy they explained that if Shiva, the eternal musician, could dance and sing for them once then they would grow harmonious and beautiful again. Narad, the divine messenger, carried their prayer to the mighty Lord Shiva, Nataraja, the king of dancers. Shiva, who was easily pleased and granted boons readily, agreed, provided the other two gods of the trinity would come as an audience. The stage was set and Shiva started his majestic dance witnessed by the gods. Such was the beauty of his dance that Vishnu, the guardian of the Divine Law, felt overwhelmed by emotions that took the form of a purifying stream of energy. It was something new emerging from Vishnu’s heart. Lord Brahma, who was always looking for new elements for creation gathered this stream of cleansing energy and kept it in his kamandalu. The Gandharvas’ bodies were then restored but the story of Ganga is yet to unfold.

While Ganga was safe with Brahma in the high heavens, another drama was unfolding upon earth. Another great king of the Ikshvaku clan is Sagara Chakrvarthi who paved the way for the arrival of the river Ganga from Heaven to earth. Sagara performed the Aswamedha yajna to rule over all domains and included them as part of one kingdom. The Aswamedha yajna was a means for the kings to become emperors. Yet, this conquest was a yajna and the effort was to extend the kingdom without war. Those who accepted the hegemony of the king performing the yajna were an equal part of his kingdom (hence the yajna) and had, henceforth, an equal share in everything that the king had! Those who did not accept it had to fight. Sagar too made all arrangements and sent out the horse to see if anyone would challenge his authority by capturing it and preventing its progress going forward. Indra, the Lord of Heaven, was in jitters on knowing this and decided to thwart the yajna in some way or another! He finally stole King Sagara’s horse and left it at the ashram of sage Kapila in Patala Loka — the nether world! Sagara waited for a long time but the horse did not come back as expected. Greatly worried at the non-arrival of the horse, Sagara deputed his sixty thousand sons to go in search of it and bring it back. They went to all the four corners of the world in search of the horse but in vain.

Unrelenting, the sons of Sagara dug up the earth to see if the horse could be found in Patala Loka. They discerned a cave in the northwest and a sage sitting in deep samadhi, totally oblivious of his surroundings. To their pleasant surprise, they saw the horse that they had been tirelessly in pursuit of! The horse was safe and secure. Though valiant and indefatigable, they puffed up with ego, pride and arrogance. They mistook the sage for a thief who had stolen the horse! In their ignorance and momentary emotion, they approached the sage to attack him. The sage was Kapila, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu himself! The moment he opened his eyes, all the sixty thousand sons of Sagara were reduced to a heap of ashes by virtue of the tremendous power of his tapas. King Sagara came to know of this catastrophic news and grieved deeply. The Aswamedha yajna had to be continued and completed.

King Sagara was in a dilemma. He had no other alternative but to depute, once again, his grandson Ansuman, whom he loved very dearly. Well behaved and obedient, he followed the footsteps and the path taken by his predecessors and came to the same cave where the sage was in penance. Unlike his predecessors, he was able to recognise the greatness of the sage and his Avatara. He praised sage Kapila as the incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the protector of the universe who is manifest in all creatures and transcends all maya or illusion. He has no beginning, middle or end. He narrated how wrong his predecessors were in trying to attack him, mentioned the mahayajna being performed by king Sagara and requested sage Kapila for his permission to take back the horse. Impressed by the humility and wisdom of prince Ansuman, sage Kapila blessed him and asked him to take back the horse for the successful completion of the yajna. The yajna was then completed without hindrance.

Sage Kapila informed Ansuman that his predecessors who were reduced to ashes would reach pitru loka if the river Ganges ran over them. King Sagara tried to direct the river to earth but failed. Meanwhile, Ansuman was crowned and he too performed penance to bring Ganga to earth. He too failed! It was the indomitable will and performance of Bhagiratha that brought the Ganga to earth. He performed severe tapas and through the grace of Lord Shiva and Vishnu was able to bring river Mandakini and river Ganga, to earth and send his predecessors to pitru loka. The descent took place with tremendous force and none else but Shiva had to hold her in his locks to release the waters slowly towards earth. It is believed that the waters of river Ganga filled the great pits dug by the sixty thousand sons of King Sagara and formed the seas. Hence the sea is called sagara.

This is the story of river Ganga but it has deep ramifications. To begin with, it shows how earthly events influence the other domains and vice versa. All are part of a single plan. Next, the story reveals to us the subtle truth about Ganga. She is the result of the purified emotions that arose in the heart of Vishnu on watching the dance of Shiva. Thus, an effervescence of purified emotion that rises within us in response to the rhythms of the eternal dancer is not only capable of creating things anew but also of purifying us and releasing us from the bonds of ignorance. If we look at the course of Ganga, she starts as drops of crystallised Grace from the abode of Shiva and travels towards the feet of Dakshineswar Kali in the great wide expanse of the coast of Bengal! Ganga is also the meeting point of the trinity of the Indian pantheon. Her birth was a product of Shiva’s dance, through the emotions that arose in Vishnu’s heart and she is kept with Brahma as a powerful element of creation! She is also the unifying power that links earth and the beyond. She goes right to the subconscient regions known as patal-ganga, thereby linking the superconscient with the subconscient regions of our being. It also shows that the subconscient parts that contain ghosts of our past continue to exist in some way, but can only be conquered by the descending force of the Divine from above. Does the story anticipate the Supramental manifestation? We cannot say. But it does indicate the process of all change which must begin from within, moving outwards and from above, moving downwards. And more importantly, a new sense of moksha and purity emerges from this story. She is the one who provides liberation by purifying our being. In one sense, we are free beings deep within. Yet, through the cycles of Time, we gather dust and mud that cover our earthly nature. When this is cleansed by the purifying streams of Divine Grace, we automatically discover our true freedom. Suddhi gives mukti. Equally, we may say that true mukti is not in our outer marks or outer purifications but lies within. When we are cleansed from within and like the children of Sagar freed from the phantoms of the past, from arrogance, vanity and restless energies that have entered the subconscient regions, it is then that we are truly freed.

These truths, among others, are concealed in this interesting story of Ganga. The very course of Ganga is so symbolic. She runs as a garland across the neck and chest of India. Gomukh literally means the Mouth of Light. Haridwar is the doorway of the Lord. Sangam is the meeting point where the three energies flowing through our subtle bodies meet. Kashi is where we go beyond death and Dakshineswar, where it falls into the ocean, signifies the Feet of the Divine Mother. Perhaps the author of this wonderful tale was trying to convey deeply occult ideas, like many other ancient stories of India have. While we have preserved stories, we have lost their meanings. The present movement of cleaning the Ganges, an urgent necessity, of course, may well be indicative of the need of cleaning the mind, heart and life of all dross and liberating the truths we have lost in our subconscient parts. Cleansing the body is no doubt important for physical health but cleansing our mind, heart and life is as important and even more so for our psychological and spiritual health.

CHAPTER 9
Radha: Embodiment of Perfect Surrender in Love

Shiva and Parvati, Krishna and Radha are often considered in Indian Hindu thought as ideal couples, uniting the best of the masculine with the best of the feminine. They are the templates or archetypes of what love could be or should be. While the love of Shiva and Parvati is the epitome of conjugal love, the love of Radha and Krishna is regarded as the epitome of a love that never consummated itself through marriage. And yet their union is regarded as complete as can be. In its origin, the masculine and the feminine aspects are regarded as two aspects of a single Reality, thereby resolving the mutual antagonism and inequality that is a misunderstanding of the relationship between these two sides that One Existence created.

The masculine aspect is regarded as the passive side; it is the aspect that contains within itself the Light of Truth in its unmanifest state. The feminine represents the power that receives and manifests this truth in its manifold forms. This ideal relation was often compared to that of the earth and the sky. The sky surrounds the earth on all sides and yet is distant and aloof at one level. The masculine element is prone to live more in the mind, in the world of ideas. The earth receives the outpourings of the sky, his love for her, through sunshine and rain, turns it into seasons, colours and flowers and the manifold love for all her creatures that take shelter in her. Yet, secretly she longs always for the sky and knows that without him she would not even come into existence. The sky too longs for earth since he knows that without her power of conception and organisation, there would be no life, no manifestation and all will exist only in some vain sound and fury, a blaze that burns rather than creates.

It is because the earth longs for the heights that her creatures always long to reach beyond the skies, which translates into progress, seeking and longing. And it is because the sky too loves the earth that the gods, including the Divine Himself, takes birth on earth to touch and redeem it from its fallen state, to lift it little by little, nearer to the Divine Idea that she carries within her heart. The seed of this Divine Idea, indeed the Divine Himself, is in the heart of all creatures.

It is from the heart, therefore, that the feminine operates. It is from here that she derives her strength and the wisdom needed for her work. It is this relationship between the masculine and feminine aspects of the One that is the basis of gender in creation. Whatever is stable and unmoving is generally considered masculine. Whatever is in motion is generally considered feminine. The first is Purusha or the Soul in humans. The second is Prakriti or Nature which is the manifesting power of the Purusha. At their highest, the two become Iswara and Shakti. The bridge between the two is the fire of aspiration which is present in all elements of creation. It is neither masculine nor feminine, rather contains both within itself. Its light is masculine, its warmth feminine, its power to uplift and purify, to create and devour all things is feminine. The masculine is like a witness presence, an ideative mentality, whereas the feminine is the one who actually executes all these ideas in terms of real-time and space.

All the various pairs of gods represent this dual reality but the ones who embody it most are Radha and Krishna as well as Shiva and Parvati.

In the story of Radha and Krishna, we see this ideal love remain an unfulfilled dream and yet love fulfils itself in and through Radha. Krishna’s divine consort must stay away from him. And yet Radha’s love remains imprinted in the memory of the race, inspiring many sages and saints, showing them the way to Krishna through love, devotion, faith and surrender. The different consorts of Krishna are the different forms that this feminine energy takes in its ascension. But it is only Radha who accompanies him right from the most material world to the highest world of Bliss. What then is this love that can abandon itself so completely with utter surrender and find her beloved in each and every movement of her being?

An interesting thing about this relationship is that it is free of fear and shame. Radha goes running to the call of Krishna’s flute, be it the hot summer noon or a wintery night. The village folks call her mad; some even cast aspersions on her. But no fear of social ostracisation deters her; such is her love and her self-giving, unrestrained, unconditional.

In an interesting episode, Sri Krishna plays a prank on the gopis. While they are down in the waters of Yamuna bathing, Sri Krishna takes away their robes left by the riverside. When the gopis realise this they plead with him to give it back. Sri Krishna insists that they come and take it from him. While some of the gopis hesitate, Radha is simply ready to walk up at the bid of Sri Krishna’s command. The story is deeply allegorical. The robe that Sri Krishna takes away from the gopis is the robe of virtuosity. More often than not our virtuosity is simply a social conformity. We do certain ‘good things’ to avoid shame and guilt. Or it is a garb that we wear to ‘look good’ in the eyes of others. Last of all, it is sometimes simply a cover that we hang over our nature inadvertently. But our true nature is pure and carries in it a holy innocence like that of a child until social conventions and notions come in and corrupt it. Whatever it is, the story is not only a reflection of what we are but more importantly how we should approach the Divine. This should occur just as we are, without any garb of vanity or even righteousness, since nothing can remain hidden from his eyes. And only the soul that is ready to give itself so completely to the Divine is the soul that finds and receives him in utter integrality as well as in absoluteness.

Indian mystics have always seen the human soul’s love for the Divine in the highest regard.

The legend of Radha is a living example of this. Only utter purity can be this free and Radha’s being is indeed purest of the pure. Her purity is neither presumptuous nor full of the pride of holiness. It is neither the ‘purity’ of following social norms nor one of following religious or moral conventions. It is natural, spontaneous and expresses itself in wanting what Sri Krishna, the embodied Divine wants. It is a state of perfect plasticity and complete surrender of one’s entire being to the Divine. That is why Radha is never demanding nor jealous, nay, does she go a step further. She showers extra love on those gopis whom Sri Krishna loves and who are closer to him. It is said that she got married to a nobleman but her love for Sri Krishna remained undiminished even while she fulfilled all her duties towards all those who came into her life, so much so that none had any complaints and all who came near her felt uplifted and healed by the sheer radiance of the love in her being.

It is indeed the most sublime of all stories of love. Such is the perfection of love in Radha’s being that some historians doubt whether or not there ever existed a woman by her name. Whether or not the historical figure of Radha is true, Radha is a fact of our soul, an inner fact, more real to those who have an inner life. Her ‘Reality’ continues to inspire many and serves as a beacon of light for the soul’s turning to the Divine. She indeed symbolises the highest feminine force of love, for indeed only a woman can love, surrender and give herself with such an absoluteness, so completely, identifying with the object of her love so perfectly that till date, it is she and none of the other queens, who is remembered as the eternal consort of Sri Krishna, Radhe Krishna, Radha Krishna.

Ordinarily, love is punctuated with feelings of despair and separation, pride and revolt, joy when the lover is present and grudge, sorrow and complaint the lover is absent. This is not the case with Radha. Such is Radha’s love for Krishna that she does not feel his absence even when Sri Krishna leaves his body. She identifies with him to such an interchangeable extent that she herself becomes full of Krishna, Krishnamaya. This is the utmost possibility of love, not just the physical union which is only an imperfect symbol, but the union of one soul with another, of one being with another such that one becomes inseparable with one’s loved one. This love goes beyond the attachments that arise out of the ego that loves for its own sake. But Radha loves for the sake of her lover and beloved and hence, her love epitomises the highest form of love that breaks all barriers and limits within which the force of love is penned.

Sixteen thousand wives of Krishna

The first and the shorter one is the betrothal of Sri Krishna with the sixteen thousand women who are held captive by the demon king of the netherworld, the thousand-armed Narakasura.

The captive women cry to Sri Krishna for help and Sri Krishna does arrive indeed, as he responds to every call. In this battle with Narakasura, he is accompanied by Sathyabhama. A fierce battle ensues wherein Narakasura dies and all the captive women are released who then choose Krishna as their husband. The story is symbolic of the energies of the underworld, the dark underbelly, Narak, that are released and reunited with Sri Krishna. These energies or women, it is said, were the women who experienced grief during Rama’s conquest of Lanka. They were the demon-wives or demonesses who asked Rama to marry them since their demon husbands lay dead. But Rama could not consent as his present incarnation was a limited one. He embodied the sattwic mode, and the sattwic mode by its very nature cannot be wedded to the dark and demoniac. But Sri Krishna brings light from beyond the sattwic mind. His light can take in, reassimilate and reabsorb the fallen energies. He can rescue them from hell and its denizens where they are trapped. We see a very similar story in the Vedas in the legend of Agastya Rishi and Angirasa Rishi rescuing the ‘cows’ (Gou means light) from the caves of the Panis, Dasyus and Vritras (the demoniac forces residing in the subconscient caves below patala). This legend, therefore, symbolises the uplifting of nature from a dark and demoniac state to a bright and luminous one by changing their allegiance from the lower to the higher. It gives us the key to change nature. It is not enough that we change the surfaces of life and manipulate external behaviour. As long as we fundamentally owe our allegiance to the cult of the Asura and are moved by the idea that he embodies and manifests, then regardless of our religious beliefs and practices we remain captive to the subconscient darkness. However, the day we begin to seek freedom and cry to the Lord to deliver us, to deliver our fallen nature from captivity to the dark Asuric worlds and the darknet of forces, the change begins. A shift takes place as we shift our allegiance from the King of Darkness to the Lord of Light (Gopal). The Lord does come and to assist him in battle there comes an incarnation of mother earth, Bhoodevi, who is Satyabhama. This battle is fought upon earth or rather in the material field. There even is a moment when the Asura seems victorious as he uses the powers he has accumulated from the past. But in the next moment he is killed with the help of Satyabhama. Indeed, darkness is the greatest before dawn.

As an interesting aside to the aforementioned legend of Narakasura, while returning from this battle Satyabhama requests Sri Krishna if he can carry the heavenly Parijat tree home. The gods are caught in a fix, especially Sachi. This will make men breathe the atmosphere of the gods. A battle ensues but this time the opponents are the gods themselves with Indra as their leader. They lose, as was inevitable, and the Parijat tree that blossoms at night, also known as the tree of aspiration, is planted on earth. The symbolism here is clear. The gods do not want man to grow in aspiration since it would mean that they would become not only equal to the gods but actually unite with the Supreme Himself. Another aspect of the story is that the tree of aspiration blossoms only at night and when we look at the ground where the flowers fall, we find that it looks as though it is covered with flame all over. In the night of ignorance, it is the flame of aspiration that must be lit. It is no longer needed when the sun shines, but until then, it is this flame that leads our journey.

CHAPTER 10
Sati and Parvati: Consorts of Shiva

Of all the gods in the Hindu tradition, the two that are prominent and captivating, each in their own way, are the divine personalities of Sri Krishna and Shiva. Sri Krishna is the supreme attractor of our souls. He attracts through sweetness and Ananda but he also puts forth aspects of knowledge and power to the world in light of the battle through the ages between the powers of light and darkness, good and evil. Although easy to be attracted to, Sri Krishna is hard to please. He is exacting and takes the soul towards the divine perfection and fullness intended in nature. That is why he is described as having all the divine qualities needed for earthly perfection and the divine embodiment within him.

Shiva stands at the other end. He too is mighty and majestic, but in the world-play he has chosen the dreadful task of destroying all that stands in the way of the world’s forward evolutionary march.

Not fullness but emptiness is his sign. The lord of ascetics is worshipped by the gods and the Titans, the Sage and the Sinner, the virtuous and the wicked alike. Though his personality is devoid of “Qualities” as he ever dwells in the silence of the “Void” that we find on the high peaks of nature, Kailash, love is what lies in the heart of this silence and its core, one that is easy to please and willing to grant any boon to a seeker, a might that if aroused can destroy universes by their footfall. There is, in this might, a deep creative passion whose rhythmic beats bring life, vigour, peace, strength and hope to the world’s jarring hearts. And this love makes no distinction whatsoever between the virtuous Saint and the wicked Asura. Whosoever surrenders gets a response; whoever trusts finds his trust justified. As Sri Krishna puts it so beautifully in the Gita: “A leaf, a flower, a fruit, a drop of water: whatsoever the devotee offers, the divine rejoices in it.”^[25]

Indeed, Shiva and Krishna are a single god or rather two sides of godhead. But who then are Parvati, Uma, the daughter of the mountains, Haimvati? Parvati is the heart of Shiva, his love and beneficence, his strength and power. In the Hindu conception, a woman is Shakti, the manifesting power that is there in everything and every being. It is Shakti that gives form to the being of the Purusha and it is Shakti that manifests the potentialities of the Purusha. Without Shakti, Shiva would be shava^[26], the self-absorbed trance of matter. The relation between these two aspects of one reality is comparable to that of the sun and the light and heat in it, the flower and its fragrance, and so forth. But it is rare to achieve such perfect poise between these two sides.

Hindu thought has however conceived of some ideal couples and Shiva and Parvati, Uma — Maheswar are ideal examples. It is through them that the concept of Ardhanarishwaran, symbolically represented in the Shivalinga that the tantriks have worshipped through the ages, has come into being. In essence, it means the most perfect union of the two seemingly opposite principles, soul and nature, right down to the material level. When the soul is in perfect possession of its nature and enjoys it, extending itself into the world through it, and when nature is in a state of complete surrender to the soul, focussed in its aspiration, given to it completely; it is then that we have the perfect dance of creation. Therefore, it is only when Shiva and Sri Krishna are empowered by Parvati and Radha that they can dance with perfect rhythm and measure leading to creation.

There is another interesting side to this theme of a perfect couple. Since all power, even the power of perfection comes from the woman or the feminine principle, the major portion of the work relies on her. When she is able to engage the soul completely, when she is able to identify with him fully, she becomes Sati, a woman full of truth. So much so that she follows the soul in every sphere and on every plane as an inseparable duo. It is perhaps from this idea that there originated, much later in Hindu tradition the practice of Sati, where a woman literally followed the footsteps of a husband after his death. In its modern version, it is attributed to the brave queen of Chittor, Rani Padmini and her companions who would rather burn themselves in the fire than lose their chastity to Sultan Allaudin Khilji and his hordes who were out to conquer Chittor at any cost, even deception, just to possess the beautiful queen. Like many traditions, it was later distorted and even perverted, its deep kernel of truth lost amidst enforced customs and blind ritual ceremonies. But that deep truth is still preserved in the immortal legend of Shiva and his two consorts, Sati and Parvati.

Story of Sati

Sati is an incarnation of the Divine Mother in times left far behind. She is the Shakti of Shiva who has gone into the creation as the wisdom and force that work from behind and becomes so completely identified with material nature that she has forgotten her very origin. It is because of her origin of being the divine consort of Shiva that she is always attracted to him in some way. Shiva too feels the same attraction and he too is powerless without Sati. She has to be brought back to Shiva and restored for creation to function smoothly. It is for this purpose that the gods conspire and she is born to Daksha Prajapati, one of the main governing powers that govern this world. He is a Prajapati, the manager of the worlds who sets the rules and laws that would govern it, and hence wields great power. He builds the form and the norm. There is, however, a great grudge that he carries against Shiva since he believes that the mighty god has insulted his father Brahma. Destiny, however, unmasks that Daksha’s daughter Sati has chosen Shiva as her master and beloved despite Daksha’s wishes to the contrary. The unhappiness of Daksha can be well understood if we see that the marriage of form with the formless essence of the spirit (Shiva) would mean that one day the form by the very touch of the spirit will grow beyond the power, control and the kingdom of Daksha. The kingdom of forms is bound by certain rules and norms. Shiva, on the other hand, obeys no rule. He lives in infinite freedom. The world of Daksha Prajapati and the domain of Shiva cannot come together according to him. But since his denial of Shiva does not work, he decides to humiliate and belittle him. So, in one of the yajnas that Daksha holds from time to time for the purpose of creation, he invites all the gods except Shiva; he invites his daughter Sati as well, who herself is a goddess. Sati is caught in a dilemma. On one hand is the progenitor who has given her material birth and endowed her with shape and form. On the other side is Shiva, her lord and soul without whom her very existence has no meaning. Hoping to reconcile her father, she goes to him without Shiva. But all her efforts to bring her father to reconcile with Shiva fail. Not only that, he goes so far as to refuse to give to Shiva his share of the offerings that are distributed after the yajna. This infuriates Sati and by the power of tapasya she invokes the fire from within her, plunges into it and gives up her life.

Meanwhile, Shiva and his ganas, the attendants that surround and keep a vigil over his abode, hear of this calamity. They rush out and destroy the yajna and Daksha. Daksha is beheaded and his slain body lies beside his daughter. The slaying of Daksha, the destruction of creation and its functioning is no ordinary event. The gods are naturally worried as they are the cosmic powers that guard creation. So they pray to Shiva to help save the situation. The ever-merciful Shiva agrees but on the condition that a head is to be found so that it can be affixed to the trunk of Daksha. A hustle and bustle follows and the attendants get the head of an animal, a goat. Now it so happens that the head is placed in a way that it faces backward, thus, though Daksha is revived, he can only keep looking backward.

The story is quite symbolic in that during moments of transition old forms are destroyed because the spirit that breathed into them has passed away. The new is yet to emerge. When men try to revive the old form without reviving the spirit, society retrogresses even though it believes it is advancing.

Meanwhile, Shiva moves through the different dimensions of Space with the Sati’s corpse, carrying on his shoulders the grief of a world that will not see the ideal relation of soul and form again. As Shiva moves through the borders of time and space, Vishnu, the preserver, follows him and relieves Shiva of the burden that he carried bit by bit. For unless the soul is relieved of its coverings of ignorance, it cannot take a new form again. Shiva must leave the dead form behind and move on to his abode and plunge himself into the immobile trance of endless peace.

But all is not wasted. Nothing is really destroyed completely. The body of Sati still holds the power it received through its contact with Shiva, the Supreme Soul. The different parts of the body fell on different parts of the earth. Legend has it that the parts of her body that have fallen are shakti sthala or power-spots on earth. In India, these places are regarded as sacred pilgrimages since Sati’s body continues to infuse her love for Shiva into the very body of earth, into matter itself, and through this communion, she communicates the power of the relationship between nature and soul, the feminine and the masculine principles, between form and spirit.

Sati reborn as Parvati

This indeed is the first part of the legend. But what follows is something very beautiful. The death of Sati, though symbolic at one level, reads like a tragedy of love that afflicts even a god as great as Shiva. But on a closer reading its symbolism becomes clear. The father of Sati is the old consciousness that wants love and life to move according to certain rules ordained by him. He represents the law of the mind, the old consciousness. Shiva, however, represents the law of Freedom, the law of Truth. This greater law does not act according to our mental ideas and concepts which is what makes it difficult for the mind-centred humanity to understand the ways of God. It rather acts according to a deeper vision of Truth in all its integrality.

In that vision, Sati must die since she holds within her the Divine Truth and yet she wears the veil of ignorance. She is the Divine Mother who has limited herself by penning Her infinite Force within the boundaries of ignorance. Thus, what strikes as a tragedy at first glance seems to be the one golden chance for the old nature to assume a greater consciousness. Our nature too must rise to the consciousness of the Divine whom we adore. That is only possible through tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour. The death of Sati is the beginning of a greater life. It is a tragedy in appearance but not in its eventuality. Death is not the end of our walk. The soul’s aspiration returns and eventually fulfils itself, shaping our unborn destiny. Sati dies so that she may be reborn as Parvati and resume the thread of her unfinished curve of destiny. Sati’s hopes and aspirations are fulfilled by Parvati.

Parvati’s tapasya

All is not lost with death. Sati is reborn as Parvati and her heart’s love, her soul’s aspiration returns in a new body and mind. Rebirth, in Indian thought, is a means to complete and fulfil the unfinished curves of our destiny. Sati too has returned to fulfil her destiny that requires her to serve her love for Shiva. She is his Shakti after all and hence, is destined to be with him. Yet, it is seldom that such destinies are fulfilled in one lifetime. Here we must understand the subtle distinction between events and destiny or fate and destiny. In the course of many lifetimes, we meet many events and circumstances that are the workings of fate within us. But these events only make for the ever-changing scenario of our lives. Our destiny, however, does not comprise these events that occur on our journey, but the destination that our soul has chosen. This destiny is engraved in our soul and is witnessed in the silent aspiration that we carry deep within us. It is beyond the wishes and hopes of life, beyond what we ignorantly term as good and evil, pleasant and painful. Our true destiny fulfils itself through both of these seemingly opposite pairs. This is what we see in Parvati. The apparent tragedy of her life as Sati is only the prelude of a greater theme. The tragedy was only the preface; the full story was yet to be told. That story is the story of love, the story of strength, the story of truth, harmony and delight. Sati’s pain was the beginning; the end is Parvati’s delight through the final union of love.

Parvati is born to Himavan, the king of the Himalayas, to fulfil this higher destiny. Parvati being born to Himavan would only mean that she embodies in herself the power of the mountains. That is why she is also referred to as Haimvati, one who is full of the qualities of the snow-clad summits, its majesty, purity, strength, austerity, high and unwavering in concentration, one-pointed aspiration, the power of immobility, the ability to stand alone — in short, she embodies all the qualities needed for tapasya. Like the great and majestic mountains hold sweet streams within them, so too behind her strong exterior, is a heart of tremendous love whose streams rejuvenate the earth that lies prostrate at her feet. Her purity is such that even with the mere washing of her skin, a wise and sweet god, Lord Ganesha, is born. Not only does Ganesha guard the gates that separate our material nature from the subtle world where Parvati dwells, he also removes the material obstacles as the chief presiding deity over material energies as Vighnesh. Yet, he too must bow down to Shiva, the eternal who is free to move as he wills and where he wills. It is this deep truth that is reflected in the symbolic tale of Ganesha stopping Shiva from entering the home of Parvati resulting in Shiva beheading him and then at the request of Parvati replacing it with an elephant’s head. Thus Ganesha, originally only Parvati’s creation, becomes now a dual creation, Shiva shaping his head while Parvati the rest of his body. It is he who now guards the doors that shield our material nature from the subtle worlds and embodies the power and knowledge to remove obstacles.

Slaying of Kama

It is said that Parvati was one-pointed in her love and concentration towards Shiva since birth. But Shiva was lost in his trance of Immobility and the liberating Peace. Meanwhile, the earth was being run over by demons and their menacing energies reached even the heavens. One particular demon king Tarakasura had become particularly powerful. Armed with all kinds of boons and powers, he could only be destroyed by Shiva’s child. The gods were in a quandary. Who would awaken Shiva from his trance and run the risk of destruction? Who would persuade him to marry and have a progeny? It was then that Kamadeva, the god of vital love who awakens desire and attraction, agreed to try his luck. He tried everything that he could within his powers, from changing the cold austere Kailash with the bloom of spring, filling the abode with beautifully scented flowers and so on but Shiva was unmoved. As a final attempt, he summoned all the occult forces that gave birth to him and hurled it at Shiva’s heart. The result is obvious; Shiva’s heart is full of the fire of tapasya. The entire body of Kamadeva is burnt as Shiva opens his inner eye to see the cause of this impertinence. It is then that Kamadeva’s consort Rati pleads Shiva’s compassion and the god, easy to melt and generous to a default, tells her that he has only destroyed the form and visible shape of the god of love, not his essence. None can destroy the essence, especially Love, which is the essence of creation itself. He assures her that in the time to come, Kamadeva will be born in a new form, as the grandson of Lord Krishna, the Avatara. It is then that Kamadeva’s being will be redeemed and given back to Rati.

Once again, the symbolism of the story is deep and clear. For finding the perfect partner and mate, the soul mate as it is commonly understood, the first condition is a complete conquest over sexual desire. The story, therefore, also hints at how it is possible for a couple to experience the highest joy of marital union, even beget a child born for a great purpose, if they can conquer and master the force of lust. It is only when we have slain lust within us that the full power of the energy of Love can emerge and when this energy brings together the soul and nature in a perfect union then the mighty and victorious force of Kartikeya is born. Ganesha represents the Knowledge aspect of the great Goddess, and Kartikeya represents the Power aspect.

Shiva comes out of his trance and the gods pray to him to help with their proposal to unite with Parvati (who is none other than Sati reborn) and have a progeny. Shiva agrees but first, he must ascertain that Parvati has arrived at that state of one-pointedness in love. Therefore, the great god appears before Parvati in the form of a mendicant and tries to dissuade the daughter of the mountains from seeking Shiva, describing him as ‘void of qualities’, a beggar, an orphan, living in the most difficult terrain and surrounded by all kinds of beings, many of whom are uncouth and unholy. Parvati beautifully replies, “Yes, he is void of qualities for he is beyond them. He is a beggar for he lives freely and largely and yet owns nothing nor holds anything as his possession yet all things belong to him. He lives in difficult terrains for he is the lord of tapasya and shows the way to gather strength and force through austerity and askesis. And yes, he is even surrounded by the uncouth and the unholy for he is equal to all, partial to none and the sovereign refuge of all beings, even the most fallen. He is an orphan since he is self-born and indeed the supreme father of all.

Shiva is happy. Truly, this is the being of Sati who is reborn as Parvati. He in turn gives himself completely and freely to Parvati, his ideal consort. Together, the divine couple begets Kartikeya (Lord Murugan as he is known in South India) and the demon is destroyed.

The stories of Sati and Parvati, the twin consorts of Lord Shiva are indeed fascinating and enigmatic tales. They are, in truth, one, not temporally nor physically but psychologically and spiritually, since Parvati is none other than Sati reborn after her act of sacrificial immolation in the fire of yajna.

Sati is the daughter of Daksha Prajapati who, as the name suggests, was the foremost of powers that contributed to the work of creation. In Indian mythologies, these powers are personified not simply for the ease of communication through imagery but also because the Indian seers always saw these two aspects, the impersonal and the personal as two sides of one reality. Just as Light can be seen as waves or particles depending upon the stance of the observer, similarly, these forces and energies of physical and other subtle worlds can be experienced and contacted as impersonal forces or personal beings. Both are true but the aspect of personality adds a special dimension to it since it helps us to relate not just as an abstract symbol but as a living reality.

Thus, Sati is born to Daksha. As she comes of age, her mind and heart are fixed upon Shiva whom she is able to please with her tapasya. Now if we take a closer look at the legend, the attraction of Shiva and Sati is the attraction of earth, nature and the heavens. It is the attraction of Spirit and Matter since it is the power of the Spirit that has become Matter. This mutual attraction shows itself in many ways such as man’s constant search for something higher and greater, an impulse that we find even in plant and animal life in different ways. In man, this takes the form of conscious yoga. Daksha, the mind skilled in building forms and setting their limits in a certain fixed order, is not too keen to give his daughter’s hand to the one who lives in utter freedom. This will disturb the fixed order of things. Yet freedom is the first step of creation and its last step is consummation. But this freedom is not as we understand under the impulsion of avidya. True freedom is to be one with the Lord and His Will. Avidya must pass through the flames of purification and sacrifice and be reborn as what she is in her origin, vidya, or the Divine Power of Oneness.

This, in short, is the story, a clear symbol of inner life and many of the occult processes and energies that have gone into the act of this complex many-tiered system of worlds. Shiva and Parvati are adored and worshipped throughout the length and breadth of the country. A favourite among tantriks, he is the god easy to please and quick to grant boons, earning the name of Ashutosh. But if his compassion and mercy are endless, his wrath is equally frightening and shakes even the strongest of Asuras. Therefore, he is also called Rudra, the furious one. He has taken upon himself to bear the burden of the world’s grief, the inevitable portion of the struggle, the poison that foams up as the ocean of consciousness is churned. He drinks this poison that stains his throat blue and is therefore also called Neelkantha. Many are the legends associated with Shiva and Parvati and he is surely regarded as one of the greatest cosmic powers that help sustain creation’s load.

The story of Shiva and Parvati is closely woven into the fabric of Hindu life. It is interesting to note that to date, despite the rise of consumerism and society running madly after more material comforts, girls in some villages of India still consider Shiva and Parvati as the ideal relation between man and woman. When a girl seeks divine favours for an auspicious man in her life, she prays to Shiva to intervene to send someone like him. The symbol is clear enough. A man’s true worth is not by his parentage and his home, nor even by his qualities but by his power to stand above nature as its master and lord. The ideal man, in this image, is a tapasvi, one who has gone so far as to destroy kama, that troubled seed of desire in all things.

Secondly, all marriages start with Shiva’s marriage and stop with the awakening of the gods. Each marriage is meant to be a miniature re-enactment of the ideal divine couple and its purpose is the awakening of the gods like Shiva, the man must be free of desire, kama; free of possessiveness, strong and generous by nature. Like Parvati, the woman must be a mass of strength and beauty acquired by inner tapasya; her will one-pointed to the eternal; aspiring for nothing but the very highest in herself and the man. Their coming together is also not merely for personal satisfaction but the good of the world, for the birth of a god, for bringing to life a greater power of light that can destroy the forces of evil and darkness!

Thirdly, the story has its deep occult aspect, Sati and Parvati are two forms of the same truth, Sati is nature in her ignorant mode of movements, avidya. Though she too carries the truth within herself, yet she is divided between the eternal lord whom she seeks and the world. She is ever trying to conciliate the two through compromises of all kinds, but this cannot be. Shiva cannot come and dwell in the house built on division. Sati must choose either Shiva or the old movement of consciousness, to which also she is attached. In the legend, she chooses the latter, though momentarily and thus, she herself becomes the object of the world’s sacrifice.

But Sati or the old nature must be reborn as Parvati to unite permanently with the lord. Parvati too embodies the earth’s nature but nature at its highest. Mountains represent the peaks of the earth. Symbolically, they represent the height to which our nature can rise in a moment of still immobility, carrying in the heart only a burning aspiration to unite with Shiva, the Lord, one-pointed, immaculate and purified through askesis. If one could remain in this high and pure state of nature, attracted to nothing else, not comfort or riches or possessions then our earth — nature can find Shiva in the inner summits and even unite permanently with him.

Such is the story of Sati and Parvati, the two who are one, revolving around Shiva the great Lord. The legend is not a story that can be understood by our current understanding or intellectual analysis, though these will have their interpretations and they may be valid in their own limited domain. But to the eye accustomed to the inner and the occult movements of nature, the symbol is revealed at once as a deep and powerful truth, valid for all times, a truth that can reshape our lives in the image of Shiva and Parvati, the eternal soul and purified nature united on the peaks to which we can climb through ardent aspiration and a long painstaking tapasya.

CHAPTER 11
Shatroopa: Multi-faceted Feminine

Indian thought sees a beautiful blend between the principles of creation that exist in themselves, their subtler manifestations and more earthly forms and figures through which they manifest. This creates a unique style and lends to the myths and legends of India a double or a triple significance. The significance is at the symbolic level, at a subtler and occult level and at an earthly, physical or practical level. But the practical significance is always subordinated and derived from the deeper and the subtler.

Thus, we have the myth of Manu-Shatroopa, the “first couple” like Adam and Eve. However, the myth has a very different texture, differing ramifications and meanings in its Indian form. To begin with, Manu and Shatroopa are both born from the right and the left sides respectively, of Brahma, the mediator of the creative power. As soon as the couple emerges, Brahma himself asks them to participate in the process of creation. They agree and with that intent begin to come together. But Shatroopa is shy and she hides in various forms. Manu, however, is able to trace her in every form and through their union, many forms and types of creatures are born. Then they finally assume human form and marry their progeny to sages who have also been directed to earth by Brahma to participate in the process of creation. King Manu and his consort Shatroopa meditate for years and engage in austerities till they are blessed with the vision of Lord Rama and Sita. Enthralled by the vision, they pray to Lord Rama, “May we have you as our child?” and Rama grants them their wish — that in another age, when the couple Manu and Shatroopa would be born as king Dashratha and queen Kaushalaya, Rama would descend on earth and be born to them and accomplish this mission as an Avatara. Time passes by and Rama is indeed born to the couple as a result of a special yajna. The rest, we know, is the popular and epic legend of the Ramayana.

The story is deeply suggestive. Even on the surface, its symbols are fairly clear. To start with, creation is not seen here as a fall but an extension of consciousness in the subtler and higher world followed by the gross material sphere. It is the fiat of God and not the lure of an evil whisper that has triggered the great act of the epic drama of God upon the earthly stage. The human species is not an outcast driven out of heaven to suffer on earth for some sins they committed. To participate in creation is to participate in God’s work. What that work is we shall see a little later and that too is interestingly hinted at in the myth itself. But first, we must look at the symbolic and subtler truths.

Manu and Shatroopa are surely beings of the subtle planes, more accurately, they are the masculine and the feminine energies that emerge from the Creator as the left and the right side. This denotes their essential unity; the difference lies only in the functioning. The left side indicates the right brain’s functioning whereas the right side indicates the left brain. The faculties of the two sides must come together to create humans in their present totality. The thinker in man is at his present highest level but this human intellect itself must be a harmonious synthesis of two sides or two modes of functioning that must come together to release the creative energies within us.

The third layer is the intellect or buddhi, which is the real instrument of thought and that which orders and disposes of the knowledge acquired by the other parts of the machine. For the purpose of the educationist this is infinitely the most important of the three I have named. The intellect is an organ composed of several groups of functions, divisible into two important classes, the functions and faculties of the right hand and the functions and faculties of the left hand. The faculties of the right hand are comprehensive, creative and synthetic; the faculties of the left hand critical and analytic. To the right hand belong Judgment, Imagination, Memory, Observation; to the left hand Comparison and Reasoning. The critical faculties distinguish, compare, classify, generalise, deduce, infer, conclude; they are the component parts of the logical reason. The right-hand faculties comprehend, command, judge in their own right, grasp, hold and manipulate. The right-hand mind is the master of knowledge, the left hand its servant. The left hand touches only the body of knowledge, the right hand penetrates its soul. The left hand limits itself to ascertained truth, the right hand grasps that which is still elusive or unascertained. Both are essential to the completeness of the human reason. These important functions of the machine have all to be raised to their highest and finest working-power, if the education of the child is not to be imperfect and one-sided.[27]

This is as far as present mankind goes. Of course, evolution is not yet over. It will go further to create an entirely new type that will transcend the genders but that is something yet to be perfected and it belongs to the possibilities of the New Creation. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother both hint at it.

There is a fourth layer of faculty which, not as yet entirely developed in man, is attaining gradually to a wider development and more perfect evolution. The powers peculiar to this highest stratum of knowledge are chiefly known to us from the phenomena of genius, — sovereign discernment, intuitive perception of truth, plenary inspiration of speech, direct vision of knowledge to an extent often amounting to revelation, making a man a prophet of truth. These powers are rare in their higher development, though many possess them imperfectly or by flashes. They are still greatly distrusted by the critical reason of mankind because of the admixture of error, caprice and a biased imagination which obstructs and distorts their perfect workings. Yet it is clear that humanity could not have advanced to its present stage if it had not been for the help of these faculties, and it is a question with which educationists have not yet grappled, what is to be done with this mighty and baffling element, the element of genius in the pupil. The mere instructor does his best to discourage and stifle genius, the more liberal teacher welcomes it. Faculties so important to humanity cannot be left out of our consideration. It is foolish to neglect them, it is criminal to discourage them. Their imperfect development must be perfected, the admixture of error, caprice and biased fancifulness must be carefully and wisely removed. But the teacher cannot do it; he would eradicate the good corn as well as the tares if he interfered. Here, as in all educational operations, he can only put the growing soul into the way of its own perfection.[28]

And the Mother indicates more directly:

Some of the most ancient traditions, perhaps even the most ancient, ascribed the cause of the creation of the universe to the will of a Supreme Absolute to manifest by his own self objectification; and the first act of this objectification was said to be the emanation of the creative Consciousness. Now, these ancient traditions usually speak of the Absolute in the masculine gender and of the Consciousness in the feminine, thus making this primordial gesture the origin of the differentiation between man and woman and at the same time giving a kind of priority to the masculine over the feminine. In fact, although they are one, identical and coexistent before the manifestation, the masculine took the original decision and emanated the feminine to carry it out, which amounts to saying that while there is no creation without the feminine, neither is there any feminine manifestation without the previous decision of the masculine….

In their best moments, both man and woman can forget their difference of sex, but it reappears at the slightest provocation; the woman feels she is a woman, the man knows he is a man and the quarrel is revived indefinitely in one form or another, open or veiled, and perhaps all the more bitter the less it is admitted. And one wonders whether it will not be so until there are no longer any men or women, but living souls expressing their identical origin in sexless bodies….

For one dreams of a world in which all these oppositions will at last disappear and where a being will be able to live and prosper who will be the harmonious synthesis of all that is best in the human race, uniting conception and execution, vision and creation in one single consciousness and action….

In any case, until the manifestation of a new conception and consciousness compels Nature to create a new species which would no longer have to yield to the necessity of animal procreation and thus be under the obligation of dividing into two complementary sexes, the best that can be done for the progress of the present human race is to treat both sexes on a footing of perfect equality, to give them the same education and training and to teach them to find, through a constant contact with a Divine Reality that is above all sexual differentiation, the source of all possibilities and harmonies.[29]

Manu is the man, the thinker. It is the Purusha or the soul within man that has assumed this station for its present stage of evolution. It is bound to go further, but for the man, the soul is involved in the mind. It is not yet free and has not ascended to its highest possibilities yet. Then there is nature that is many-faceted, manifold. Therefore, she is rightly named Shatroopa, one who has a hundred forms and figures. And yet, in each form and figure that seems separate and distinct to the mind, there hides the same universal Spirit, the Purusha. He sanctions the forms that Shatroopa has built in the subtle worlds, following which they begin to precipitate and manifest upon earth through a process of evolution. The right and the left sides of Brahma’s indicate the aspects of knowledge and the aspects of power. Manu and Shatroopa are two in appearance and for the task of creation, they must so appear. But in the consciousness of the Creator, they are one. They are not inferior or superior to each other but have the same status and position. The difference is only in their role and function. Shatroopa, as nature’s power, builds the forms and hides inside them. Manu, as knowledge, seeks her power and engages with her in the delight of a creative union. Man and woman perhaps reflect something of this dual aspect of one reality. That is why, in Indian thought and conception, man and woman were seen as equal partners albeit performing different roles. The man was associated with the masculine principle of mind and his proper function was to think, to reason, to analyse and understand and thereby lay down a base of knowledge in his individual and collective life. The woman was the executrix, the organiser, the helper. This power to execute was not limited to any particular or a few fields only. She was a power of knowledge and we have in Vedic times, Rishikas, the seers of knowledge such as Gargi, Arundhati, Lopamudra. She held the powers of war and action like Kali and Durga, Kaikeyi, the queen of Awadh. She also wielded the powers of love, charm and grace, like Lakshmi, and we have many examples of kindness, love and care. She also held the power of detailed execution and administration. These few feminine names have survived, partly maybe, because of the self-effacing nature of women. Wherever the Purusha, the soul involved in the mind fixes his thought, there Prakriti moves on to execute. The Mind or Purusha fixes the limit, nature as life-breath rushes to fill it. Thus, creation is maintained.

We see in the story of Manu and Shatroopa, a powerful symbol that is at once subtle and occult as well as practical. That, perhaps, is what the story hints at when it ends with the boon given to them that they will be born as Dasaratha and Kaushalaya in the age of Treta and bear Lord Rama as their child. This itself is very significant for Rama as the Avatara brings to earth the idealised mentality, the highest sattwic mode that mind-governed nature, the Manomaya Purusha, Manu can aspire for. Rama’s birth is its own fulfilment through nature. This is the conception and birth of Rama in the mentalised nature. Beyond it, the play of Manu and Shatroopa ceases and there begins a much freer, bigger, truer and powerful play of Shiva and Shakti whose highest peak of possibility is ardhanarishwar. But there is still the Iswara who continues to dominate.

A new type that goes even beyond, that is yet to emerge amidst us. It is the new species that the Mother hints above. This new species will have no gender differentiation but only two psychologically distinct and different modes of functioning. With this, the problem of feminism, of the valid demand for gender equality yet without losing the feminine powers will be solved for good and the mutual antagonism will be replaced by mutual complementariness. Sex distinctions will no more be needed since the new species will not create children the way of the old. It may resort to purely occult processes of bringing out a child through a union and fusion of energies as we see in the birth of Kartikeya. This fusion of energies without the actual sexual process may be transplanted in matter drawn from the body of the parent which would then be impregnated by the life energy drawn from the inner union of two complementary beings. Right now, we do not have the means to harness these energies, let alone securely transplant them as life resources that would make matter grow and develop as a living matter moulded by the power of life within. The force of life energy itself will contain seeds of the New Consciousness released from the new beings of the future.

CHAPTER 12
Diti and Aditi: Dark and the Bright Mother

Indian thought has always tried to synthesise the diverse strands of human nature, its aspirations and seekings, its higher sublime flights and its more mundane strivings. This is reflected everywhere including its religious side. On one side, Indian thought is not just polytheistic but pantheistic. It sees the Godhead in everything; behind what we consider as natural elements and also behind what we consider as supernatural elements. Nature and Supernature are only the hierarchical arrangement of One Reality that surpasses both and yet, (and here comes the beautiful synthesis expressed through both) what we consider as Nature is only a diminished figure of a concealed Supernature waiting for its discovery. On the other side, Hindu thought is deeply monotheistic. These two sides of One Reality are best expressed in the ancient concepts of the Upanishads.

— ekam satyam vipra bahudha vadanti

The Truth is but One, the wise call it by different names

— ekamevadviteeyam

The One without a second

— ekobahunām

The One who has many names

— ekambeejam bahudha yat karoshi

The One seed that became the many and, finally, a most powerful One

— sarvakhalvidambrahman

Know all this that is here as the Brahman, the sole Reality behind all things.

The gods are therefore powers and aspects of the One who alone is Self-luminous, Pure and Unstained, Shadowless Light, All Love, All Power, All Wisdom, All Bliss. Rather, they are conscious of the One and hence of the essential oneness of all things.

They are many and arranged hierarchically, corresponding to the many planes of cosmic existence. Thus, when the great seer Yajnavalkya is asked by Gargi about how many gods exist, Yajnavalkya replies, “there are indeed thirty-three million gods or three million or even three thousand or three or one and a half or just one, if you please”.[30]

The sense is clear that the gods are emanations of the One Divine, like the countless rays emerging from the Sun. The first three emanations are the aspects and Powers that are engaged in the Creation, Preservation and Dissolution of the universe. As they move further, they multiply in multiples of three and work in the smallest of elements of the universe.

And who are the Titans if there is only the One? They are the shadows of the gods as they fall upon creation. The principle is very simple. A god is one aspect of the Infinite and by its very nature, we may say that a god takes birth when the Divine withholds all else within and puts forth only one or two aspects at the forefront. It is this frontal consciousness that later lapses into its very opposite by forgetting the Oneness from which it emerged. It feels separate and enters into a state of division. Thus, while the gods create forms in harmony with Oneness and the Divine law in Creation, the Titans create forms that are not in tune with the cosmos and the Divine law. The result is an increase in disorder.

Again, while the gods preserve what still needs to be preserved for the right balance of creation, the Titans preserve those elements that need to pass over and whose hour is over by the Divine dispensation and decree. So too is the case with destruction. The gods destroy what needs to be destroyed for the good of the totality, to assist creation’s forward march. The Titans destroy all that comes in their way, in the way of their personal, separate goal and not in harmony with the greater Divine Law. The gods carry creation forward in the evolutionary journey; the Titans hold it back and even try to slide it back. Thus, the gods and the Titans are forever in struggle in the cosmos, and in every human heart. The thinner the veil of a separative ego, the more the godlike elements act through us. The thicker the veil, the more the Titan occupies space in our consciousness.

Yet, the two may be seen as representing two stages of evolutionary growth. Our journey starts in darkness, in the womb of division, ignorance, obscurity, under the tutelage of the dark mother, Diti, the mother of division and ignorance. She too is a mother and holds her children dearly. In the legends, She is shown as coaxing her children, the daityas, sons of darkness and ignorance with ambition and desire. She even goads them to win the crown of the gods that ever remains beyond their reach. Yet, through these means, She stimulates them, brings out their force, though not their wisdom. She pulls them out of their tamasic torpor but not out of their restless ego. Restless and reckless, they strive for personal egoistic aims and it is good for them lest they completely lapse into tamas, obscurity, darkness, in a state of torpor, clouding and utter confusion as if drugged and drunk. The dark mother pulls them out of this torpor and as they grow in power, shows them the crown and the kingdom of the gods to covet and enjoy.

They strive; sometimes momentarily succeed as shown in certain stories, dethroning Indra. Yet they are unable to touch Indra’s consort, Sachi. For Sachi is Truth-conscious, even though her origins are from the world of the Titans, she has ascended to the throne of Indra, not by showing brute violent force like the Titans but by the power and the Light of Truth. She and the gods then turn to their own origin, their Source of Light and Might, the Mother of the gods, the luminous mother Aditi, who dwells forever in the undivided Consciousness. Initially, they do not give up their old ways and try to possess the Divine Mother rather than give themselves to Her in joyous surrender. They try to win Her and please Her with their ignorant ways of an egoistic desire-driven consciousness but their delusion only brings their end nearer. And when their ego is slain by the cosmic recoil of an excess of violence by Kali, the mighty Mother, they are chastened and made ready for the beautiful side of the eternal goddess, Gauri. Then Aditi works out a way to rescue them and re-establish the cosmic order.

Revealing this subtle truth about the two stages of our evolution, Sri Aurobindo reveals:

The general nature of all human beings is the same, it is a mixture of the three gunas; it would seem then that in all there must be the capacity to develop and strengthen the sattwic element and turn it upward towards the heights of the divine transformation. That our ordinary turn is actually towards making our reason and will the servants of our rajasic or tamasic egoism, the ministers of our restless and ill-balanced kinetic desire or our self-indulgent indolence and static inertia, can only be, one would imagine, a temporary characteristic of our undeveloped spiritual being, a rawness of its imperfect evolution and must disappear when our consciousness rises in the spiritual scale. But we actually see that men, at least men above a certain level, fall very largely into two classes, those who have a dominant force of sattwic nature turned towards knowledge, self-control, beneficence, perfection and those who have a dominant force of rajasic nature turned towards egoistic greatness, satisfaction of desire, the indulgence of their own strong will and personality which they seek to impose on the world, not for the service of man or God, but for their own pride, glory and pleasure. These are the human representatives of the Devas and Danavas or Asuras, the Gods and the Titans. This distinction is a very ancient one in Indian religious symbolism. The fundamental idea of the Rig Veda is a struggle between the Gods and their dark opponents, between the Masters of Light, sons of Infinity, and the children of Division and Night, a battle in which man takes part and which is reflected in all his inner life and action. This was also a fundamental principle of the religion of Zoroaster. The same idea is prominent in later literature. The Ramayana is in its ethical intention the parable of an enormous conflict between the Deva in human form and the incarnate Rakshasa, between the representative of a high culture and Dharma and a huge unbridled force and gigantic civilisation of the exaggerated Ego. The Mahabharata, of which the Gita is a section, takes for its subject a lifelong clash between human, Devas and Asuras, the men of power, sons of the Gods, who are governed by the light of a high ethical Dharma and others who are embodied Titans, the men of power who are out for the service of their intellectual, vital and physical ego. The ancient mind, more open than ours to the truth of things behind the physical veil, saw behind the life of man great cosmic Powers or beings representative of certain turns or grades of the universal Shakti, divine, titanic, gigantic, demoniac, and men who strongly represented in themselves these types of nature were themselves considered as Devas, Asuras, Rakshasas, Pisachas. The Gita for its own purposes takes up this distinction and develops the difference between these two kinds of beings, dvaubhutasargau. It has spoken previously of the nature which is Asuric and Rakshasic and obstructs God-knowledge, salvation and perfection; it now contrasts it with the Daivic nature which is turned to these things…

The Deva nature is distinguished by an acme of the sattwic habits and qualities; self-control, sacrifice, the religious habit, cleanness and purity, candour and straightforwardness, truth, calm and self-denial, compassion to all beings, modesty, gentleness, forgivingness, patience, steadfastness, a deep sweet and serious freedom from all restlessness, levity and inconstancy are its native attributes. The Asuric qualities, wrath, greed, cunning, treachery, wilful doing of injury to others, pride and arrogance and excessive self-esteem have no place in its composition. But its gentleness and self-denial and self-control are free too from all weakness: it has energy and soul force, strong resolution, the fearlessness of the soul that lives in the right and according to the truth as well as its harmlessness, tejah, abhayam, dhrtih, ahimsa, satyam. The whole being, the whole temperament is integrally pure; there is a seeking for knowledge and a calm and fixed abiding in knowledge. This is the wealth, the plenitude of the man born into the Deva nature.

The Asuric nature has too its wealth, its plenitude of force, but it is of a very different, a powerful and evil kind. Asuric men have no true knowledge of the way of action or the way of abstention, the fulfilling or the holding in of the nature. Truth is not in them, nor clean doing, nor faithful observance. They see naturally in the world nothing but a huge play of the satisfaction of self; theirs is a world with Desire for its cause and seed and governing force and law, a world of Chance, a world devoid of just relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true, not founded in Truth. Whatever better intellectual or higher religious dogma they may possess, this alone is the true creed of their mind and will in action; they follow always the cult of Desire and Ego. On that way of seeing life they lean in reality and by its falsehood they ruin their souls and their reason. The Asuric man becomes the centre or instrument of a fierce, Titanic, violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount of injury and evil. Arrogant, full of self-esteem and the drunkenness of their pride, these misguided souls delude themselves, persist in false and obstinate aims and pursue the fixed impure resolution of their longings. They imagine that desire and enjoyment are all the aim of life and in their inordinate and insatiable pursuit of it they are the prey of a devouring, a measurelessly unceasing care and thought and endeavour and anxiety till the moment of their death. Bound by a hundred bonds, devoured by wrath and lust, unweariedly occupied in amassing unjust gains which may serve their enjoyment and the satisfaction of their craving, always they think, “Today I have gained this object of desire, tomorrow I shall have that other; today I have so much wealth, more I will get tomorrow. I have killed this my enemy, the rest too I will kill. I am a lord and king of men, I am perfect, accomplished, strong, happy, fortunate, a privileged enjoyer of the world; I am wealthy, I am of high birth; who is there like unto me? I will sacrifice, I will give, I will enjoy.” Thus, occupied by many egoistic ideas, deluded, doing works, but doing them wrongly, acting mightily, but for themselves, for desire, for enjoyment, not for God in themselves and God in man, they fall into the unclean hell of their own evil. They sacrifice and give, but from a self-regarding ostentation, from vanity and with a stiff and foolish pride. In the egoism of their strength and power, in the violence of their wrath and arrogance they hate, despise and belittle the God hidden in themselves and the God in man. And because they have this proud hatred and contempt of good and of God, because they are cruel and evil, the Divine casts them down continually into more and more Asuric births. Not seeking him, they find him not, and at last, losing the way to him altogether, sink down into the lowest status of soul-nature, adhamam gatim.

This graphic description, even giving its entire value to the distinction it implies, must not be pressed to carry more in it than it means. When it is said that there are two creations of beings in this material world, Deva and Asura, it is not meant that human souls are so created by God from the beginning each with its own inevitable career in Nature, nor is it meant that there is a rigid spiritual predestination and those rejected from the beginning by the Divine are blinded by him so that they may be thrust down to eternal perdition and the impurity of Hell. All souls are eternal portions of the Divine, the Asura as well as the Deva, all can come to salvation: even the greatest sinner can turn to the Divine. But the evolution of the soul in Nature is an adventure of which swabhava and the Karma governed by swabhava the are ever the chief powers; and if an excess in the manifestation of the swabhava, the self-becoming of the soul, a disorder in its play turns the law of being to the perverse side, if the rajasic qualities are given the upper hand, cultured to the diminution of sattwa, then the trend of Karma and its results necessarily culminate not in the sattwic height which is capable of the movement of liberation, but in the highest exaggeration of the perversities of the lower nature. The man, if he does not stop short and abandon his way of error, has eventually the Asura full-born in him, and once he has taken that enormous turn away from the Light and Truth, he can no more reverse the fatal speed of his course because of the very immensity of the misused divine power in him until he has plumbed the depths to which it falls, found bottom and seen where the way has led him, the power exhausted and misspent, himself down in the lowest state of the soul-nature, which is Hell. Only when he understands and turns to the Light, does that other truth of the Gita come in, that even the greatest sinner, the most impure and violent evil-doer is saved the moment he turns to adore and follow after the Godhead within him. Then, simply by that turn, he gets very soon into the sattwic way which leads to perfection and freedom.

The Asuric Prakriti is the rajasic at its height; it leads to the slavery of the soul in Nature, to desire, wrath and greed, the three powers of the rajasic ego, and these are the threefold doors of Hell, the Hell into which the natural being falls when it indulges the impurity and evil and error of its lower or perverted instincts. These three are again the doors of a great darkness, they fold back into tamas, the characteristic power of the original Ignorance; for the unbridled force of the rajasic nature, when exhausted, falls back into the weakness, collapse, darkness, incapacity of the worst tamasic soul-status. To escape from this downfall one must get rid of these three evil forces and turn to the light of the sattwic quality, live by the right, in the true relations, according to the Truth and the Law; then one follows one’s own higher good and arrives at the highest status. To follow the law of desire is not the true rule of our nature; there is a higher and juster standard of its works. But where is it embodied or how is it to be found? In the first place, the human race has always been seeking for this just and high Law and whatever it has discovered is embodied in its Shastra, its rule of science and knowledge, rule of ethics, rule of religion, rule of best social living, rule of one’s right relations with man and God and Nature.[31]

Diti and Aditi, the dark and the luminous Mothers are the two steps towards evolution. When our souls chastened and strengthened through conflict, opposition, struggle and suffering are ready, mother Diti delivers it out of her dark womb and we are then carried by mother Aditi in Her Vast, Strong and Luminous embrace to the heights of freedom, pinnacles of joy, and the splendours of a higher Supernature.

At Her highest, She stands one with the Supreme, the Shakti, the Parameshwari, the Power and Knowledge of the Supreme …

But Maya is a veil of the Absolute;
A Truth occult has made this mighty world:
The Eternal’s wisdom and self-knowledge act
In ignorant Mind and in the body’s steps.
The Inconscient is the Superconscient’s sleep.
An unintelligible Intelligence
Invents creation’s paradox profound;
Spiritual thought is crammed in Matter’s forms,
Unseen it throws out a dumb energy
And works a miracle by a machine.
All here is a mystery of contraries:
Darkness a magic of self-hidden Light,
Suffering some secret rapture’s tragic mask
And death an instrument of perpetual life.
Although Death walks beside us on Life’s road,
A dim bystander at the body’s start
And a last judgment on man’s futile works,
Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:
Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride
The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,
A grey defeat pregnant with victory,
A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.
The inconscient world is the spirit’s self-made room,
Eternal Night shadow of eternal Day.
Night is not our beginning nor our end;
She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid
Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.
We came to her from a supernal Light,
By Light we live and to the Light we go.[32]

Om Anandmayee Chaitanyamayee Satyamayee Parame.

ॐ आनंदमयी चैत मयी स मयी परमे।

Two Great Epics

CHAPTER 13
Sita: Born of the Soil

Who is not familiar with the story of Sita in Hindu mythology? Sita is the daughter of King Janaka, a seer among kings. Legend has it that she was found as a baby lying in a casket while the fields were being ploughed. She grows up to be a woman embodying the very best of feminine qualities, a rare combination of inner strength and beauty. A woman, refined in every way, she is the Avatara (descent into a physical body) of Vishnu’s consort, the goddess of harmony and beauty, Lakshmi. On meeting Rama, the seventh Avatara of Vishnu, she instantly recognises in him her complimentary self and prays to the World Mother, Jagadamba, the Source and womb of creation, to grant her union with Rama, her Lord, in earthly life as well. Meanwhile, her father King Janaka, places a condition for anyone who asks for the hand of his daughter. The suitor must bend Shiva’s bow, a celestial bow that even the Titan kings and the strong princes who have come to ask for the royal hand find difficult to lift. Rama is able to do it easily and Sita’s hand is given to Rama in a heavenly betrothal. Like Sita, Rama too combines the rare qualities of strength and gentleness, calm and courage. The two would make a wonderful pair and can do much to help establish the reign of dharma upon earth. For that is Rama’s mission, to uphold dharma and show the animalistic humanity a more sattwic luminous humanity — the way of sacrifice and love, of self-control and mastery. But there is one who stands between him and his divine mission and will challenge his and his betrothed heavenly spirit.

Fate intervenes and through a twist of events, Rama is exiled to the forest, his rightful throne usurped by the cunningness of his own stepmother and a helpless father. Rama accepts the ordeal to uphold his father’s decree. His brother Lakshmana and the ever-faithful Sita follow in his steps, braving the ordeals together. But worse follows and Sita is one day abducted by the Titan king, Ravana, and forcefully carried to his prosperous kingdom. Ravana tries to lure her, then threatens her into obeying his wish and marry him. But Sita stands by her faith and refuses all entreaties and fears. Meanwhile, Rama gathers an assorted army and marches upon Ravana’s capital, Lanka. The city falls before the brave warriors and it is not long before the entire demon kingdom concedes defeat. Enthroning the youngest brother of Ravana as king, Rama returns to his kingdom Ayodhya along with Sita and Lakshmana, but not before Sita is subjected to agnipariksha, the test of fire, that one must pass through to prove one’s purity.

An interlude of an ideal reign follows but only for a short while. A washerman in the kingdom of Ayodhya points fingers at Sita’s chastity during the time she was forced to stay with Ravana. The matter reaches Rama and he is caught in a dilemma over his love for his wife and demands of the ethics of the age. To hold an open enquiry at the behest of the washerman would be to belittle the dignity of Sita whom he knows to be an ideal woman in every way. At the same time, to dismiss the charge by the power of the throne would be to disgrace the spirit of democracy and equality that Rama has come to establish. At last, he comes out with a difficult solution. Sita is sent away to stay in the quiet shelters of Rishi Valmiki’s ashrama. There, she gives birth to two beautiful children, Luv and Kush, and rears them to become as extraordinary as their illustrious father. She displays not even a trace of bitterness or sorrow and withholds her grief in her solitary heart, rising to the challenge.

Eventually, fate yields and the two are reunited, but this time, Sita makes a conscious choice. She is born of the earth and she chooses to return to the earth. In a moment of apocalypse, the earth gives way and legend has it that just as she was discovered in the lap of mother earth one day, she goes back to her lap, leaving Rama alone and helpless before her choice. Stricken with grief, he is overtaken by a sombre mood. It is then that the great sage Vasistha reminds him of his divine origin and his earthly mission. He has secured the earth against the Rakshasas; he has also placed before humanity the ideal ethic of a king who must place the demand even of a most ordinary citizen above his own. It was destined that Sita and Rama could not stay united for long in this life. Rama regains his divine self and he too returns through the waters to the celestial home he had descended from.

As we can see, the story is difficult to understand in its totality if we take it at its face value. There are, in the story, not only titans and the gods but also monkeys, birds and bears who speak and counsel, fight and struggle, align themselves with the forces of Rama, or are friends with Ravana. The very persona of Rama and Sita is sometimes difficult to comprehend, especially when we apply our present yardsticks and standards. How do we explain, for example, Sita’s test of fire and her subsequent banishment to the forest at the behest of a washerman, or her appearance from the earth and her equally sudden disappearance into the earth? How are we to take the speech of monkeys and birds, and the mythical ten-headed Ravana with his kingdom of gold? What are we to make of Rama’s grief at Sita’s abduction, like any man who may grieve at the loss of his wife, and then his marching onto the demon kingdom and bringing it down upon its knees, even if it were just to save his wife? What is the definition of dharma here? Whatever be the difficulties posed to the modern mind in its understanding of this great epic and the role of the enigmatic Sita, generations of Indians have been deeply inspired by this epic and have taken it as a practical guide to the ethics of life. Many have received from it the psychic touch required for inner life or felt tears of gratitude flow from the depths of their souls — as if, the story of Rama and Sita, the defeat of Ravana and the courage of Rama, the victory of Sita’s inner being over adverse fate, are in some mysterious way a re-enactment of the story of the human soul. And that indeed is the value of this great epic, that it is at once contemporary and universal and touches something very deep within us, some hidden cord that our minds have forgotten but the soul remembers.

Since the present focus is on the feminine, let us try to unravel some aspects of the inner life of man through the persona of Sita, and the Power of God hidden in the bosom of the earth searching for her Lord who would come and rescue her from the clutches of the animal and demoniac nature.

Rama and Sita — the ideal man and woman

The most powerful means however of transmitting and instilling the spirit of dharma can be found in the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Ramayana, at the centre of which we find Lord Rama, the seventh Avatara of Vishnu and Mata Sita, the Divine Mother in her gracious aspect of goddess Lakshmi is essentially a story of love rather than of war. Of course, war is an aspect of life. Even the power of love when it enters the earth must battle all its inferior and lesser forms, it must ruthlessly excise all that stands in the way of its purity and sullies its beauty before it can find its true expression in human beings. The Ramayana is not just the story of a unique divine love between Rama and Sita but the love that the Divine has for creation. It is to rescue creation from the trampling feet of the Asura, to restore dharma and righteousness and goodness that the Avatara descends. The Divine assumes a human body so that man can follow his divine example and make the effort needed to elevate himself to a diviner way of life. But since it is not possible to do so all at once, a big gap lies between man in his largely animal-like consciousness that often and easily enough comes under the spell of the Asura with its gigantic appetites that would swallow the whole world for its selfish purposes. This evolutionary journey of man has to be graded in a stepwise manner.

Each step forward is a battle between the past forms, past ways of life and the immediate future that the Avatara has come to establish. The Ramayana is a story of one such step wherein a link is made between the animal-man and a more ethical way of life. Rama is an embodiment of the highest dharma possible at the time wherein humanity was still struggling with the pashu, the animal, and the Rakshasa and Asura, the Titan, in man. It is true that the human march is never static and mankind has moved far ahead in its surge towards the Light and Truth. Other rungs in our evolutionary history have been added. The Christ came to sow the seeds of love while the Buddha showed to man the way of compassion. Sri Krishna came to show the path of freedom and delight. But Indian thought, knowing that all these are luminous links in the great evolutionary becoming, foresaw a yet to come Avatara of the future who would take up the work of all the past Avataras and carry it to its final divine consummation and intended perfection. Such an Avatara would embody at once the nobility and courage of Rama, the subtlety of wisdom and freedom even while engaged in all the works that we find in Sri Krishna, the deep compassion of the Buddha and the sacrifice of the Christ. This is what Indian thought envisaged as the future type of humanity or rather a superhumanity whose early glimpses we find in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

Conversion of the Asura

Ramayana is not just about the killing of an Asura but the sincere attempt to convert him back to his origin. Since according to Hindu thought everything, even what seems to be ugly and wicked, has an ultimate divine origin. The ugliness and distortions are crusts that have been added as the energies and forces released by the Divine have strayed from their straight path and rolled in the mud of earth’s nature, still in the grip of the Inconscient darkness into which creation had plunged.

An Asura is therefore someone who has not only completely forgotten his divine origin but revolts against all that is beautiful and divine. He is driven by the impetus of the shadow that lies at the back of every human being and hence his steps are retrogressive. But the way for man is to look up and look forward. The deva type of humanity is engaged in the forward march. Ravana represents the retrogressive movement in nature. He wants to undo what has been done through the centuries by the seers and sages. He wants to sow seeds of an aggressive and ambitious type of humanity whose focus is material and technological advancement at the expense of the spiritual side. His idea of liberty is licentiousness, typified in the story of his sister Surpanakha and his own life led by lust and blind impulses. He cannot accept dharma since it means efforts at self-mastery. He rather prefers to be driven by every impulse to satisfy his desire for selfish gains and personal pleasure. And yet, even he is an angel who has strayed from his true path. But the Lord remembers and hence he assumes an earthly body to redeem and restore him to his divine origins which he has forgotten completely. It is this sublime love that leans down to rescue and redeem what is fallen, disturbed, distorted and releases the divinity in it that we find in the Ramayana and also at another level in the Mahabharata.

Spiritual feminism

The work of this redemption has been undertaken primarily by Sita, the embodiment of Lakshmi. The Ramayana is as much a story of Sita as of Rama. Though certain modern historians judging an ancient epic by modern standards without going into its tremendous spirit see in her either a woman who is too virtuous to be true or a weak lady who is always at the mercy of her father or husband or the demon king or even a commoner whose one word is enough for her to be banished. But the Sita that emerges through all this is indeed a strong woman, stronger by the spell of adverse fate that has led a once princess and queen into the life of a sannyasini in the forest.

It is her love for her husband that carries her there and she is willing to face every kind of danger. Then she is kidnapped by the Asura by deceit. It is said that it was one of her divine strategies to bring him back and convert him through love. But the Asura is not yet ready for divine love. For him, love is synonymous with lust. He must usurp, possess and fulfil the impulses of his body and vitality rather than dive deep into his soul where alone true love can be found. To dominate, to possess, to crush everything that does not yield to his ambition, to stamp his ego on the whole world is his way. It is said that the whole story of Mayamriga, the golden deer, for whom she sent Rama to hunt while Ravana kidnapped her was done by deliberately putting upon herself the veil of avidya for a moment so that the Asura could come near. Otherwise, Ravana would not have been able to touch her. The agnipariksha that she has to undergo later is a symbolic story, unless we believe that a human body can survive fire which would mean a transformed body and not a humanly built one as it is now. It is a symbol of the purification that earth-nature must undergo for its redemption having been stamped by the touch of the Asura. It is through this fire of aspiration and purification that the state of avidya, ignorance, can be converted into vidya, knowledge of truth and oneness. She accepts all these ordeals willingly since she is born to redeem the earth which is suffering under the spell of the Asura, the hyper-intellectual man who has studied the Vedas, and has some kind of mental knowledge of the Truths that are contained therein. Yet, he misapplies them, uses such profound things for his personal and egoistic ambitions.

For such are the Asuras, whatever intellectual ability and even religiosity they may have, their real creed is the expansion of the empire of the ego. This Asura in man is typified in Ravana, once a devotee of the Lord who has hence fallen due to his lust for power, wealth and wanton ambition. Though the main antagonist in the plot, he is not a villain to be simply weeded out of existence, if such a thing were at all possible. Killing Ravana becomes inevitable only because he refuses to change his ways. He is given a chance to reform until the last moments but he refuses and insists on his doctrine of might, hence leading Rama to take the challenge and fight him on his own grounds. With the fall of the Asura and the conversion of the animal, the path of humanity is secured at least for a few millennia until the necessity for the coming of another Avatara arises. The work of Lord Rama and Mata Sita is rather to convert back the Asura and restore the forces and energies that have strayed from their real purpose back to their original divine purposes.

In the end, when she is banished, we see Sita grow stronger. While Rama suffers and is unable to bear the loss which has come in the course of following the rajadharma of his times, Sita never allows a trace of bitterness or grievance to enter her heart. Such is the beauty and strength of her love that she rears her two children with all grace and dignity and teaches them the way of nobility and courage. She is indeed the ultimate feminine — strong, wise, patient and forbearing — whose divinity shines more and more as she faces the challenges of earthly life.

Later when her earthly mission is over, she refuses to go back to the palace of a repentant Rama and prefers to be identified with the earth out of which she has emerged. Even in her departure, we see her great sacrifice wherein she redeems earthly matter by permanently merging with it rather than choosing either the comforts of the palace or the riches and splendour of her heavenly home. In the early dawns of humanity, Sita sets some of the highest standards of spiritual feminism and empowerment by awakening one’s own inner strength rather than following the asuric impulse of a licentious life or an egoistic love that loves only as long as one is loved. If Rama embodies the strength born out of spiritual manhood, Sita embodies the strength born out of true love.

Setting and the context

Indeed, if killing Ravana was the main motive of the Ramayana, then the incarnate Divine would not take so many twists and turns to get hold of him. Rama, the mighty king is a warrior par excellence, so much so that Sri Krishna declares in the Gita that among the men of valour, paurush, I am Rama. His valour is known throughout Jambudweep, as India was known then. It was a land inhabited largely by an early humanity closer to the animal kind. Vanara is not just a monkey but a type of early human race presaging the modern man and the Rakshasa, the crude humanity with gigantic appetites whose life is centred on satisfying his vital desires. The Asura, on the other hand, is humanity that has developed intellectually but its lower vital appetites have remained unchanged. His brilliant mind is driven by ambition and he believes that the whole earth is meant for his enjoyment and fiefdom. He governs the Rakshasa who will fight and die for him; he keeps them on his payrolls but also smites them if they refuse or are unable to fulfil his lustful dreams of expansion.

Among this, we have mainly two kingdoms that try to keep the flag of dharma and nobler humanity flying high. They are the kingdoms of Ayodhya and Mithila.

The kingdom of Ayodhya is ruled by the mighty kings of the solar dynasty. Known for their steadfastness and adherence to truth, they never break a promise even if it is given in a dreaming state. The lineage of Lord Rama and his ancestors is still available in the records of ancient India where they had a method of maintaining elaborate details of history through rote memory and folklore transmitted down the generations by bards. Notable among them are Ikshvaku, the son of Shraddhavan Manu who survived the last great deluge; Muchukunda, who fought in the battle between the Devas and Asuras on behalf of the gods; and Trishanku, who attempted a bodily ascension to heavens — which would literally mean a transformation of the present death-bound body into an immortal one. He has been immortalised by Sri Aurobindo in his poem ‘The Triumph Song of Trishuncou’. Then there is King Harishchandra who goes to the extreme degree of truthfulness in giving away his kingdom to a sage whom he had promised thus only in his dream. He, his wife and son walk away from the kingdom without looking back. The twist and turn of fate make them lose everything including their freedom and even the piece of cloth upon their body and yet they do not go back upon their promise and remain steadfast to the practice of truth. Later, it is told that they were being tested by Shiva, Indra and other gods to see how steadfast he was to the Truth. Eventually, Shiva is pleased and declares that the place where the king turned into a low menial slave for helping burn the dead is sanctified and anyone who is given to fire there would attain moksha directly without the need of any return to earth to complete the cycle of rebirths.

Then is King Bhagirath who brought down the river Ganga through intense tapasya and Dasaratha himself, father of Rama, who fought against the Asuras.

Such was the dynasty in which Rama was born as a result of a yajna, whereby a divinely burdened being was invoked by the king as his child. Such were the high and noble ideals that were sown as seeds of early humanity and developed in the lap of the great mountains by the rishis. Their will and wisdom matched the heights of the Himalayas and the Vindhyas and yet their hearts harnessed the sweetest founts of love that nourished India’s soul just as the seven rivers nourished its body.

It is a different story altogether that modern India, still reeling under the spell of alien dharma imposed upon it through centuries of foreign rule, has lost connection with its own soul and has caught the universal disease of utilitarianism as the yardstick of every system of knowledge and action. Perhaps that is why it is even more important to re-establish the Truth of the ancient Aryan world, lest with the sinking of India, sinking of dharma, hope sinks and the world is deprived of its psychic nourishment, going down into the abysses of lust and greed — after material power, money and immediate success.

The ancient Indian rishis and kings knew how to shun and renounce immediate success and small gains for expanding their spirits and growth in strength and wisdom through challenges, hardships and high sacrifice, which they valued above everything else.

Sita is not born but rather discovered when the king of Mithila is tilling the soil rendered barren by severe famine. It is, again, clearly a symbolic story that links Sita’s birth with her mission which is to redeem earth-nature. King Janaka, her father is from a whole family of kings who were known as rajrishis. They were yogis of the highest order, Jivanmuktas, liberated, even while engaged in all worldly works.

Sri Aurobindo has again spoken highly of the ideal that the lineage of King Janaka represented. It is to him that the Divine Mother chooses to come as a child. The story of her being found in an urn buried in the earth is symbolic as she embodies the aspiration and anguish of material nature tormented by the Rakshasas and the Asuras. These beings, hostile to Truth and dharma, would often accumulate occult powers of various kinds and misuse them to further their ambition just like certain nations and groups of mankind misuse technology and wealth towards ends that are detrimental to the human race.

The leader of this gang of hostiles is Ravana whose ten heads indicate an enormous ego. To those who turn it into an Aryan-Dravidian clash or of the upper and lower class would do well to remember that Ravana, the king of Lanka was himself the son of a rishi born to the lineage of Brahma.

Fall from the heavens

Ravana is a Brahmin who comes from a high priestly class, someone who has studied the Vedas in great detail and has even been instrumental in spreading its teachings. He is a devotee as well; however, he belongs to a class or type of bhaktas whose devotion is tainted with ego and ambition. They long to appropriate the Deity whom they worship in a way as to hold exclusive rights in much the same way as some religions do and thereby become a breeding ground for fundamentalism. Or these devotees are in search of power and their worship, penance and religious observances are all driven by a lust for power, even the ultimate power if possible so that they can remain the uncontested sovereign of the world. Ravana is such a devotee. He is a pandit, a scholar, even an accomplished poet and music lover. He is sometimes portrayed as playing the difficult veena, and Rudrastakam, his famous composition on Lord Shiva, his chosen Deity, is well known. That the Rudrastakam of Ravana is still looked upon as a beautiful hymn in praise of Lord Shiva is a sign of Aryan society which, keeping in tune with the Vedas, accepted great ideas regardless of the origin. The world of ideas belongs to nobody and if it is good, true and beautiful, it can find its rightful place regardless of the person through whom it comes into existence.

The mighty king of Lanka has accumulated various kinds of powers harnessing all the elements and forces of nature and also looks after his subjects very well. Such is the opulence of ancient Lanka that its houses has gold-tipped domes and it is the only kingdom to possess a flying machine, called the Pushpak Vimana. Yet for all his material development and technological advancement, Ravana leads his kingdom to ruin by following the path of adharma. This is indeed a lesson of history that is as valid today as in the past. Clearly, the story also reveals to us that it is not your circumstances of birth that make you great but what you eventually do with your life, your actions. The Rakshasa and Asura is not a surname or a label decided by birth but something into which mankind can grow, so much so that even a deva can degenerate into an Asura just as an Asura can evolve into a deva as the story of Ravana’s brother Vibhisana indicates. It is this among other things that make the Ramayana so contemporary. It is, like the Mahabharata, truly a history that repeats itself unless we have learnt its lessons well.

If Ravana represents one class of humanity that would use everything including religion and worship as a cloak to cover up its ambitions, Vibhisana represents the kind of bhakta who by his force of devotion can be converted from his asuric birth to a diviner status. The rigid distinctions that we sometimes draw between the Devas and Asuras were not so distinct in ancient times. Originally a divine being, Ravana’s life reveals, among other things, that there is an Asura concealed within us, no matter how close we may seem to the Lord, outwardly. Ravana and Kumbhakarna were dwarpal, gatekeepers, of Lord Vishnu, yet if we allow ego to take the better of us then this is bound to spell ruin. On the other hand, there is Vibhisana who is also with the Asuras by birth and yet has kept himself aloof from the misdeeds of his brother. It speaks of a man’s character when he does not succumb to the influences of family and society but follows what he believes to be the right thing and speaks his mind freely even if it means being cast out from his kingdom and the comfort of family. Such a person, regardless of his birth, is an adhikari, deserving and fit, for the friendship with the Lord. Thus, we see here that the distinction which the Ramayana draws between the two types of humanity is not based on birth and beliefs, least of all on colour of the skin and language but only on one thing, and that is what differentiates the Aryan from the un-Aryan, that is how the scriptures distinguish these two types, that subtle yet clear line between dharma and adharma. It is subtle because dharma is not defined as a rule book prescribing certain dos and don’ts. It is something to be felt within our soul which is truly the seat of dharma and not the mind that tends to draw a line dividing black and white. What is unclear to the mind is clear to the evolving soul of man. There is great importance given to dharma at every step in Indian spirituality. Yet knowing that it is subtle in nature, it has presented to us various examples to drive the point home. The Ramayana itself touches upon this with a subtlety and fineness that is rare to find elsewhere.

Dharma and adharma

Thus, for example, the Ramayana takes up the question asked by Vali who asks Rama as to why he killed him hiding behind a tree, especially since Vali had no personal enmity with him. Rama answers explaining the subtle nature of dharma, explaining that in the forest he is wandering as a servant of his brother Bharat, who is right now the king. Therefore, to maintain the law and order of a just society, he must punish the aggressors who rule along the principles of ‘might is right’. Being a kshatriya, it is also his duty to protect the righteous. In this case, Vali was clearly the unjust aggressor against his own brother Sugriva. He had married his sister-in-law who should have been rather looked upon as sister or mother. Hence, his killing of Vali is justified. When asked about why the deed was done in hiding, Rama states that he had shot at him as a hunter would a wild animal, since Vali has been like an animal in his behaviour. Besides, it was impossible for anyone to kill Vali in frontal combat, leaving no other option than to kill him thus. Yet, here comes the final verdict. Rama accepts inwardly that though he did what he did due to the exigency of time and circumstances, it was not the ideal way. Hence, in his next incarnation as Krishna, he chooses to be killed accidentally by Vali’s son Angad, now born as a hunter who shoots an arrow while hiding, mistaking Krishna’s Feet for a deer’s eye. The circle of dharma is completed. Even though Rama is none else but the Divine incarnate, he at first identifies himself as the servant of the then king of Ayodhya, and later as an upholder of dharma, and takes upon himself the consequences of the act, thereby, respecting the cosmic law.

The only other blot on his rather impeccable and noble character is the banishment of his spouse, Sita, at the instance of doubt raised by a commoner. Leaving aside the symbolism, here we see Rama setting the highest standards of dharma by wilfully binding himself to the then law of the land, in the same way a commoner had to, rather than conveniently overrule the law by his regal powers. And, even though his banishment is to uphold the rajdharma, the code of governance of a king, he refuses to remarry and suffers in silent agony for Sita.

Test of fire

A clear example of a deeply symbolic tale is the test of fire that Sita has to undergo after Ravana is killed. The story goes that Sita, the daughter of earth, conceals herself before the lila of the Lord begins in the forest. Ravana could not come near her if she did not conceal herself and become powerless and weak. The first sign of this self-concealment is that she is lured by the unusual trick of the golden deer and refuses to listen to Rama’s counsel. She is then abducted by the demon king and kept a captive in his kingdom where she spends her days remembering her Lord. A great battle then ensues and she is released following the victory of Rama. She is all set to meet him but what is this that she must undergo before the reunion, to walk upon fire to prove her fitness!

Our modern mind naturally does not understand this ritual and revolts. But to one on the path of yoga, the symbolism is very clear. Sita or Nature is one, the Shakti or Power of the Lord, but conceals and diminishes Herself to become this earthly nature. Her Power is hidden from her own sight and therefore she is lured by appearances, the golden deer. The soul wanders in pursuit of this illusory goal, while in the process the demoniac forces of an asuric nature are attracted to her and seek to possess her by force. Sita refuses to yield and even while in captivity spends her days remembering her Lord. A fierce battle is then waged in our nature between the forces of a higher Light and Darkness. The Lord wins but there is still one more test that our fallen nature must pass so that it can ascend to a supernature and be one with its Lord. It is the test of inner purification, the test of our sole allegiance to the Lord and Master of our being, the test of our sincerity and faithfulness to the Supreme. Thus is redeemed our nature and re-wedded to our Lord finds its supreme consummation. It is the union of material nature with the Divine that will eventually create a Divine Life in a divine body upon earth.

Indian ideal of chastity

The same deep symbol is there in the story of Sati and Parvati wherein Sati must give herself through fire and be reborn as Parvati before she can be married forever to Shiva, the great and mighty god whom she adores. But apart from the symbolic nature of the tale of burning in fire, we often find the mention of Sita and Savitri as the ideal of chastity as well. Here too the principle is the same. The Indian mind, never satisfied with the average and the ordinary, often sets the highest possible standards of life to which one could look up to and strive to be. When Sita is set as a standard of chastity, certain eyebrows are raised, wondering how and why a woman who has been, apparently, neglected by her husband, doubted and abandoned in the forest should even remain chaste towards him.

First of all, we must understand that Rama did not neglect the daughter of King Janaka. It is his love that impelled him to march upon the mighty kingdom of Ravana with an inadequate and ill-equipped army. He is shown as sensitive to her pain and suffering even when far from her. But that is not the issue here. Why should Sita continue to love him despite Rama showing that for him the kingdom and his subjects are the most important of all? He can sacrifice his loved wife’s happiness and his own in the process but not the law to which he is bound as any other commoner.

The answer lies in looking at the whole phenomenon of love, even conjugal love, independent of the person whom you love. Sita, at least, has Rama as her counterpart but Mandodari, the wife of Ravana and Tara, the wife of Vali, have husbands who live far from dharma of any kind. And yet, these two women are regarded as great in their own right, and among the five sacred women in ancient India. The reason is very simply that love is at once a personal and an impersonal force. In its origin, like all universal forces, it is impersonal. It is only in a human vessel and when it is directed towards another being that it takes a personal hue.

The practice of chastity is to potentiate the power of love by directing it towards one human being. By learning to love unconditionally, unselfishly and completely, one passes beyond the individual form to the principle of Divine Love. Possibly, women were much more capable of it than men. The practice of chastity through the double power of love and truth was a kind of yoga in its own right. It did not matter, therefore, who or what the man was. What mattered was that one loved from one’s own side truly and unconditionally. That is the fire of chastity or one-pointedness in love that purified earth-nature and turned it into some semblance of divinity.

Banishment

Finally, there is the banishment of Sita into the forest where she brings up her children single-handedly in the hermitage of seer Valmiki. This part of the story that some doubt to be authentic adds to the flavour of the Ramayana. Without this episode, the epic would have been all about Rama and his divinity. But with this single masterstroke the epic weighs heavily in favour of the feminine. She is not a helpless weak creature. When faced with adversity she can handle it much better than a man. She remains steadfast in courage; faith and love while a captive to the demon king. She remains steadfast in courage, faith and love even when she is banished and never lets a trace of bitterness escape her lips. With this, the epic becomes balanced beautifully between the masculine and the feminine. Not only Rama but Sita too comes out through every test as a strong woman, a woman of substance who refuses to yield to adversity. Neither does she bow her head in helpless shame nor slip into the vicious cycle of anger, depression and hate. She rather chooses the path of glory, showing that a woman does not need a man, that she is indeed Shakti and if she so decides then nothing is impossible for her. Alone, she is equal and greater than her fate.

Archetypes of humanity

But apart from these two stories, which have their own justification, given the age, context and background, the image of Rama long imprinted upon the Indian psyche is of the ideal kshatriya, strong and fierce in combat yet gentle in demeanour, fearless in battle and tender in feelings when it comes to his dealings with the different segments of society, wise in his counsels yet humble in his approach towards knowledge. He is ready to gather pearls of wisdom from all the sages whom he meets on the way during his sojourn in the forest and does not spare his younger brother Lakshmana to seek the ways of good governance from Ravana before he dies, even as his arch-rival lies fallen on the ground during his final moments.

His deep compassion for the lowly and the outcast, Guhak, his upholding of friendship with the vanara Sugriva, his redemption of Ahilya whom her husband and the society had abandoned as a sinner, his treatment of one and all, whether it be eating from the hands of an ordinary woman Shabari or doing the last rites for the vulture king Jatayu sowed the seeds of divine socialism in the Indian mind and opened the path towards an ideal society known till date as Ramarajya.

The key element of this perfect society was that the king held himself responsible for all that happened in his kingdom, including the various forms of sufferings and diseases in his subjects. His renunciation of the kingdom to uphold his father’s or rather a king’s promise given to his wife is matched only with his valiant stand to rescue the daughter of Janaka from the clutches of Ravana. We can see the true meaning of renunciation which is not an outer abandonment of life and action, but to act not under the impulsion of ego and desires, but to uphold the dharma.

In the single persona and figure of Rama, we see a perfect symbol of the high and noble Aryan type, the heroic humanity that shrinks not from any battle whether it is inner or outer. His battles are never for the ostentatious expansion of ambition but the expansion of dharma. The conquest is as much dharma as everything else. In him, we see the meeting of the triumvirate of manhood in the form of wisdom, strength and love knit together around the ideal of dharma.

Ideal bhakta

Finally, the story of Ramayana cannot be complete without Hanuman, the Avatara of Shiva as Rudra who comes to aid the work of Vishnu embodied in Rama. He represents the perfect bhakta whose life is dedicated to the service of the Lord. One-pointed in his mission to serve the Lord, he has taken a body despite being a celestial being since he could serve him the best alone. Ever ready to listen and obey the slightest command of the Divine, he is fearless and strong, knowing that his life and death are in the Lord’s hands. But he is also wise; he knows how to distinguish the Truth from falsehood and to find the way through every difficulty and obstacle that may arise in the path of his service. He is the ideal that man must follow in his ascension towards the Divine consciousness to get out of our present animal nature. For, while the mind can enjoy the study of scriptures and the heart can feel joy in singing the name of the Lord, the animal acts in us can only be tamed through the service of the Lord. This is what the life and story of Hanuman reveal. Without service, knowledge remains theoretical, without service bhakti remains incomplete, without service our freedom remains imperfect.

This and much more is suggested in the Ramayana if we care to find it. But a word of caution is needed. We should be careful not to fall prey to this modern mentality, that is, nitpicking and eager to find faults in “the great ones”. Great beings may and do have their imperfections. The greater the Light, the deeper the shadow it casts by contrast. So too the characters of the Ramayana are not perfect beings, certainly not by our standards. But their imperfection is overarched by the spirit of dharma in which they dwell, the light of dharma that they hold as a guiding light for all actions, and the love for dharma that impels them to make any amount of sacrifice that may be needed for the victory of Truth and the advent of a diviner life upon earth.

Most importantly, the Ramayana, especially the work of Tulsidas and other poets like Kamban, provide for man the much-needed food and nourishment for his soul. For while we have all kinds of food to nourish or harm our mind, senses and the bodily self, there is very little to nourish our heart and soul. The story of Rama and Sita fills that gap and hence its relevance will continue as long as the earth remains a field for the evolution of the human soul through the various challenges and vicissitudes of life towards Truth, Light, the Beauty of Love and the dream of a harmonious collective living.

The following are some of Sri Aurobindo’s remarks about Ramayana and its main hero Rama, the legendary king and Avatara of Vishnu:

The Ramayana is a work of the same essential kind as the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more delicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and colour. The main bulk of the poem in spite of much accretion is evidently by a single hand and has a less complex and more obvious unity of structure. There is less of the philosophic, more of the purely poetic mind, more of the artist, less of the builder. The whole story is from beginning to end of one piece and there is no deviation from the stream of the narrative. At the same time there is a like vastness of vision, an even more wide-winged flight of epic sublimity in the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in the detail. The structural power, strong workmanship and method of disposition of the Mahabharata remind one of the art of the Indian builders, the grandeur and boldness of outline and wealth of colour and minute decorative execution of the Ramayana suggest rather a transcript into literature of the spirit and style of Indian painting. The epic poet has taken here also as his subject an Itihasa, an ancient tale or legend associated with an old Indian dynasty and filled it in with detail from myth and folklore, but has exalted all into a scale of grandiose epic figure that it may bear more worthily the high intention and significance. The subject is the same as in the Mahabharata, the strife of the divine with the titanic forces in the life of the earth, but in more purely ideal forms, in frankly supernatural dimensions and an imaginative heightening of both the good and the evil in human character. On one side is portrayed an ideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilization founded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation of the moral ideal which is presented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and sweetness; on the other are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence, and the two ideas and powers of mental nature living and embodied are brought into conflict and led to a decisive issue of the victory of the divine man over the Rakshasa. All shade and complexity are omitted which would diminish the single purity of the idea, the representative force in the outline of the figures, the significance of the temperamental colour and only so much admitted as is sufficient to humanise the appeal and the significance. The poet makes us conscious of the immense forces that are behind our life and sets his action in a magnificent epic scenery, the great imperial city, the mountains and the ocean, the forest and wilderness, described with such a largeness as to make us feel as if the whole world were the scene of his poem and its subject the whole divine and titanic possibility of man imaged in a few great or monstrous figures. The ethical and the aesthetic mind of India have here fused themselves into a harmonious unity and reached an unexampled pure wideness and beauty of self-expression. The Ramayana embodied for the Indian imagination its highest and tenderest human ideals of character, made strength and courage and gentleness and purity and fidelity and self-sacrifice familiar to it in the most suave and harmonious forms coloured so as to attract the emotion and the aesthetic sense, stripped morals of all repellent austerity on one side or on the other of mere commonness and lent a certain high divineness to the ordinary things of life, conjugal and filial and maternal and fraternal feeling, the duty of the prince and leader and the loyalty of follower and subject, the greatness of the great and the truth and worth of the simple, toning things ethical to the beauty of a more psychical meaning by the glow of its ideal hues. The work of Valmiki has been an agent of almost incalculable power in the moulding of the cultural mind of India: it has presented to it to be loved and imitated in figures like Rama and Sita, made so divinely and with such a revelation of reality as to become objects of enduring cult and worship, or like Hanuman, Lakshmana, Bharata the living human image of its ethical ideals; it has fashioned much of what is best and sweetest in the national character, and it has evoked and fixed in it those finer and exquisite yet firm soul tones and that more delicate humanity of temperament which are a more valuable thing than the formal outsides of virtue and conduct.^[33]

I do not consider your method of dealing with Rama’s personality to be the right one. It has to be taken as a whole in the setting that Valmiki gave it (not treated as if it were the story of a modern man), with the significance that he gave to his hero’s Personality, deeds and works. If it is pulled out of its setting and analysed under the dissecting knife of a modern ethical mind, it loses all its significance at once. Krishna so treated becomes a [mere?] debauchee and trickster who no doubt did great things in politics — but so did Rama in war. Achilles and Odysseus pulled of their setting become one furious egoistic savage and the other a cruel and cunning the savage. I consider myself under an obligation to enter into the spirit, significance, atmosphere of the Mahabharata, Iliad, and identify myself with their time-spirit before I can feel what their heroes were in themselves apart from the details of their outer actions.

As for the Avatarhood, I accept it for Rama first because he fills a place in the scheme — and seems to me to fill it rightly — and because when I read the Ramayana I feel a great afflatus which I recognise and which makes of its story — mere fairytale though it seems — a parable of a great critical transitional event that happened in the terrestrial evolution and gives to the main character’s personality and action a significance of the large typical cosmic kind which these actions would not have had if they had been done by another man in another scheme of events. The Avatar is not bound to do extraordinary actions, but he is bound to give his acts or his work or what he is — any of these or all — a significance and an effective power that are part of something essential to be done in the history of the earth and its races.^[34]

It was not at all Rama’s business to establish the spiritual stage of that evolution — so he did not at all concern himself with that. His business was to destroy Ravana and to establish the Ramarajya — in other words, to fix for the future the possibility of an order proper to the sattwic civilised human being who governs his life by the reason, the finer emotions, morality, or at least moral ideals, such as truth, obedience, co-operation and harmony, the sense of honour, the sense of domestic and public order, to establish this in a world still occupied by anarchic forces, the Animal Mind and the powers of the vital Ego making its own satisfaction the rule of life, in other words, the Vānara and the Raksasa. This is the meaning of Rama and his life-work and it is according as he fulfilled it or not that he must be judged as Avatar or no Avatar. It was not his business to play the comedy of the chivalrous Ksatriya with the formidable brute beast that was Vali, it was his business to kill him and get the Animal Mind under his control. It was his business to be not necessarily a perfect, but a largely representative sattwic Man, a faithful husband and a lover, a loving and obedient son, a tender and perfect brother, rather, friend — he is friend of all kinds of people, friend of he kinds of people, friend of the outcast Guhaka, friend of the Animal leaders, Sugriva, Hanuman, friend of the vulture Jatayu, friend even of the Rāksasa Vibhisana. All that he was in a brilliant, striking but of this note or that like Harishchandra or Shivi, but with a certain harmonious completeness. but most of all, it was his business to typify and establish the things on which the social idea and its stability depend, truth and honour, the sense of the Dharma, public spirit and sense of order. To the first to truth and honour, much more than to his filial love and obedience to his father — though to that also — he sacrificed his personal rights as the elect of the King and the assembly and fourteen of the best years of his life and went into exile in the forests. To his public spirit and his sense of public order (the great and supreme civic virtue in the eyes of the ancient Indians, Greeks, Romans, for at that time the maintenance of the ordered community, not the separate development and satisfaction of the individual was the pressing need of the human evolution) he sacrificed his own happiness and domestic life and the happiness of Sita. In that he was at one with the moral sense of all the antique races, though at variance with the later romantic individualistic sentimental morality of the modern man who can afford to have that less stern morality just because the ancients sacrificed the individual in order to make the world safe for the spirit of social order. Finally it was Rama’s business to make the world safe for the ideal of the sattwic human being by destroying the sovereignty of Ravana, the Rāksasa menace. All this he did with such a divine afflatus in his personality and action that his figure has been stamped for more than two millenniums on the mind of Indian culture, and what he stood for has dominated the reason and idealising mind of man in all countries — and in spite of the constant revolt of the human vital, is likely to continue to do so until a greater Ideal arises. And you say in spite of all these that he was no Avatar? If you like — but at any rate he stands among the few greatest of the great Vibhūtis. You may dethrone him now — for man is no longer satisfied with the sattwic ideal and is seeking for something more — but his work and meaning remain stamped on the past of the earth’s evolving race.

When I spoke of the gap that would be left by his absence, I did not mean a gap among the prophets and intellectuals, but a gap in the scheme of Avatarhood — there was somebody who was the Avatar of the sattwic Human as Krishna was the Avatar of the overmental Superhuman — I see no one but Rama who can fill the place. Spiritual teachers and prophet (as also intellectuals, scientists, artists, poets, etc.) — these are the greatest Vibhūtis, but they are not Avatars.[35]

CHAPTER 14
Draupadi: Born of Fire

If Sita is the epicentre of the story of the Ramayana, Draupadi can well be regarded as the epicentre of the other great Indian epic the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is of a later age and is, in many ways, much more complex and many-sided than the Ramayana. Its characters are also closer to us than those of the Ramayana. No wonder we find in the persona of Draupadi a woman, at once complex and enigmatic, strong and beautiful, wise and intelligent and full of fire and passion. The legend goes that she is born of the fires of yajna. Her father, King Drupada burns with the agony of humiliation, having suffered defeat at the hands of his one-time friend Drona, now a patron teacher of the Kuru clan. King Drupada knows that he does not yet have the prowess to defeat his rival. So, he performs a yajna for progeny who is powerful enough to defeat the erstwhile warrior. He does beget the desired progeny, not one but two, a son named Dhristdyuman and a daughter named Draupadi. It has been said that Draupadi was the incarnation of goddess Kali and had come down to destroy the arrogant clan of warlords who were menacing the earth with the terrible weapons they acquired. But she performed her tasks without the inner control and mastery one needed to wield them. The birth through yajna is often described in the ancient scriptures. What this means is that birth is a conscious conception. There is an invocation to the cosmic powers to beget a child for a certain purpose. The child is therefore born with a mission and is armed and equipped for the same. Destiny too operates so that the mission may be fulfilled.

Binding power in a common mission

However, she is not alone in this mission. Some of the emanations of the gods have also come down to free the earth of this menace. The Pandava brothers are such emanations. Yudhisthira, the emanation of Dharmaraja, the god of justice who upholds the balance of creation; Bhima, the emanation of Vayu, the wind gods who make all things move in the right direction impelled by the sun; Arjuna, the emanation of Indra, the god of gods who governs the higher reaches of the mind; Nakula and Sahadeva, emanations of the celestial twins Aswini Kumar, who are the divine healers that embody the forces of harmony and peace. Above all, in their midst and to keep them on the appointed road that their soul has chosen, Sri Krishna, the Divine Avatara himself has descended.

It is no surprise then that as Draupadi grows up, she feels an innate affinity and a natural love for Sri Krishna, to whom she will always remain a close confidante and a dear sister and friend. As Fate has it, she is wedded to the five Pandava brothers following a strange turn of events soon after her swayamvara. Actually, it is Arjuna who wins her in a difficult competition, the purpose of which is to find the most capable suitor for the princess. But, as Arjuna reaches home along with the five brothers and reveals to his mother that they have something invaluable with them as a surprise, mother Kunti who has always treated all her sons as equals remarks that whatever it be they must share it equally among each one. What may seem to be a cruel turn of events to the modern mind turned out to be the best thing for Draupadi’s work. Like a bunch of flowers held together by a thread, Draupadi keeps the five brothers together as a united force.

Disrobing of the daughter of Fire

But greatness has always its price to pay. Soon, the adversarial powers that wish against peace and harmony or the reign of Truth and Light catch up on the Pandavas. They are haunted and hunted in every way by the jealous and ambitious Kauravas who leave no stone unturned to humiliate and cheat them. The acme is reached when the Pandavas are tricked into accepting a game of dice and lose all in the process, their wealth, their kingdom and worst of all, Draupadi.

The Kauravas, drunk with lust and vanity, try to outrage Draupadi’s modesty publicly in the king’s court and none who is present dare oppose. When Draupadi’s entreaties fall on deaf ears, she turns to implore her eternal companion, Lord Krishna. And Sri Krishna does come to her rescue. The hands of the wicked Dushasana bent upon disrobing her, fails in strength and the length of Draupadi’s saree stretches to no limit. The incident is often narrated in Indian folklore to remind men of the Divine Intervention in the life of the devotees and how He comes to our rescue when everything fails if we turn to Him in real earnest, unreservedly surrender ourselves to Him and depend upon Him alone. But the impact of the incident and the lesson it contains goes far beyond this. It is this incident that tilts the balance of justice completely and with finality in the favour of the Pandavas.

The day Draupadi is humiliated, that very day the fate of all those sitting helplessly in the Kuru assembly is sealed. Each of them — Duryodhana, Dushasana, the ace archer Karna, mighty Bhisma, master of various weapons Dronacharya — die as helplessly as Draupadi would have felt during the disrobing. Here we see the inner sense of the law of karmic balance. It is not so much the outer act but the inner state which returns. It may come due to a variety of outer causes. The inner state is the state of consciousness in which a deed is done. Thus, for example, Draupadi experiences a state of utter helplessness during the disrobing incident. None is able to help her except the Divine. The great Kuru warriors too die as helplessly with none to help them. Who knows though if things would not have been different if Duryodhana had chosen Krishna instead of his army, but that is only a moot question.

Secondly, this incident reveals that a society where women are disrespected is fast on its way to degeneration.

Finally, a woman need not depend upon someone else to protect herself. She carries the strength within her and must know how to bring it forward when needed. If she knows how to bring out this inner strength, then ways and means will be created. And if she dies fighting valiantly, then the perpetrators are doomed since the throne of justice swings violently and when this happens it does not reckon about emperors and empires. If Josephine and Helen were behind Napoleon and Paris, we also see Sita bringing the downfall of Ravana and Draupadi being the force behind the demolition of the once mighty, invulnerable and seemingly invincible Kuru empire. Draupadi was Kali’s incarnate and when Kali takes a stride, the wheel of Time changes and even the most powerful, the high and mighty bite the dust and lie helplessly where they once ruled. This is the great lesson embodied in the life of Draupadi.

Exile

Nevertheless, this does not end Draupadi’s tale of woes even though it seals the fate of the wicked Kauravas, for whatever a man may do, even if he deceives the whole world and manages to usurp the world’s throne, he cannot get away from the web of fate that his actions spin for him. All the Kauravas would hence be decimated in a gory war that would be remembered for ages to come, not just for its fierceness but more so for the birth of the Gita, the Song Divine, in the midst of that terrible destruction. But now, Draupadi along with the Pandavas must suffer at the hands of the forces of darkness that Duryodhana represents. They wander into the forest but again the touch of Krishna turns it into a blessing of some kind, apart from a few incidents where Draupadi must face humiliation again at the hands of the proteges of the Kaurava.

Most of their time, however, is spent in quiet contemplation in the company of the sages of the forest, gathering wisdom and inner strength for the upcoming ordeal. It is during this period that the chief hero of the epic battle, Arjuna, gathers celestial weapons from the higher powers that govern the world from their high seats. Instead of staying back in the palace or returning to her father’s kingdom to enjoy the luxuries and comfort of being a princess, Draupadi, like Sita, prefers to walk the way with her husbands, to be their strength in this dark hour of distress rather than blaming and cursing them for her ills. She knows that even the best among men may be overtaken by folly but a man is not to be judged by the difficulties he faces and his errors but by his Divine possibilities. The Pandavas, no doubt, are noble because they stand with dharma even though they have their blemishes and defects. What is of much more importance is where our core lies and which side we are aligned to within the battle of life, what is the destination and the road we have chosen for our journey of life rather than our small or big shortcomings which are almost universal.

Battle of the future

Wars are schools of courage and help humanity get out of their petty, selfishly driven lives and its comfort zones. Wars, like at Kurukshetra, help humanity to advance by clearing what must go out of creation and laying down a new base for the future. It reshapes the group-life of a people and the collective life of humanity as a whole. Of course, if humanity was more receptive to Truth, then this would not be necessary. But since things tend to get stuck in grooves, wars become necessary to unplug them. This is what happened during the Kurukshetra war and also in our more recent times during the two world wars of the previous century.

The hour of the decisive battle and its eventual victory arrives in Kurukshetra. The Kauravas are all killed and a new era of peace and harmony begins with the coronation of Yudhisthira. When the reign of dharma is established once again, Sri Krishna returns to his divine abode and the Pandavas, realising that their mission is over, ascend to the high heavens through the snow-clad mountains, leaving the kingdom in safe and strong hands that would govern people with wisdom and courage for centuries to come. As they ascend, Draupadi, the power that had held them together, is the first to fall away. But before shedding her mortal sheath she has a wonderful vision of Krishna who has himself come to accompany his sakhi, friend, to the higher worlds. During the sojourn, Draupadi asks him many things and Krishna responds with his words of sublime wisdom.

Quite evidently, the epic is a story of the struggle between the forces of Light and the forces of Darkness for their supremacy upon the earth. In this struggle, the forces of Truth and Light are bound to be eventually victorious but not before crossing a dreadful path through the human night and the suffering it entails. Draupadi plays a pivotal role in holding together the forces of Light in this difficult and dangerous passage where the last defence of the darkness is to prolong their reign under the pretext of a misplaced virtue. Yudhisthira, in his eagerness to be known as fair and just, is ever ready to hand over the kingdom to the plotting brothers and to let them reign even though it is the reign of adharma where not even the royal woman is safe and secure — the case of ordinary subjects a far cry. But Draupadi keeps reminding them of their high mission and with the help of Sri Krishna, her eternal friend, keeps pointing their strength on the road appointed to them by Fate. For this, she accepts to suffer even humiliation and ignominy at the hands of the oppressor only to make her resolve firmer rather than compromise with the forces of darkness and falsehood for her personal safety or comfort.

It is a challenging task by many standards and Draupadi rises to the challenge and takes the concept of woman as strength and love to a new zenith. To face the wrath of the king and the harsh verdict of fate and yet to not succumb but strive to conquer the adversary and struggle to alter the balance of Fate, is what Draupadi represents as the queen unparalleled, the embodiment of strength, the woman half-human, half-divine.

Brief overview of the Mahabharata

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana can be understood at many levels where each is valid and complements the other. Most outwardly, it represents a crisis that a human undergoes from time to time that has the potential to plunge the human into the abyss of destruction, setting the clock of human evolution backward by a few centuries, if not millennia. The crisis itself comes due to a steady degeneration of the high and sublime values, the noble ways of life that are given to man for his evolution. This is what the Gita calls as ‘dharmasya glani’ which has little to do with any formal organised religion (possibly there were none at that time). It is a way of life, based on certain eternal truths and the eternal law as given to mankind from time immemorial and activated in the memory of the race by countless rishis, sages and yogis. A time comes when the degeneration is so large that there is a need for a complete changeover. When the time comes for this complete changeover, a near-total transition from one age, yuga, to another, the Divine himself appears at the forefront of the human march as its leader. Once again, he utters the eternal word that man has forgotten and helps humanity both by his own life as an example and by other direct and indirect means to navigate through this dangerous period. These periods when the Divine himself assumes a body to lead earth and humanity are indeed moments when humanity takes a leap across some perilous bridge.

The advent of the Divine during such moments when He himself takes the rein of humanity directly as the leader of the human march, lokasangrahartha, is called the Avatara. The Avatara comes not only to establish the eternal truths but he also gives it a new form, a form that is in accordance with the age, yugadharma. There is a purpose behind the death of the old ways of life — that the new ways may be born. This new way is based on the eternal law, Sanatana Dharma, the spirit of which is always intact but the outer body changes as it happens when the individual soul changes from one body to another. That is how evolution takes place.

Sri Krishna not only restored the Sanatana Dharma in its original glory and splendour but also gave it a new body and form. The established custom of the birthright of the king was changed. The king had to be a servant of the people. His life had to be an embodiment of dharma otherwise the common folks, the gwal bal, the cowherd-men, had the right to overthrow him. Secondly, Sri Krishna established the nation-unit, in the sense of a single nation or people knit together through a common spirit within a land. India was reborn through the Mahabharata. Of course, Bharatvarsha is as old as the Himalayas but its name has changed several times. The Jambudweep of Lord Rama, the Bharatavarsha of the mighty Kuru clan born of the coming together of a rishi and a rishika, Shakuntala whose son Bharata ruled the ancient land of India mightily and wisely, changed into aryavarta, aryabhumi. As we know by now, the Aryan was not a physically distinct type as a certain section of politically motivated scholars insist on holding the corpse of a now-dead Aryan invasion theory. It was rather a psychological type of humanity epitomised in Bhisma, Arjuna, Vidura and Sri Krishna himself. In brief, it was the ideal of true and complete manhood embodying the triumvirate of wisdom, strength and love. This is the kind of divine humanity that Sri Krishna envisages in the Gita and the way shown towards it by following the triple path of jnana, karma and bhakti.

We see a similar crisis in the previous century, with two of the goriest wars that man could ever imagine. It was as if all the rot within of humanity came out in one dark flow. Kali, the mighty Mother who turns the tide of Time by inspiring the hearts of men to sacrifice, descended to drink this darkness and, in the process, destroyed the Asuras — in other words Nazism, Imperialism, Scientific Materialism, Freudianism and the like. Communism too, in its dark ignorant, or rather twisted form, based on the biological unity of mankind and its stark division between two classes of people based on money, it has destroyed though there still exist pockets of political influence — units with their zealot, faithful followers who aggressively attack, threaten and pull down all that contradicts with their idea of another kind of hegemony upon the world. The expansionist idea of Communism that dreams of unity through the enforced acceptance of a common ideology is as worse, if not more, as religious zealots trying to convert people into a single belief system. An ideological hegemony has no essential difference from a religious hegemony and conversion except that the gods and the gospel are replaced. All the rest is the same with dangerous consequences: the effort at religious domination of one cult or group over another.

The previous century also saw the descent or the advent of an Avatara who steered humanity through this narrow gorge of Time into which the world was hurled by dark asuric forces leading to the two great World Wars and the backlash of Imperialism, into which civilisation had entered and was being stifled to death. He rescued humanity in the Age of Kaliyuga just as Sri Krishna had in the previous age, Dwapara Yuga. In the footsteps of the Lord, he restored the eternal truths of Sanatana Dharma, breathed new life in the spirit of the age and gave it a new form, consistent with the yugadharma. He opened the ways to the future and showed the way for man to navigate through this crisis towards a luminous future. We know whom we are referring to here. It is none else but Sri Aurobindo. He did in our age what Sri Krishna did in the Dwapara Yuga.

The legends of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, though appearing as crises of outer events, are at their core evolutionary crises wherein humanity is called upon to make a choice depending upon which side of the history it finds itself on. Each of the main characters in the Mahabharata represents one such archetype of humanity who stands either on the side of the intended progress or resists the human advance by its obstinate refusals, denials or simply inaction when destiny demands it to act aligned to the Time-Spirit.

We can take them one by one.

Sri Krishna, of course, is the centre of the entire scene. The epic revolves around him. Even though his action in the actual war seems limited to the ordinary eye of man, the sage and seers know that it is he who is conducting the war though sitting unarmed on the chariot on the battlefield of life. He is conducting the war not by outer means as much as by the silent impersonal Will that a yogin has access to. It is this Will that drives the stars, the sun, the moon and earth on their course. It is this Will that orders the atoms and the galaxies in their orbits. It is this Will that awakens as life in the plant and animal, blooms in the flower, flows in the river and stands erect and lofty in the mountain ranges high. It is this Will that climbs as thought in man, kindles within him the fire of aspiration and leads him on the inner paths towards God, Freedom, Truth, Bliss and Immortality. It is this Will that labours in the whole creation as Love.

Though the scientists see it as something mechanical, hidden behind this mechanical energy in the atom and man is a Conscious Force that arranges all the events and circumstances of individual and collective life. Random though they may seem, there stands behind them the workings of a deep cosmic Intelligence and Wisdom from the heights, prajna prasrita purani^[36] that one can realise through yoga. Once we know this Will and align our acts to its rhythms, life flows beautifully as it catches hold of the secret music that rings in our soul. Then, even the battle of Kurukshetra becomes a tremendous means for our growth. It is this Divine Will that Sri Krishna embodies on the great battlefield of Kurukshetra. The Gita is His teaching to Arjuna and to man and the various ways and means through which man can and must align to this Divine Will that operates within us and within the world. In aligning to It, rather than living by our mental standards which are nothing but partial and shadowy gleams, man can find his ultimate salvation, not an otherworldly moksha by shunning the world and existence but a moksha here and now while being engaged in all the various activities of life. He can live his life as a jivanmukta if his heart and mind can attune to this Divine Will within.

But first, we must disabuse ourselves of all that distorts this Will within us. This distortion arises due to the intrusion of the ego and desire. It is this that is the cause of our suffering. The first thing that the Gita teaches, therefore, is to draw back the old ways of working of nature, its impulsions through the ego-self and desire. It teaches us jnana yoga. By this, we realise another self within us, our true Self which is One though it expresses itself through the three modes of Nature, sattwa, rajas, tamas.

Next, it teaches us karma yoga, the way of aligning ourselves to the Divine Will. It takes time and there is a whole process which includes nishkama karma to take away the sting of desire, the practice of equanimity that further breaks the knot of the ego that distorts and falsifies our vision and action, constant remembrance and offering of all we think, feel and do, as a conscious sacrifice, yajna, to the Master of works who is none other than the supreme being. This purifies our egoism and prepares us for the direct Divine action flowing through us. Finally, it crowns its gospel with bhakti yoga through which we enter into an entire and complete possible union and communion with the Lord. When this happens, when our surrender is complete, we are completely freed from all bondage to ignorance. Then, whatever we do becomes a means of serving, loving, adoring and worshipping the Eternal until all in us becomes one with His Being, one with His Consciousness, one with His Vast Delight. Sri Krishna comes to reveal all this to man through Arjuna.

Arjuna comes next in the line of great characters in the Mahabharata. He is the hero on the battlefield of Kurukshetra and most importantly, the recipient of the great teaching of the Gita directly from Sri Krishna. His qualification is simply that he has stood with Sri Krishna from age to age in the great battle of the future, not shrinking from action; rather, working together for the consummation of the Divine Will in humanity. He has forgotten his previous births but the Lord remembers and hence, he is the chosen hero of a great plot that is going to change Time and usher in a New Age for mankind. In his personality, he represents the rajo-sattwic man, the kinetic dynamic man who is moved not so much by personal ambition and desire as much as by higher and nobler ideals. He is the srestha, the true Aryan in spirit and deeds. In his personal evolution, he has arrived at a high point wherein he can go beyond the circle of trigunatmic prakriti, the threefold modes of nature called tamas, rajas and sattwa and finds himself completely one with the Lord, living in Him forever and doing His deeds in the world. He is the kshatriya, the warrior of a high and noble type like the knights and the samurai who do not fight for personal gains but for defending the honour of their people and country, for protecting the helpless and weak, for taking on the strong Rakshasa and stand up against the forces of injustice and evil that oppress the world. Such is Arjuna, the noble warrior prince who naturally becomes the hero of the great war and is the recipient of a special Grace from the embodied Divine, Sri Krishna.

The Pandavas, all five of them, represent a new humanity that is born amidst the old. Their mother is Kunti, the long-suffering yet strong and patient woman that the ancient Aryans cherished. She has faced many challenges — from being socially ostracised, to the untimely death of her husband, the newly anointed king of the Kuru clan, injustice at the hands of her own people who usurp the kingdom wrongly and through deceit — and yet she refuses to give up. She is the epitome of a strong Aryan woman, who, like Sita, Draupadi and Savitri grows stronger with the blows of fate. They do not become cynics nor complain about what destiny gives them. Instead, they take the challenge of destiny head-on with courage and confidence and win against all odds. The only little stain on Kunti’s noble nature is the abandoning of Karna born before her marriage, an act for which she suffers lifelong remorse and pain.

Each of her five sons is born through the intervention of the gods. They represent power and aspects of the Divine, vibhutis as they are called in India. Yudhisthira, the eldest represents justice and dharma, Bhima the strong represents Life energy in its tremendous power submitting itself to nothing and none except dharma which his elder brother embodies. Arjuna represents Indra, the leader of the gods, who is fierce in battle and armed with subtle intelligence. The other two from Madri, the second wife of Pandu, the king, Nakul and Sahadeva represent the Aswins, the gods of youth, vitality and health. Among them, Nakul is the prototype of someone who is balanced in his living whereas Sahadeva is a more meditative type who has a clear vision of truth.

Last comes Karna, who is also born to Kunti. He is not a Pandava since he was born before Kunti was married. His life is an interesting story of a man who is in search of his true identity. He is a kshatriya by temperament and equal to Arjuna in his prowess and skill in the battle. But what differentiates him from Arjuna is that he is overtaken by ambition and jealousy. The spirit of vain competition drives him, as do the will to prove himself better than Arjuna to the extent that he makes it his life’s goal to challenge and defeat Arjuna and even deal on him a mortal blow to prove his superiority. His ambitious nature takes the better of him, enslaving him to the evil-doer Duryodhana, just because he offers him a kingdom to rule. Though born a deva, he is representative of someone who has lost his way and falls from his high possibility, thereby finding himself in the camp of the evil-doers and on the wrong side of history. His is the worst fate since it is one thing when our basic nature is still unevolved like Duryodhana’s, but quite another when you abandon a Divine possibility with which you are born and stand to support evil. The tragedy of his life is not that his identity remains unknown. What, after all, is an identity by birth? Karna does discover his kshatriya nature and destiny that allows him to learn all that he needs to learn under the tutelage of the ablest master of the time. His real tragedy is his fall from his high divine possibility. His guru, Lord Parashuram, an Avatara himself, cautions him when he knows the seed of ambition and tendency of deceit in his nature and advises that he should not use his skills to defend adharma and if he does so, he will lose it all. He does not listen to this wise advice much like he does not listen to the entreaties of Sri Krishna to step aside from the battle and therefore, meets his nemesis.

Modern commentators wrongly think that Sri Krishna was being diplomatic in asking him to join the Pandavas. Whatever divine diplomacy there may be, Sri Krishna, knowing Karna’s true kshatriya nature and his godlike birth, wanted to give him a fair chance to come out of the grip of evil, of the gang of Duryodhana and Shakuni and join forces with dharma. Karna refused and hence, the gods took away their protection, the famous armour presented to him by his godly father, Surya. The armour given by the gods is not meant to be used for evil purposes. If one does so, then one stands to lose the protection of the gods and fall on the battlefields of life. All who have tried this, to put the powers to wrong use, have failed and Karna is no exception.

Then there is Bhisma the fierce, who stands as the noblest and best of the old world. He is dutiful, virtuous and mighty. His virtues and might are at the service of the clan. To protect the clan is his dharma — the highest social unit of the times. But Sri Krishna has come to break the clan system and establish a larger national entity. Bhisma with all his wisdom, virtue and might stands on the wrong side of history. And towards this end, destiny has already provided a big chink in his armour. He carries a blemish from the past. He has previously forcibly taken away the three daughters of the king of Kashi to get his brothers married in order to perpetuate the clan. This opens the doors to his nemesis.

In this story, as in quite a few others, we also see the complex workings of destiny. Bhisma and Karna silently watched the disrobing of Draupadi, an act heinous for a kshatriya. Whatever their justification may have been, they had fixed their destiny at that very moment like the others such as Dronacharya and Dhritarastra. Strangely, while they win the immediate game of dice, by this very act, the dice of destiny is loaded heavily against them. The time comes and destiny brings out its destined cards and Bhisma, Drona, and Karna all fall helplessly on the field of Kurukshetra. People often start debating about the fairness of the means that Pandavas used. Well, it is a war where the balance of justice must prevail. It is not a competition about who fought the war fairly when the war itself was unfairly thrust upon the Pandavas. The rules of the game were already altered with the killing of Abhimanyu, and the end was just a matter of time. Abhimanyu is another valiant character in the Mahabharata. He defies death, then embraces it and becomes immortal in history. Men will later swear by his courage and valour. His life shows us the distinction between true glory, kirti, and mere name and fame, yash. Men like Duryodhana pursue blind ambition. They have earned name and fame for their outer position, wealth and also strength and might. But they are weak in their soul power. Abhimanyu is endowed with soul power and that is why he fights as if death does not exist. This is true valour, and in his life we see one of the noblest archetypes of a kshatriya. No wonder that it is his seed, Parikshit, who must eventually inherit the great kingdom. The stress in the Mahabharata is on the heroic soul since Dwapara Yuga was the age of heroism everywhere — in Greece, Egypt and India, where the clash of forces was taking place at the vital level.

There are many other interesting characters as if a whole range of humanity is on display, and as though all shades and varieties of human possibilities are represented. There is the infamous Dhritarastra, blind not only physically but also psychologically. His charioteer Sanjay who is blessed with a subtle vision can be seen symbolically. It is also true that the power of subtle vision exists and Sanjay has been blessed with it. But this blessing is more of a curse for the king who must now not only hear but see, through Sanjay, the gory details of his children’s death one by one. It is as if the Divine Wisdom wants him to know what fate befalls a man who stays with adharma despite knowing what the right thing to do is. He is by far the most unfortunate character but suffers a misfortune of his own making. Then, his wife Gandhari chooses to blindfold herself sharing her husband’s pain instead of keeping her eyes open and guides him on the path of dharma. No wonder they pass on their shadows to the one hundred children. Of course, Vikarna and the hundredth one Kaurava, Yuyutsu, child of Dhritarastra and a maid, turns out to be the only jewel in the entire clan. It is Yuyutsu who later looks after the kingdom and also his parents, proving the point that a high position does not necessarily make a high human being.

We see this point stressed time and again in the Mahabharata. Vyasa the sage, the author of the great epic — the longest epic in any language — is a multifaceted genius who can be said to be, in modern terms, an illegitimate offspring, being born of a sage and fisherwoman whose destiny changes with this betrothal. Sage Parashar had a child through Satyavati without ever marrying her. The child went on to become the renowned seer Vedvyas who has authored the Mahabharata. Satyavati will go on to become the empress of one of the greatest kingdoms of all times. Vidura, the son of a dasi, a maid, turns out to be another jewel in the Kuru clan. We see this point reiterated when the son of Bhima, the mighty Ghatotkach, born of a Rakshasi tribal woman, turns out to be another strong and valiant character whose sacrifice is one of the least sung yet among the most glorious of all.

There are many other characters and stories interwoven in the epic such as that of Aswatthama whose immortality itself is a curse or of Eklavya who emphasises adhikarabheda, an ill-understood concept in modern times where everything is freely available to all. Adhikarabheda referred to the imparting of highly specialized knowledge of the scriptures or weaponry to the select few lest it gets distorted or misused falling into wrong hands. The world is only beginning to realise its consequences with the quick transfer of dangerous technology falling into the hands of the unchaste. Eklavya did finally join the rank of Duryodhana though ideally, he should have stood up against Dronacharya! But the most fascinating story that we find is Draupadi’s who also occupies quite the centre stage in the Mahabharata.

Draupadi is born from the fire of yajna. Whatever occult processes there may be involved in this, it mainly indicates that hers is a conscious birth. She has been conceived for a purpose and therefore, has a mission assigned to her from her very birth. Though her father had asked for a son to defeat Dronacharya, at whose hands King Drupad had suffered humiliation, the first child that comes out of this yajna is Draupadi, a woman. The father rejects the boon and asks for a son again. The son Drishtadyuman is born but Draupadi, though rejected initially by her father, has been born with a purpose too. She is Sri Krishna’s counterpart in the great epic, she is His friend, sakhi. Like Radha, she is never married to the Avatara, but a common divine work, a divine intention has brought them together in the great battle of life. Inwardly, she is the Avatara of Kali who has come to destroy the arrogant kshatriyas who have lost their way in their pride and lust for power. She is ever pure, though married to five husbands, a sati, who lives by the Truth. Where else in the world can we find such a bold portrayal of the feminine, such liberal views on women, and such a lesson that a society that does not respect women and treats them as pleasure objects deserves to be destroyed! Draupadi is the dynamic Divine Will, the incarnate divine Force who has come to set the balance of justice right, to restore the reign of dharma. Like Sri Krishna, she too does not lift a weapon in the great war but her will is enough to ensure that the scales of destiny are tilted in favour of the Pandavas and therefore, in dharma’s favour.

Of course, all this can be seen symbolically but to see it only thus is to relegate its real significance. For example, the chariot of Arjuna being driven by Sri Krishna is very clearly also a well-known upanishadic symbol wherein the chariot is the body, the horses are the senses, the reins are the mind whereas the driver is the buddhi, the illumined intelligence in man. Arjuna is the soul that travels through the chariot. But a better symbol is that of Arjuna as the human soul and Sri Krishna as the immanent Divine in man. As long as man drives his life with his senses and limited mental lights that we call moral and ethical doctrines, he faces the chances of being lost when crucial dilemmas confront and bewilder his soul. But when he can make the courageous act of surrender to the Lord within and live only to obey His Will and His impulsion, abandoning all other standards of conduct, moral and mental, it is only then that he is truly delivered from delusion, grief, error and sin. That is how the Gita declares its mahavakya towards the end, revealing this great and profound truth, “Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in ME alone. I shall deliver thee from all fear. Do not grieve.”^[37] Yet, the war is not just the symbol of an inner war but a real war where the forces of light and darkness clash and their result will determine the destiny of the world. The inner war within man also has its collective counterpart and therefore, needs to be understood as such. The epic, therefore, is at once symbolic and real, replete with spiritual wisdom and occult truths. To speak about all of them or even a fraction of them would need a whole book.

With the end of the great Mahabharata war, mankind entered the age of Kali where the clash of forces would be played out at the most material level. The ideational clash will also be between a materialistic vision of life and the spiritual. This clash will end up both embracing each other and enriching life. That is what we are witnessing today. It is the age when man will explore matter and one who finds its forces and uses them rightly for the good of all will advance whereas one who refuses matter and material existence will suffer a fall. This is where India made a mistake post-Buddha. But now we see a new wave occupying young India with the stress of unifying material knowledge with the spiritual. It will also open doors to a new form of collective ethos that we call internationalism and a new religion which can be called the spiritual religion of humanity. Initially, this will enter the field of human thought as sentiment and an intellectual creed but, as mankind advances, its real truth will begin to appear, which will be to support a larger spiritual evolution of the race. Sri Aurobindo foresaw all this post the two great wars, the WW1 and WW2 of the previous century where not just clans but nations were put to test in the hearth of purification. There is so much more that we can write about the Mahabharata but this is its brief essence. The characters are at once real and symbolic. To reduce them only to symbolic forces is to do great injustice to the great epic. They are archetypes; each character is something that we can find distributed in humanity ranging from the most barbaric, crude and Rakshasic to the various shades of humanity moving towards the godlike. Today, all these shades are being taken up and summed to create a yet higher and new type of superhumanity of the future, the divine human. Let us close with a few passages from Sri Aurobindo on this and related issues:

There are many who say that the Mahabharata is only a symbol; Sri Krishna is God, Arjuna the human soul, the sons of Dhritrastra the inner enemies of the soul’s progress, the Pandava army represents the forces that help towards liberation. This is to relegate the Mahabharata to a low position in the world of letters and at the same time to minimise and bring to nought the deep seriousness of the Gita, its utility for the life of the man of action and its high teaching that makes for the progress of mankind. The war of Kurukshetra is not simply a frame for the Gita picture; it is the prime motive and the best occasion for carrying out the law given in the Gita. To accept a symbolic meaning for the great war of Kurukshetra is to reduce the law of the Gita to a law of ascetic quietism inapplicable to life in this world, not a law of the heroic man, a law to be followed in life. Sri Krishna is the Speaker. The scriptures say that Sri Krishna is God Himself. In the Gita too, Sri Krishna has proclaimed Himself as God. It has there been declared, on the basis of the Avatara doctrine in the fourth chapter and the theory of the Vibhuti in the tenth, that God dwells hidden in the bodies of all creatures, shows Himself to a certain extent through the manifestations of power in some particular beings, and is fully incarnated in the person of Sri Krishna. According to many, Sri Krishna, Arjuna and Kurukshetra are mere metaphors, and in order to recover the true meaning of the Gita these metaphors are to be ignored. But we cannot reject this part of the teaching. If the Avatara doctrine is there, why should Sri Krishna be ignored? Therefore, God Himself is the propounder of this knowledge and the teaching.

Sri Krishna is an Avatara. He has accepted in human form the law of man’s body and mind and spirit and has played his game, lila, accordingly. If we can grasp the obvious and the occult meaning of that play, we shall be able to grasp the meaning, the aim and the method of this worldgame. The main feature of this great game was action impelled by total knowledge. What was the knowledge underlying that action and that play has been revealed in the Gita.^[38]

Secondly, there is the typical, almost the symbolic significance of the human Krishna who stands behind the great action of the Mahabharata, not as its hero, but as its secret centre and hidden guide. That action is the action of a whole world of men and nations, some of whom have come as helpers of an effort and result by which they do not personally profit, and to these he is a leader, some as its opponents and to them he also is an opponent, the baffler of their designs and their slayer and he seems even to some of them an instigator of all evil and destroyer of their old order and familiar world and secure conventions of virtue and good; some are representatives of that which has to be fulfilled and to them he is counsellor, helper, friend. Where the action pursues its natural course or the doers of the work have to suffer at the hands of its enemies and undergo the ordeals which prepare them for mastery, the Avatar is unseen or appears only for occasional comfort and aid, but at every crisis his hand is felt, yet in such a way that all imagine themselves to be the protagonists and even Arjuna, his nearest friend and chief instrument, does not perceive that he is an instrument and has to confess at last that all the while he did not really know his divine Friend. He has received counsel from his wisdom, help from his power, has loved and been loved, has even adored without understanding his divine nature; but he has been guided like all others through his own egoism and the counsel, help and direction have been given in the language and received by the thoughts of the Ignorance. Until the moment when all has been pushed to the terrible issue of the struggle on the field of Kurukshetra and the Avatar stands at last, still not as fighter, but as the charioteer in the battle-car which carries the destiny of the fight, he has not revealed Himself even to those whom he has chosen.

Thus the figure of Krishna becomes, as it were, the symbol of the divine dealings with humanity. Through our egoism and ignorance we are moved, thinking that we are the doers of the work, vaunting of ourselves as the real causes of the result, and that which moves us we see only occasionally as some vague or even some human and earthly fountain of knowledge, aspiration, force, some Principle or Light or Power which we acknowledge and adore without knowing what it is until the occasion arises that forces us to stand arrested before the Veil. And the action in which this divine figure moves is the whole wide action of man in life, not merely the inner life, but all this obscure course of the world which we can judge only by the twilight of the human reason as it opens up dimly before our uncertain advance the little span in front. This is the distinguishing feature of the Gita that it is the culmination of such an action which gives rise to its teaching and assigns that prominence and bold relief to the gospel of works which it enunciates with an emphasis and force we do not find in other Indian Scriptures. Not only in the Gita, but in other passages of the Mahabharata we meet with Krishna declaring emphatically the necessity of action, but it is here that he reveals its secret and the divinity behind our works.

The symbolic companionship of Arjuna and Krishna, the human and the divine soul, is expressed elsewhere in Indian thought, in the heavenward journey of Indra and Kutsa seated in one chariot, in the figure of the two birds upon one tree in the Upanishad, in the twin figures of Nara and Narayana, the seers who do tapasya together for the knowledge. But in all three it is the idea of the divine knowledge in which, as the Gita says, all action culminates that is in view; here it is instead the action which leads to that knowledge and in which the divine Knower figures himself. Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine, stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle. The Teacher of the Gita is therefore not only the God in man who unveils himself in the word of knowledge, but the God in man who moves our whole world of action, by and for whom all our humanity exists and struggles and labours, towards whom all human life travels and progresses. He is the secret Master of works and sacrifice and the Friend of the human peoples.^[39]

Such then is the divine Teacher of the Gita, the eternal Avatar, the Divine who has descended into the human consciousness, the Lord seated within the heart of all beings, He who guides from behind the veil all our thought and action and heart’s seeking even as He directs from behind the veil of visible and sensible forms and forces and tendencies the great universal action of the world which He has manifested in His own being. All the strife of our upward endeavour and seeking finds its culmination and ceases in a satisfied fulfilment when we can rend the veil and get behind our apparent self to this real Self, can realise our whole being in this true Lord of our being, can give up our personality to and into this one real Person, merge our ever-dispersed and ever-converging mental activities into His plenary light, offer up our errant and struggling will and energies into His vast, luminous and undivided Will, at once renounce and satisfy all our dissipated outward-moving desires and emotions in the plenitude of His self-existent Bliss. This is the world-Teacher of whose eternal knowledge all other highest teaching is but the various reflection and partial word, this the Voice to which the hearing of our soul has to awaken.

Arjuna, the disciple who receives his initiation on the battlefield, is a counterpart of this conception; he is the type of the struggling human soul who has not yet received the knowledge, but has grown fit to receive it by action in the world in a close companionship and an increasing nearness to the higher and divine Self in humanity. There is a method of explaining the Gita in which not only this episode but the whole Mahabharata is turned into an allegory of the inner life and has nothing to do with our outward human life and action, but only with the battles of the soul and the powers that strive within us for possession. That is a view which the general character and the actual language of the epic does not justify and, if pressed, would turn the straightforward philosophical language of the Gita into a constant, laborious and somewhat puerile mystification. The language of the Veda and part at least of the Puranas is plainly symbolic, full of figures and concrete representations of things that lie behind the veil, but the Gita is written in plain terms and professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual difficulties which the life of man raises, and it will not do to go behind this plain language and thought and wrest them to the service of our fancy. But there is this much of truth in the view, that the setting of the doctrine though not symbolical, is certainly typical, as indeed the setting of such a discourse as the Gita must necessarily be if it is to have any relation at all with that which it frames. Arjuna, as we have seen, is the representative man of a great world-struggle and divinely-guided movement of men and nations; in the Gita he typifies the human soul of action brought face to face through that action in its highest and most violent crisis with the problem of human life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection.

Arjuna is the fighter in the chariot with the divine Krishna as his charioteer. In the Veda also we have this image of the human soul and the divine riding in one chariot through a great battle to the goal of a high-aspiring effort. But there it is a pure figure and symbol. The Divine is there Indra, the Master of the World of Light and Immortality, the power of divine knowledge which descends to the aid of the human seeker battling with the sons of falsehood, darkness, limitation, mortality; the battle is with spiritual enemies who bar the way to the higher world of our being; and the goal is that plane of vast being resplendent with the light of the supreme Truth and uplifted to the conscious immortality of the perfected soul, of which Indra is the master.

The human soul is Kutsa, he who constantly seeks the seer knowledge, as his name implies, and he is the son of Arjuna or Arjuni, the White One, child of Switra the White Mother; he is, that is to say, the sattwic or purified and light-filled soul which is open to the unbroken glories of the divine knowledge. And when the chariot reaches the end of its journey, the own home of Indra, the human Kutsa has grown into such an exact likeness of his divine companion that he can only be distinguished by Sachi, the wife of Indra, because she is “truth-conscious”. The parable is evidently of the inner life of man; it is a figure of the human growing into the likeness of the eternal divine by the increasing illumination of Knowledge. But the Gita starts from action and Arjuna is the man of action and not of knowledge, the fighter, never the seer or the thinker.^[40]

But what, then, is it that makes the difficulty for the man who has to take the world as it is and act in it and yet would live, within, the spiritual life? What is this aspect of existence which appals his awakened mind and brings about what the title of the first chapter of the Gita calls significantly the Yoga of the dejection of Arjuna, the dejection and discouragement felt by the human being when he is forced to face the spectacle of the universe as it really is with the veil of the ethical illusion, the illusion of self-righteousness torn from his eyes, before a higher reconciliation with himself is effected? It is that aspect which is figured outwardly in the carnage and massacre of Kurukshetra and spiritually by the vision of the Lord of all things as Time arising to devour and destroy the creatures whom it has made. This is the vision of the Lord of all existence as the universal Creator but also the universal Destroyer, of whom the ancient Scripture can say in a ruthless image, “The sages and the heroes are his food and death is the spice of his banquet.” It is one and the same truth seen first indirectly and obscurely in the facts of life and then directly and clearly in the soul’s vision of that which manifests itself in life. The outward aspect is that of world-existence and human existence proceeding by struggle and slaughter; the inward aspect is that of the universal Being fulfilling himself in a vast creation and a vast destruction. Life a battle and a field of death, this is Kurukshetra; God the Terrible, this is the vision that Arjuna sees on that field of massacre.^[41]

Then, as to human life in its actualities, we have to accept its aspect of a struggle and a battle mounting into supreme crises such as that of Kurukshetra. The Gita, as we have seen, takes for its frame such a period of transition and crisis as humanity periodically experiences in its history, in which great forces clash together for a huge destruction and reconstruction, intellectual, social, moral, religious, political, and these in the actual psychological and social stage of human evolution culminate usually through a violent physical convulsion of strife, war or revolution. The Gita proceeds from the acceptance of the necessity in Nature for such vehement crises and it accepts not only the moral aspect, the struggle between righteousness and unrighteousness, between the self-affirming law of Good and the forces that oppose its progression, but also the physical aspect, the actual armed war or other vehement physical strife between the human beings who represent the antagonistic powers. We must remember that the Gita was composed at a time when war was even more than it is now a necessary part of human activity and the idea of its elimination from the scheme of life would have been an absolute chimera. The gospel of universal peace and goodwill among men — for without a universal and entire mutual goodwill there can be no real and abiding peace — has never succeeded for a moment in possessing itself of human life during the historic cycle of our progress, because morally, socially, spiritually the race was not prepared and the poise of Nature in its evolution would not admit of its being immediately prepared for any such transcendence. Even now we have not actually progressed beyond the feasibility of a system of accommodation between conflicting interests which may minimise the recurrence of the worst forms of strife. And towards this consummation the method, the approach which humanity has been forced by its own nature to adopt, is a monstrous mutual massacre unparalleled in history; a universal war, full of bitterness and irreconcilable hatred, is the straight way and the triumphant means modern man has found for the establishment of universal peace! That consummation, too, founded not upon any fundamental change in human nature, but upon intellectual notions, economic convenience, vital and sentimental shrinking from the loss of life, discomfort and horror of war, effected by nothing better than political adjustments, gives no very certain promise of firm foundation and long duration. A day may come, must surely come, we will say, when humanity will be ready spiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace; meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and function of man as a fighter have to be accepted and accounted for by any practical philosophy and religion. The Gita, taking life as it is and not only as it may be in some distant future, puts the question how this aspect and function of life, which is really an aspect and function of human activity in general, can be harmonised with the spiritual existence.^[42]

In the age of the Mahabharata, the nation-unit had not been established in India, everybody regarded the clan itself as the pivot of the human race. It was precisely because of this that men like Bhishma and Drona who were steeped in the old tradition fought against the Pandavas. They were aware that right was on the side of the Pandavas, they realised that to bind the whole of India round a single centre through the establishment of an empire was a necessity. But they also knew that the clan alone was the pivotal point of the nation and in it lay the foundation of the right law; to maintain the law and found a nation by destroying the clan was an impossibility. Arjuna too fell into that error. In this age, the nation is the foundation of the law, the pivot of human society. To preserve the nation is the primary duty of this age, to cause the ruin of the nation the great unforgivable sin. But there can possibly be the advent of an age when a great society of the nations can be established. At that time perhaps the world’s eminent men of knowledge and action would take up arms in defence of the nation, and on the other side Sri Krishna as a maker of revolutions would start a new Kurukshetra war and effect the good of the world.[43]

Ever Living Ones

CHAPTER 15
Savitri: Tale of Conjugal Love Conquering Death

Let us take up one of the oldest stories from an ancient Indian epic that is preserved as a living legend in the memory of the Hindu psyche. It is the story of Savitri and Satyavan, a well-known but little-understood story. The tale of Savitri and Satyavan is narrated as one of the many side stories in the Book of the Forest in the great epic Mahabharata.

The story has hence become a popular part of Indian folklore whose memory is kept alive through a tradition of annual Savitri vrata where women fast and perform certain rituals. This was a way of preserving the essence of the story in the Indian mind whose real purpose goes far beyond fasting and narration of the tale. Like many other such tales of the Vedic cycle, this story is deeply symbolic of the human journey out of the darkness of Ignorance which is typified by death towards the Light of supreme Wisdom that Savitri represents.

The power that helps Savitri’s victory over Death is not just another conjugal love, which of course it is, but Love that is one with the highest Wisdom and sublime Strength. It is this Wisdom that impresses Death most, who then eventually concedes the soul of Satyavan to return to earth. At the same time, it is her strength and the power of love that helps her take on the challenge of Death and follow the dark angel in his own lair and wrestle back the cherished soul of Satyavan from his clutches.

Just like Durga, Savitri is a perfect embodiment of Wisdom, Love and Strength. In Goddess Durga, love has taken the form of beauty and bliss since she is a goddess. In Savitri, however, we see Love itself at the forefront since a human birth gives us that extra edge. We carry within our hearts a flame of truth, a flame of love, what is known as the psychic being or the soul within man. It is this that the gods do not have and hence they remain unaware of the joy of surrender, aspiration and love that challenges death and refuses to die.

We see, therefore, that Savitri is married and is an earthly incarnation which adds greater credence that if she, born as one of us, could do it then surely, we too can. Durga, therefore, becomes a goddess whom we worship and invoke, whom ask for Strength and Protection but Savitri is someone we hold as an example of what we can and must one day become. Durga is the power that sits enthroned on the sublime heights. Savitri leaves that blissful home and descends upon earth to give us the example that we can become. Her human personality is beautifully described by Sri Aurobindo in the epic poem with her name. Let us savour the following verses to our hearts’ content:

All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple-door to things beyond.
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.
A wide self-giving was her native act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all that came
And gave a sense as of a greatened world:
Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,
Her high passion a blue heaven’s equipoise.
As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,
Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms,
And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,
In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose
One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,
Recover the lost habit of happiness,
Feel her bright nature’s glorious ambience,
And preen joy in her warmth and colour’s rule.
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
Love in her was wider than the universe,
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:
Vacant of the dwarf self’s imprisoned air,
Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath
Spiritual that can make all things divine.
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.
At once she was the stillness and the word,
A continent of self-diffusing peace,
An ocean of untrembling virgin fire;
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.[44]

Sri Aurobindo, who wrote a marvellous epic poem on this narrative, expanding it into the longest English poetry of nearly 24,000 lines, revealed that the characters in the legend are not mere symbols but living and conscious beings and forces who continue to labour in their one mission to rescue mankind from the grip of Ignorance and lead his soul to the pathways of Immortality. The question of fate and the consequence of the choices we make is a theme that has always fascinated mankind, even as the degree of freedom we enjoy, if at all, the quest for ultimate truth and the possibility of Immortality.

The story itself is narrated by one of the immortal sages, Markandeya, when he is asked a question by the eldest of the Pandavas, Yudhisthira. He has just lost his kingdom in a deceitful game of dice and has been banished to the forest along with his brothers for a good thirteen years. Their wife Draupadi has been humiliated doubly by the folly of Yudhisthira putting her at stake and by her brother-in-law, Duryodhana, who has commanded Dushasana to disrobe her in the assembly. Yet, instead of burying her head in shame and lamentation, she chooses the heroic way to accompany the Pandava brothers to the forest with an eventual view of avenging her humiliation. Ashamed at his foolishness that overtook the otherwise noble Yudhisthira and his helplessness at the inability to protect his wife and woman from the abject humiliation, he asks the sage Markendaya if ever there was one who was as pious and noble as Draupadi and yet suffered as much. Markandeya replies in the affirmative and cites the example of Savitri, the princess of Madra through the narrative.

The story begins in the palace of the seer-king Aswapati who has performed a yajna for begetting a child. Pleased by his austerities, the sun god grants him a daughter who is aptly named Savitri, daughter of the sun. She grows up into a most beautiful and wise girl but when the time comes no one dares to be her suitor. King Aswapati thereby sends her to distant lands to choose her husband. Savitri travels through the mountains and the plains until she chances upon a young man, named Satyavan.

Satyavan is a prince in exile who is living in the forest along with his parents, once king and queen. His father Dyumatsena is blind and it is now Satyavan who takes care of all their needs living far away in inhuman solitude. The two look upon each other and recognising a hidden bond of love, get married in the wilderness with the sun and winds as their witnesses.

Savitri returns to her palace to receive blessings from her parents, only to find that the demigod and sage Narada has paid a surprise visit. Aswapati takes this opportunity to ask the sage about the future of his daughter’s betrothal. All is good and Satyavan is a gem of the earth, observes the sage, but there is one great hitch to their marriage. His life is cut short abruptly and all that the couple have to themselves is one year alone.

A silence falls in the royal hall and Aswapati’s wife and queen Malavi tries to persuade Savitri to go back and make another choice since an early and premature death has made her choice futile. But Savitri, steadfast in her will and one-pointed in her love, refuses to change her choice. Instead, she takes on the challenge of Destiny and Death. The dice of destiny is now cast as Savitri returns to the forest to dwell with Satyavan and look after his parents in their moment of crisis. What makes her choice even greater, revealing the strength of her character, is that she does not reveal the prophecy of Narada to anyone. Carrying the anguish of the future in her depths, she silently prepared herself for the moment while outwardly ensuring that her cherished husband and his parents were happy because of her presence in their life. A few days before the year would end, she engaged in severe austerity to equip herself with the power to face Death.

To be born human is to share the fate of a human. It is to accept the burden of Ignorance and to drape the immortal blissful soul in a cloak of suffering and death. It is to wrestle with error and bear the stroke of adverse fate even though holding the Truth within us. Savitri too must bear the burden of destiny in her own way. How else can she show the way to struggling and suffering men if she has not felt nor experienced what they do? But she herself has no ‘karmic load’ of her own; her being is born pure and free. It is the return or coming of a being whose destiny is clean as a slate. So, to fulfil her work, she chooses to link her own destiny to man’s. For when we tie a knot of love with someone we also share the burden of the fate of the other person. And it is alright and done even gladly without the sense of a sacrifice since, in reality, there is no other. Thus, the Avatara, the embodied divine descends and ties himself to the creation and the creature’s fate. So too Savitri comes down, inwardly free, and of her own will ties herself to the fate of a mortal man, Satyavan, as she ties a nuptial knot to him.

There are other stories in Indian mythology where an immortal celestial has been wedded to a mortal who has risen to inner heights of glory. Thus, we have the story of Menaka and Urvashie, both nymphs of heaven who are drawn to sage Vishwamitra and King Purusavan respectively. So does Ganga, the great goddess, stay for a while with King Shantanu. But all the three stay with the ‘mortal’ only for a term after which they ascend back to their homes, enriching the mortal’s life for a short period of time, but in their passing, leaving him distraught and in grief at the loss of someone whose mere presence gave a sense of security, joy and love. It is as if heaven and earth, though attracted to each other, cannot stay together for long. Heaven’s flower is too pure for earth’s brittle vase and earth’s atmosphere too heavy and loaded with ignorance and sorrow for the immortals to breathe.

But Savitri is neither a heavenly nymph nor just a goddess, though she has all the charm and beauty of a nymph and all the grace and loveliness of a goddess. Yet, this is not all, she has something more, the wisdom and the power that saves, the strength and the force to stay the wheels of doom and death. For she has leaped as an arrow of Time straight from the hands of God. This flower of god has now chosen to make the heart of Satyavan her earthly home. And here comes the strange twist of fate for Satyavan, though a jewel of the earth, a soul of wisdom, courage and truth, he lives in the forest along with his blind father and mother — once a royal couple but now exiled from their kingdom. As if this is not enough, Destiny has it written out for him that he has one more year to live upon earth. Whether god wants to draw back his loved child soon into his arms, away from the sphere of sorrow, or that fate is jealous of Satyavan’s inner treasures of the soul and therefore chooses to strike where it still has a hold — the ambiguous play of circumstance is hard to tell. Our destiny is written in dual terms. Outwardly, we call it good or bad, based on the events, situations and circumstances, whether they comfort us or harass us. Depending on our mind’s ignorant value of things, we label it as fortune and misfortune. Further, based upon our habitual reactions we are moved by joy or grief. Yet, there is an inner side to destiny, the god-vision, the evaluation of the soul, the growth and progress towards some ultimate good through the apparent ‘good’ and the apparent ‘evil’ of life. But Savitri has come to challenge and change this scheme of things. Not just inner good but also outer, not just victory over the self but also victory over the world-forces (that ‘fate’ represents) is her self-appointed, seemingly impossible mission. Therefore, she has chosen her betrothal to Satyavan even after knowing that he has just another year to live. Which man or woman of a lesser make would do that, prefer quality and substance over quantity and vanity that expresses itself in pomp and show? She takes the challenge of fate and instead of drowning in helpless grief, she plunges into the depths of her soul to equip herself and meet death with the immortal’s strength.

The fateful day arrives. Death casts its noose and draws the beautiful soul of Satyavan towards its dark abode, even if for a while. Then, after a brief sojourn through heavens and hell, the soul must return to the great drama of earth and its battle and surprise, its wounded happiness and tormented heart of troubled joy and grief. Satyavan’s soul follows the law ordained of old — drawn and led by death from mansion to mansion. Following them in their steps is the being of Savitri, her luminous being lightening the burden of shadows around Satyavan but torturing the darkness of death.

‘Stay away from us,’ death cries out to her, ‘for this is the law and it is to me that his soul belongs.’

‘I implore,’ the woman replied, ‘for the law of love to prevail over the law of death. They who love, to each other belong.’

Silently they walked a few more godlike steps in the chill of the darkness illumined by Savitri’s light. And then death again: ‘What is this love you speak of? Your love for wealth, kingdom, riches and enjoyments? These I grant thee, but turn back.’

And Savitri received these gifts on behalf of and for Satyavan’s father. But she did not stop trailing death. Once again, the embodied darkness thundered, ‘Go back, or if thou wilt, I grant you some more earthly boons and favours that Satyavan’s father and all that he and his son desired for thee.’ Savitri once again received the boon but did not leave the trail. And death implored once again, ‘Go back, I once again command you and grant you in return for Satyavan’s soul, strong and beautiful children to fill your lonely days so that you may forget him whose steps you follow.’

And once again Savitri accepted quietly what death could offer but did not leave the trail. By now they were nearing the gates of the underworld and none could pass through those gates while one was still linked to one’s body upon earth, as Savitri was. Death’s temptations had failed to halt her. Rather, if anything, Savitri received the gifts and yet kept her soul poised and one-pointed. Now, death began to threaten her with all kinds of consequences if she attempted to cross the gates. He was by now in his own native empire and even declared that he, death, is the lord and god of the universe of all creatures obey him and so should Savitri.

But Savitri was not just another creature to silently suffer and bow down to fate. She knew that this was death’s black lie to cheat mankind, who had come to place their trust in death rather than in life. It was the belief of mankind that death exploited. So, she declared boldly the Truth that she knew: ‘Death, you are only the dark shadow of god by whose luminous love all creatures live and breathe. One day that love will save the world and rescue it from your dread law and the dark reign. When the veil of ignorance is lifted from man’s soul, when his soul has grown strong by adversity and sweet by love, then the time will come for the end of your reign. But now as a token of this forthcoming victory give me back the soul of Satyavan.’

And death resisted unconvinced. As he stood resisting the woman’s will, the heart of love that Savitri embodied and the light of her being grew wider than the universe. Death saw with utter amazement the fire and light that Savitri embodied spreading wide over and engulfing all space, destroying all darkness and ignorance from every corner of the universe. Frightened, he hurried through the narrow gates of the underworld, releasing the soul of Satyavan in Savitri’s safe hands. A victory was won for god and earth and man.

Sri Aurobindo has described it powerfully in his masterpiece, the epic poem Savitri:

She spoke; death unconvinced resisted still,
Although he knew refusing still to know,
Although he saw refusing still to see….
The two opposed each other face to face.
His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;
Around it her light grew, an ocean’s siege…
A pressure of intolerable force
Weighed on his unbowed head and stubborn breast;
Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,
Light was luminous torture in his heart,
Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;
His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze….
At last he knew defeat inevitable
And left crumbling the shape that he had worn,
Abandoning hope to make man’s soul his prey
And force to be mortal the immortal spirit.[45]

Revealing the deeper side and the symbol of the story, Sri Aurobindo has written in the Author’s Note to the epic poem Savitri:

The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.[46]

Such is the tale as narrated by sage Markandeya. But even a cursory look would reveal to us that it is a tale pregnant with symbols and possibilities. The names are symbolic as we have read from Sri Aurobindo’s note. But what about Death? Death, here, is the penultimate power of division just as Love is the ultimate power of union. Death symbolises Ignorance with its attendant results of fear, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, anger, frustration, greed and lust and all that mankind feels since it knows not its own truth nor the truth of existence.

We believe in our mortality because we believe that the body is all we possess. Yet we all live as if we were immortal. This is so because there is an immortal element within us, our real truth, our true self and that is Satyavan. But we are normally not aware of this deeper truth. It needs a greater knowledge and a deeper Wisdom, one that Savitri represents and brings to all who thus open to her Love and Grace. She is indeed an incarnation of the Divine Mother in the times gone by who takes upon a human body to show the way and free the human soul from the clutches of Ignorance and Death.

If this were all, the tale would be yet another symbolic spiritual story. But the story goes further. She must bring Satyavan back to earth, win back from Destiny’s cruel hands his father’s sight and his kingdom. It means grappling with the issue of fate and discovering ways and means to master our Destiny. There is one message here that rings loud and clear and it is that Destiny can be changed. Contrary to later fatalistic Indian thought, our ancient forefather believed that within man there lies the power to change Destiny. Destiny is nothing else but a complex thread woven by many known and unknown forces operating in the world including our own deeds. Conquering Destiny, therefore, means conquering all the forces that operate in the world-play. This is the second message for us from this story. But this is a near-impossible task. The Asuras ask for such a boon and invariably fail. Death and Destiny find their way. Yet there is a way, a greater and better way — it is to surrender ourselves completely to the Divine Mother.

But the third and most important message is that Love is an all-powerful force, provided we can harness this energy and purify, refine and uplift it to its greatest possible heights. That is the austerity performed by Savitri, an austerity of love that could empower the being of a woman to make even the gods obey her. This is what was meant by the term sati — one who lives by and is established firmly, steadfast in Truth. There are many legends and myths of Sati in the Indian tradition of which Savitri is one. Sati purified her energy of love by giving it a one-pointed and divine orientation. It did not matter then who the man in her life was. The power was there and it could be purified while living the life of an ordinary householder. It was this profound truth that got distorted later and took a grossly physical colouring in the practice of a widow ascending into the pyre with her dead husband. Like most myths of the Vedic era, its deeper meaning lost and the outer form misunderstood by the gross outer mind of man and became an instrument for mistreating a woman. But mark the contrast in the Vedic age when a woman challenges Death and brings her dead husband to life. This is no ordinary woman dependent upon her husband for empowerment. Nor does her empowerment depend upon her outer actions, nor even on economic and other forms of freedom. It is an inner Freedom that wins for her the outer freedom. Indian thought cherished this inner Freedom that comes through sacrifice and tapasya. But as we see in the story of Savitri, this inner Freedom is not impotent against the forces that govern our outer life. By awakening her inner Shakti, any woman (or even man) can truly empower themselves. Otherwise, they remain one more pawn in the vast chessboard of nature controlled by the unseen hands of Destiny.

Perhaps only a woman could thus empower herself through the energy of love that comes naturally to her. What greater tribute than this to womankind and what greater message for our contemporary world that continues to belittle women and suffers the most due to the lack of love, the wells of its heart dried up under an excessive, almost exclusive stress on analytical thought. Or given to blind passion and ambition, the chalice of the heart becomes a heady wine bringing imbalance, turbulence and agitation rather than being sweet and invigorating, life-giving ambrosia, the immortalising nectar of the gods.

All this and much more is explored in this short story, such as the subtle meaning of dharma, the conversion of Death itself from the great restrainer that he is (Yamaraj) to the one whose work is to keep the balance of dharma (a term that has nothing to do with religion but all to do with the law of Truth and it is unfolding), the mystery of Divine Incarnation and most of all the great secret, the mystery of the alchemist energy of the Divine, called Love.

CHAPTER 16
Ahilya: Redeemed by Grace

Among the tales of the five sacred women, the most enigmatic of all is the story of Ahilya. It is a short narrative with almost all the features of a myth. It is usually narrated as a story depicting the power of Grace and most persons remember it as such. Ahilya had been turned into stone as a result of the curse of her husband, Sage Gautama. She remained thus till Lord Rama, the Avatara of Treta Yuga or the Silver Age, set his feet over the woman-turned-stone. In an instant, she was magically transformed, her being assumed a celestial form and ascended heavenward. But there is a short background to the story.

Ahilya was married to Sage Gautama, and the two were engaged in a tapasya to ascend to the native sphere of Truth-Light. This tapasya involves hard and difficult labour and needs strict austerity, which, as we shall see shortly, is primarily in the form of psycho-spiritual self-discipline and not, as is commonly misunderstood, in the form of self-mortification or self-torture. It may be necessary to dwell a little upon the word tapasya that is often encountered in the stories of sages, to understand the full sense of Ahilya and Sage Gautama’s story.

Just as yajna or sacrifice is not merely an external ritual of giving up something or a fire-worship, but is also a process of psycho-physical and psycho-spiritual purification, tapasya is not merely the external hardship undertaken to increase inner merit, but also an inner process of self-discipline. The word literally means ‘to increase heat’, tapa, or concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour. Thus, there can be a tapasya of speech, a tapasya of feelings, a tapasya of thoughts, a tapasya of movements, a tapasya of beauty and sensation. The principle is to concentrate, sublimate, purify, channelise, conserve and augment.

Among the various forms of tapasya, one of the most difficult but most powerful is the tapasya of brahmacharya, which leads in due course to a complete mastering of the sex-centre and the sexual energies. This was given great importance in the life of a tapasvi in the olden days. The reason is that sexual energy lies at the very base of life. It is the strong urge of life energy. If this energy can be conserved and raised then it is this very same energy that can lead us higher and upwards towards the spiritual goal. For the average man, however, the ideal was rather of sexual moderation and regulation, rather than absolute continence. In other words, there were two steps in the process of this change. The bestiality of the sexual act had to be first humanised through progressive regulation and refinement. Next, it had to be completely sublimated and conquered, turned into its divine equivalent. Retas had thus to be transformed into tejasa and ojas, and next into vidyut and viryas. In its highest form, this converted energy could directly act upon matter.

Gautama, the sage, and his Shakti, Ahilya, belonged to such a category of humanity that was aspiring to go beyond the human frame. In Indian thought, when complimentary souls can free themselves of the desire and the worldly happiness of a conjugal relationship, they are no more just husband and wife. The woman becomes the Shakti or Power of such a man. In a miniature form, they are meant to reflect the relation of the Creator and the Creatrix-Consciousness. But as noted, it needs tremendous austerity and inner self-discipline. Gautama and Ahilya were such a pair.

When one strives for such a great effort, there is an equal possibility of it resulting in a precipitous fall. Not only does one have to battle the established forces of universal nature, but one also has to fight the subtle and occult forces, the cosmic powers of the gods and the Asuras. While the Asuras mainly seek to destroy all upward effort by sowing seeds of doubt and despair, or vanity and ambition, the gods test our strength and sincerity by offering various gifts and allurements to see our fitness to ascend to the next higher level. The tests are managed in a most common and unsuspecting manner.

Indra, the guardian of the higher worlds of mind, is one such power who would not let an aspirant pass beyond the mortal state easily until he has tested him and seen that the aspirant is really no longer interested in worldly boons of a transient kind or, more specifically, is no more tempted by the snare of lust. Normally, Indra would inspire a woman’s heart through one of his nymphs or apsaras. But surely neither Gautama can be moved by that, nor is Ahilya’s heart lured so easily by the whispers of the heavenly nymphs. So, Indra designs a most subtle test.

Besides, as the story seems to suggest, Indra, the king of gods, was himself attracted to Ahilya, the seer-woman. This is another interesting aspect of such Indian myths, that human beings are shown as having something so special in them that even the gods end up envying. It is a different matter that most human beings are neither aware of this immense potential nor work to realise it. Rather, they prefer to remain dependent on the gods to confer boons through propitiating them. But there is another relation that the Vedic rishis sought, another relation with the gods, whom they saw not as independent, autonomous beings, but as powers and aspects of the One Supreme. Instead of asking them for outer favours that even material wealth or science, technology and industry may provide, they sought inner gifts, the growth of consciousness, power, knowledge, peace, delight, and wider vision. By growing, they became not only equal to the cosmic powers or gods, but exceeded them. Naturally, such beings became an object of envy even for the gods, who stood to gain, while the human stood to lose in an interchange with such a being.

So, Indra wove a plan in collusion with the moon god who holds the key to certain mysteries of the higher consciousness. The moon represents spiritual illumination in the mind. The moon god played his part first. In the middle of the night, he imitated the crow of the cock near the sage’s hut and brightened his glow in such a way that the sage mistook it for the hour before dawn — the sacred, auspicious hour when all is still and uncorrupted. The sage, not realising that it was yet quite some time to go for dawn, stepped out of the hut and proceeded to the nearby stream for his bath and morning rituals. Meanwhile, Indra entered the hut, assuming the form of the sage. Ahilya found the unexpectedly early return of the sage a little odd, unaware that it was actually Indra in disguise. It was still night and she was unable to discern the difference. The disguised god then expressed his desire to mate with Ahilya, who gave in to his advances and succumbed to lust. It was only when the sage returned that he and Ahilya discovered the damage that had been done. As mentioned earlier, the damage is not just physical — it represents a fall, a precipitous fall from a great effort whose end was close in sight. But now that effort would probably fail in this life. Decades of hard penance were wasted in one moment when the mind had wavered and all discernment was lost.

The sage too lost his inner discernment and his natural calm. “Go, become like a stone, for you have acted like one,” he cursed Ahilya and the quarters listened and the powers that weave the warp and woof of fate obeyed. Ahilya instantly turned to stone. Turning to the moon, he cursed, “May you always carry a blot upon your face,” and the moon got eroded, its face marred by a dark spot. Turning to Indra, he cursed, “May you lose your kingdom and suffer a fall from glory just as you made us fall,” and destiny began to work in such a way as to fructify the curse in course of time. For when one has practiced tapasya and harnessed the power of truth, creation obeys when such a person utters something with deep anguish and emotion. Even ordinarily, the power of words is immense and can cause incalculable damage if misused and misdirected. Equally, when words are used to project goodwill then sometimes it is enough to say, “So be it” for things to change course. Such were the profound occult truths known to the sages and they used it effectively, harnessing the natural psychological powers of thought, emotions and will given to man. Here, however, the power of the sage was wasted on these curses.

The fall of the couple engaged in intense tapasya is one of the lessons that we find in quite a few other Indian myths, such as Vishwamitra and Urvasie, among others. Alas! Repentance came to Sage Gautama soon thereafter, but it was too late. He saw that the magnitude of the curse given to his wife was too harsh. But the words uttered from the lips of a sage cannot be nullified. They are like the arrows released from the bow and must do their bidding; they must hit the target. But the subsequent consequences can be changed. A term can be fixed or the effects mitigated or, better still, the curse transformed into an opportunity. So, the sage said that Ahilya would be redeemed by the touch of the Supreme Lord himself in his Rama Avatara. Now all that Ahilya had to do was to wait for this unique and rarest Grace — the Lord’s direct touch to redeem her. Her entire sadhana underwent a change. The tapasya of strenuous effort changed into the tapasya of constant remembrance while waiting for the redeeming touch of Grace, her whole being now surrendered to Rama’s Grace!

Spiritual literature is full of this deepest truth — that what cannot be achieved by the most strenuous of tapasyas can be achieved by remembering the Lord’s name and His Grace. Ahilya’s curse too thus turned into a blessing. For Rama, the Divine incarnate did indeed arrive, and as he set his feet upon the woman-turned-stone, she was freed, not only from the curse but from all bondages. Liberated, her being shed off its mortal state and ascended to the highest home of glory, chanting God’s name. In a moment she had fallen from the heights that had been so close within her reach. And now again, in a moment, she was redeemed, and her being ascended to peaks she had not even aspired for, above the seat of Indra and the gods, above the seat of the holy trinity, above the illuminations of the spiritual mind to the Lord’s own abode, for there is nothing higher than that.

This is the story in brief, but as always, it is full of significant suggestions. While reading the symbols, we must be careful not to evaluate them with our limited awareness based on the imperfect understanding, the prejudiced standards and other inherent biases of society in each epoch. The story belongs to another age and another cycle of civilisation, an age when humanity still communed with the gods and the cosmic powers as living realities. The modern mind, seeing the reflections or the shadows of these powers in the matter and in the physical world, has reduced them to mathematical formulas and assigned them with fixed forms and names. For the gods are cosmic powers and have a personal as well as an impersonal side. Thus, for example, the power of Agni works in the sun and the atom as well. It is also hidden within water, gas, and the other states. It also operates in our psychological system as hunger and desires and deep within as the flame of aspiration and the fire of Truth that develops when we conserve its lesser and lower manifestation and upgrade it to its deeper and higher forms. But Agni can also be seen as a god who can grant these various forms of power to us.

To the ancient seers, the world and its reality were multi-dimensional, at once physical and spiritual and all else in between. Thus, the moon is at once a physical reality as well as the symbol of a state of spiritual consciousness that half-illumines our intellectual night, just as the physical moon does. It is a state of transition between our ignorance and the full blaze of the sun of Truth, Savitra, one of the names of the sun in its effulgence, whom the seers invoked. So too, Indra represents a power of mind that transcends sensory knowledge or knowledge that comes through a study of sensory perceptions, indriya. Indra and the moon together represent a movement of consciousness beyond the ordinary, sense-bound mind, but below the full Supramental power and glory. Gautama or Gotama, Light or Darkness, as his name suggests, is the seer struggling or aspiring to go beyond these half-truths of the lunar worlds to the full truth of the solar world. As long as his consort, his Shakti, Ahilya, his natural powers are in a state of stillness, he is unmoved within and it is then alone that he can ascend. But, at a crucial moment when his conquest is near, the moon and Indra deceive him. He mistakes their mixed and limited illumination to be the coming of his own spiritual dawn. His nature, so unmoved and vigilant until then, slips for a while, and a movement of lust and anger overtakes him. Moved by Indra, he perhaps mistakes his movement of lust to be inspired by something higher. His nature succumbs and he suffers a fall. Yet there is a way out, but for that, he must learn to wait upon the Divine Grace. Even in a state of falling, Grace can and does come and redeem the aspirant, for any genuine upward effort is never wasted.

Thus seen, the story can be understood as an allegory of inner life, the life of a seeker of Truth and the tests he must face. But even if we give to the sage and his wife the separate realities of two complimentary beings, aspiring together, the essence of the message remains unchanged. They are two beings who have grown to be one in consciousness. They are developed beings and need to exercise utmost vigilance. Even at night, their discrimination must be ever awake. Ahilya should have seen through the play. She was a rishika — how could her husband desire her in such a way? And even if he did, it is her spiritual duty to remind him of the high goal they have set for themselves, rather than to consent to his overtures and advances and then suffer the consequences of the fall. The curse, of course, is the natural fall that follows, the actual physical curse only hastening its course. For, the sexual act, in particular, leads the consciousness downwards, gravitating it towards the inconscient and death. Once fallen, it is not easy to rise again. It is easy to fall, as that is our natural state. Our consciousness, bound and barely awake, is so much tied to its material origins: jadavata, as of a stone. It has been known to happen to yogis who strive for inner realisation but whose nature is not ready for it, that by some force of tapasya they glimpse the mighty glory of the Divine, yet they may actually lose balance. Their nature may become like that of a child, balavata, or as of a stone, jadavata, or even as of a ghoul, pisacavata. Probably, Ahilya’s turning into a stone-like state reflects such a dissonance between her nature and her aspiration.

Nevertheless, the high point of the story is not these occult symbols or subtleties of inner life or the psychological movements accompanying spiritual life. No doubt these enrich our understanding and equip us better to understand the Vedic adventure. The high point, however, is the redeeming touch of Grace, for that is how the story is popularly remembered. As the Gita puts it:

“However fallen or low a being may be, even one whose nature is at the lowest ebb or a woman tied to a thousand bonds or the worst of sinners, him [you should] regard as a holy one who has begun to remember the Divine and invoke His Name. For soon, He [Krishna, the Divine] uplifts him out of his fallen state and leads him to a high inner status of the Soul.”

This is the promise of the Divine Incarnate:

sarvadharman parityajya
mamekama sharanam Vraja
aham tvam sarvapapebhyo
mokshsyami ma sucha.[47]

सर्वधर्मान्परित्यज्य मामेकं शरणं व्रज ।
अहं त्वं सर्वपापेभ्यो मोक्षयिष्यामि मा शुच: ।।

A promise He keeps in every age: the promise that matter, even if it is stone-like and inert, shall one day be redeemed by His touch of Grace.

CHAPTER 17
Damayanti: In the Face of Adversity

The story of Damayanti is narrated in the Mahabharata as a tale of ideal love and fortitude against the stroke of adverse fate. Damayanti, the princess, and Nala, the prince, fall in love with each other even before they have seen each other or met physically. It all happens through a mysterious dream and the intercession of a pair of golden swans that acts as a bridge between the two. The duo decides to give their lives to each other as they have given their hearts. But before their marriage can solemnise, a formal swayamvara must be organised where the princess chooses the prince of her choice from a number of suitors. All is fine and decided except for one problem. The fame of Damayanti’s beauty and wisdom, her qualities of the head and the heart have reached far and wide. Not just the hearts of mortal men but also the gods eye her. No wonder then that the gods too arrive on the occasion as prospective suitors. But they have learnt of the choice made by Damayanti inwardly, so they decide to test her wisdom in a subtle way. Each of the five gods assumes the form of Nala, posing a most difficult moment for Damayanti, who must distinguish the real Nala whom she loves from the rest of them. Wise as she is, Damayanti does indeed pass the test, since she notices that only one of the six look-alikes casts a shadow and blinks. His garland too has flowers that are beginning to fade. “This must be my Nala,” she thinks, “for only a mortal can cast a shadow and blink (the gods do not know tears and are made of the stuff of Light).” Besides, as long as anything is in contact with their atmosphere it does not decay since they drink the ambrosia and can therefore ever rejuvenate themselves. Most amazingly, Damayanti knows and yet chooses a mortal over the immortal ones.

Indeed, she would love him immortally. Soon thereafter, the jealous god, Kali (the spirit of the Dark Age of mankind) who tempts the soul of man, begins to unleash his fury one after another upon the happy couple. He first prevails upon King Nala so that his mind enters into a state of confusion and begins to make a series of wrong choices. Impelled by Kali, he places his kingdom and even his wife at stake in a game of dice and sure enough, loses both. Eventually, he and his wife have to leave the kingdom and walk away with barely a piece of cloth to cover their bodies. They have hardly gone far enough that Nala loses even that piece of cloth over his body in trying to catch a goose for food by spreading the cloth over it. Now they share the single piece of cloth left over Damayanti. Tormented by his fate, he escapes one night while they are resting at an inn, leaving his sleeping wife alone and defenceless.

Both must now undergo their own series of difficulties and challenges. For Damayanti, it is a frightening spectre to wake up alone, with nothing to support her. Beautiful as she is, soon enough she is eyed upon by men with evil intentions. However, something comes to her rescue at the last moment as if there was a guiding angel protecting her all the way, even in her hour of extreme adversity. Somehow, she manages to land in a friendly kingdom where the queen keeps her in personal attendance and on Damayanti’s terms. Yet, through this entire ordeal she never stops loving her husband Nala and even worries about his fate, knowing how lonely he must have felt. She has but one question for him and it is this: why did he leave her alone at the inn?

Meanwhile, Nala goes through his own ordeals till he meets with a strange experience. In trying to rescue a snake from a forest fire, he is bitten by the snake. Instantly, his skin turns dark and his body assumes a different appearance. He is perplexed but soon he hears a voice from the being of the snake assuring him that this change will help him in two ways. First of all, it will save him from his enemies who are after him, having usurped his kingdom. They will not recognise him anymore. Besides, the poison in his body will continue to torment the spirit of Kali that has taken hold of him, making him quit his body soon. Finally, the spirit of the snake assures him that he has only to wish and his form and colour will return to normal. Now, Nala gets employed in the personal service of a king as his charioteer and constant companion.

But he too cannot forget Damayanti, his dutiful loving wife and secretly laments his foolishness but knows not how and where to find her. But love is a power greater than fate and can create its own means, provided it is true. Damayanti has spread the word, rather a question whose right answer will fetch a handsome reward. She does this after she is identified by her father, the king, who receives her back to the palace. The question is simple enough and directly addresses Nala without naming him: “Why did the husband leave his wife sleeping and defenceless in the forest inn?”

Soon, Nala too learns of this question and replies instantly that he did so because he was overwhelmed with shame and guilt and did not want his wife whom he loved so much to suffer along with him. Damayanti now knows that this person must be Nala but is disappointed in seeing him since his form and appearance have changed so much. But the love in her heart refuses to give up. She lays another test. She invites the king with whom Nala is employed to join her for another swayamvara that is being hastily organised by her father. The timing is such that only the most expert charioteer can reach in time. Nala offers to take the king in time since he and he alone is such a master in handling the chariot. Now the Truth is out and Damayanti recognises her love even though he is deformed and changed completely in complexion. Nala too acknowledges her. Then he wishes for the spell to be broken and resumes his normal form. Fate takes a turn for the better and the two are soon reunited. Kali, the spirit of time that tests the soul of man, gives up hope to defeat the spirit of true love. Ashamed and defeated, he returns, leaving Nala free with his love. Love in the woman’s heart is victorious against adverse fate.

The story operates at several levels and often conceals many shades of meaning in a single event. Besides being a tale of love and fortitude, it reveals a number of occult truths that were known to the ancient seers but have been lost today, awaiting the hour of their discovery. But for that, we too must shake off the influence of Kali and harbour in our hearts the power of true Love whose force is irresistible and eventually conquers everything.

At one level, it is clearly an allegory given that Nala is described as one who can bend low and fit through any door. Nala literally means a faucet (for the flow of water or any other liquid). Damayanti is purity, beauty. The tale of Nala and Damayanti is the story of the union of soul (Nala) with its true nature, the purified higher nature which it must be wedded to and which should be allowed to flow through. These two are naturally complementary and in love with each other. But fate would not want them to come together. The gods are envious lest this union makes a human being equal to the gods, if not greater than them. The spirit of the dark ages does not allow it lest through this union man and earth grow divine. Fate too conspires to keep them apart. Yet, eventually, the power of love draws them close again through the devious play of chance and the two are united. The snake bite that changes Nala’s colour turns out to be a blessing and gives him the needed experience before he can reclaim his lost love. Nala must die and be reborn to claim his counterpart. The death, of course, is not a physical one but a complete change of his imagined ego-self. He must confront his alter ego, the shadow, before he can deserve the true soul-nature.

At a second level, it is clear that the two, Nala and Damayanti are complementary beings given their sudden and spontaneous love for each other. But such complimentary beings have to meet several challenges posed by Time and circumstance to prove their steadfastness in love. Even when separated, their love must continue until, destiny yields and the tough times give way to a beautiful one.

Finally, the tale is also a reminder to man that if he remains steadfast in love and persevering in his will, all adverse and opposing forces yield before the sovereign power of love. What seems to be adversity turns into a blessing and out of the darkest night there comes the greatest dawn. What is needed is to never give up, to keep faith, hope, love and courage alive even if all else is snatched away.

CHAPTER 18
Anusooya: Power of Truth and Love

The gods are great but the human soul is greater than the gods. The human soul seats all the glories, powers and greatness of the gods. The soul passes at first, in the early beginnings of its journey, through the dark and fallen asuric worlds and the corresponding states; in the middle, it tastes the glory and the splendour of the gods, but in the end, it rises beyond both evil and good, vice and virtue, sinfulness and righteousness, beyond all dualities and opposites into the utter Unspeakable Truth and Bliss, the Home of Immortality from which all else is born. This is beautifully revealed in an interesting story, the legend of Sati Anusooya, literally, the one without jealousy.

Sati, as the word signifies, would mean one who is wedded to Truth. In later years, many words with a deep psychological and spiritual significance, such as yajna, aditya, varna and dharma got distorted, and the truth of this profound word also came to assume a rather limited and fixed meaning. During periods of decline, it first assumed the meaning of total commitment and fidelity to the husband, irrespective of what he did or how he treated the woman. An extreme result of this change was that a woman was ‘supposed’ to die along with her husband if he were to die first. She was ‘supposed’ to burn herself alive along with his dead body in the pyre. Those who could do so were declared as sati and revered or worshipped. Those who could not do so were looked down upon and had to remain largely indoors. They were regarded as inauspicious. The fallout of all this was that women started wishing to die before their husbands, even considering it as something sacred and blessed if she were to die before the man she loved and lived with. Whatever be the sentimental side of this last romantic wish, the actual custom of sati was no doubt a grotesque and cruel thing which vibhutis like Raja Rammohan Roy rightly fought to change. It is also possible that later the custom got enforced by social pressures arising from the invasions that India suffered through the Hindukush. Whatever be the reasons, the ancients did not mean this when they used the word sati as a sign of reverence before a woman’s name. The steadfastness to Truth was the one thing, the absolute fidelity to the husband in thought, word and act was a secondary element quite naturally flowing out of the first. The story of Shakuntala is itself an indicator that Truth was greater than anything else and it is that to which both man and woman had to be faithful.

And Truth is powerful, as we find in the story of Sati Anusooya who could humble even the gods by the power of Truth within her.

Like Lopamudra, Arundhati and Gargi, Anusooya (without envy or jealousy) is a realised being. She is the wife of a great rishi, Atri.

It so happens that one day, Narada calls upon the three great goddesses — consorts of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva — that is, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Parvati and praises Anusooya’s steadfastness to Truth. The praise is in such terms that even the goddesses feel a touch of jealousy, “How can a mere mortal be greater in consciousness and conduct than the gods?” Though, time and again, the gods have been humbled when they let pride creep inside them, yet the lesson of humility is forgotten. They forget in their pride that however high and great these celestial beings may be, man has in him ‘something’ that can make him even greater than the gods. That is because, unlike gods who are typal beings fixed to their role and function, man is an evolutionary being. The man carries in himself a spark or seed of the Divine Himself and if this seed is nurtured by vigilance and watered by spirituality, it will blossom and make him greater than the gods. But he has lent his heart and brain to the untruths of the Titans.

However, Ansooya is different. She has grown in her inner stature greater than the gods. So, they decide to test her. The three great gods, the trinity, visit her house in a Brahmin’s appearance and ask for food. Brahmins, in ancient India, were meant to gather deeper and higher knowledge. This required tremendous askesis, time and concentration. They could not afford to spend their energies on livelihood and the elaborate framework of life. Therefore, the arrangement in the old social order was that the Brahmins shared their knowledge and wisdom thus gathered with the society while the society, in turn, took care of their earthly requirements. This was a neat arrangement, each giving his best for the good of all; the shudra, his craftsmanship and service, the vaishya his wealth and opulence, the kshatriya his courage and strength to protect and the brahmin the very highest gift, the gift of Knowledge. He looked after the most important of all needs, the spiritual needs of the society. In turn, the society expressed its gratitude by looking after the material needs of such men of great learning and wisdom. That the whole thing degenerated later like many other things is another matter. But this was before the decline.

The gods concealed as brahmins asked for food and Anusooya responded with a ‘yes’, asking them to come in and take their seats till she prepared to lay some food for them.

When the preparations were made and the food was ready to be served, the gods who came to test her in the disguise of brahmins suddenly made a strange request: “You have promised to offer food to us and we are extremely pleased. We have, however, a request to make. You have to serve us food by making us sit in your lap and without any piece of cloth on your body.”

Pausing to note her reaction they added: “You may go back on your word and not feed us. We will go away quietly. But if you would still keep your promise and honour, your word, then this is our condition”.

Anusooya was a sati. She was wedded to Truth — Truth in speech, Truth in feelings, Truth in thoughts and Truth in actions. The gods knew that such a person would not go back upon her word. At the same time, to concede to this strange demand may be a deviation from another dimension of Truth for her, a total fidelity to her aim and also to the sage to whom she had completely committed herself. What they did not know was the strength of the human soul which had passed beyond lust and greed, envy and sin. Anusooya’s chastity and truth were not dependent on anything external. It was her senses and mind that she had conquered and hence, she was free regardless of her bodily state.

A tapaswini of Love, a yogini and seer of Truth, she invoked the power of Truth and Love with which she had lived her life. The power of Truth gave her the capacity to see behind appearances. The power of Love gave her the capacity to love all beings as children of the great world-Mother. Anusooya clearly saw who these beings were in reality and what their purpose was. She also saw in the Light of this Truth within her heart as to what her response should be. Turning to the gods in disguise, she said with a smile: “Yes, I would certainly keep to my word and your condition. By the law of Truth that has built this world and keeps it in order, a mother can feed her child on her lap without a piece of cloth to cover either.” Thus, saying and invoking the Truth and Love that she had practiced all her life, she commanded: “May you become like babies so I may feed you as you wish”.

No sooner did she utter these words that the gods came as if under a spell. They became like children and started behaving like little babies since their consciousness was reduced to that of a human baby. It is said that one who always speaks the Truth, her words and thoughts carry such a power that they come true because they embody the vibration of Truth in the person.

No sooner did the gods become babies, Anusooya fed them, making them sit in her lap. Then she caressed them as one does a child affectionately and put them to sleep.

Meanwhile, the three goddesses, the consorts of the Trinity started to wonder as to why so much time has elapsed since their departure to earth. As they descended from their immortal seats to the mortal sphere, they could feel the agony and pain that the mortals bear. That itself is a humbling experience. But they were in for more and they had asked for it surely. They approached Sati Anusooya to find out if they came and what had happened. The great and luminous being of Anusooya replied: “Yes they are there, sleeping inside as little babies. You may go inside and carry them back.”

The goddesses were surprised and stunned. Their consorts could not be recognised as they had become just like babies. Ashamed at their deed, they approached Anusooya with humility, requesting her to release the gods from her divine spell. She smiled compassionately and had to simply utter “So be it!” and the gods returned back to their original form. They too bowed before the power of Truth in the woman’s heart and knew that man will one day surpass the gods. For they could sense in the being of Anusooya the future type of humanity, free inwardly and governed by the highest Truth and the transforming power of Love. She is the prototype and the forerunner of a greater being who would one day arise out of man and surpass even the greatest of gods.

When a film on the story of Sati Anusooya was shown in the Ashram’s playground, the Mother commented thus:

If human love came forth unalloyed, it would be all-powerful. Unfortunately, in human love, there is as much SELF love as love for the beloved; it is not a love that makes you forget yourself.

Evidently the gods of the Puranas are a good deal worse than human beings, as we saw in that film the other day (and that story was absolutely true). The gods of the Overmind are infinitely more egocentric — the only thing that counts for them is their power, the extent of their power. Man has in addition a psychic being, so consequently he has true love and compassion — wherein lies his superiority over the gods. It was very, very clearly expressed in this film, and it’s very true.

The gods are faultless, for they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint; it is their godly way. But if one looks at it from a higher point of view, if one has a higher vision, a vision of the whole, they have fewer qualities than man. In this film, it was proved that through their capacity for love and self-giving, men can have as much power as the gods, and even more — when they are not egoists, when they can overcome their egoism.

Certainly man is nearer the Supreme than the gods. Provided he fulfils the necessary conditions, he can be nearer — he isn’t so automatically, but he can be, he has the power, the potentiality to be.[48]

CHAPTER 19
Vrinda: Power of the Curse

Even for the most fallen of beings, there is hope. There is always hope. All that is needed is something within us that would support divine action and free us from the tyranny of the darkness which our souls are caught in during the early stages of our evolution. One such story is of Tulsi or Vrinda, revered through India as the consort of Vishnu, earning her the name Shivapriya. Her marriage to the god Vishnu is celebrated at the end of the monsoon as Tulsi Vivah. But this is the culmination of a long winding tale.

Legend has it that once the great god Shiva assumes the form of a mendicant and sits across the path of Indra and Brihaspati to teach them a lesson in humility. Indra, blinded by his pride in being the highest god, tries to engage the ascetic into a duel. The ascetic who is none other than Shiva opens his third eye, sending a terrified Indra back to his world. But the energy released from the third eye enters the ocean, giving birth to a most powerful Asura named Jallandhar. Like many Asuras, Jallandhar engages in austerities in his search for power to satisfy his ambition to rule over the three worlds. He does succeed in humbling Indra and the gods, including Kartikeya and Ganesha, as he is born from Shiva’s fiery energy of destruction. Eventually, Shiva himself enters the fight. It is again as if Shiva is fighting against his own energy! The battle continues for long until Shiva notices that Jallandhar’s real strength comes from his wife Vrinda’s steadfast devotion and love.

Vrinda, herself an Asura’s daughter, is a devotee of Vishnu. Her steadfast love towards her husband shields Jallandhar even against the prowess of Shiva.

At this juncture, on seeing that the fight would continue without any result leading to many after effects upon earth, Vishnu approaches Vrinda, disguised as her husband. For a moment, Vrinda is tricked and embraces him, mistaking his identity. At that moment, Jallandhar is weakened and is slain by Shiva, only to return to his third eye. Now Vrinda does realise what has happened and in a moment of rage, curses her own ista devata, Vishnu, indicating that the great god will also suffer the absence of his wife one day and will be tricked. Vishnu accepts the curse and turns it into a means for the killing of Ravana, when he descends in his Rama Avatara. Instead of being angry at Vrinda, he blesses her, saying that this momentary embrace will turn into an eternal togetherness, wedded forever. She curses Vishnu to become a stone, saying that he acted as a stone, not caring about her feelings. Vishnu accepts this too and turns it into a boon. He takes one of his forms, the Shaligram, which is a special stone revered by Hindus as a manifestation of Vishnu. Vrinda, agonised doubly, gives up her body in the fire of askesis for love. She turned into a plant growing near the stone, the tulsi plant. Thus, the two are wedded together. Such is the deep impact of this tale that Vishnu’s worship is considered incomplete without tulsi leaves.

But what is its hidden sense? Firstly, it reveals to us that even a great god can release a devastating energy in a moment of passion, the effects of which may be difficult to control even by him. Even the gods are not completely immune to the play of the ego that may take a different form in them since they have tremendous force. Of course, eventually good comes out of everything because the guardian of the law, Vishnu, is there but a lot of damage is done. Secondly, the story once again emphasises the tremendous power of love. Vrinda’s love for her husband supported by her devotion for Vishnu saves her husband even from the wrath of Shiva, the mighty one. But the most important aspect of the story is the conversion of the Asura. As with all Asuras, he is absorbed back into his origin which is also none other than some aspect of the Lord. In the Divine, this aspect is of Wisdom and in harmony with other aspects. But once released, any of these aspects can lose their harmony and, separated from their origin, turn into an asuric force asserting its separate power against the rest of creation. With Jallandhar, his asuric deeds are supported by divine energies of love which must eventually be converted. They must find their true place. The true place of love is in the heart of love. So, Vrinda eventually finds her place with the great god Vishnu as one of his consorts. It is indeed a very powerful tale that reveals the power of love that a woman harbours and nurtures by which she can raise herself to the stature of the gods.

CHAPTER 20
Kanyakumari: Eternal Wait for the Beloved

The story of Kanyakumari, where now the rock temple stands in the ocean at the tip of India, where the three oceans meet, is a fascinating tale of love and sacrifice. As the legend goes, a demon king, Banasura, did penance to secure a boon from the gods that only a virgin could kill him. Once the boon is granted, he ensures that each and every girl in his land is married off, even prematurely. Meanwhile, emboldened by the boon, he starts getting drunk with pride and commits all the excesses that one is prone to when ego overtakes the normal consciousness of people. To ensure his nemesis which must follow hubris, goddess Parvati, the Shakti of Shiva, takes upon herself the task of killing the demon and is born as a daughter to a couple in the southern tip of India. She is remembered as the virgin goddess, Kanyakumari, whose name is borne by the ancient city of Kanyakumari. She is indeed an incarnation of goddess Parvati, the Adishakti of Shiva. As she grows up, she is quite naturally drawn to Shiva, her Lord. Pleased with her penance, Shiva assures her that he will marry her. The auspicious moment is fixed, but the gods are in a quandary. If Parvati incarnating as Kanyakumari marries Shiva, then her mission to relieve earth from the heavy tread of the demon king, Banasura, will not be fulfilled. Hence, in collusion with Lord Vishnu, sage Narada weaves a plan. As the time of marriage draws near and Shiva is striding down south, Narada creates the illusion of daybreak, which means that the auspicious moment is over. Shiva returns to his divine abode, leaving Kanyakumari in a state of eternal wait. Banasura, not ready to take any chances, decides to force Kanyakumari to marry him. The result is that the Divine Mother wakes up within her and after a fierce battle, slays the demon fulfilling her mission.

The story is clearly symbolic. First of all, it beautifully connects the northern tip of India, the Himalayas which are the divine abode of Shiva, with the southern tip where the three oceans meet, thereby connecting India culturally and spiritually. But there is much more to it. It is once again the meeting of the Supreme Soul with Nature. The meeting point of the three oceans is the three streams of cosmic energies that meet in rock-like matter. Before the two can meet, the demon must be eliminated. But, for this, the goddess must first do a tapasya wherein she longs for Shiva but never actually meets him. She remains a virgin forever, meaning that she must remain pure of all dross through her deep and intense longing for only Shiva. It is this transmutation of sexual energies that makes her so powerful and intense. It is this intense longing that gives her the strength to slay the demon. This longing itself becomes yoga and generates enough heat and tapas within the yogin that can annihilate much darkness. At another level, the story also indicates the power of the feminine energy which, if aroused in wrath, can destroy a formidable enemy. Kanyakumari standing like a rock is the symbol of feminine strength which can be awakened through a one-pointed tapasya and once aroused, fears none, however strong one may be. Alone, she is greater than all the demons in the world.

CHAPTER 21
Chudala: Beautiful One

The story of Sikhidwaja and Chudala is one of the most inspiring tales of the Vedic cycle. Chudala is a beautiful princess but she is not merely a maiden of external beauty. Her beauty has an inner depth as she is a wise and spiritually realised woman. Her husband, King Sikhidwaja, however, is unable to see her inner spiritual beauty and is enamoured only by her outer glow. But how long can the charm of appearances last? It begins to pale and one day and the king declares that he wants to renounce the kingdom and take to the forest to lead an ascetic life in pursuit of God. Chudala, herself a realised woman, knows that one does not have to abandon life to realise God. But knowing that this kind of vairagya has its own place in our evolution of our soul, she does not stop her husband from what he thinks is the best. While he is away, leading the life of an ascetic, Chudala governs the kingdom on his behalf keeping all the subjects happy, prosperous and harmoniously together. She is indeed regarded as one of the great queens of the Vedic cycle during the Treta Yuga. After many years have elapsed, she goes in search of her husband who is still struggling to find his path. She meets him and gives him the most important spiritual lesson in renunciation. It is not external objects such as the kingdom, relationships and works, that need to be renounced. It is rather the ego that attaches itself to people and things as their own and is the big barrier to godly realisation. The king is suddenly enlightened on hearing this simple, yet profound truth. The two returns to their kingdom and govern it beautifully as jivanmuktas, freed of ignorance while still living.

Thus, the story reminds us that one need not abandon life or the varied relationships of this world. What is needed is to reorient them rightly towards higher goals. It also reveals to us, as an aside, and perhaps in the same vein, that outer beauty and inner beauty need not be opposed to each other. They may well complement each other, the latter enhancing the former. The story is also a revelation of the way society was organised during the Vedic times when women and men had an equal status and were provided with equal opportunities to organise and govern life.

The Mother reminds us:

In their best moments, both man and woman can forget their difference of sex, but it reappears at the slightest provocation; the woman feels she is a woman, the man knows he is a man and the quarrel is revived indefinitely in one form or another, open or veiled, and perhaps all the more bitter the less it is admitted. And one wonders whether it will not be so until there are no longer any men or women, but living souls expressing their identical origin in sexless bodies.

For one dreams of a world in which all these oppositions will at last disappear and where a being will be able to live and prosper who will be the harmonious synthesis of all that is best in the human race, uniting conception and execution, vision and creation in one single consciousness and action.

Until such a happy and radical solution is reached, India remains, on this point as on many others, the land of violent and conflicting contrasts, which can nevertheless be resolved by a very wide and comprehensive synthesis.

Indeed, is it not in India that we find the most intense adoration, the most complete veneration of the Supreme Mother, creatrix of the universe, conqueror of all enemies, mother of all the gods and all the worlds, dispenser of all boons?

And is it not in India too that we find the most radical condemnation, the uttermost contempt for the feminine principle, Prakriti, Maya, corrupting illusion, cause of every fall and every misery, Nature that deceives and defiles and lures away from the Divine?

The whole life of India is shot through with this contradiction; she suffers from it in both mind and heart. Everywhere feminine deities are erected on her altars; the children of India await salvation and liberation from their Mother Durga. And yet is it not one of her children who said that the Avatar would never incarnate in the body of a woman, because no right-minded Hindu would recognise him! Fortunately, the Divine is not affected by such a narrow sectarian spirit or moved by such petty considerations. And when it pleases him to manifest in a terrestrial body, he cares very little whether or not he is recognised by men. Besides, in all his incarnations, he seems always to have preferred children and simple hearts to the learned.

In any case, until the manifestation of a new conception and consciousness compels Nature to create a new species which would no longer have to yield to the necessity of animal procreation and thus be under the obligation of dividing into two complementary sexes, the best that can be done for the progress of the present human race is to treat both sexes on a footing of perfect equality, to give them the same education and training and to teach them to find, through a constant contact with a Divine Reality that is above all sexual differentiation, the source of all possibilities and harmonies.

And it may be that India, the land of contrasts, will also be the land of new realisations, even as she was the cradle of their conception.[49]

CHAPTER 22
Sujata and Chandrabala: Heart of Wisdom

The wisdom of a woman comes mostly through a direct intuition in her heart. She is not the codifier of the law, she does not care to systematise truth and arrange it in a logical manner so that it can appeal to the intellectual mind. Yet, there is a deep philosophical side to a woman that can understand the secret of our nature much more swiftly and directly. According to an anecdote, when Ma Sharada, the great and luminous consort of the illustrious and legendary seer of Dakshineswar, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, was asked by someone about Swami Vivekananda’s sudden outburst when anything belittling was said about India, she gave a very intuitive reply — “Oh that, Narendra’s anger. You want to understand, it is just a little veil that Maya herself has put over to prevent him from rushing into the Absolute. It is needed so that he can stay and do the work.” Of course, Swamiji was born of the fiery energies of Shiva and hence carried that awe and aura around him. This was a direct wisdom that seer women could possess effortlessly and history is full of such examples. The feminine brings not only love, sweetness, forbearance and inner strength but also a wisdom that can show the way, change a heart, reveal a truth. That is why, perhaps, in Indian mythology, the goddess of intuition and the goddess of learning and wisdom are feminine, Ila, Bharati, Mahi, Sarama, Saraswati, Maheswari. Their role in showing the path or rather revealing it at a crucial point of the inner life is noted in the life of Sri Ramana Maharshi, of Sri Ramakrishna, Saint Tulsidas and others. There is an interesting incident in this regard in the life of Lord Buddha. As we know, Buddha had left his home and kingdom in search of a way that could free human beings from ignorance. He meditated for years with all kinds of austerities but the crucial realisation was still eluding him. Just around that time, Buddha had an unexpected visitor in the forest. A woman by the name of Sujata came to the tree to worship the being of the sacred tree. But seeing Buddha seated as he was, absorbed in his serene contemplation, she took to him to be a god, perhaps the deity presiding over the forest itself. So, she waited with folded hands holding a bowl of kheer, sweetened milk with boiled rice, that she had brought as an offering.

When Buddha came out of his contemplation, he asked the woman as to the path she was following that gave her such natural purity and grace. The woman hesitantly replied in all humility, “I only know this much that good deeds bring good near us, while evil begets evil. Love fosters love while hate increases hate.” She went on to add — “One must observe moderation; neither pull the bow-string so tight that it snaps, nor leave it so loose that it is incapable of serving its purpose. This is all my philosophy of life and the path I walk and know.”

It is said that the Divine Mother came in the form of an old woman to guide the sage of Arunachala Hill, Shri Ramana Maharishi, and advised him to stay at one place. It was her guidance that made the great sage ponder and eventually make Arunachala Hill his permanent abode.

Buddha blessed her as she wanted a child but not before asking the woman to bless him so that he may find the path and realise his goal. The woman did so before leaving. Buddha took the kheer she had brought with joy, and then plunged back into his contemplation. Soon after, he attained enlightenment and gave the eightfold path, and taught the middle path of balance as part of the dhamma to mankind. Was it a woman or a goddess who spoke through human lips? We may never know.

A similar story is cited in Jain scripture with regard to Lord Mahavira. It is said that Mahavira had not eaten for days. He had taken a sacred vow that he would eat or rather break his fast only if he was offered food by the hands of a woman who had herself not eaten anything for three days, whose feet were tied, who had been treated unjustly and who was yet in a state of tranquil, happiness and trust, who was waiting with a few grains of pulses in her hand to give to someone who needed them. Obviously, no ordinary woman would fit this strange requirement, to remain inwardly tranquil, happy and full of trust, even waiting to give the little food she had, placing the need of others before herself, despite being in a state of outward misery and abject adversity. It so happened that as Mahavira was moving through the tower, he spotted Chandrabala who was precisely in the above condition and circumstance. Adversity had never left Chandrabala since she was a young princess. Her kingdom was lost, she had been kidnapped, then sold as a slave-girl, then worked as a maid who was mistreated by the lady of the house who had punished her unjustly. Yet, Chandrabala was more obstinate than the adversity that seemed to chase her and would refuse to give in to any depression. Instead, she continued to remain in a state of trust, generosity and surrendered to the will of god. No wonder she became the first woman disciple of Mahavira, one who stayed close to him and served him throughout till the very last moment.

The story carries a deep symbolism that even if we face grave adversity, amidst the bonds of ignorance, we must never leave the path of dharma, of truth and compassion.

Sujata and Chandrabala are not just names of a few exceptional women amidst a general mass of otherwise average humanity. That seems to be the apparent truth. But to a deeper vision, these and other exceptional women are rather prototypes of what a woman is capable of, the heights to which she can rise, the extent to which she can efface herself and stay in the background as silent support and a dynamic power to unlock a door in the inner being. Chandrabala did not care for any recognition though she was more than exceptional. Which man or woman can suffer such a radical shift of her life — from being a queen to a slave and yet remain untouched by bitterness or grief, yet keep her trust and hope in god and goodness? Indian thought has hailed and celebrated such women as an example of the greatness that resides in a woman.

CHAPTER 23
Shakuntala: Child of Love

In the times that we live in, one may well wonder about the relevance of delving into the past life of a nation and its people. The impulse towards globalisation is leading humanity forward at a dizzying pace beyond all boundaries — social, religious and cultural. The traditional norms are all broken and gone and what survives are scattered fragments, damaged beyond recognition. If we try to rebuild the form by somehow mixing and matching the fragments, adding a piece here or colouring another there, we are likely to create a caricature. Instead of reviving the dead form that has been broken by the Time-Spirit, if we search for the soul as it shone itself in the past to our ancestors, we may find our efforts rewarding.

For the soul is ever fresh and fragrant like a flower and radiant with the smile and Beauty of Love that hides in the heart of all creations. It neither fades nor grows old. Yet, it seeks new vases, new landscapes, new gardens for its self-expression and blossoming under new and changed climatic conditions of the earth. That is why we find a revival of the Vedas in modern times and a sudden, even an increasing interest in the humanities of the past, not so much as to understand its outer form as to feel its soul. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are living testimonies of the spirit of India of the past. These are living testimonies because the characters and their convictions, the special turn of temperament, the inner conflicts, and above all, the goals and aspirations are still there within us. They are present as living truths, albeit layered by the civilisational transitions of generations. The forms have changed and must change to adapt to the times, but the essential spirit, the psyche of a nation, the soul of a collective body remain eternal and unchanging. Its essence is that divine felicity that is its special work and mission to manifest. Its evolution from life to life is a growing perfection in degree, quality and even quantity of the Truth or truths of the spirit.

If we take the earth as one body, as indeed it is, each nation is a unit that must manifest some of the Truths that are inherent in the soul of the earth. Some nations manifest the qualities of the head, the thoughts of god; others manifest the force of life, the breath of god moving upon the seas of time. Still others manifest the qualities of the hands and feet and hair and skin, and all the senses through which we perceive and act upon the world. A select few or one or two are marked out for their special role and experience the privilege of god’s love. But of all these, there is one and one alone that has been assigned the most difficult and yet the most privileged role of being the soul-centre. That soul-centre, the indwelling home of the divine as he manifests and radiates to the rest of the world is without doubt India. It will be no exaggeration to say that India represents the spiritual centre, the inner most heart of the earth, its very secret soul. It is important, therefore, that we know about the deepest essence of India for it is in this knowledge that we can find the spiritual key to resolving the problems that besiege the modern mind and also pave the way to a higher Harmony and greater peace. The soul of India has spoken through the voice of the ancient seers and though the language is lost, the ancient hermitages seldom seen, the line of seers few, yet, the eternal truths they revealed continue to be a guiding star and a beacon of light pointing to the right road towards earth’s and humanity’s greater destiny. One form they used to clothe these truths is through legends and stories that are at once real as well as symbolic. One such story relates to the very origin of the Indian race, at least its recorded origins. It is the story of Shakuntala and her son, Prince Bharat, after whose name the ancient land of India was called Bharatavarsha.

Shakuntala is so named because she was found in the forest, surrounded by a type of bird called Shakun. The little baby was left abandoned by her mother, the celestial nymph, Menaka. The child was born of a marriage between the celestial nymph and the sage Vishwamitra during the fugitive years of his sadhana. The sage had already walked away, the mother knew the moment had come for her return to heaven and so she walked away, leaving the little child ‘abandoned’ in the forest. This action of the sage and his consort may appear rather irresponsible and cruel by our human standards and indeed it may be so. But as the destiny of Shakuntala unfolds, it seems possible that the heavenly nymph and the sage knew the destiny of their child and had arranged it in an occult way through means that we do not understand today.

We must not forget that many of these sages had mastered and commanded forces of a greater cosmic order that weave the destiny of man from behind the scenes.

Just as the standards and yardsticks of an adult’s action differs from a child’s because of the maturity and wisdom that come with experience, a meaningful access to greater information and better capacities, so too do the actions of a realised man or even a yogi differ from those of us still caught in the haze of the senses and physical mind that limit our arc of vision and understanding.

Nevertheless, Shakuntala is left alone on the shores of time with none else but her destiny to safeguard her. There is a great though subtle irony in this. On one hand, she is born of illustrious parents and yet, lies ‘abandoned and helpless’ in the forest. On the other hand, she is under the care of fate whose will is obeyed and executed by the forces. Our destiny is in the hands of God and our soul and the circumstances of our lives are simply a clumsy attempt to outwardly recreate the Truth held within us. Our outer mind knows not what our soul has chosen or what God has willed and hence, it cries against the Will of God. Fate has it that just around that time, Kanva Rishi is passing by. Attracted by the strange scene, he goes near it and finds the little baby. This was a moment of destiny. The little girl that the sage held was an empress to be and yet her road to fame began with helplessness. A celibate for life himself, destiny handed over this unusual child to him. Naming the little girl Shakuntala, the sage carries her to his hermitage where she blossoms into a beautiful maiden, loved and protected by one and all in the sacred ashram.

But the ashram of the sage Kanva, beautiful and inspiring though it is, is not the place of her final destiny. It has set the foundation for her being, an indispensable spiritual foundation on which her future life must be built. Another page turns and Shakuntala has an unexpected visitor one day. King Dushyanta has strayed far and deep into the forest while on a hunting spree. Tired and thirsty, he somehow reaches sage Kanva’s ashram where he is greeted by this young maiden as the sage is away. After the king’s hunger and thirst are quenched and he is able to rest awhile, he comes to his full senses and beholds the beautiful maiden who has thus looked after him so well. He falls in love instantly and proposes that they get married in terms of Gandharva Vivah. In ancient India, there were eight forms of marriage, out of which six were sanctified by the Vedas. One of these six was called the Gandharva Vivah presumably named so after the beings of the vital worlds, prana jagat, who inspire music and art forms in mankind. They are regarded as the musician of the gods. Such a marriage took place without the awareness and consent of parents, with only the elements and the sun as witnesses. Dushyanta proposes and also promises that the child born to them would be the future king. Shakuntala accepts. Fate ties the knot and the two find each other in the oneness of their embrace.

Meanwhile, the search party reaches and the king must leave for his kingdom to settle things there before inviting Shakuntala to join him. He promises to send for her soon and leaves. Shakuntala is lost in the enchanting reverie of her newfound love and the promise of the king. Soon, the sage returns and seeing his daughters changed behaviour knows that something has happened in his absence. Through his inner vision, he can sense what has transpired. With the kindest and gentlest of words, he endorses her choice and asks her to wait for the king’s word.

Time goes by; days change into weeks, weeks into months, and the colour of the earth and its mood change to another season. Nine months pass and the seed of Dushyanta and Shakuntala is born in the sacred hermitage. Withholding her grief in her heart at having no news from the king so far, Shakuntala brings up the child in ways that befit a future king.

Legend has it that the little child Bharata, as the sage named him, was endowed with a rare combination of wisdom, strength and sweetness. A few more years passed and yet there was no news from the one man to whom Shakuntala had given her all in a moment of trust and love. Rightly, she decided and the sage advised her to meet the king and remind him of his promise and reclaim her rightful place.

What unfolds next is a high drama of love whose very intensity lends itself to hurt and pain. The king feigns forgetfulness of the whole episode and Shakuntala is furious. She has not come here to beg for anything but only to ask for that which is rightfully hers. The king finally asks her: “But what is the proof? Who is the witness of our betrothal? How can I ensure that you are not just any woman who simply wants to enter the royal household through this trick of placing an unknown child in my lap as my own?”

It seemed strange and surprising that a king such as Dushyanta could forget this whole affair, given that he was known for his integrity and justice. In his reign, the subjects were happy and there was no thief or poor man, none who was ill or in misery; abundance flowed on every side because the ruler of the land was a man steadfast in dharma. The reason attributed to his forgetfulness in the story itself is that a spell or a curse was laid upon him. Nonetheless, Shakuntala answers with all the force of Truth in her heart that the sun, the earth, the fire elements were the witnesses of her truth and their marriage. Their own self, from whose eye nothing remains hidden, was the highest witness.

The king is greatly impressed, this time, not only by her outer charm and grace but by her inner beauty as well, by the radiance and purity of her love, by the power that only steadfastness to truth can give to a man or a woman. The woman wins both, the man’s heart and the king’s crown. With her wins Truth, Love and Nobility. The little child is crowned as the prince, his name remembered for generations to come until, in the age of Darkness, Kali, the Truth and Love in Bharatavarsha’s heart is veiled by the adverse influences of fallen glories. The name of this sacred land, punyabhumi Bharatavarsha, more glorious than the heavens, once nurtured and nourished spiritually and intellectually by great seers, protected materially and physically by noble kings; served beautifully and dutifully by men of letters and learning, entrepreneurs and artisans, scientists and artists, warriors and noblemen; now lies changed to India, even as its people lie fallen and prostate over its soil made sacred by the touch of great lineages of seers and kings. Like Shakuntala, Mother India waits with agonising patience for the power of Truth and Love in her heart to reclaim the kingdom that her child inherits.

Right now, this true India, the greater India is nurtured and nourished in the sacred ashrams that, though less in this age and often influenced by the darkness of Kali, still provide light and strength to mankind. One day, like Bharata, this greater India will move out of her ashrams and led by the secret hand of Destiny, reclaim it for truth and establish once again the Divine Kingdom of harmony, peace, unity, love. Ancient wisdom will shine through her children in new forms and strength, courage and love will become inherent in their nature. For Shakuntala, the mysterious child of the heavens, born of a seer and nourished by the sages, is not yet dead. She survives sorrow, she survives suffering, and she survives ignominy, humiliation and neglect by her rulers. Yet, the will in her heart is undefeatable, the Truth that she embodies is eternal, the love that she brings to earth is unfading and triumphant over all adversity, ill-will and the cruel hand of fate.

The story of Shakuntala is the story of courage and strength that comes from the power of truth and dwells within the heart of love. All true love carries within it a great power that keeps two beings together regardless of the twists and turns that may come between them. This is what is perhaps called the test of Time. The last and final verdict is the verdict given by time and however long it may take, truth eventually wins and has the last word.

The second important thing we see in this story is regarding the workings of Fate. There is logic in its random steps. Even adversity eventually helps us to come closer to our true and inevitable destiny. It helps us grow and shapes us in a way as to fulfil the demand of destiny within us. Had Shakuntala been brought up by her parents, had she not been abandoned, she may have taken to being a rishika or a beautiful damsel. But, she was born to be an empress for which another kind of training is needed.

CHAPTER 24
Kayadhu: Nature Versus Nurture

This is another story about great mother from the pages of Puranas, the ancient stories that wove the fabric of the social and psychological life of the Indian people. As we have seen, love and care are integral parts of the feminine. Even the demoness and the ogre love their child; on earth, so do the beasts and the birds. But mostly, this love is an ignorant one. It is given to the body but does very little to shape the mind and is hardly directed to the soul of the yet unborn and the newborn. But this is not so with Kayadhu, the wife and queen of the demon king, Hiranyakashipu.

Infuriated by his brother’s death at the hands of Lord Vishnu, Hiranyakashipu is engaged in austerities to win the seat of immortality. Of course, the motive behind this tapasya is to conquer power for egoistic purposes.

While he is gone, the gods feel threatened by Hiranyakashipu’s child who is growing in queen Kayadhu’s womb. She is the lesser-known but illustrious wife of the demon king engaged in austerities to win power. Not knowing what to do, they are approached by sage Narada. “Leave this part to the One who resides in the heart of every creature,” he assures the gods. The child is yet not born and his mother-to-be is a woman with a pious heart.

Of course, the parents can only have a say in forming the nature of the child and that too, mostly in its outer aspects, though rarely in the inner parts too, through example and influence. But finally, it is the individual soul’s choice and its destiny. Thus, explaining and placating their apprehensions, Narada left to see Kayadhu who was carrying the demon’s seed in her womb. The gracious queen welcomed him expecting that the presence of the sage would cast a happy influence on the child who was developing in her womb. Narada suggested that the queen shifts to an ashram nearby during this period so that the unborn child is nourished not only with the beautiful words of a sage but also by the peaceful and harmonious atmosphere and positive energy of the ashram’s environment.

As the king was away, the queen could easily decide, surely her child’s future was far more important than the royalty, luxury and comfort of her palace. She knew that the destiny of her people was being nurtured in her womb. If she wished to change the demon kingdom and its ways of deceit and cunningness, she could not do it by mere law and ordinance but by changing the nature of the children who are still a malleable lot. So, leaving the able ministers, she left for the ashram of sage Narada.

Days and weeks flew by as Kayadhu spent her time in deep reflection, meditation and contemplation of God. In the palace of the demon king, she would have been surrounded by an atmosphere of ambition and vanity, pride and greed, cunningness and intrigue, anger and hate since such was the nature of the daityas.

But here, in the devarshis ashram, her days were filled with the light of yajnas and the sound of mantras. She would often hear the young and the old engage in uplifting discussions that cleansed the understanding and purified the mind. The nights brooded in silence upon the coming dawn as if in a prayerful mood. Above all, the atmosphere of the ashram, and its very air was charged by the vibrations of harmony, peace and love. The love and devotion of the inmates of the ashram always gladdened her heart and she felt the stirring of a strong impulse of bhakti within her, towards Narayana, the indwelling God who has chosen man as his special habitat.

Kayadhu, the queen and mother’s sacrifice bore fruit; in time she gave birth to a beautiful child, one not only with a beautiful body but also soul. He was named Prahlada. As it turned out, Prahlada was a great devotee of the Lord, a devotion he had spontaneously imbibed in his mother’s womb and drank with her milk. Annoyed by the son’s natural and spontaneous bhakti for his arch-rival Sri Hari, Hiranyakashipu, on his return, appointed special tutors to brainwash the child.

But the seed of spirituality was already firmly established in the young boy. The tutors went back helpless, themselves changed in the heart by the love that the boy radiated. Next, the father tried to threaten and even get him killed by various means but here too he failed. Finally, he confronted the boy himself and asked him as to whose empire he will inherit if he so chose, his father’s or Hari’s, the god whom he worships. However, in the latter case, he would incur the demon king’s wrath. The king was already blinded, having earned a boon that would practically secure him against the threat of facing Death. But Death finds its way. And so, Prahlada chose Lord Hari even if it meant death. Burning with anger, the demon king rushed to kill his own son, demolishing a pillar that stood in between on the way. But lo and behold, out of the pillar emerged Narasimha, Lord Hari, in the form of the lion-man and stood between the father and child. What happened next was not for weak and sober hearts to bear. Dragging the demon to the entrance of the palace, the Lord tore him away, leaving his dead body halfway between the palace and the courtyard. It was the twilight moment when the day is transiting towards the night. All the conditions of the boon were satisfied in that the demon king had asked Brahma that may he not be killed by a weapon, not by man and beast or by gods, neither should he die during day or night, nor inside nor outside the house. But he forgot something crucial which we shall speak of later.

After slaying the demon king on his lap, hanging above the ground and placed between within and outside the house, while it is the twilight moment, Lord Narasimha crowns Prahlada as the king of the demon kingdom, blessing it with prosperity along the way of light and the right.

Kayadhu’s wish had come true. A queen’s desire for the genuine good of her people had been fulfilled. And so, a mother’s hope to see her child be a divine example for the world and not like her demoniac husband who, though a king who looked after the material well-being of his subjects, stifled their spiritual possibilities. History and legend remember Prahlada, but it has forgotten Kayadhu without whose sacrifice, wisdom and choices, Prahada could not have become what he became. Only a woman could be so self-effacing. The story reveals the key to changing society, it is not through law and ordinances, nor through freebies and material prosperity but by sowing the right seed in children. While the seed of heredity comes partly from the father, the seeds of psychology come mainly from the mother who nourishes the child in more ways than one. It is said that children drink anxiety with their mother’s milk. It would be better to say that children drink wisdom and love with their mother’s milk as well. Finally, there is the seed of spiritual growth which is sown by the Master or Guru, Narada in this instance. It is this spiritual seed, if rightly nurtured, that is the game-changer of human life, pulling us out from a life of vanity, ignorance and ambition into a life of beauty, love, truth and light. Though this much is obvious from this wonderful tale, there is so much more to it.

We see here, for instance, that the distinction between good and evil is not categorised by birth but by deeds. Kayadhu and Prahlad (and quite a few others) are demons by birth but godlike and saintly in their nature and temperament. Anyone, born even of the most fallen kind can be thus converted from an asuric state into a godlike one. In this sense, it is the story of every human being. We are born to the ego-self and mistake the desire-self to be the true self in us. Hence, our life is driven by wanton ambition and expansion of the empire of the ego. But as we grow out of our womb, there emerges a deeper spiritual self as our own child. We initially ignore it, later try to suppress it, giving it a tough fight, but finally concede to it, our ego defeated and slain before the leonine courage and heroism in man that refuses to accept evil and its reign.

The story also shows us how there are two kinds of kings and kingdoms. One is that of the more common asuric kingdoms. One such kind was of the legendary king Vali who looked after the material well-being of their subjects. They may even engage in austerities and alms giving but what they ignore is the spiritual side which also needs to be nourished and nurtured. Surely, the king may not be able to do so but he can help by extending his support to the genuine seers and sages who dwell in his kingdom. By doing so he lays the ground for nurturing the spiritual seed in his subjects. Not only that, an ideal king was envisaged as one who took wise counsel from the seers who were the chief advisers whose advice was regarded as incumbent if not absolutely binding, even upon the king.

Finally, and most profoundly, the story is about death and immortality. Trying to keep death away by material and other means is a chimera since it always finds its way. The only way to escape the law of death is by discovering the secret soul within which is what Prahlada clearly represents since he cannot be slain or burnt or destroyed in any way. Each attempt to kill him only makes him grow stronger. His only support, the support of the soul within us is the state of oneness in which it enters by chanting the Name Divine with complete faith and absolute surrender.

CHAPTER 25
Jabali: Initiation

The feminine energy, even if subdued and penetrated by much darkness, is capable of redeeming itself and is capable of redeeming the world around her through her inherent power. She is Shakti. She is given the power to create and destroy an empire or a universe. As Maheshwari, she carries in her bosom the knowledge of all the forces and energies and marshals them towards the manifestation, holding them in a bond of underlying unity even when they seem separate on the surface. As Mahakali, she destroys what needs to be removed out of manifestation, that which has outlived its purpose and that which has now become a menace and danger to creation itself. As Mahalakshmi, she fills creation with her charm, love and grace and pours her riches, opulence, beauty and joy in the cup of life. As Mahasaraswati, she enters into the details and processes of this vast and immensely complex many-tiered universe. As Radha, she waits for the hour when all of this earth will become like Sri Krishna, anandmaya. As Aditi, she is the mother of the bright and luminous gods and as Diti, she cares for her dark and fallen children forever engaged in strife. She fosters them so that one day they may outgrow their darkened state and become gods. For this, she always inspires and goads them, knowing well that heavens cannot be conquered so long as the force in us is blind and obscure.

And yet that is the high goal that she always keeps before her children, the daityas, children of Darkness and Division and never lets them rest. True, the daityas mistake her message and rush to the heavens without the purification that is born out of surrendering to the One and are naturally beaten down. Even the dark underworld is kept in a just balance by her power, as Yami, the sister of Yama, the lord of Death. Even the darkest and most menacing energies become the recipient of her material care and affection as Patala Bhairavi.

That is why nature has so ordained that a woman or the female of a species is always endowed with this material care, fostering and protecting instinct. She readily and naturally assumes charge of the world she inhabits and the beings she creates. Man goes out and his name and fame grow, while the power that nurtures him, endows him and stays by his side in all trials and tribulations, the power that heals and puts a balm over his battle-hardened body and wounded heart, the power that lulls him to rest and sleep then organises and arranges his life and its needs of food, cloth and other details, is the power of the feminine. If it is less known and less sung by the historians since it is self-effacing by nature, it is because she has chosen to stay in the background. And yet, when man disrespects or misuses this power, it leaves him and he is left just an empty name.

That is why perhaps, in some parts of India, the prefix shree or sri is used before the name of a man. ‘Shree’ is feminine and it means prosperity, riches, magnificence, power, glory and all else. All these are gifts of the goddess Shree, the beautiful and gracious mother of the three worlds. The man who ignores or mistreats this goddess and her earthly representatives that enter his life as mother, wife, friend and daughter becomes shreeheen, devoid of all merits, and soon enters the path of decline.

History is full of such instances. But how many mothers of great heroes and sages have remained unknown will never be brought to light. Two stories interestingly reveal this. The first is from the time of the Upanishads whence a young boy Satayakama aspires to study the highest knowledge, Brahmavidya and approaches Sage Gautama with this intent. “What is your gotra, the lineage to which you belong?”

the sage enquires. It was the custom in those days to reserve this very highest knowledge only for the rare initiate, someone with good learning and upbringing. This adhikara bheda, as it is called, is not difficult to understand. The fitness of an aspirant in any field of knowledge is a necessary thing. I may ‘wish’ to be an architect but may lack the necessary qualities of aesthetics, sense of proportion and all the rest that are needed. I may have the ambition to be a doctor but my nature may be insensitive to human suffering. Lacking in compassion and generosity, I cannot make a good physician, lacking in powers of observation I cannot make a good clinician, lacking in faith, goodwill, enthusiasm and hope, I may end up harming rather than helping patients even if I have passed all my exams with flying colours. Today, in a society built on a mechanical sense of equality and an over-stress on intellect, this innate capacity of temperamental turn of nature is lost and its ill-effects are all too obvious. Not all Souls are equal and can do everything, though all souls are equal and divine, nature and its possibilities, the stage of evolution are all different, hence the adhikara bheda. One such method was to ascertain the force of heredity and the environment in which the child was being nurtured.

So the sage asks the young candidate to test whether he is fit and ready for this most difficult and demanding of all knowledge, Brahmavidya. The young boy had never seen his father. So, he went back and asked his mother to tell him what gotra he belonged to. The mother unhesitatingly spoke out the Truth to her son: “My dear one, before I conceived you, I was working as a maid in many households. Now I do not know through which of those men whom I served as an attendant and a mistress, I begot you. But this much I know as truth that you are Satyakama and I, Jabali, am your mother.”

The boy went back and reported the facts as they were to the great sage. And Gautama, the wise one knew that none but only an exceptional nature can have the courage to speak out such a difficult truth in all simplicity and feel neither remorse nor vain pride about it. Deeply impressed by the courage and truthfulness of the boy and his mother, the sage enrolled Satyakama, son of Jabali as his disciple. The seer’s understanding turned out to be prophetic. In time, not only did Satyakama become a great seer and a master of spiritual knowledge but also, as a mark of respect to his mother, the school of knowledge and the lineage of luminous sages that followed after him bore the name of Jabali. A whole new lineage had started from a woman’s truthful heart. Can one say that the boy Satyakama’s first initiation into Brahmavidya, the knowledge of the highest truth was through his mother and only next by the Sage Gautama? The first prepared his nature, the second freed his soul.

This story of initiation reveals many things to us. The initiation into the highest knowledge needs a certain temperament and a calling. It is not a mass conversion that certain religions practice. It is a cry of the soul seeking a certain line of evolution which is answered by a certain path meant for it to move along its evolutionary journey. In the story itself, the Master, Haridrumata Gautama, sends him to the forest with a hundred lean and thin cows with the instruction to return after he has managed to multiply them into four hundred healthy cows. It was indeed a strange way of teaching and a very challenging one. Leaving aside the symbolism that cows symbolise knowledge which the erstwhile disciple had to multiply and increase through meditation and practice of yoga in real-time through real-life challenges, Satyakama accepts the instructions with complete trust and surrender. It is because he is keen to learn that the whole universe seems to guide him. He learns from various elements of nature, from various events and incidents until he is ready to return. On seeing him return with a radiant face, the Master knows that he already has the knowledge he was seeking. However, the last test was yet to take place. He tells the disciple that he no more needs the Master since he has the knowledge. But the disciple full of humility and gratitude which is the hallmark of a true knower, entreats with the Master that it is through him that he wants the final instruction just as he had his first initiation through him. The Master is happy and smiles, giving the last bit that is needed.

In the time to come, Satyakama himself becomes a great rishi and Master known by his mother’s name.

Such were the great Masters and their way of teaching and training the disciple. Such were the women — straightforward, sincere, honest and truthful. The story also reveals to us that the real worth of a human being is not in what he or she does or the lineage but the stamp of inner character that he or she bears. In an age when we judge people with appearances, the story is a reminder that the true man is the inner being and his true worth lies there.

CHAPTER 26
Gargi: Seer-Woman

In ancient India, Brahmavidya or the knowledge of the One, the Eternal Self was given prime importance above all things. It is the Brahmagyani, the knower of Brahman, the ultimate Reality and the Brahmavadin, the revealer of Brahman through the written or spoken word, who was given the utmost reverence. Neither a priest nor a man of much learning; neither a pundit who had simply studied the scripture without realising it nor one who was merely eloquent in speech; neither a king nor a prosperous rich man; neither artisan nor craftsman were given that honoured place as the God-knower and the God-lover.

Man or a woman, high-born or low-born, well-read or illiterate mattered very little if one had the inner wisdom. The social stratification of the four varnas and the various hierarchies applied only to the average life of men. But the spiritually realised was above these and all had to bow to him irrespective of his outer achievements or the lack of it.

Thus, one had a good number of women who were revered as Veda knowers and whose experiences are recorded in the Vedas. Among these realised women were the illustrious Ghosha, Sulabha, Surascha, Arundhati, Lopamudra, Anusooya, and the well-known Gargi and Maitreyi. Yajnavalkya, the great seer who gave to earth and mankind some of the most profound and magnificent verses of the Isha Upanishad is interestingly linked to both by way of a significant interchange of wisdom.

In an interesting episode, King Janaka who had completely mastered all his senses even while he existed in the earthly world, was very fond of deep learning. He would often arrange an assembly where seers and sages would come and impart Wisdom to those who would be present. On one such occasion, he invited a number of wise men to his palace intending to have an exchange of wisdom. In addition, he also declared that whoever has the most comprehensive knowledge of the Brahman in all its aspects can take with him a thousand cows, each with their horns tipped with gold. Yajnavalkya also came to the August assembly. When none dared to broach the subject, Yajnavalkya rose from his seat and asked the king for the cows since he needed them for his ashram. Janaka pointing at all who had gathered in the assembly asked Yajnavalkya to prove himself first before them.

Yajnavalkya looked around but none dared to question him. Then, Gargi put the first question to him, testing and taking his plummet of wisdom deeper into the mysteries of existence. To begin with, Gargi asked him what the support and base of creation was. Yajnavalkya, the seer, replied ‘the sun’, the original Creator. Indeed, the spiritual consciousness, the higher worlds of greater knowledge and intuition are all derived from the Supramental Gnosis, the sun of the Truth, or the golden Purusha who sheds its rays even in the night of ignorance through the moon and who had kindled in matter the fire that energises it.

Gargi was quite satisfied with the answer. She proceeded further. “What is the support of creation when there is night and the sun is hidden behind a veil?” and Yajnavalkya replied, “The Moon”. The Moon in mystic lore is the spiritual consciousness that one finds in the higher mental world. It is this higher consciousness that supports creation until the sun returns.

And Gargi was satisfied but she went one step further to inquire what is the light that illumines and the power that sustains creation when the moon has not yet arisen and the sun has set. Yajnavalkya replied “Fire”. Of course, fire, Agni, is the principal energy that carries in it inherently, the two aspects of light and heat, knowledge and will. It illumines and purifies, it gives warmth and support, it also destroys. It is this secret Will in creation that is one with Knowledge that is revered as Fire. Fire as a subtle principle also builds forms. It is the base energy in all things from the atom to man. In man, its purest form is the Fire of aspiration.

Gargi was happy; once again she probed a little deeper. “And on what do the sun and the moon and the fire rest?” Gargi asked, “And what is the support of ether and of space and time itself?” And, the great seer rounded off, “The atman, the Self, and there is none other than that.” But Gargi was not to let him off so easily, she wanted to ensure that all this was not mere mental knowledge and that Yajnavalkya knew the difference between a mere mental knowledge of these things versus the actual experience, so she put forth a final question; “And pray tell me, great sage, on what is this atman founded?”

Yajnavalkya knew that this is the limit of mental questioning, for though it is possible to know what lies beyond, it cannot be described effectively in mental words and language. It can be known to the soul but the mind cannot know it since the mind itself is born out of it. He cautioned Gargi that if she persisted and questioned him further, her head would fall off. This head falling off is neither an expression of annoyance nor of arrogance. Our mental consciousness when compared to the infinite One is merely a point. The only way to know is to ascend beyond the Mind. One may lose one’s balance completely, and that is what Yajnavalkya cautioned Gargi about. Indeed, Gargi understood the point very well. She was not there to debate or prove a point but only to help facilitate the quest for truth. So, she steps down gracefully but not before declaring that indeed Yajnavalkya is the greatest of seers around them.

The story is often resented by feminists as if Yajnavalkya, annoyed by a woman questioning him, had threatened her in some ways. But to one who has the mystic experience, it is self-evident. Whether we keep the sequence of fire, moon and sun or exactly its reverse, the final word is to understand that not everything can be known by the mind. It is only the Soul in the human that can know the Self through identity or else ascension through the mind with the help of the fire of aspiration.

No wonder Gargi is revered and honoured as a Master who knew Vedic lore and had the living experience of Truth as well. She was a woman of fierce independence, who remained unmarried, was endowed with subtle intelligence, a rare intellect and a wonderful aspiration. She is the symbol of the respect and honour that men and women of true wisdom enjoyed regardless of any gender bias or difference. Such were the great women who gave birth to this ancient, mighty and wisdom laden civilisation called Bharatvarsha.

CHAPTER 27
Maitreyi: Wise Choice

Woman, in ancient India, was seen neither as an object of pleasure as in some modern and even medieval societies, nor was she seen as an obstacle to spiritual life as in certain later religious thought. She was sahadharmini, one who walked the path of dharma along with the man that she chose to marry through swayamvara. That is the significance of the symbol of marriage where a man and a woman walked hand-in-hand, step by step, together and at the same pace along the path carved by destiny and life. At the centre of their life was to be kept neither their personal life nor family but the fire. This fire was at once the symbol of the fire of the central aspiration that purified us and led us upwards towards the height of our human and divine possibilities, it was also a reminder of the great law of sacrifice which the universe is built on and which we must remember. When we forget this law, due to the intrusion of egoism or the onslaught of desire, we enter into all kinds of quarrels, conflicts, bitter disappointments that turn a beautiful relationship into a perpetual hell. The enemy and the bondage are not outside but within us. Neither man nor woman, neither work nor children can enslave us if we can detect this inner enemy and remove this main obstacle. This is what we find in this interesting dialogue between Yajnavalkya and his wife Maitreyi.

Yajnavalkya had two wives and yet he was one of the greatest seers. This may well be shocking to a rigid, puritan mind that is limited in its outlook and passes judgement on the basis of narrow and moral social standards. But as we know very well, the social, cultural and moral standards vary from region to region and differ from time to time and from one age to another. One has to only travel across the world a little to understand this. The true basis of action is the state of consciousness that inspires us, the state of our consciousness, our attitude and inner vision, secret motive and intent, the idea that it is meant to serve and the force that moves us to act. The seers knew this secret and therefore, constantly strove to attune their natural movements with the universal will in the creation and created thing.

To come to the story, it so happens that Yajnavalkya decides to live in solitude for a longer time, at some stage of his life. To ensure that the two women, who have loved and looked after him well, do not suffer from any material want in his absence, he decided to give each an equal share from his assets and belongings. Katyayani, the elder one, happily accepts whatever the great seer has to give. But Maitreyi, before deciding to accept what the seer has to offer before leaving, asks her husband and seer a pertinent question.

“Tell me, O Sage, will this wealth and property that you are leaving for me give me abiding happiness, lasting peace eternal Wisdom, and immortal life?”

“No”, the sage quietly answered, “they can give you some momentary happiness and comfort, but surely not a lasting happiness nor immortal bliss.”

The, what would she gain from her husband’s munificence, was her thought. And in response she said: “I do not want these. Give me that wisdom and the way that would lead me to lasting peace and immortal bliss, the path that you know and have trodden?”

It is interesting to note that though Yajnavalkya was a renowned seer and King Janaka of Mithila was himself one of his disciples, he had not initiated his own wives into the supreme mystery yet. One must be ready for it; one must ask and seek it for then the words of wisdom dropping on a soil that is ready, bears fruit. But on falling on hard and unprepared soil, they simply dry and wither away with time. We see this even in the Gita that Arjuna, though such a close confidante of the incarnate divine, is not initiated into the inner journey and the yoga till, in a moment of psychological crisis, he consciously surrenders and asks for guidance. How far removed is this vastness from the narrow sectarian outlook where cult gurus are eager to catch disciples as an angler for the fish and the disciples go about in evangelistic fervour to win converts? How far is all this from the practice of religious conversions through force, fraud, and lures? Here is a seer who is capable and yet has not initiated his own near and dear ones since they are not yet ready.

But now, Maitreyi has sought and is ready to receive true inner wealth that the seer can give, a wealth before which all outer riches appear poorly. She says: “Give me that wealth, O seer, having which one no more desires anything else, for all one’s seeking are fulfilled in that eternal Wisdom, Peace and Bliss.”

The seer is happy and remarks in a touching way that though both the wives are dear to him, this seeking of Maitreyi has made her even dearer. This seemingly casual remark of the seer is not without its depth. It is not simply the expression of a passing sentiment or natural affection. The depth that this simple statement conceals is remarkable. For we have three levels of nearness corresponding to the three levels of our existence. The first is the outer and is determined mainly by physical closeness, proximity, sharing and common physical ties or even a common physical environment, by blood or by custom. There is a deeper, psychological nearness, a bond of affection, an interchange of thought and feeling, a commonality of vital interests, activities and tastes, a sharing of thoughts and a sense of camaraderie and companionship. But deeper than this, there is a third level of intimacy and union without which the other two are precarious and fleeting and cannot give the fullest happiness. It is the union of two souls in a common aspiration in relation to the Truth that they are seeking. Now that Maitreyi has shared this aspiration, Yajnavalkya feels her closer and dearer to him. It is not an expression of partiality but completeness. Happily, he goes on to explain to Maitreyi: “My dear one, one thinks that one loves the wife for the sake of the wife but one loves her for the sake of oneself. One does not love the child for the sake of the child but for the sake of oneself. So also is with everything else. The secret, therefore, is in the Self.”

As is the self, so is our love. If we are identified with the animal self within us, our love is also like an animal. If we are identified with the human self within us, our love shares the nature of humanity with all its egos and desires, with occasional uplifting impulses. If our self is identified with the gods then our love is also like a god. And when we are identified with the great Universal Self that is One and Infinite our love is also like the Divine. Thus, at the end, he concludes that to uncover one’s highest self, atman, must be man’s true and first business upon which all the rest can be built. As is our self, so is our relationship with ourselves and the world.

There are few passages in world literature that are present with such profound psychological insights expressed in so few words and in such a simple way. It implies that as our understanding and awareness of self-will be, so will be the quality and nature of our love. It also implies that we cannot love someone/something that we either do not have or have not yet discovered in our self. What we admire in someone is either something we hope to become or acquire or else something we secretly possess and have yet to recognise or recover. In a general way, we see in others what we are. The world is a mirror where we often see our own reflection. Thus, the people we meet and the relationships we develop are a means to bring us in contact with our own different, often hidden parts. But unless we have discovered the wholeness within us and integrated them with our central Truth, our deepest Self, and our relationships will always be deficient and suffer incomprehension and misunderstanding. Just as this world is an objectification of the One Divine Self, so too is our personal life a projection of our own self. Thus, the more we discover the perfection that we seek within us, the more we are likely to discover it in others. All this and much more has been revealed by Yajnavalkya to Maitreyi in one masterstroke. In ignorance, we love for the sake of the ego-self. But when we have true Wisdom, we love no more for the ego-self within us but for the sake of the Divine within us and in others. Quite naturally then, we cannot even think of harming, hating, or injuring someone wilfully. This truth has been revealed to Maitreyi as a law of action and relation in the world. Maitreyi is ready; she is initiated. The seed of spirituality has fallen on ripe soil and she starts on her inner journey to become a Veda — knower in due course.

It is interesting that Maitreyi has indeed been immortalised like quite a few others, through this one single interaction or rather question that draw a revelatory truth from the seer Yajnavalkya’s lips. Otherwise, little is known about her personal life except that she was Yajnavalkya’s wife and dear to him and that she was a seeker who found her path. Is it important to know anything else about surface life? Time washes away all else except the soul’s moments. History records some surface facts and superficial details but misses the most important aspect of human beings. Indeed, what happens deep within us is the only true thing. All the rest is artificiality and a mask, the husk around the grain of truth. It is amazing how the Indian mind and its spiritual genius have picked up and recorded these soul moments. And immortalised a name that even time cannot forget nor can history erase. Maitreyi is surely one of them. To have such an inner movement is the mark of an extraordinary being and a great soul.

CHAPTER 28
Taramati: Path of Truth

Indian thought and civilisation gave utmost value to dharma. But dharma has come to be misunderstood today as an equivalent of religion. The fact is that the word, like many other ancient Indian terms, has no equivalent. It comes from the root ‘dhr’, to hold. It means, therefore, that which holds our existence, the base, the final support, the Eternal Reality behind everything. It also means that which is at the centre of our evolutionary unfolding and the collective march of mankind and of creation itself. Thirdly, it means those actions that draw from this one fundamental Truth that holds and upholds all things. There are four fundamental truths that lie at the core and base of this particular Indian thought.

1. There is but One Reality underlying all phenomena.

2. This One Reality is infinite and hence it can assume many names and forms. Each name and form is a partial, distorted or true reflection of one or several of Its infinite aspects.

3. Man’s journey of life starts from division and ignorance and moves towards the Oneness of the One.

4. This journey takes the form of a struggle between forces that oppose, hinder, and deny and the forces that help and guide in the advance.

This is not an easy journey. Truth is a strenuous conquest and the one who undertakes it must be a one-pointed seeker, the Brahmin, and a Kshatriya warrior who refuses to give up against all oppositions and battles the forces of darkness within himself. He must also be a vaishya who circulates his yields and shares them with all. He is also a shudra who gives outer form and beautiful expression to what has been discovered and rescued as a means of service to God in all. We see some of these aspects in the story of King Harishchandra and his noble wife Taramati for whom truth was of utmost importance. Their story of living a life of riches to rags and again from rags to riches is more than what we ordinarily know of.

The story goes that King Harishchandra lived in the Treta Yuga. He too belonged to the Ikshvaku clan that culminated in Lord Rama, the Avatara of Treta Yuga. Taramati is wedded to king Harishchandra who is one of Lord Rama’s ancestors. All is well in their life till one day the gods try to put his nobility and truthfulness to test. Vishvamitra, the sage, appears before the king in a dream and asks for his kingdom. Now, the very next day as he wakes up, he is besieged by a great conflict. The conflict is not over the fact that he foolishly gave away his kingdom in a dream, as we may suppose with our practical mind. It is rather over the fact that he has no further right to use anything from the palace anymore as he has pledged it to the sage whom he is now keen to find and hand over responsibilities. The sage arrives shortly and the king, handing over the kingdom, walks away with just a piece of cloth over his body. But his woeful tale does not end here. He has promised in the dream an additional amount of coins which he cannot pay-off from the royal treasury as it is not his own anymore. It is then that the noble queen comes to his rescue. Though under no compulsion or obligation to do so, she chooses to share the king’s fate. It was the dharma of the age that when two beings were wedded, they not only shared their earthly fortunes and misfortunes but also the otherworldly ones. This has, no doubt, a subtle truth behind it. When we share our lives with someone, we do get linked to the person’s fate in one way or the other. It may be through sympathy or through a deeper link of the soul. But surely, someone who has enjoyed the good times together and then decides to leave the friend or partner when one most needs him or her, is a thief. Taramati knows this well and thus nothing swerves her from the path of dharma. For above all things, above wealth and riches, kingship and lordship, success and fame, the Indian mind valued dharma the most.

It was dharma alone that one carries to the other worlds and it is dharma that is the safety and it is dharma that wins the ultimate victory. Events and circumstances shift and change but dharma holds one always and it is dharma that one must hold onto always. So, she chooses dharma over selfish gratification, comfort and pleasure. She understands her husband’s idealism and not only walks with him as a ‘nobody’ but also chooses to be sold as a slave to clear the balance that is pledged to the sage.

Here, we see the story bringing to the surface the subtle shades of human standards. It is, no doubt, not a good thing to sell oneself or to lose self-respect, but not to fulfil one’s pledge is a worse thing to do. The worse adharma is to tell a lie, to indulge in falsehood. So, the queen becomes a slave not out of compulsion but out of her own choice following the path of truth. But the Truth is a difficult conquest. Its demand is exacting. So long as we are attached to anything we cannot become fit recipients of truth. And for Harishchandra and Taramati, truth is the highest and noblest of things worth striving for. And as all seekers of truth must know, the journey towards truth starts with one simple but extremely difficult step, to never tell a lie. And Harishchandra has gone as far as never to speak a lie even in his dream.

As we have seen, truth demands utter austerity and only he who is willing to lose all finds the Truth. He who is released from the ego finds the Truth that saves. Here too, the adversity of fate does not give up even as the king and his queen refuse to yield. So, the cosmic forces that test man’s strength devise an ultimate test. Tragedy strikes the once royal couple where it would hurt the most. Their only child is bitten by a snake and he succumbs to it. But matters do not end here. As the grieving queen carries the dead child in her arms to give him to fire, she finds her husband working there as the chandala, who arranges the fire and collects the levy for the same. He is only acting on behalf of the head of the chandalas. Now, the queen, his wife has not a penny to pay for the funeral and her honest husband, once a king, will not make an exception just because the dead is his son. As he is caught in the dilemma and the queen is about to tear a piece of her saree as a pay-off, the gods give up and fate yields before the power of truth. Shiva, the lord of lords appears over the horizon, pleased by the austerity of truth. The son is revived and the kingdom is restored to them. As a mark of respect for the human king’s greatness and fidelity, Shiva declares that henceforth he himself would adopt the guardianship of Harishchandra’s kingdom and whoever dies under his reign will straight away achieve moksha, redeemed of all their transgressions, absolved from the return to the great and dolorous cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.

Some may find this story extreme. No doubt it is. But the India of the olden days loved extreme characters. In every field, they loved to go to the ultimate extreme possibility, piercing whose limits one enters the limitless. King Harishchandra and Queen Taramati go to the extreme in their practice of truth. At the end of it, they found freedom, moksha, not only for themselves but even for their subjects. Helping people go through death, they themselves go beyond Death. It also shows how adversity can open the doors to a greater fate if we face it with trust and courage. Fate is not what happens to us but how we respond to what happens. Outer events may not always be in our hands but our response to them is. If we fearlessly look into the eyes of fate, it eventually yields the divine possibility hidden within it. Fate is always like a double-faced sphinx. An adverse fate can completely pin us down or it can release us into utter freedom if we know how to go through it with the right attitude. But the path to face things with courage is not easy and yet it is the one marked for humans. The other path, the easy one though apparently successful, eventually leads to ruin.

Truth triumphs eventually, even though its path is as hard and sharp as a razor’s edge. Truth liberates not only ourselves but many others who are linked to us. And when the king and queen of a land practice truth then god himself guards their kingdom and the residents are saved even from their own ills. The greatest misfortune of life is not the outer adversity we face but a lack of enough conviction and courage to follow the ideal we have chosen and the lead and calling of truth. Truth is the all-victorious dharma, Satyamevajayate nanritam.

Afterword

We close here, having selected a few of the examples among many gems and pearls. The purpose, as has been stated, is to reinstall woman as the eternal feminine, the Goddess, in whatsoever form she comes to us. Due to the want of space and a different kind of treatment required, the author has omitted the more recent personalities, vibhutis and incarnations of the Divine Mother. What has been attempted is to give a glimpse of ancient Indian history through its famous feminine characters. They are the soul of India, its force and power, Shakti, which have assumed the form of myths and mythologies. They form the backdrop following which many other great personalities and powers of the Mother have incarnated, not only in India, but all over the world. Since a lot more details are available about their lives, it would require considerable space to take each of them and do justice to it. They are the flowers and fruits whose seeds were laid down ages ago. Let the seed be sown in the hearts that are ready and let them blossom in those whose soil has been prepared through the fire of aspiration and the purifying rains of yoga. After all, she is always within the reach of man, as the Energy lying coiled in the matter at the base of our spine, or in our heart as Aditi, Mother of the Gods, or above and beyond the system of the worlds as the Divine Will one with Wisdom that governs all creation. She is the eternal womb of all things from which all emerges and into which all returns, the power that sustains, nurtures and destroys if need be, so that it may return as a New Creation. She is the refuge of all whose glory even the great Shankaracharya, known for his adwaita monism, acknowledged by becoming a worshipper of Bhavani, the infinite Energy, Shakti. The two great and powerful seers of modern India were both worshippers of Shakti, Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. Swami Vivekananda went on to say that to worship a woman as a goddess is the supreme tantra. But it was given to Sri Aurobindo to lift this worship of the woman towards the ultimate heights of Glory as revealed by him in his wonderful book, The Mother. To conclude, let us meditate upon some passages from his writing:

Father nor mother, daughter nor son are mine,
I obey no master, served am I by none,
Learning or means I have not, wife nor kin;
My refuge thou, Bhavani, thou alone!
Charity I have not learned, Yoga nor trance,
Mantra nor hymn nor Tantra have I known,
Worship nor dedication’s covenants:
My refuge thou, Bhavani, thou alone!
Virtue is not mine nor holy pilgrimage,
Salvation or world’s joy I have never won,
Devotion I have not, Mother, no vows I pledge:
My refuge thou, Bhavani, thou alone! [50]

While reviewing Arthur Avalon’s book Hymn to the Goddess, Sri Aurobindo writes:

Vidyāḥ samastās tava devi bhedāḥ
Striyaḥ samastāḥ sakalā jagatsu.

विद्या समस्तास्तव देवी भेदाः
स्त्रियः समस्ता सकला जगत्सु।

Is there not a hint of a distinction between the simple bhed.ah. (भेदा:) and sakal.a. (सकला)? “All sciences, O Goddess, are different parts of thee, all women entirely in the worlds.” The sense would then be that wherever the feminine principle is found in the living personality, we have the entire presence of the world-supporting maternal soul of the Divinity. The Devi with all her aspects, kal.as, is there in the Woman; in the Woman we have to see Durga, Annapurna, Tara, the Mahavidyas, and therefore it is said in the Tantra, in the line quoted by Mr. Avalon in his preface, “Wherever one sees the feet of Woman, one should give worship in one’s soul even as to one’s guru.” Thus this thought of the Shakta side of Hinduism becomes an uncompromising declaration of the divinity of woman completing the Vedantic declaration of the concealed divinity in man which we are too apt to treat in practice as if it applied only in the masculine. We put away in silence, even when we do not actually deny it, the perfect equality in difference of the double manifestation.[51]

The cause and Mother of the world,
She whose form is that of the Shabdabrahman,
And whose substance is bliss.
Thou art the primordial One,
Mother of countless creatures,
Creatrix of the bodies of the Lotus-born, Vishnu and Shiva,
Who creates, preserves and destroys the worlds….
Although Thou art the primordial cause of the world,
Yet art Thou ever youthful.
Although Thou art the Daughter of the Mountain-King,
Yet art Thou full of tenderness.
Although Thou art the Mother of the Vedas,
Yet they cannot describe Thee.
Although men must meditate upon Thee,
Yet cannot their mind comprehend Thee.

This hymn is quoted as culled from a Tantric compilation, the Tantrasara. Its opening is full of the supreme meaning of the great Devi symbol, its close is an entire self-abandonment to the adoration of the body of the Mother. This catholicity is typical of the whole Tantric system, which is in its aspiration one of the greatest attempts yet made to embrace the whole of God manifested and unmanifested in the adoration, self-discipline and knowledge of a single human soul.[52]

Om anandmayi, chaitanyamayee, satyamayee parame.

ॐ आनंदमयी चैतन्यमयी सत्यमयी परमे

[1] CWSA (Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo), Vol. 32, p. 14

[2] CWSA, Vol. 33, pp. 312–314

[3] CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 276

[4] A story was published in the Tribune dated 29th November 2015 where a child Disha had this faculty of reading blindfolded from Grade 1 itself.

[5] CWM -> On Thoughts and Aphorisms -> Aphorism 37

[6] CWM -> On Thoughts and Aphorisms -> Aphorism 39

[7] CWM, Vol. 10, pp. 60-61

[8] The Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 1, September 16, 1958

[9] Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo by AB Purani, pp. 156–157

[10] Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo: July 23, 1923

[11] CWM, Vol. 6, pp. 195–96

[12] CWM, Vol. 6, pp. 275–276

[13] CWM, Vol. 7, p. 271

[14] CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 276

[15] Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Chapter One, Section Two, Verse 1: “Formerly there was nothing here; this was concealed by Death — by Hunger, for it is Hunger that is Death.”

[16] CSWA, Vol. 16, P. 30

[17] CWSA, Vol. 13, pp. 153–155

[18] CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 346

[19] Durga Stotra by Sri Aurobindo, originally in Bengali. ‘Hymn to Durga’ is English translation of Durga Stotra.

[20] Mother You Said So: Conversation dated November 5, 1957

[21] The Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 3, July 25, 1962

[22] The Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 3, August 8, 1962

[23] The Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 2, August 2, 1961

[24] CWSA, Vol. 34, pp. 528–531

[25] Bhagawat Gita, 9.26

[26] Corpse

[27] CWSA, Vol. 1, p. 387

[28] CWSA, Vol. 1, pp. 387–388

[29] CWM, Vol. 12, pp. 102–106

[30] Collected works of Nolini Kant Gupta, Vol. 2, pp. 29–30

[31] CWSA, Vol. 19, pp. 470-474

[32] CWSA, Vol. 34, pp. 600–601

[33] CWSA, Vol. 20, pp. 349–351

[34] CWSA, Vol. 28, p. 490

[35] Correspondence with Dilip Kumar Roy, Vol. 2

[36] Intelligent Consciousness that went forth in the beginning — Swetaswatara Upanishad

[37] Bhagawat Gita, 18.66 – सर्वधर्मान्परित्यज्य मामेकं शरणं व्रज । अहं त्वं सर्वपापेभ्यो मोक्षयिष्यामि मा शुच:

[38] CWSA, Vol. 9, Writings in Bengali and Sanskrit

[39] CWSA, Vol. 19, pp. 17–19

[40] CWSA, Vol. 19, pp. 20–21

[41] CWSA, Vol. 19, p. 39

[42] CWSA, Vol. 19, pp. 48-49

[43] Sri Aurobindo’s Writings in Bengali (Translations), p. 154

[44] CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 14

[45] CWSA, Vol. 34, p. 666

[46] CWSA, Vol. 33, Author’s Note

[47] Bhagawat Gita, 18.66 – सर्वधर्मान्परित्यज्य मामेकं शरणं व्रज । अहं त्वं सर्वपापेभ्यो मोक्षयिष्यामि मा शुच:

[48] The Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 1, August 9, 1958

[49] CWM, Vol. 12, pp. 104-105

[50] CWSA, Vol. 5, p. 383

[51] CWSA, Vol. 1, p. 571

[52] CWSA, Vol. 1, pp. 574-575