Showing posts with label ramprasad sen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ramprasad sen. Show all posts

9.27.2015

Divine Love, my encounter with the crazy world of Bhaktas

Are you a bhakta? How far does your Bhakti go? Will you take the leap, close your eyes and trust me and let go?

"No" would most likely be the answer. How then do we go on this path of faith, ahem blind faith. Blind faith which is not so blind that you take anything that’s given but blind faith that is informed on whom you take it from and what they have to offer. And yes, you had better know your faith better, way better because whoever you go to, won’t teach you that. 

Faith is what you make of it, it is not what you see in a group of people as to what they make of it. It is not a war of symbolism, it is not a war of numbers, it is not a war of belief (whether my belief is greater than yours or not). It is a STATE OF MIND. It is yours for you to manage, like your home, your work, your kids... faith is all about managing the creature called you. Why, because guess what ... you spent your whole life managing everyone and everything else around you but yourself. 

I belong in that world, the world where we think managing ourselves is way more important that managing others. We manage ourselves and define what principles and virtues we want to live up to and define who we really want to be...in the divine world. I discovered a handful of others who have tried as much to do the same thing with themselves and succeeded. And we have a common goal, the goal is to seek the divine, the goal is to exploit what we have in abundance - sheer love. 

Love - not the chemistry between a man and a woman, not a spark that defines a human relationship - but love that is free of human definition. You and I are capable of it. I discovered a man, I read his poetry and now I am deeply in love with his ideology, deeply in love with his craving for the Goddess, deeply in love with his purity towards the divine. And every line in his poetry just makes my heart cry out for him. Oh where is he, the great lover of the Goddess, who looks so dejected because he can’t find me. 

Alas, we are born in two different eras...we are born never to have ever met before. And as I scroll through his divine verses to the Goddess... I feel the pain of what he feels. We are simple people, we don’t know the ways of the world, and we just know one thing, deep love, just love for the divine Mother. 

He writes:

A Country Fair (Excerpts) 

Drive me out of my mind, O Mother
What use is esoteric knowledge
or philosophical knowledge
Transport me totally with the burning wine
Of your all-embracing love
Mother of mystery, who imbues with mystery
The heart of those who love you
Immerse me irretrievably
In the stormy ocean without boundary
Pure love Pure love Pure love

The Poet Stammers, 
Overcome with longing:
When? When? When?
When will I be granted companionship 
with her intense lovers. 
Their holy company is heavenly
A country fair for those mad with love
Where every distinction between master and disciple disappears

 - Ramprasad Sen (Shakta Poet, 18th Century, West Bengal)

Yes it’s a mad world when one true bhakta meets another, it’s a mad world of freedom from the hypocrisy of men. Out here there is truth, there is pure love and deep faith that pulsates, binding us together. We sing each other’s praise, we view each other as an extension of ourselves. We realize just what we need beyond the world of earthly human love and existence. And the divine mother drives us, like horses tied to her chariot as we run in directions of our own choice, of our own freedom. The harness of love keeps us steady and doesn’t let us stray away.



He taught me well. He taught me to love the Goddess. He taught me to look into the mirror and see him as a reflection of me. 

That is truly when the divine illusion of the Great Mother falls and she sees herself face to face with herself. We are but a figment of her imagination. Ma Kali meets Ma Kali, I am you seen through her eyes and this illusion too shall fall. 

At last... I have realized the meaning of true love.

3.05.2013

Ma Kali - Consciousness of Time and Change


The sad story of Indian faith is largely influenced by the mimicing of the great acts of devotion by some superior soul mechanically and not emoting the same intensity of Bhakti that goes with the action. 

Many lambs, tender and young and scared, meet their peril at the foot of the Goddess at numerous shrines across Bengal and other states. It is the thoughtless murder of innocent animals that have nothing to do with the deep meaning of the embodiment of Kali Ma. Mythology says the Mother wants blood and in our world we know no better as to how to offer it. 

The Mother asks for our blood, now this doesn't mean we literally need to offer it. Ma Kali is an integral part of Brahma Vidya and she signifies the deep realization that life and death are just transition points. Her nature and terrific outlook defines the jolting presence of time, of change, and that to reincarnate into another form to progress in our spiritual journey, we need to discard this body. She brings the realization that death is nothing to be feared and that we as mortals need to get over that ignorance and realize the beauty of it. 

To attain higher spiritual realization we need to discard our fears. We need to get over our bias and perception. The shamshan ghat should look no different from a glamorous resort simply because it is so temporary. It doesn't take too long to convert a gorgeous resort into a burning ghat. Where is its permanence and why are we so enamoured by the apparent beauty of the location or why do we consider the cremation ground as forbidden land?

Ma Kali's presence is to teach us to get over our fear of death, not to drag an unwilling innocent lamb to its end. Now the fact that this is so not clear to anyone, uneducated or scholars alike, shows how ignorant we are capable of being. Are we waiting for someone to come and drag us to the book to learn it, or are we just happy living in some fool's paradise assuming we are doing a great job by cutting off the neck of an innocent lamb. 

Well if Bhakti would have it, its really not the lamb that would be out there. The true love for Ma Kali denotes that we want to get over the fear of death, we want to merge with her and that being a hanging skull on her garland is possibly a way of attaining salvation. Offering our own head to the goddess, is a greater and more daring offering to make, one out of love, one out of bhakti, one out of fearlessness. Now isnt that the true sign of getting over the fear of death by facing it head on? 

Unfortunately our outlook and our laws consider that suicide, but it just saddens me that killing a lesser being simply because its helpless is an act of spiritualism. How pathetic is it to draw a knife across a lambs neck when the texts actually describe the act of selflessness and high devotion to be the ultimate end of cutting off one's own neck. I am not propagating the act of cutting off one's own neck though historically that has really been the case and we have sculptural evidences all over the country to deliver that message.

Is it right or wrong, I dont know, but certainly killing an innocent lamb is not right. Ma Kali can be attained without killing, without the shedding of blood, Ramakrishna did it, Ramprasad Sen also did it. Why can't we take their examples and stop this slaughter, I mean somewhere we also need to do some thinking instead of just following the crowd. 

Kali is the significance of time and change and the reality of death marks that change. All we need to do is accept it and get over our fear of dying one day. I can't understand how it is related to killing a lamb in big numbers on a Saturday at the Ma Kali temple? The idea of Kali is spiritual and intellectual and is not related to the ghastly act of bloodshed. 

Buddha taught Ahimsa, so did Shankara. How can we see love when there is so much pain and horror in the eyes of the lamb? 

2.21.2013

A Lost Heart in the Land of Ma Kali


A hollow emptiness descended on my mind and heart as I stared at the setting sun over the sacred Ganges in the holy land of Dakshineswar. Pigeons fluttered around the temple roof that was a sad but modern attempt on copying ancient Bengal temple architecture. I was a little more prepared this time not just to visit the Kali Ma shrine there and look at her up close but to also go around and see the Panchavati and if my luck would have it, the sacred tantrik sadhana spot. 

Great men have walked this earth, Ramakrishna and Ram Prasad to name a few and they all felt the growing presence of Ma Kali in the air. Yet, as I closed my eyes and breathed in the air under the Panchavati and filled my lungs as best as I could, I still felt nothing. No Ramakrishna, no Kali Ma, no Tara Ma, no body. The place, the spot, the Divinity and the air is all the same and yet I don't even get a glimpse of the Goddess, not a shread of it, what am I really missing?

My immediate answer was potentially Bhakti, an emotion or a logical reasoning that I feel, a sense of familiarity with the Goddess and a budding relationship which I have not yet taken for granted. But is it Bhakti that I lacked or is it tantrik sadhana that I severely lacked that didn't allow me even near her door. I dont think Sadhana would have solved my problem entirely, end of the day just mechanical ritual doesn't get us spiritual bliss though when it is coupled with Bhakti, one can feel the rising spiritual heat in the body. 

Their world and our world are so different and the only visible connect between the two worlds are the idols of the blue skinned Goddess that dot the Kolkata landscape in brick walls or tiled rooms, in bright electrically lit chambers or in the dark. Shivji and Ma, both live here as Shamshan Bhairava or Shamshan Kali but when I step into their world, I just step into a land with air and people lost in a peculiar belief but I want to feel a part of it, there hangs a deep feeling of hollow emptiness inside me that says, I just have to try a lot harder.

Frustration takes me to the doors of Kalighat, where the Mother rises violently in her spark of mad fury stepping over the pale body of Shivji, or at least I would like to believe that He is there under all those sarees that drape her. Bright orange hue lights up her forehead and her blood red ferocious eyes look up closely at me. Lets not mention the lousy priests or the noise or the sickeningly dirty floors, but here in all the bright light, soot covered silver parasols and candid groups of cockroaches that crawl over her hibiscous covered shouders, she lashes out with a bright orange dripping silver sickle, dancing in vigorous madness yet all frozen in stone, in time, in belief.

The fire burns on, the arti of the day culminates and I still stare blankly at her wondering, Mother, did I even try hard enough to connect with you? I can only stare, I can only wait and hope that Ma will reveal herself to me... some day... some time... some place. 

10.25.2012

The sacred seat for perfect meditation.


I haven't quite seen anything like this, anything as intriguing, or secretive and yet so open. When we get down to discipline and discover the deeper roots of our faith, I speak only for Hinduism, and in this case more pointedly towards the cult of Shiva and Shakti, it appears to be a treasure hunt, difficult to find and exhilarating when discovered and yet it leaves a hint of something more that lies beyond. 

Its very easy to get surpassed by presumption to perform ritual and follow religion like a herd of sheep with little knowledge of why we are doing it. In India there are plenty of rules to follow ritually and no one really know why, but no one seems to care enough to find out beyond the reasons they have been given. We feel we have done our bit but have we really? There are many ways to discover Hinduism; I, for now, have chosen the path of ritual more for its structure, its intrigue and its apparent magic that is stitched in with the deities. 

And this hunt has taken me all over the place, to the most sacred sthalas and to the weirdest rituals that are still being performed even today ["am being judgmental with the general non acceptance that anything beyond the rules of our society are basically absurd"]. And the best place to visit for such intriguing rituals is Bengal. I love Bengal for its openness, for its broad minded society, for their belief system and social acceptance of it and the hint of mystery that dots the land. After much reading and stomach churning discoveries, I came upon a few common areas of interest in the lives of few Bengali saints, of whom I would like to concentrate on Ramakrishna and Ramprasad Sen, both of whom were Brahmin priests of the Tantrik order. 

My focus is not to generalize a few facts common to their lives but to zero in on one strange and yet mysterious element that brought them both to the state of divine consciousness that they both experienced. All roads lead to Rome, yes, but this particular road has a twist. Circumstances presented them with the right teachers, perfect rituals and right attitude to go through with it. One thing that I found of great interest was their seat of meditation. While there are no written texts available to elaborate the significance and the reasons why [at least on the internet] what really strikes me is the combination of elements that make up the perfect ground for meditation. 

The great seat of dualism, the meeting of the highest of the pure with the lowest of the impure, the confluence of truth where the human mind dwells to reach higher zones of existence, of bliss, of spiritual intoxication. This is at the seat of meditation, a seat that both Ramakrishna and Ramprasad Sen spent a lot of their time in meditation. At the head of this seat was the Panchavati, the 5 sacred trees of purity namely the Banyan, Vilva, Aamla, Ashoka, and the Peepal which make the air sacred and pure and bring in life into the environment. At the foot of the seat is the altar of the impure, the panchamundi asan, the burial place of 5 skulls belonging to a snake, frog, rabbit, fox and human, the seat of death that houses the very power of the Goddess. And between these two worlds of dualism, sits the seeker in mindful contemplation in love with the Gods and in a state of pure consciousness. Both elements of life and death are arranged in the sacred order of the number 5, seeking the highest realm of divinity. Yet the mystery of the highest form of dualism leading to the gates of super consciousness remains a mystery to lesser mortals like us. 

Now to the common man's mind, the presence of skulls, the association of death and impurity itself is a question from the ritualistic perspective of why this peculiar combination is required at all. While we accept Panchavati without batting an eyelid, we find it hard to accept the panchamunda asan [though its very acceptable in Bengal]. And hence the combination brings in the an eerie feeling of what else we might have to go through and whether we are really cut out for this path of spiritualism. That is really the whole point. Its the bias we have to kill, the mind set that we are stuck with, the upbringing that is so one sided. And to kill this bias we have great saints who have performed it, Ramakrishna and Ramprasad Sen were lucky enough to own these seats and no one came in their way. They were aided by gurus who presented them with the required material to get them going. They have proven that with rigorous sadhana, no matter what the seat on which they sit is, no matter what kind of food they are asked to eat, no matter what they are told to perform in terms of core ritual, no matter what kind of trees cover their roof, all that matters is serious consciousness towards the supreme. 

So this just leaves me with one question, is the great seat of dualism a catalyst to higher consciousness, or is the seat meant to just kill the aversion the seeker may have in their path of performing sadhana. Its possible that the aversion is killed once the seeker sits on the aasan and figures there is nothing wrong with it :). The other reason for the skulls could also be associated with the presence of Shakti residing within them in the form of Ma Kali. And when the seeker sits on this holy throne, the closest body part associated with this seat is the muladhara chakra forming a direct path through the seeker to reach Sahasrara which is the seat of purity and life alias the trees. Maybe there is more to this which can only be discovered through experience. For now, we know that this seat promises results and is hard to come by.