Shivaratri

Tanjavur painting of Lord Shiva,
the principle of unattached love.

When one is attached
to objects, or persons,
one calls them 'mine',
rather than seeing them
as oneself.

When there is possessiveness
and attachment
there is duality, division, separation.
Where there is love
there is no more duality or separation.

Actually there are no objects;
all is Subject (Self).
And there is only one person;
all is Shiva, Allah, Jahwe -
the singular Personification of all that exists.

Tonanatzin

Our Lady of Guadalupe

"It is no secret to anyone that Mexican Catholicism is centred about the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe... the scene of her appearance to the Indian Juan Diego was a hill that formerly contained a sanctuary dedicated to Tonanatzin ‘Our Mother’, the Aztec goddess of fertility."
- Octavio Paz (Mexican writer and diplomat)

.

Early one morning in December 1531, a Mexican Indian, Juan Diego, heard beautiful music and a woman’s voice calling him to the top of Tepeyac Hill, which he was just passing. He saw a radiantly beautiful woman, who identified herself as the Virgin Mary. She told him that a temple should be built in her honour at the bottom of the hill.

The Aztec earth goddess Tonantzin wore a white robe and was called "The Goddess of Sustenance", "Honored Grandmother", and "Serpent".

The serpent often has negative connotations in Christian cultures, but it is very common to find it as an attribute of the Goddess all over the world.

Ownership and Illusion

Disowning an arm or a leg despite the fact that it is still attached to the body is a common symptom of stroke, anorexia and schizophrenia. And, curiously, the temperature of these rejected limbs is always low. Now researchers have tricked healthy people into disowning a limb. The work implies a more complex relationship between mind and body than had been thought. The so-called ‘rubber hand illusion’ is induced by stroking a person’s hand while it is out of their sight and at the same time stroking a visible rubber hand. The trick makes the subject perceive the rubber hand to be their own. It was discovered that this feeling is accompanied by reduced blood flow and a drop in temperature in the ‘rejected’ limb. Thus the body tells the thalamus (part of the brain thought to regulate body temperature) what to do.

"The experiment suggests that the conscious sense of who we are is intimately linked to our physical bodies. This is pretty ingenious. They have shown a direct link between body ownership and the physiological system", says Henrik Ehrsson from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Sweden.

-New Scientist 30 Aug 08

Through its identification with the physical body, and the inanimate objects used by the body, the ego gives us an illusory sense of being a discrete self (rather than a universal Self).