Goddess of the Mountain

Detail, Allegory of Chastity, Hans Memling, Nederlandish, 15th century.

The Hindu goddess Parvati is the wife of Shiva, the personification of the Eternal Self. Parvata is one of the Sanskrit words for "mountain"; "Parvati" translates to "She of the mountains" and refers to Parvati being born the daughter of Himavan, lord of the mountains and the personification of the Himalayas. Shri Parvati is also called Gauri, meaning "of white or golden complexion". Gauri Mata (Mother Gauri) is the goddess of purity and chastity, and a benevolent aspect of Devi (Goddess); the 'brilliant'. Another form taken by Parvati, is the warrior goddess Durga, whose name means "inaccessible", or "fortress'.

The Veil of Self

According to Plutarch, the Egyptian temple of the goddess Neith bore the inscription:

I am All That Has Been, That Is, and That Will Be. 

No mortal has yet been able to lift the veil that covers Me.

There was one who arrived there.
He lifted the veil of the goddess.
But what did he see?
Wonder above wonder,
he saw himself.

Georg Philip Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), 18th century.

Hymn to Isis

O Wealth-giver,
Queen of the Gods,
Lady Hermouthis,
Omnipotent
Good Fortune,
Greatly Renowned Isis,
Exalted Deity,
Highest Discoverer of all life.

Many are the miracles You have performed so that mankind could exist,
and morality be established for all.
You taught us customs so that justice might in some measure prevail,
You taught us skills so that human life might be comfortable,
And You found the blossoms that produce nourishing fruit.

Because of You heaven and the whole earth have their being,
And the gusts of the winds, and the sun with its sweet light.
By Your power the channels of the Nile are filled, every one,
At the harvest season, and its turbulent water is poured out
On the whole land so that produce may be unfailing.

All mortals who live on the boundless earth:
Thracians, Greeks and Barbarians,
Express Your fair Name, a Name greatly honored among all,
Each speaks in his own language, in his own land.
The Syrians call You: Astarte, Artemis, Nanaia,
The Lycian tribes call You: Leto, the Lady,
The Thracians also name You as Mother of the gods,
And the Greeks (call You) Hera of the Great Throne, Aphrodite,
Hestia the goodly, Rheia and Demeter.
But the Egyptians call You ‘Thiouis’ (because they know) that You, being One, are all the goddesses invoked by the races of men.

Mighty One, I shall not cease to compose hymns to Your great Power,
Deathless Saviour, many-named, mightiest Isis,
Saving from war, cities and all their citizens:
Men, their wives, possessions, and children.
Those who are bound fast in prison, in the power of death,
Those who as are in pain through long, anguished, sleepless nights,
All who are wanderers in a foreign land,
Those who sail on the Ocean in winter,
When men may be destroyed, and their ships wrecked and sunk.
All of these are saved if they pray that You be present to help.

Hear my prayers, O One whose Name has great Power;
Prove Yourself merciful to me, and free me from all distress.

Isidorus, c 100 BCE

Anahita

A 4th century BC depiction of the Iranian goddess Anahita, radiant and mounted on a lion, being worshipped by Artaxerxes II. She was an important deity in the Zoroastrian religion of ancient Persia, responsible for fertility but also skilled in the arts of war. A virgin goddess, Her name means "the immaculate one". 

The Indian goddess, Shri Devi, also rides on a lion or tiger and is indomitable in combat.

"Creation Delights in the Recognition of Itself"

At the end of Huston Smith's autobiography, Tales of Wonder, he describes an experience his friend Ann Jauregui had as a young girl in Michigan:

In summer she would lie on a wooden raft anchored in the bay, listening to the the waters lapping, drowsy in the warm sunshine. The warm day, the clear northern light, and the water's gentle motion together worked a semi-hypnotic effect.

Then suddenly Ann would snap alert and feel intensely alive, or rather that everything was alive and that she was part of it. The rocks, the water itself - everything seemed pulsating with a kind of energy. She found she put questions to the experience. 'What is my role in all this,' she whispered. 'Show me.'

The rocks, the trees, the water - all in silent chorus 'answered' - not in words, of course - that the wanting to know, just that, was her part in the pulsating landscape.

'Creation delights in the recognition of itself', is how she would later put it.

Inquiry (called vichara in Sanskrit, the language of yoga) is the posing of questions to the Self/Spirit. It is an initial step on the way into Self-realisation or Self-recognition. 

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi recommends asking the simple question: 'am I the Spirit?'

As meditation deepens, there is less need for Self-inquiry (atmavichara) - at least in words - and the thoughtless awareness state of nirvichara (without inquiry) is established.

Self as Universe

The little space within the heart is as great as a vast universe.

The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun,

and the moon and the stars, fire, lightning and winds are there,

and all that now is, and all that is not:

for the whole universe is the Self and the Self dwells within the heart.

- The Chandogya Upanishad

Dream and Reality

Self-realisation is sometimes compared to the moment of awakening from a dream state. But how is one to know that the waking state is not itself a further dream?

After receiving Kundalini awakening and the opening of the Sahasrara Chakra, one is not entirely free of Maya - The World-Dream continues - but one begins to dream lucidly, to participate in it's creation from moment to moment. This is how one begins to distinguish illusion and reality after Self-realisation.

In the film Inception, the character Ariadne tells Leonardo DiCaprio's character to "remember yourself" just before he plunges into a dream state of indeterminate length. The film does not explore the nature of the Self, however.

The idea that the world is an illusion or dream can become an infectious meme. As we see in the character of Mal (Leonardo DiCaprio's character's wife), a kind of self-destructive madness results, if the ego claims ownership of the world-dream, rather than seeing it as an aspect of the Supreme Self.

According to Advaita philosophy, the world is a dream if seen as separate from the Subject; real if seen as the Subject.

Reincarnation

The Buddha, by the Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo.
After Enlightenment the Buddha remembers countless past existences.

From the viewpoint of the Self, there is no reincarnation; there is not even incarnation. The Self does not incarnate. If Self and World are indeed one and the same, how can it be said that the Self enters into a particular physical form? How can the all-pervading Self enter into itself?

However, from a human viewpoint, there is reincarnation.

Self-realisation is not an action

As soon as I say, 'You cannot put in any effort about it,' our ego gets challenged. How is it? It's difficult for a modern person to understand, that God's grace is going to work it out. Even Shankaracharya, you know Adi Shankaracharya, the one who propounded Hinduism in India, said that "Na yogena, na samkhyena," [Neither by observances nor by analysis] not by any of these things that it is going to happen, but by Mother's grace it's going to work out that you are going to be realized. There's no way out. No way thinking about it, writing about it, preaching about it, talking about it, it has to happen to you.
-Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, 1979

Praises of the Divine Mother by Four Incarnations of the Primordial Master, Shri Adi Guru Dattatreya

William Blake, The Mother Goddess whom he called Jerusalem, the Emanation from Albion (Shiva, the Self)


"The beginning of the universe is the Mother of all things."
-Master Lao Tse

"A son's paradise is found at the feet of his mother."
-Lord Muhammad

"The Primordial Mother came into being by Herself, mysteriously,
and She created three deities: one was the Creator, one the Sustainer, and one the Destroyer."
-Shri Guru Nanak (Founder of the Sikh religion), first lines of the Guru Granth Sahib

"Surrender to me and I will take care of you as a Mother takes care of a little child."
-Shri Shirdi Sai Nath

"Let us reach for the world that ought to be - that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls." 
Barack Obama

We have a stake in one another, and what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done."

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

Vibrations

This is, apparently, a real answer to a question in a school physics test.

Self-forgetting

Shri SitaRama Enthroned, Gouache on Japanese paper.

Lord Rama was an Incarnation of the Supreme Self who deliberately forgot His divine identity in order to become a human being (an ideal one).

After performing intense and prolonged austerities, the demon Ravana had won a boon from the god Brahma (or Shiva?), and asked that he become invulnerable from death at the hands of any god or fellow demon. Contemptuous of apparently frail human beings, he neglected to ask for immunity from them, thus creating a loophole which allowed Shri Rama (the all-powerful Lord Vishnu in human form) to kill him and free the world from oppression.

The Dishonesty of Ego

In Western culture, ego is often thought of as 'healthy', or at worst a necessary evil. But constructing an artificial sense of self based on the lie of separateness, can have catastrophic consequences not only for the person but for entire societies. Dorothy Rowe writes:

Can you bear to remember that time in your life when you were going along feeling secure and thinking, "This is me, this is my world, that was my past, this will be my future," when suddenly you found that you had made a major error of judgement? When you realised that many of the ideas underpinning your whole sense of being a person - that sense of "I", "me", "myself" - had been invalidated by events?

Have you ever had the sensation of falling through infinite space, shattering, crumbling, of being about to disappear like a raindrop into the ocean? Perhaps you knew that what was falling apart was not your sense of self but some of your ideas. You knew that you now had to go through a period of uncertainty until new ideas emerged. But if you did not know this, you would have been utterly terrified, so terrified that you would do anything never to go through such an experience again.

Psychiatrists and psychologists have either ignored this experience, maximised its significance as a full-scale "breakdown", or minimised it as a "panic disorder". Yet this feeling of falling apart is an essential part of our lives and of most of our narratives. In The Wizard of Oz, for example, Dorothy and her companions emerge wiser and strong from the invalidation of their idea that the wizard could solve their problems, while paradoxically Othello is destroyed by the invalidation of his belief that his wife Desdemona had been unfaithful.

We first experience the terror of being invalidated when we are small children, but by the time we are 3 or 4 we have learned a way of avoiding it: we have learned how to lie. From then on, whenever we glimpse the faintest possibility that our "selves" might be threatened with annihilation, we lie.

First of all, we lie to ourselves. Why? Because we fear that we do not have the strength and courage to face the truth of our situation. We even lie about lying, preferring to call our lies anything but a lie. We say: "He's in denial" or "She's being economical with the truth".

All lies have networks of consequences we did not expect or intend. The lies we tell may well protect us and our personal - or collective - sense of self in the short term, but in the long term and in a linked-up, complex world, the consequences can be truly disastrous. After all, when we lie to ourselves and to others, we multiply a thousandfold the inherent difficulties we have trying to determine what is actually going on inside us and around us.

-New Scientist, 21 June 2010
Dorothy Rowe is an Australian psychologist and emeritus associate of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Read the full article

The Self is infinite

The Self appears to be finite because of ignorance.
When ignorance is destroyed, the Self,
which does not admit of any multiplicity,
reveals itself by itself:
just as the sun reveals itself
when it evaporates the clouds covering it.

-Shri Adi Shankaracharya, Atmabodha

Research on Meditation

Spiral Jetty

Meditation helps to anchor someone in the present. A new study has found it also stops people from anticipating pain.

Brain scans revealed that the most advanced meditators were the least likely to anticipate pain induced by a laser device, which made the experience more bearable.

Lead researcher Dr Christopher Brown, said: 'Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a way to treat chronic illness such as the pain caused by arthritis.

'Recently, a mental health charity called for meditation to be routinely available on the NHS to treat depression, which occurs in up to 50 per cent of people with chronic pain.

'However, scientists have only just started to look into how meditation might reduce the emotional impact of pain.'

The study, to be published in the journal Pain, found that participants who meditated showed unusual activity in the brain region known to be involved in controlling attention and thought processes when potential threats are perceived.

Dr Brown said: 'The results of the study confirm how we suspected meditation might affect the brain.

'Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse.'

Dr Brown said the findings should encourage further research into how the brain is changed by meditation practice.

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