Navaratri : The Worship of Mahadevi by Swami Krishnananda Saraswati

Navratri: The Worship of Mahadevi

by Swami Krishnananda Saraswati

The Divine Life Society -
Sivananda Ashram,
Rishikesh, India

The worship of Mahadevi - Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati - which is prevalent in this country, is a religious festival, an occasion for great enthusiasm socially, and people revel in the freedom of the expression of their feelings for the divine superintending power which is regarded as the source of this universe.

Every aspiration that originates from the mind of a human being has several facets and interpretations. When something happens, does anyone pause to think why anything happens at all? Why should anything occur? We generally attribute events in the world to some cause that is visible to our eyes or is calculable intellectually. To that extent we can find out why things happen at all, in the way that they happen in the world.

We have great scientists in this world who are proficient in finding out the causes of things; and as science advances, the meaning of 'cause' receives newer and newer interpretations. When rain started pouring, religious observers thought that a divinity called Indra was lashing forth his weapon and the force of his vajra (thunderbolt) which he wields in his hand whirls the forces around, and there is the downpour of rain. The rainbow was considered as Indra dhanush, a bow wielded by Indra himself after the rainfall. We attributed divine causative factors behind visible phenomena - a bow wielded by Indra himself after the rainfall. But science has nothing to do with religion. It believes only what it sees. As we cannot see Indra sitting in the skies, we cannot agree that he is the cause of rain.

What do we see with our scientific eye? Here, also, observations started advancing gradually from crude perceptions to finer and finer subtleties. Philosophers there were, both in the West and the East, who thought that originally God created cosmic waters, and He brooded on these waters at the beginning of creation. A poem in Sanskrit says that God created waters, and everything emanated from the waters.

There are others who think that this earth itself is a chip, a block shot off from the orb of the sun, and evolution took place gradually on this earth planet during the course of endless periods. But why do all these things happen was also a question of the scientific mind. It happens because there are causes behind causes. There are minute molecules which are the causes of solid objects like a rock, for instance. Everything that is solid in appearance is molecular in its structure, and there the scientific observation in the medieval period ceased. But then it advanced and discovered finer and finer potentials behind the molecules. Forces seemed to be whirling like eddies in a vast sea of energy everywhere, and it was thought and believed, by mathematical calculation as well as observation and experiment, that the whole world of solid matter is some sort of condensed energy. The energy, even in its gross form like electricity, has such power that it can break to pieces solid objects. If an adequately powerful voltage of electric current is passed through a mountain, the big solid mountain will crumble to pieces and will be reduced to smithereens. Such is the power of even electricity.

These causative energies which are supposed to be at the back of all occurrences have been further analysed by more and more concentrated observational processes, and it was not easy to understand why such a variety should be there in this creation, even taking for granted that the cosmic sea of force is manifesting itself as material substances. The variety of individuality was inexplicable. This was a further advance in modern techniques of scientific observation whereby it was observed that I differ from you and you differ from me - everything differs from everything else, nothing is equal to another - because of a mysterious activity taking place in the various centres of this cosmic sea of force, though we cannot imagine differentiations in a vast sea of equilibrated energy.

For instance, we do not see difference in the water of an ocean. However far we may travel on the surface of this water, everywhere it is the same water. We do not have one kind of water in one place and another kind of water in another place in the ocean - somewhere it is sweet, somewhere it is sour, somewhere it is salty. It is not like that. It is a variety of a uniformly distributed nature. But the world is not made up of a sea of this kind, it appears, because there is a dramatic differentiation of everything from everything else. Why do you differ from me in every manner and in every way? Even the RNA and DNA principles of medical science, which are supposed to be the determining factors of the cells of the body of an individual, do not produce identical perception of individuals.

Why are we born in different states - conditions - psychophysically? The modern scientific inward analysis is based on what is called the quantum mechanics of observation, whereby it was seen that there is an action and interaction taking place between centres of force in this vast energy ocean. There is a central pressure exerted at one spot, and that pressure will be of that character, that intensity, that specification, that form and significance as is its relation with other such centres in this vast sea of energy. It is very difficult to understand what all this means. A particular action of a particularised centre of energy is not an offhand action of that location independently by itself, but is universally determined by its connections through tentacles that it manifests through millions and millions of centres of that kind, so that the world of centres is more a bundle of relations of one with another than a heap of individual solid centres of activity.
We are reminded here of what ancient Buddha said in a similar strain. There is movement only, relativity only, fluxation only, process only, and nothing is stable and located in one place continuously. Even a burning flame in a lamp is not a solid flame. It is an emanation which is jetting forth with rapidity, forces impinging one on the other, so that it is like the flow of the river which looks like a continuous mass of water. Such is a flame, a burning fire. "The world is burning fire," said Buddha. From this statement one can discover any meaning.

Why does this happen? The scientist has his own answer. There was an original action of the universe, and that original action is the motivation for every other subsequent action. They call this original action by many types of descriptive epithets. Some call it a big bang; a large sound was produced. What would be that sound which broke the cosmos? We cannot imagine what it is. Some such thing they posit as the original cause, which broke the universe into two parts - half this way, half that way. This - fortunately or unfortunately - is corroborated by the Upanishads, the Manu Smriti and the Mahabharata. So what they are saying is not a cock-and-bull story; it is not a fairytale. There seems to be some truth behind it because we have it said even before the scientists were born. The Manu Smriti says a big anda was there, a cosmic egg which split, as it were, into two parts. We may call one gold and the other silver. Who broke it? The scientists cannot answer this question. Who split the universe into two parts? "He became the All. He was the All, is the All and shall be the All in the future. He, being All, created Himself through Himself," says the Purusha Sukta. Thasmadh viradajayatha virajo adhipurushah; sajatho athyarikshatha pascadhbhumim-athopuraha: From Him arise the cosmos; from that arose the presiding principle of the cosmos; from that also arose that which decides what is to happen in this universe after this split took place.

The beginning of the concept of power, or shakti, seems to be hidden here when we are told that one part was cut off from the other part. This is also the concept of Ardha-Nari-Ishvara, in our religious parlance. Lord Shiva is half man and half woman, but not half in the sense of two differentiated irreconcilable parts. It is an androgynous totality. Lord Shiva is not a half-man, and the other part is not segregated from him. It is his energy, which cannot be dissociated from himself.

Some descriptions are attempted in scriptures like the Yoga Vasishtha, the Vishnu Purana, etc. where we are told that the relationship between one part and the other part - Shiva and Shakti, and Ishvara and Nari in this Ardha-Nari-Ishvaraconcept - is something like the relationship of sesame to the oil which is immanent in it. Water which has liquidity imbedded in it, fire which has heat inseparable from it, sugar which has sweetness which cannot be separated from it, and so on, are examples before us in such scriptures as the Yoga Vasishtha. In the Vishnu Purnana, Narayana and Lakshmi are described in this fashion of relationship between themselves. Sesame is Narayana, oil is Lakshmi; water is Narayana, liquidity is Lakshmi; fire is Narayana, heat is Lakshmi; and so on, are the descriptions.

All these are intriguing descriptions of certain mysteries which seem to be the causes of everything, and causes of even our own selves. The person who speaks and the people who are listening and this very building, this very earth - all these are included in the activity of this comprehensive occurrence that took place originally as, in the language of the Purusha Sukta, a yajna or a sacrifice. God sacrificed Himself, as it were, in becoming the universe. Why is it called a sacrifice? He became other than what He is. The alienation of Himself in the form of another than what He Himself is, is the act of His sacrifice. When I cease to be what I am and give away part of me to somebody else - a share of me goes to another - I am supposed to be doing a sacrifice. If nothing from me goes, it is not a sacrifice. If you give charity but lose nothing by giving that charity, it is not charity. You have not shared a joy of your personality. A millionaire's donation of one dollar is not to be regarded as a great sacrifice on his part, because he has not shared his joy. He has a joy in possessing the dollars, but he has not lost that joy even in a modicum by parting with one dollar. But if half of it has gone and he has given it voluntarily, he has shared a large part of his joy also and he has done a sacrifice.

The abundance of the joy of God's universal existence is supposed to be overflowing in the form of this creation. This is how mystics sometimes exuberantly describe the act of creation: He becomes His own power. "I am death and immortality," says the Lord in the Bhagavadgita. The Nasadiya Sukta says, "Death and immortality are shadows cast by this Absolute Being." Immortality also is a shadow; so, what is the original of it? There cannot be anything called immortal unless there is something called death. So they are correlative factors, and there is no such thing as independent immortality minus its relationship with the concept of dying. Hence even immortality is considered as a secondary factor. God transcends death and immortality, life and annihilation, because He Himself is this process.

"One who contemplates this mystery, says the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, "he himself becomes death." So death cannot kill that person. Death becomes his very existence. The death itself, which is so frightening, seeming to be totally outside us, controlling us in every way, is the very self of that very person who knows this truth. So if the self itself is death, and death is your own self, who will kill it? That is not possible.

Thus, in the act of sacrifice of the Almighty in the form of this creation, He has become Himself, in another form, as it were. Shiva has become Shakti, Narayana has become Lakshmi, or we may say Brahma-shakti has become Saraswati, meaning thereby the power of transformation, the power of sustenance and the power of illumination are three phases of one great activity interconnectedly taking place in this sea of energy I mentioned - which, according to the modern scientists, is the beginning of all creation.

Namo vishvas sujai purvum vishvam tadanu bibhrate, atha vishvasya samhartre tubhyam tredhasthitatmane in Kalidas' Raghuvansha Kavya is thecommencement of a prayer put into the mouth of the gods when they went to the abode of Narayana and prayed to him for redress from the sorrows inflicted upon them by Ravana. What is the beginning of this prayer? Namo vishvas sujai purvum: Prostration to Thee who appearest as the Creator of all things. Vishvam tadanu bibhrate:Prostration to Thee who appearest as the Sustainer of all things. Atha vishvasya samhartre: Prostration of Thee who appearest as the Transformer and Destroyer of all things. Tubhyam tredhasthitatmane: To Thee who appearest as all these three things. He does not become these three things; He Himself is the judge and the executive and the legislature, if you can imagine such a thing. The legislature, the executive, the judiciary are not identical things. They are three facets of the administrative principle. But if one thing is all the three? Earlier, sometimes in kingdoms ruled by Rajas, the king was all things. He was the judge, he was the executive, and he was also the legislative authority. He could do anything. Such seems to be the manner in which the origin of things operates in this world and our religious interpretation of this cosmic activity in the form of worship of Shiva or worship of Shakti. In whatever manner we may try to understand this mystery, this mystery indeed is what lies at the back of our irresistible urge every year to worship Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati, willy-nilly, whether or not we understand what we are doing.

Calcutta, where Durga pujya is very famous and people begin a month before to prepare for it, is also the place of Marxists. And the Marxists say, "What is there; let the pujya go on." They have all heart and soul even for this performance of Durga pujya in the heart of Calcutta, while outside on the veranda, on the outskirts of the pandal of the worship, they sell the works of Karl Marx at the same time. Whatever it is, let Karl Marx be there, but inside him there is something operating, transcending him. And so, finally, what man thinks is not the final judgement of things.

All political, administrative dogmas and pronouncements have something behind them which compels them to think in that manner. We have democracies, we have plutocracies, aristocracies, tyrannies, monarchies. We have peace and war. We have everything in this historical process of the universe. But all this is not finally a contemplated original thought of the human being. He is forced to move in this direction by the requirement of cosmic forces. History is a movement of forces in the cosmic structure, which manifests itself as human, political and historical procession.

There is, therefore, something which remains still not properly understood. When we say that God created the world, that ununderstood mystery is the mystery of the relationship between God and his Shakti - Rudra-Shakti, Shiva-Shakti, Brahma-Shakti and Vishnu-Shakti. It cannot be understood. Actually speaking, if we dispassionately judge phenomena, one cannot understand what is the relationship between a man and a woman. Though we think that everything is clear, it is not clear. It will become more and more unclear when we probe deeper and deeper in the the phenomenon called this duality of the sexes. It cannot be understood unless you transcend both these things. You have to cease to be a man and cease to be a woman; then you will know what the relationship is between you. As a man, as a woman, this relationship cannot be understood because you are one party. One party cannot judge another party.

Therefore, human beings are not in a position to understand this mystery adequately, because who are human beings? They are either men or women. They think only in terms of their social relationship; and the connection between Shiva and Shakti or Narayana and Vishnu, etc. is not a social connection. It is impossible to understand what connection it is. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, in the first chapter itself, in the fourth section, starts with a great enigma placed before us. Atmaivedam agra asit purusavidhah: The Cosmic Person, as it were, existed in the beginning. This is the concept of the personality of God as is prevalent in Christianity, for instance, and also in the Vaishnava and the Shaiva doctrines in our own country. God is a person.

But this 'person' - we have to understand the meaning of this word carefully - it is not a human person; it is The Person, Mahapurusha, the Purusha Sukta's great divinity, Purushottama, in the language of the Bhagavadgita. This Original Being, which has become the Creator as well as the created, has also eternally brought out a problem between the relation of cause and effect, to the chagrin of all philosophers right from the beginning of centuries. Even today we cannot know how an effect comes from a cause. If the effect is totally outside the cause, we cannot say it has any connection with the cause. If it has a vital relationship, inseparably, with the cause, then there is no such thing as an independent effect at all; only the cause is there. Either way we cannot know what has happened. The cause has not produced the effect if the effect is inseparable, in a sense, from itself. Clay has not produced the pot. Though the pot is not clay, we can carry water in a pot but we cannot carry water in the clay. So there is a difference between the clay and the pot. Is there not a difference? Yes, but what is the difference? If we break the pot, it will become the original thing from which it came.

So we do not know whether there was a cause for this universe or whether this world has really come as an effect from this cause. Who created it and how did it come? The conclusion of the Nasadiya Sukta of the Veda is: "He Who created it may know it or," the poet says, laughingly, as it were, "perhaps He Himself does not know how He created it." Yadi va veda, yadi va na veda: He may know, or He may not know.

Such is the difficulty in understanding the facts of life. We are floating on the surface of wisdom as wiseacres imagining that we are great philosophers and scientists - neither of which we really are. If we go into the depths of things, even a philosopher ceases to be a philosopher in his bedroom, in his kitchen and in his bathroom. He becomes a poor nothing. He forgets all of his wisdom because of the little pinpricks of real life that seems to be there behind him, pursuing him like a creditor wherever he goes, and the scientist knows that he knows nothing finally because he finally jumped on the conclusion that unless he knows himself as an inseparable ingredient in the process of observation, he will not know anything. So what does the scientist, who is a materialist, as they say, finally tell us? Know thyself and thou will knowest all the universe, because thou art involved in the very process of your trying to understand this universe which is the object of your perception, observation.

Thus, no one can understand who this Shakti is. In the great prayer the gods offered, as we have it in the Devi Mahatmaya: namo devi, maha devi, everything is told about her. I do not know whether to use the word 'her'. It is a defect of language. It is not a woman. How can you regard God's alienation of Himself as an other than what He is, for the purpose of this apparent creation, as a woman? As you will appreciate, there is no such thing as a woman or a man in this world.

They are certain functional features manifested by the requirement of this interaction of cosmic forces, one related to the other, as I mentioned earlier. Impersonality rules the cosmos, and this is the meaning of the so-called differentiation of Shiva and Shakti. God's dancing - sometimes Shakti is dancing, we say. We do not know who is dancing on whom. In some pictures or portraits we see Kali dancing on Shiva's chest. What is the matter that she is dancing on Shiva? How is it? It is the power of the cosmos dancing on its rootedness in the Absolute. Indescribable is this phenomenon.

Shakti worship - Devi worship, Durga pujya - is not a female deity's worship, as some people wrongly imagine. Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati are not females like a woman that we see in the world. We would describe this very Shakti as is portrayed to us in the Devi Mahatmya: Brahman itya bhidhiyate, Narasinhi, Rudrani, Kumari - all sorts of names. She appeared as Skanda with spear in hand, as Narasimha with roaring lion's mouth, as Vishnu with sudarshana in hand, as Rudra with pasupata in hand. Can we call that great being a woman? A man has always counter-posed before him this difficulty of having something opposed to him, and so is the case with a woman also. This idea has to be shed before we become true worshippers of this great divinity. Otherwise it becomes a kind of Tantric cult and a ritual which may take us to any place, like a firecracker that bursts during Divali. It may burst in the sky, or may burst our face also; anything can take place.

Tantra, which is at the back of Navratri Pujya, is not a cult by itself. It is the basic explanation behind every activity that takes place in this universe. Even the littlest activity of ours is explicable only in terms of what Tantra describes as the meaning of life; but this meaning you and I are not supposed to understand merely by a snap of our fingers. Dynamite is a powerful force. It can burst rocks and mountains. It can burst our own head also if we do not handle it properly. Like Pasmasura, it will turn upon us.

Therefore, this is a very, very meaningful and highly significant spiritual occasion provided to us, not merely religious in the ordinary sense of the term, where we rise to the occasion of contemplating God in all this power in any form whatsoever in which it reveals itself and whatever form it takes - as beauty to the eyes, sonorous music to the ears, fragrance to the nose, sweetness to the tongue, softness to the touch, and intellectual exaltation for a literary genius; all this is the Shakti operating. It is, therefore, imperative on the part of an ardent seeker and a worshipper of the divinity during this Navratri occasion to be benefited by this worship and not merely pass through it as a kind of routine for nine days. "It has been done for so many years and now, this year, we will do it, and make a noise, and then the whole thing ends." That is not so. Religious observances have their spiritual import, as we know very well. They are deeply significant as divine occasions provided for us to rise to that occasion now and then for the purpose of accelerating the progress of our soul towards its destination.

Thus, in our worship, what do we worship? God as He is, and God as He appears - God as the cause, God as the effect; God as the male principle, God as the female principle; God as the positive and the negative. Worship is many a time considered as an act of the soul with no connection with the body. It is Shakti worship - Tantra sadhana - that tells us that we should not commit this mistake. There are levels of reality, degrees of expression of God Himself, and we have to rise from the lower level to the higher level. We cannot cut off our connection with the lower level, imagining that we are on the top, because everyone is conscious of one's being in the body. This bodily consciousness has to be transmuted, not severed; otherwise the soul will writhe with agony that it has lost a part of itself, and the result would be not yogic attainment but miserable rebirth. The body is not to be discarded; it has to be transmuted into a subtler energy. Molecule becomes atom, atom becomes electron, electron becomes electric force, and it becomes the space-time continuum, whatever we call it. We do not reject the molecule for the sake of the finer essences because they are the transmuted forms of the very things which we saw with our physical eyes - a solid object.

In spiritual practice, in Tantra sadhana, there is no abandoning anything, no rejecting anything. We cannot reject Shakti and catch hold of only Shiva. That is not possible. It is like abandoning creation for the sake of the Creator. Not so is the case, says the Purusha Sukta. He is the creation. Tasmad virad ajayata: From Him only everything comes.

Spiritual aspiration is an integrated march of the whole thing that we are, the body-mind-spirit complex, towards that total whole which is Shiva-Shakti, Ardha-Nari-Ishvara, Mahapurusha, Purushottama, Para Brahman, which is All, the source of power and power itself, to that great glory - we can call it only glory - yesya nama maha desah. Unable to say what it is, the poet of the Purusha Sukta says yesya nama maha desah: What can I call thee? Thou art great glory. God, or whatever we call this great mystery, is great glory. Shakti, or whatever we call this mystery, is great glory. The universe, or whatever we may call it, is great glory. The whole of life is a great miracle and a wondrous glory. Its worship it is that we are engaged in during this holy occasion of blessed Navratri of Adhya Shakti - Maha Durga, Maha Lakshmi, Maha Saraswati. May that grace be upon us all.


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