The shortest distance
to The Mother is within yourself.
From: "jagbir singh" <www.adishakti.org@gmail.com>
Date: Sat Aug 28, 2004 8:22 am
Subject: The shortest distance to The Mother is
within yourself.
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The Mother GODDESS
Anne Lowenkopf
Anne Lowenkopf is the author of American Indian
Religions, The
Hasidim: Mystical Adventures and Ecstatics, and several
other
nonfiction books. This article originally appeared in
Living Wisdom:
Vedanta in the West. She teaches writing in Santa
Barbara,
California.
We catch the Godhead much as we catch light. The very
structures
that enable us to experience both limit how much of each
we can
experience. Since we catch God with our human hearts and
intellect
and will, since we reach out to the Godhead because of
our human
need and desire, it is not surprising that what we
catch—our
visions of God—have both points of similarity and points
of
difference.
We experience anything—everything—through ourselves. It
is
all we have to experience with. And so, not surprisingly
because we
humans are gendered life forms, often our experience of
the Godhead
has gender.
God the Father is familiar to those of us who have grown
up in the
Judeo-Christian tradition; round the globe and in the
past various
peoples have perceived and worshiped father gods and
other male
deities in love and terror, hope and dread.
Though no statistic count that I know of exists,
abundant evidence
makes it safe to estimate that we humans have "caught"
goddesses as
often as gods. Some of these goddesses like the Navaho's
Spider
Woman and the ancient Greek's Athena have specific
functions: you
would not go to Athena for aid in childbirth nor to
Spider Woman for
strength in warding off enemies.
But some of us have caught a Mother Goddess who is
all-encompassing,
beyond role: "I am all alone in the world here. Who else
is there
besides me? See these goddesses who are but my own
powers entering
into my own self!" a flat announcement of monotheism
from the Great
Goddess herself in the famous Sanskrit hymn Devi
Mahatmyam, Glory of
the Divine Mother. Again and again the Devi (Goddess) of
the Devi
Mahatmyam is described as the one without another:
ultimately no
duality of any kind exists, no division between matter
and spirit,
no division between created and creator. The Great
Goddess contains
within herself not only all other deities but existence
itself. Her
children and all things reside within her, are of her
substance, and
she indwells inside them. The shortest distance to the
Mother is
within yourself.
This vision of The Mother is exciting attention today
when for the
first time in history so many young adults live alone,
outside
family and organized peer groups. As the constrictions
of
paternalism break down and are replaced by the
bewilderments of
choice and lack of structure, the concept of a Mother
deity who all
alone creates and sustains begins to feel right; young
people are
feeling they can understand such a deity and such a
deity can
understand them. A nexus of empathy radiates support,
comfort, and
understanding in a two-way flow.
This concept of The Mother first attracted me as a young
woman who
was rebelling against the notion of being born in the
need of
redemption for the actions of others. I still remember
the thrill of
excitement at my discovery of a Goddess who did not
punish the
created for what went wrong in her creation, who took
the heat for
evil and death and yet was untouched by both.
Empathy for a deity who exists alone and copes alone
grows stronger
as more and more young people have been raised by single
parents,
and more are coping with the difficulties of being a
single parent.
The Devi of the Devi Mahatmyam could and did act as a
warrior queen
even though she was the monotheistic deity. Its hymns
are part of an
exciting story in which the Goddess is approached by
gods who are
being harassed by bandits and neighbors, and she agrees
to help them
fight off their enemies. No question of damnation and
eternal
punishment here but of will against will, skill against
skill, with
the Devi, as one who plays chess with herself, taking
all the parts.
The layering of abstract philosophy and dramatic
personification is
molded into the story itself. Its monotheistic concepts
are
unwavering even while the battles and their equipment
are described
with all the ferocious glee which you would expect from
a poet of
raiding peoples. And the Goddess, though described as
young and
beautiful and caring, was savage and intent when she
threw herself
into battle.
An American brought up in the climate of Victorian
notions of
maternal behavior asked a contemporary devotee of the
Devi how he
could be drawn to such a fierce deity and was told, "Ah,
but you
need a strong mother who will go to battle for you when
you are in
trouble." Single parents who find themselves battling
for survival
in their work worlds, battling traffic to get home at
the end of the
day, battling to feed their kids and educate their kids
and keep
their house reasonably sane resonate to the concept that
one can be
both and at the same time nourisher and warrior.
The Mahatmyam (sometimes called The Chandi), first
recorded in
writing around 600 A.D., is by no means the oldest of
hymns. But the
concept of the Great Mother is ancient indeed.
Anthropologists
believe a vision of a Mother Goddess to have emerged in
neolithic
times as early as 7000 B.C. and that her worship
extended in a vast
area, at the very least a great arc stretching from
parts of Africa
northward to Lithuania and westward to Crete and Greece.
Some make a
case that pushes the range of her worship into Italy and
Spain and
as far west as the British Isles and Ireland.
Stone carvings and pottery figures can resist time, but
ideas do not
fossilize. So there is much debate among academics as to
exactly
what beliefs inspired those stone and pottery figures of
female
deities. Did the neolithic people worship a supremely
monotheistic
Goddess like that extolled in the Mahatmyam, or a God
The Mother who
holds the whole world in her hands, or was she a
specialized deity
in charge of childbirth and the abundance of the foods
that sustain
human life? Did the artifacts of female deities our
archaeologists
have found all belong to one related Goddess worship, as
all the
forms of Christianity today are related and can be
traced back to a
single source, or did those artifacts belong to separate
and
unrelated visions that were caught by mystics in
different tribes?
Academicians argue the point, and will continue to,
because the
evidence is scanty and mute.
Are the visions those mystics "caught" real? Is there an
actual
Mother Goddess, or any deity in human form and
personality? Asking
whether The Mother Goddess is real is very much like
asking whether
red is "real." We have discovered that red is a
particular vibration
of light and what we call light is waves made up of
particles, and
that our experience of them is their impact on our
sensory apparatus
together with the subsequent processing of the coded
messages of
those impacts by our central nervous system. We are not
seeing
particles and waves as such, we see red. But that
experience—red—works for us; it helps structure our behavior; we
react to it
emotionally.
We cannot truly know whether my experience is the same
as your
experience of what I call red. But whatever we
experience is similar
enough so that once we agree on terminology—red, for
example—if I ask for something of that color what you
bring back
is more likely than not going to be acceptable to me.
The same seems
to be true of mystical experience. Details differ from
culture to
culture, and they shift from age to age as peoples' own
customs and
understanding shift. But within the details a central
core of
experience is startlingly similar.
I can ask a Buddhist, an American Indian, a Jew, a
Christian, a
Muslim to bring me back an experience of God, and what
they bring
back meets my needs. Look at Gladys A. Reichard's
description of the
Navaho's Changing Woman: "She is the mystery of
reproduction of life
springing from nothing, of the last hope of the world, a
riddle
perpetually solved and perennially springing up anew. .
. ." How
similar to this description from the Devi Mahatmyam:
"You are the
origin of all the worlds! ... You are incomprehensible
even to
Vishnu, Shiva, and others! You are the resort of all!
This entire
world is composed of an infinitesimal portion of
yourself! You are
verily the supreme primordial Prakriti (nature, creator)
untransformed." China Galland in her book Longing for
Darkness tells
of turning her back on her Catholic origins to search
for the
Tibetan Buddhist black Mother Goddess Tara only to find
herself as
part of that search walking through the fields of Poland
in
pilgrimage to the Black Madonna. Every mystic who has
experienced
the Godhead, personally, intensely, unmistakably,
assures us that
the experience is real and open to anyone who truly
reaches for it.
Ramakrishna, that man of God who was the inspiration for
the
Ramakrishna Order of monastics, replied when asked if he
had seen
God, "As clearly as I see you now."
What Ramakrishna saw so clearly was often a goddess, the
Great
Goddess, The Mother of the universe. He called her by
more than a
dozen names as if to demonstrate that the particulars of
dogma and
tradition were of little importance compared with the
vision itself.
(Ramakrishna made this same point in other ways,
practicing the
disciplines of many different religions and catching God
with each
of them.)
Catching sight of the Goddess may not come easily. For
years
Ramakrishna cried after her—a child wailing for his
mother. And
when he first caught her it was as a mother who gave him
comfort,
affection, attention, guidance. Later he discovered that
"his"
Mother was indeed that monotheistic deity who creates
the universe
and holds it within her being, and yet resides within
living beings
and objects.
The Devi of the Devi Mahatmyam came to us in Sanskrit
that was
written by Aryan peoples, who worshiped masculine
deities. They had
poured into India from the north, over the mountains,
conquering,
and eventually living off, the dark peoples who grew
crops there.
The Devi belonged not to the invaders but to the growers
of crops.
Mystics from each of these two traditions report they
have glimpsed
behind the veil of their deities' human forms and
personalities, a
formless impersonal Godhead. Aryan mystics called that
Godhead
Brahman. Another name is Satchidananda, which is a
linking up of
three Sanskrit words meaning Existence-Knowledge-Bliss
that
describes as nearly as possible their understanding of
Brahman. And
similarly some followers of the Devi have encountered
behind the
Mother's form and personality, a formless, impersonal
Godhead they
named Shakti.
Descriptions of Shakti and Brahman are exactly the
same—except in
one particular. Brahman is eternal and unchanging while
Shakti is
eternal and always changing. The two actually are one,
Ramakrishna
said, "like fire and its power to burn." According to
East Indian
cosmology Shakti's creative force spews out and develops
this
universe, which after an "age" draws back into itself to
rest in the
blissful, unchanging being of Brahman, only to spew out
again
through Shakti's restless power. This model is not so
different from
the theoretical model, proposed by some contemporary
physicists,
which depicts the universe exploding from a tiny and
incomprehensibly dense core of existence to expand
farther and
farther until finally, drawn by gravitational pull, it
falls back
upon itself into a tiny and incomprehensibly dense core
of
existence, which will once again explode and expand.
And come to that, descriptions of Shakti/Brahman are
uncannily
similar to contemporary physicists' descriptions of the
force field
which creates and comprises all existence.
I find it comforting to learn that science, which I
absorbed along
with my mother's milk, and the mystics I go to for help
in coping
with myself and my world are, at core, in agreement.
Nevertheless
force fields, waves, and particles, though interesting,
are
abstractions. But the color red, however ultimately
unreal, hits my
perceptual and emotional self with mood-changing,
behavior-altering
impact. Similarly I find strength and comfort in
catching glimpses
of a Mother with a human face and responses reminiscent
of my own
human passions.
Some of the visions we humans catch in mystical
experience may not
be the ultimate reality of the Godhead, whether we
experience a
Mother Goddess or a God the Father or some other deity.
Perhaps we
lack the physiological equipment to experience that
ultimate
reality. Certainly catching any mystical experience
however
anthropomorphized or astigmatic takes time and effort
and desire
enough to convert to laserlike focus of will.
Ramakrishna, who had caught God by using the disciplines
of all the
various religious traditions available to him, spoke in
his
conversations interchangeably of Shakti and Brahman,
Shiva and Durga.
Brahman is without change; Shakti, the creative energy,
is ever
changing. Both are one: in Ramakrishna's phrase, fire
and its power
to burn, or as we put it, two sides of the same coin.
Ramakrishna
knew from his own experience that all the different
forms of God
were different perspectives of the one unchanging,
ever-changing,
formless Godhead.
But Ramakrishna spoke most frequently of Mother, because
this was
the perspective that he most cherished. And he had no
more doubts
about the reality of that perspective than you and I
have of the
reality of the color red.
Ramakrishna's experience and the experiences of other
mystics assure
us that many of the perspectives of the Godhead open up
to a Mother
Goddess who functions in the lives of her devotees as
protector and
companion and mentor. What is important for us today is
that the
ability to "catch" the Great Goddess for ourselves in
our own vision
is open to us if we want to reach for it.
The Mother GODDESS
http://www.vedanta.org/reading/monthly/articles/2001/10.mother_goddess.html
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