How I Got Down with Divinity, pt. 3

the thawing of the mind gives way to the warmth of the heart

That is the long and short of what I witnessed, and eventually, as I warmed up to it, endeavoring to keep an open mind, participated in that morning at the ashram. Mahadev, or maybe the ashram’s director, the man Mahadev reported to, Srinavasan, led the ceremony, walking everyone patiently through each step of the intricate, formalized process. First, the gods are invoked, or invited, you might say: a bell is repeatedly rung, a conch is blown, and certain vocal invocations are said aloud. Incense is lit, and brass lamps with wicks saturated in ghee or another oil are set ablaze. The murtis of the gods, usually clothed in colorful, golden-laced fabric, are undressed (probably before the invocation, actually) and washed with water. With the daily puja, water is enough, while on holidays other substances like milk and honey are also showered onto them. The deities are dressed back up in fresh clothes (they have their own wardrobe and laundry for all of this) and then made offerings to: food, typically sweet food like fruit or dessert-type treats, and nuts, as well as flowers. All the while, the puja leader or pujari is chanting the right prayers at the right times and everyone else is singing songs in praise of the deity being worshipped.

The flower offering portion, called archanam, I found particularly beautiful, and I would say it was the part that, on this morning, my first ever puja, broke through to me. We had large metal bowls filled with picked flower petals (in the summer the ashram would grow these flowers on-site, usually marigolds) placed near us. As the puja leader (traditionally this would be a priest, or the head of the household in Hindu countries; on this morning it was either Mahadev or Srinavasan) recited different names and epithets of a given deity, we were encouraged to hold a pinch of flower petals close to our hearts and mentally imbue it with love. Just how does one do this? The modern, secular, materialist mind balks at this; having self-neutered its own psychical capability, the modern ‘woman or man of science’ (or just like, the average person) then claims that what’s been asked of them can’t be done, that it’s woo-woo or hippy energy shit, or just bullshit, made up make-believe. Make-believe! There’s that word again - a limiting label, a hastily made comment on the maturity of the thing in question and a denouncement of what is what and what is possible. But ask yourself, as I did in that moment, holding flower petals close to my heart with my eyes closed at a remote spiritual retreat center in the Catskill mountains: what happens if I try? If I manually, diligently quiet down my learned inner critic, admit or at least roll with the notion that there might, just might, be something to this practice that’s been done for thousands of years, and try? What happens if I redirect my mind from assertively negating the reality of a phenomenon or practice I haven’t any actual experience with and instead focus on generating a force or feeling, and try?

That is what I did. As per the Eastern love for the number 108, I had precisely 108 repetitions of the names or epithets of the divine in which to try, after each recitation casting the petals in my hand towards the deity receiving the archanam, on that morning being Tripura Sundari, a form of Devi, the Divine Feminine. To translate this process sufficiently into English, it went like this: the pujari would speak a name or title or superlative quality for the goddess, beginning with Om and ending each epithet with the Sanskrit word namaha. Each recitation begins with ‘Om’, which serves as the beginning of most mantras. The meaning of this famous spiritual word ‘Om’ is, at the same time and without contradiction, both very simple and beyond comprehension (which in itself is a wonderful, singular representation of much of the Sanatana Dharma). In the case of mantras and archanam, ‘Om’ means ‘salutations’. Namaha can be loosely translated as ‘before whom I bow’ (more precisely I believe that the words namah and namaha are self-negating participles that form a grammatically crucial part of many Hindu mantras; Mahadev explained the various forms of the word to mean, literally, ‘not mine’). Let’s say it was Mahadev leading the puja that day (I believe it was); he would say aloud the superlative epithets in Sanskrit and on the last part, the namaha, we would all join in and toss our flowers. In English this would sound something like, “Salutations to the Sacred Mother, before whom I bow; Salutations to the Great Empress, before whom I bow; Salutations to the Mother who dispels all fear, before whom I bow…” and so on 108 times! Here is a link to the 108 names of Devi that are commonly used in Her Archanam (just scroll down past the first part, or read it to get blessed): (https://www.stephen-knapp.com/108_names_of_devi.htm), taking a look at which will help this ritual make sense if it’s still confusing to you.

Imagine if you sat and challenged yourself to come up with 108 complementary or deed-proclaiming names for someone you love; it would be very devotionally evocative indeed! It’s like a love marathon. Name after name, toss after toss, I challenged myself to stick with it, challenged myself to continue to conjure up feelings of love and well-wishes however I could, with whatever mental imagery, tearful remembrances, or benevolent imagining I could muster. If the essence of meditation is concentration, archanam is meditation in the form of sustained concentration on singing the praises and good qualities of a higher power, in this instance (but I don’t see why it can’t be done to humans or pets or trees!).

As hundreds of flower petals fell lovingly on and around the Devi murti that morning, a part or tendency of my mind, held rigidly materialistic and rational since the beginning of my school-age days (when the real brainwashing began), softened. The voice that raised the incessant whine of a question, “what is this I’m doing? Why am I doing this? Is this real? Is there any scientific basis for this?” often coupled with the ensuing mental denouncements, “This is stupid. I don’t believe in this,” quieted down, humbled into a moderately blissed-out, reverence-inflected stillness. Questions of validity, the questioning attitude itself the major separating factor between oneself and the experience at hand, didn’t feel relevant, appropriate or necessary. Why? you may ask. What does it take to get one’s skepticism to stand down? To that I say, the proof was in the pudding: my inner critic, inner analyser, inner adversary to my own experience was loved into quiescence, like a mother calms her child.

After the archanam, we did arati, waved a burning lamp in front of the murti and the shrine at large as we chanted some concluding hymns. Then comes the bow at the end, prostration at five points (knees, elbows, and forehead to the ground) or full body prostration (essentially fully laying down on the ground, stomach and all, arms and hands extended forward in prayer) for those who felt so inclined. There was never an expectation or requirement for prostration at the ashram; you could salute, honor, or otherwise give thanks to the shrine and its invited divinity however you liked, short of anything perceivably offensive, or not at all. Until that day, I always hesitated to prostrate; again, according to the cultural relativism with which I grew up, bowing down before anyone or anything seemed extreme and undignified, the attitude of a groveling servant. After all of this, and for the first time, I felt no qualms about prostrating before Devi, the visage or personification of God as Mother. I wanted to.

Some time later on at the ashram, to a larger crowd in the summer season, joined by guests of all sorts of persuasions with various levels of understanding of what we were doing, Srinivasan explained Hindu ritual and puja, calling it “divine play.” Whether playtime with toys as a child, or religious ritual as an adult, we do what we must to evoke emotion and feel connected to a larger story. I don’t think it’s the particulars that are important, whether you’re playing with your LEGOs the right way or worshipping God in exactly the prescribed manner. Rather it’s, can I feel the bhav, the intensity and focus of devotion in this moment?

I walked away from the puja that winter morning pleasantly perplexed by what I participated in and felt. I was still processing how I felt. I’d just done something I’d never done before, something very culturally alien to me, and persisted through the practice within it to effectively change my mind and how I felt about it. I would say, ‘preconceived notions be damned’, but they weren’t damned then; we weren’t in the business of ‘damning’ anything at the yoga ashram. My next task that morning was helping Ambika, the ashram’s hilarious and hard-working Philippina grandmother, fold laundry. I told her about how I felt, how the puja made me feel. The feeling had a certain special quality to it that I couldn’t help myself from investigating, like knowledge on the tip of your tongue, like a melody from a song you remember part but not all of. “You have begun to open your heart to the Mother,” she said. “Good job, American boy!” was her next and constant rejoinder to me. Smiling as I heard those words from her, I suddenly felt that I had grasped it. I could put to words and remember what it was about this feeling that I now felt post-puja, after ninety minutes of intense, intentional ritual, patiently and repeatedly walking my mind back from its trained skepticism, automatic questioning and naive, prideful disbelief. This feeling felt so close, so tender and intimately known, and yet, familiar as it was, something I hadn’t felt in quite some time. As I walked up the steps from the laundry room, I had it; I knew what it was: I felt the all-powerful, unconditionally-embracing, everythings-going-to-be-okayness of the love I felt from my mother, playing with my action figures and LEGOs in our basement, as a child.