(A Teaching from 1998)
Here is a short procedure that you may find useful for gaining direct, firsthand experience of the Goddess. Let go of your doubts, fears and inhibitions. You can contact me as an equal friend, without any fear of being judged. I will always be with you, no matter what.
Introduction
What comes first: faith or experience? In my case it was experience first, followed by an unshakable faith.
Is it possible to repeat this for everyone? I think not. But I can offer some techniques that have worked for me, and for others as well. My hope is that they’ll help you gain experience of Goddess first, so that faith can follow. The procedures are easy. You need only suspend disbelief pending discovery. If you practice regularly, every day, then you too will be able to feel, then see, and then talk with the Mother Goddess, just as I did. And then you will follow her instructions for you.
How long it will take for this to happen? If your attitudes are pure and innocent like a child’s, maybe a month will suffice. Otherwise it will take longer, say 30 months. But you must commit yourself to doing at least some of the procedures given here—and preferably all of them—every day. You will need around 60 to 90 minutes in total. If you wish, you can divide the practice into three parts (in whichever way) and perform them at 6 a.m., 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. daily.
The techniques described here are all very powerful. As a result, you may occasionally experience overpowering emotion. At times, you may feel unable to bear it, just as in the Bhagavad Gītā, when Arjuna saw the universal form of Krishna, he was afraid and could not bear it. At such times, your guru will come to the rescue. Who is your guru? It can be the person who gave you mantra dīkṣā; perhaps a Great Soul seen in your meditations, or maybe your favorite form of God or Goddess. When you are afraid, simply invoke their presence and energy into yourself. Your fear will go away.
We are all familiar with the idea that the power of seeing resides in the eyes, of hearing in the ears, tasting in the tongue, smelling in the nose, touching in the skin, walking in the feet, grasping in the hands, thinking in the mind, feeling in the heart and procreation in the genitals. In precisely this way are the powers of sensation and activity distributed throughout your body. They all operate under a single power of life, which we call the Divine Mother. All of her shaktis (powers) are within you, but many of them are sleeping.
You have probably observed that when the life is missing from or reduced in any part of the body, that part cannot function well. So it is too with the lesser-known powers that might be considered more “spiritual” in nature. Even when we are fully awake in the mundane, workaday sense of the word, we are still in something comparable to a state of hypnosis. Therefore, these lesser-known powers are unable to function as well as they should. For example, you can touch that which is near to you, but not that which is far away. So it is too with seeing or hearing at a distance; the ability to know the past, present and future; or the ability to enter another person’s body and experience life through their organs, and so on.
All of these powers exist within you—but they are sleeping. So how do you awaken them? How do you empower yourself to realize your fullest potential? What is needed, in a word, is attention.
By attention, I mean here the ability to focus your mind upon a particular place or event to the exclusion of all others. To cite another example from the Mahābhārata, recall the scene in which Dronacharya is testing Arjuna during an archery lesson. As Arjuna trains the arrow on its target, Drona asks him, “Can you see me?” “No!” Arjuna replies. “I do not see you. I see nothing except the eye of that bird.” That is what I mean by attention. Only the place or event we are focusing upon must be experienced. Nothing else. That is the kind of attention that helps.
If you can pay that level of attention to all the parts of your body, then the powers residing in those respective parts will be awakened. The union of all these powers is Devi, the Goddess. Devi means life. Only if you have life can your eyes see, your ears hear and so on. Please understand that these parts of your body are the real Shakti pīṭhās—that is, the places where powers can be awakened.
When you sequence your undivided attention to each of the parts of your body in turn, their powers of awareness expand accordingly. And when this expansion takes place, your life becomes powerful. You will be able to feel and see the Mother Goddess; you will become one with her. And along the path toward this goal, you will experience closeness to Devi. You will have a form like hers, you will live in a world like hers, and finally you will attain the highest goal of moksha.
The body needs work, and the mind needs rest. In order for your health to improve, for your body to become light, for your mind to become free from the cage of your body and play freely among the apsarās and devas; in order for you to be like them, you must first decide to make it so. You must allow yourself that kind of freedom. Only then will you experience the Goddess. You must make the decision to embrace freedom from rules and regulations made by unawakened men and accepted unthinkingly by you.
Everyone, of course, desires freedom, unlimited happiness or wealth. But when such opportunities come along, they cannot embrace them. Their memories, concerns for social status, fears of others’ disapproval, become their handicaps. They are bound hand and foot by their own thought patterns. They suppress independent thought and freedom. They do not permit themselves unconditional love and bliss. They continue to spend their lives in misery.
To help you overcome such self-made miseries and set yourself free, I’ve included some affirmations at the end of this essay. Read them every day, and if you like them, make them your own. In this way, you will open for yourself the seven golden gates to freedom.
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