Understanding Sri Chakra Puja: Three Shaktis

Puja is done to Kriya Shakti, Jnana Shakti and Iccha Shakti. What is the meaning and importance of these Shaktis in the Mother worship? They are the powers residing in the erotic jones of a woman. All Goddesses are powers of attention, awarenesses, residing in certain places or times. Pure unbounded awareness is considered to be the universal Mother, Lalita. All shaktis are Her body parts. Her body is space and time.

Gouri

Gouri=Kriya, Lakshmi=Jnana, Saraswati=Iccha The word "mother" brings to our minds usually the "one who gives birth to". I was born out of her womb and that is my place of birth. The birth channel, the yoni=vagina is the only entity that really qualifies to be called the mother. It is indeed a temple where the Goddess who gives birth is located. We call the Goddess there as Gouri=creatrix. The yoni is also the place where billions of sperms who are trying to get a chance to live are destroyed. That is why she is known as Kali=destroyer. Gouri is the one who accepts the seed and gives it life, and Kali is one who accepts the seed but destroying it. That is why it is important to worship Kali during menstruation, when conception is not possible. They are different, yet they arelocated at the same place, called by different names at different times. They are both located in the Muladhara Chakra. So as the Mother of all, who gives birth to us through her yoni, Gouri is worshipped in the yoni. She is the base in which the Linga=phallus of Siva stands. Lalita Sahasram speaks of Bhagaradhya= worshipped in yoni. There are so many names in the Lalita Sahasranama that relate to such explicitly sexual aspects of the Mother Goddess worship. At one time there were fertility rites where the love between man and woman was offered as an intimate service to the Goddess. Devi the universal mother is located in the Swadhisthana chakra. Swa by self, adhisthana residing in.


The place where Devi is residing in, is the genitals. The seat of the Kundalini power, the energy which gives supreme pleasure of orgasm is located in the genitals. The starting point of Kundalini is known as Kumara. He is like the young Siva. The big Siva is the male linga= phallus. Kumara, his son, the small linga in the female is the clitoris. The female linga is the seat of happiness and pleasure and the origin of Kundalini Shakti. The first movement of the Kundalini is to make you lose your sense of body identificatiion, and that is exactly what happens in orgasm. You are flowing out of yourself as the seed and you lose all your tensions. The word orgasm is used in Tantra in the broader context as losing all your tensions. If you are worried, losing your worry is an orgasm. There was one fellow who used to wear shoes three times under size. He used to walk with those shoesall day long. And he used to have excruciating pain throughout the day. And people asked him, "Why do you wear those undersized shoes and bear the pain?" He said, "There is only one happiness left in my life and that is when I remove this shoe from my foot, only then I feel extremely happy. " We are all wearing this undersize shoe, called this body, and once you find the release from this body you find happiness, the only happiness that we know, and that is called an orgasm. We want repetion of that happiness because we want to be permanently in that state. The only way to achieve that is to recognize whenever there is stress developing, and to be let go of that stress. This is the main point of Tantra. Try to be in a state of constant orgasm, to be in the perpetual union between Siva and Shakti. The mother who gives birth is called Gouri. Man is very incidental to the process of creation. He just deposits a seed in the womb and then walks out. And there finishes his duty. We think we are the mothers of our children that we beget. But are they our children? They are not, they are the children of Gouri. Do we know how to give form to that formless seed? How to make the face, the eyes, the ears, how to make the tongue, how to put the taste in the tongue? How to create the limbs that can grow and where each should be located, in what proportion, what size? What color eyes, what looks? None of these things we know. All of this happens automatically. There is a power of transformation which is coded in the genes which is doing this job. And that power Gouri is located in the womb. It is the seed that we are worshipping. You cannot say that the seed is male or female. So before the egg, which came first, the egg or the hen? It was the seed that came before either of them. And that seed is information, knowledge information. It is the seed that is Gouri, the bindu. That is the first mother that we know of.

Lakshmi

In the womb, initially you as the child experience a tremendous growth potential. Every moment you are multiplying yourself into two and it appears as if there is an infinite possiblity of growth. And you are enjoying that happiness and richness available to you of the multiplication of yourself. But then after some time, the womb being limited in size offers resistance to growth. And you are being confined. And you don't like that confinement. You want to grow. And after some time you are pushed out forcibly. At first you do not know what is touch, you were not even breathing. You were floating in the womb for nine months. You were breathing through your navel through the blood of the mother. At the time of birth you were pushed out, and suddenly a cold metal comes and grasps your head and pulls you out and before you have learned how to transfer from one system of life to another system, your navel thread is cut. At the time of birth you are fighting for life. This trauma is tremendous. You cannot say that this trauma is not present in ceasarean births because they also cut the navel cord. From navel breathing you have got to move to nasal breathing, and that transition is very traumatic. After the birth process, then immediately protection has to be given, nourishment has to be given. Where does it come from? It comes from the Mother's breasts as her milk. There she is known as Lakshmi. She is the ocean of milk that comes from the breasts of the female. There the child feeds. The first milk that comes out of the mother's breasts has immunization properties. Do you know how to make that milk? You ate food and it became milk. That power to give nourishment is what we call Lakshmi. The nipples through which milk comes is the location of the second aspect of the Mother we worship.

Saraswati

Then the child grows and after some time it leaves the mother's breast and looks for outside food. The child is not interested in receiving nourishment from the mother any more. Neither is that mother able to provide it. It receives nourishment from knowledge. Then the third mother comes into existence. That is Saraswati. She is in the tongue. When you are talking, are you aware of where the tongue has to go in order to create a certain sequence or sounds? No, you are not aware. Still that is the function of Saraswati, to teach. This learning process starts at the age of about two and a quarter years. The first part is for nine months; the second part for twenty seven months and in the third part you are taken care of from then to 27x3=81months=about 7 years of age by Saraswati, the third mother.

In the Devi Mahatmyam, in the first part there is only one chapter, the second part has three chapters and the third part has nine chapters, where you have to dance your way through life with happiness and pleasure. For that you have toobstructions to your progress. In this part you will find a great battle being waged against all the demons and how the Devis overcome them one by one. The worst of these demons is Raktabija. Raktabija means the triggering of one thought from another.

The Iccha Shakti is located as Saraswati at the tip of your tongue. Jnana Shakti is worshipped in the heart center, and Kriya Shakti is worshipped in the yoni. If you want to manifest or create a physical form, worship of the yoni brings this power into you. All your fears and sexuality are located in the first two chakras. Worship=paying attention to feeling of respect, removes your negativities and paves the way to power and love. Worship of the heart center gives you the blessings of knowledge, of protection, of immunity, of wealth, of prosperity. Worship of the face gives you will power and emotional intelligence called Iccha Shakti. Especially when you concentrate on the eyebrow center= ajna chakra, it develops your power to control yourself and others.

The Lalita Sahasranama talks in detail about these these various aspects. There s a mantra appropriate to worshipping the Devi in the heart center, and that is Raja Shyamala. There is a mantra which cooresponds to the Ajna center which is called Varahi. There is a mantra cooresponding to the Brahmarandhra, the Sahasrara chakra and that is a single letter mantra called Souh. It is Para. It is the hissing sound of the kundalini snake as it rises up the spinal chord. When it reaches the Sahasrara it opens its hood up and implodes the cosmos into you. Vishnu is sleeping under the hood of the serpent Sesha. It means that the cosmos and cosmic consciousness( Vishnu) is under the protection of this Kundalini force. It is both a creative and a destructive force.

It creates order and destroys disorder. The symbolism of the snake is a universal archtype over the ages in various cultures. Imagine a snake crawling over your body and that you are a small child and that you are not aware that it is a snake. Or you have not learned to name it as a snake. What do you find? You find a supreme pleasure in its touch. It coils around your limbs and a beautiful massage is being given to you by the snake. In this situation you are not naming it and not identifying it with a situation that is potentially dangerous. You just play with that. This is the nature of Siva. The moment you associate that situation with the notion of fear that it can kill you, then the fear is related to the muladhara chakra. On the one hand there is pleasure and on the other hand there is fear. This combination of the pleasurefear complex is what is symbolized by the snake.

If you look at the philosophical structure behind this, you find that the snake is something that moves in a wavy curvy fashion, not straight. They say that when you are drunk you move in a wavy fashion, you are not clear in what direction you are moving. But if a snake becomes drunk, what does it do? It moves straight. The mind and its thought patterns are like the snakes, going hither and dither in wavy fashions. But when the mind becomes steady and onepointed, when it flows relatively straight then it is "drunken". This is the drink that they refer to in the tantra. The drink, the ambrosia which makes your mind onepointed and straight. The Kundalini shakti is flowing up the sushumna channels instead of going round the petals in whatever way it wants. This is the symbol of the snake.

You can worship the pancadasi in a particular portion of your body. The usual portion associated with the Devi is the swadhisthana chakra. That is where she resides. When the Kundalini is sleeping then you are aware of the world and you feel that you are separate from the world. When the Kundalini is awakening, your separateness is getting lost step by step. What causes this separateness? You are interacting with the world through your five sensory modes of perception. They are all local magnifiers. So you are not knowing the world as it exists, but through the filters of your senses. When Kundalini awakens, it enables you to transcend these sensory limitations. For example, you can smell distant odours, taste remote juices, see distant forms, touch distant objects, hear music continents apart. One after the other these senses are being transcended.

So the ascent of the Kundalini, this consciousnessprovoking, dynamic power is the loss of your separation from cosmos, your source. So it can be called worship of the yoni from which you came to be. Kundalini is thus said to be sleeping in the muladhara chakra, coiling itself 3& 1/2 times around.Going round the waist(manipura), chest(anahata), and neck(visuddhi) are the three coils of the snake. And then the head of the snake is going into the vagina through the vulva(swadhisthana) to the cervix(muladhara) and that is where the tip of the lingam is going to be. That is where the head of the snake is sleeping.

When the kundalini reverses its flow, then from the muladhara center of the shakti it enters the muladhara center of the male and flows in a reverse action and comes to the swaddhisthana, which is the base of the lingam and then moves up the spinal chord behind and comes up to the sahasrara. This is the transfer of energy from the Shakti to the Siva in the yogic posture of union. This posture is a reversal process. The exchange of energy can take place between the Siva and Shakti in union. You oscillate. And this oscillation can build up to the navel center and then from the heart center to the heart center, and then rom the throat center to the throat center and then to the ajna center.

And then the circle gets closed. When the circuit gets closed, then the cosmic consciousness is supposed to happen. Then the Siva and Shakti do not experience their separateness. They become one and it is thus that the consummation between Siva and Shakti takes place. This is the purpose of the marriage to experience this cosmic oneness of one soul moving in two bodies, between husband and wife. That is called moksha.

You have passed a lifelong term of imprisonment on yourself stating that you are going to live in this body, this mind, and live with these thoughts. When you are able to escape from these three sets of notions then you are Pasupati, you are Siva. When you are confined by these notions, you are a pasu, a beast. A beast is tied by strings. These strings that bind you are your fear, your seeking for sensations, your power addictions, and in a limiting fashion the love you have for others. These are all strings.