Sri Vidya — Initiation as Awakening Collective Power

Transferring power to imagine, nourish, and manifest an environment which supports your vision is initiation. It happens by making you understand your true potential. There is no higher purpose than to know the sleeping powers you have and that you can reinvent your destiny by tuning into the universal mind. The transmitter of such powers is the Guru; the receiver is the disciple.

Dissolve matter into spirit is the theme song of Śrīvidyā. It starts explaining concepts of solidity and shape, the identity = ego we are taught to assume. It proceeds in seven steps:

1. Solid

2. Liquid

3. Fire

4. Air

5. Space

6. Time

7. Unknown

The first step, moving from solid to liquid, meaning shape to shapelessness, is described as Gaṇapati in the tradition of Śrīvidyā. The ritual makes a paste of impurities connected to the idea of my body. With mantra repetition, spoon after spoon of perfumed water is poured over a pyramid, a symbol of spirit encased in a body. Your actions dissolve the pyramid, and you experience flowing out of your body, an ecstasy. Along with the body, the individual consciousness dissolves into collective consciousness.

Let me explain. Let us suppose that we place four pyramids in a big plate, and four of us do this ritual together. Initially each pyramid (each of us) contains its own awareness. As the pyramids dissolve, the awarenesses leak out and in the end, they all become one.

What have we achieved? Four separate persons have become one single person. The idea of this person contains all the ideas of all of us. So you know the thoughts of the remaining three of us as your own thoughts. We don’t have to tell them to you.

The first step in Śrīvidyā is giving the mantra of Gaṇapati. Why? To enlarge your ideas of who you are. To let the people you know support your ideas, and you support theirs. If n people become one, the power each one has is n(n−1). If ten persons become one, each of them gets ninety times more power than they have now. The power increases exponentially. The happiness increases similarly. Ease of solving problems increases similarly. Problems which loomed large become trivial now.

The key is to tune into collective consciousness, to be able to read the mind of Goddess Nature. The ideas rising in the collective are not exactly the same as the ideas in fragmented minds. So there is no risk of wanting the wrong thing.

If we want to transform a world having 5000 million people, we need only the square root of that number of people. What is it? Square root of 5000 is 70, and that of a million is a thousand. So 70,000 people can decide to change the world and own the power to do it. Together we can change the society. Individually I have very little influence.