Question: What is Śrī Vidyā?
Guruji: The Śrī Vidyā is a deep tradition, it is one of the esoteric traditions. It is a ritual, which integrates different kinds of disciplines in it. For example, there are aspects of the ritual where you have a visualization that you are placing your body on a funeral pyre and cover it with sticks and set it alight. So there is a light, which burns up your body, and once you burn up your body, everything that belongs to the body goes away. This is an imagination. In the imagination you try to disassociate yourself totally with your body and then, having done that, your body is reduced to ashes, which you are seeing in your mind's eye. Then you imagine that the clouds are gathering, there is rain and thunder and lightning flashes and rain is there. And this rain gives a new life to these ashes and these ashes then take the form of the divine personality and it is that personality which carries on from that point onwards. You have reset yourself to the state of being the Devi, whom you are going to worship. So it is not Joe worshiping Devī, but it is Devī worshiping Devī from that point onwards.
Now the act of worship implies a division - that is for your joy, for your play. You are trying to define the map, to give a structure to the Cosmos in ways you can understand. You are generating a probing action into the Universe through different channels of communication and each of the areas is in the Śrī Chakra and represents a particular aspect of the Cosmos. You are trying to understand through a process of division, but you also are unifying everything at the center. So this balancing of the male and the female aspects the receptive and the active aspects, is taking place in this ritual. In that sense, it is a divisive as well as the unitive algorithm or a procedure. In a pūjā context, at the end of the pūjā you withdraw that thing back into yourself and you are all alone. During the pūjā, arcāna kāle rūpa gatha, at the time of worship She assumes the form. Where does the form come from? It comes from within your heart. And you know that it has come from your heart and you are worshiping yourself when you are worshiping the Devī. This experience of the mirror, imaging yourself as Devi is an integral part of the ritual. Every action that you are performing, you must visualize the image of what you are doing, you are also experiencing. If you are giving a bath to Devī, you must experience the bath flowing over your body. If you are capable of going through the visualizations, to that extent the ritual is successful. So it’s the two sides of the mirror, this one laughing and that one laughing, but you know it's only an image. This helps, because you are trying to create a model for yourself and the model for the Cosmos to grow into. This is based on the mutually supportive functions of the different aspects of the intelligence, not divisive. I would prefer to use supportive to co-operative.
Co-operative is not strong enough. When you are doing something and if the other persons are supporting you in your actions, then there is harmony in that. So supportive validating kind of an environment is what is created by Śrī Chakra. Śrī Chakra means a wheel. And who is the center of the chakra? Śrī. Śrī means auspiciousness. It can be translated as love, it can be translated as harmony, it can be translated as the deepest of joy that one is capable of; all these things. So Śrī Chakra is an auspicious circle of whom other devotees, they are all parts of your own self. So like Śrī Kṛṣṇa playing with the gopī maṇḍala, you are playing with yourself. And this concept of Śrī Kṛṣṇa playing with the 16,000 gopīs is derived from the effect that there is a 16-petal lotus in the neck, Viśuddhi chakra and there is 1,000- petal lotus at the top of your head. If you draw the lines connecting each of these petals to one of those petals there you have got 16,000 lines. Each one of them is a different cittavṛtti, the mind vortex or the thought pattern. So 16,000 different thought patterns, the Kuṇḍalinī Śakti is flowering and playing with itself, that is the concept there. In fact there's nobody else besides you in this world. So where is the question of even a division between thought and action? It's not there.Thought is action when there is no division. If you draw a space like this and if you form a structure in the space and then you can say there’s an arrow of going like this, I can say this arrow is going from outside to inside.
This arrow represents a sensory motor functioning. I am inside this and the world is outside and I am knowing about this world. This is a sensory arrow. But if I am acting on the world, then it's an outgoing arrow. The division between outgoing and incoming arrow is there so long as a boundary is there, so long as the sensory apparatus is functioning, so long as you have the division between action and thinking. Without the boundary there's an arrow there but you can't say whether the arrow is going in or out. It represents both thought and action. A thought is action when you have merged yourself into the Cosmos. As long as you preserve the diversity or division then the thought is not the same thing as action. So the interval between the thought and action is brought about by the existence of a boundary, which is dividing inside from outside. The difference between Aham and Maha - you write Aham and reverse the letters and you get Maha. Maha is the Cosmos and Aham is the role model that we are playing, thinking that your body, your thoughts, that your individual thoughts represent the totality. That is not so. The Universe is your true nature. You are capable of knowing the Universe, being the Universe. All that you have to do, is to throw away this limited thing and gain the eternal thing.
Question: Are there different mantras for different roles, different purposes?
Guruji: Let's suppose that you want to go into a beautiful place, which is surrounded by several peaks. You can observe that beautiful place from different peaks, from peak A, peak B, peak C. And from each place it has got its own beauty, its own representation. And you are approaching a certain peak, you are having a different experience of the road that's going and the visions that it’s presenting. In the same way, the beauty and harmony of the dynamic nature of the Mother Universe can be appreciated through different channels of communication. And each different mantra is a different channel of communication. You can communicate with the world through the channel of fear, which is at the mūlādhāra chakra. Or you can communicate with it through the channel of continuation of the race, the svādhiṣṭhāna chakra. Or you can appreciate the Universe from the point of view of its awesome power and glory, that is the maṇipūra chakra. Or you can try to appreciate the Universe from the standpoint of view of the universal love, un conditionallove, that is the heart chakra. Or you can ignore all these things, ignore all the attachments, and merge yourself into all the space. Be like the tummy that contains the whole Universe inside of yourself, you are like the Mother, then you are at the viśuddhi chakra, you are containing all space. Then you see the world growing as a baby inside your womb ashiraṇyagarbha. Then you are going to the time chakra; there you know what is in the past, present and future, both bhūta, bhaviṣyat, vartamāna. So there are different levels and different āmnāyas.
At each level you’ve got different ways of appreciating. Each of these different mantras is the way of appreciating the Universe, it's a channel of communication. You’ve got so many channels on TV, so many mantras. You can have a Rājarājeśvarī channel, you can have a Bhuvaneśvarī channel, you can have a Mahāmāya channel, Kālī, Tara, Sundarī, Bālā, Chinnamastā, Bhairavī, Bagalāmukhī, different channels are there. You can choose one that is appropriate to the level of your functioning. The higher forms are more enjoyable, but you must also appreciate the different aspects. You should be both at sahasrāra as well as at mūlādhāra. As I said earlier, you must balance your Yin and Yang, your Śiva and Śakti aspects. You must probe the world with different mantras, different ways, different peaks. You see the perfection in different ways, but at the same time you must be able to correlate them and also see the unity behind this diversity. There is joy and bliss in the diversity and there is the joy and bliss in unity. The creativity is there in the diversity, and in laya, in reabsorbing back into yourself, the release of tension is there. Tension is there in the creation and release is there in a re-absorption. You must experience both, you must be tense and you must relaxed. Tense, relaxed, tense, relaxed. Bottled energy - is matter. It must become matter, become dense. And un-bottled matter is energy. It must explode into the pure energy. You must be able to do both these things, it is in the interaction between these two poles where you will find bliss.
Question: How does the concept of Yin and Yang reconcile with the concept of Śiva and Śakti?
Guruji: We can say this in more general terms - the kinetic or a dynamic aspect and a static aspect. If you are sitting on the Earth, then the Sun seems to go around you. But if you are on the Sun, Earth seems to go around you. So the static appears as dynamic from the dynamics point of view. Then dynamic also appears as dynamic from the statics point of view. So dynamic is the more essential nature, you may identify it with anything. But we prefer to identify with Śakti. It is just a tradition, that's all. There is no essential difference between these two. The main thing is the balance between them, the unity of these two. You can say that the static is an asymptotic limit of the dynamic. You can consider a harmonic wave and unless the amplitude of this is reduced to zero, then you approach this static limit. But they are interchangeable, like a kinetic energy and a potential energy. They can keep changing roles from one to the other, as you are moving the pendulum from one end to the other. At the extreme position, it's purely potential energy and there's no motion there, there’s no kinetic energy.
And when the potential energy keeps getting transformed, it requires more and more speed, more and more kinetic energy after which it gets transformed back into the potential energy. So it keep oscillating between these two. There are different modes of energy and you can change between these two. So there is no hard and fast rule which you can call kinetic. You can give it a different name. It so happened that this role inversion has been taking place all along. For example, whether initially geographically there was Mother worship, it was called Ma - Mother, Nu - the sky. And when it came to India, it became Manu, the male, Manu dharma śastra. So these role inversions have always been taking place and this is one of those role inversions. There’s no essential difference between Śiva and Śakti. It’s just the name you apply to one of the energies.
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