On the
occasion of Navarātrī, Dirk Gysels,
historian and civil servant of the Belgian kingdom, spoke, at the request of
his daughter Freya who runs a centre of devotional and ritualistic yoga to the north
of Antwerp, about the “Cosmology of the Divine Mother”. I present the major lines of the discourse of Dirk, who himself
practises Śākta spirituality.
In contrast with our own Christian upbringing
which taught us a very small world, Tantra
knows an infinite number of universes, themselves already as large as the
modern physicists’ universe. All these together are the Mother, all universes
are part of it, but the Mother is not
just the physical dimension, She encompasses deeper, more subtle levels of
reality as well. Navarātrī is the time to contemplate this.
We have a
heart but also a mind. Let us, after all the heartfelt bhajans and abhiśekams,
approach this question with our mind. We have recited the Durgāsaptaśati, the “Sevenhundred Verses of Durgā”. Those verses not only contemplate the presence of the
Mother in phenomena which we, from our dualistic mindset, see as ‘good’, but
also in less wholesome phenomena like forgetfulness, thirst, sloth, etc. In Christianity, divinity is always
associated with goodness; it doesn’t know what to do with evil. But the Divine
Mother is everything. She is śānta, maṅgala, and raudra, i.e. “peaceful”, “auspicious” and “furious, stormy”. The raudra aspects are worshipped too. So
there is no dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. There is no separation between
‘me’ and the rest of reality, and more importantly, there is no rift between
the Divine and the world. We don’t usually call it “unity” in Tantra, but non-duality, no-two-ness. So
for whom do we do pūjā? For something
outside or inside yourself? Everything is the Mother, so the Mother worships
the Mother. By playing this game, we reach unity.
“Divine
Mother” as a choice of words that wells up from the heart: Devī, Ambā. The
realization of Devī is rather called Śakti, but ultimately the two are
exchangeable.
We know the
gross level, but there are subtler levels. The Mother is on all levels. We can
start our description from the top and give a top-down explanation or we can
begin at the most obvious level of Her reality and present a bottom-up
explanation. See it as a ladder, a stairway with different sports. Now, we start at the summit, on the highest
level. From this vantage point, we will survey the 36 tattvas. Tattva is
“thatness”: a definition to order everything.
As we know,
light is both conceivable as particles and as waves. The particle side is tattva, substance; the wave part is best
conceivable in the words of Śaṅkara: ānanda laharī, saundarya laharī, “wave of joy, wave of beauty”.
Now let’s
look at tattva from the angle of the Śakti philosophy. Most of these texts,
mostly from Kaśmīr, have not yet been
translated, and much has been lost, but now texts are dug up and translations
are seeing the light of day. Once this was the preserve of a spiritual elite,
now is the age of democratization of information.
Most Hindu
philosophies see consciousness as the origin of everything. In the West, René
Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am”, but even there, being isn’t equal to
thinking. And in today’s views, matter is the basis of everything, while
consciousness is but an epiphenomenon. But here, the origin is consciousness.
Every tattva has spanda, vibration, pulsation, as explained in the book Spanda Kārikā. We live in a sea of
vibrations, and the interference between these vibrations is sometimes
harmonic, sometimes dissonant.
When
talking of manifestation, let’s be clear: we mean emanation, not creation. In
the Devī tradition, consciousness
emanates by concealing itself. Mercifully this kind of “veiling”, tirodaṇā, takes place, otherwise there
would simply be too many possibilities. (And as some astrophysicists speculate:
there may be an infinite number of realities, universes in dimensions unknown
to us.)
In the
oldest philosophy of India, Sāṁkhya
(“enumeration”), there are 24 +1 tattva’s;
here, this number is expanded to 36. Sāṁkhya
is a dualistic worldview, and dualism is contrary to the experience of the
yogis, so 11 extra tattvas are added
to unite the two poles.
So,
starting above, these eleven are:
1.
Static
consciousness, that in which everything rests, the “power of consciousness” (cit-śakti),= Śiva.
2.
The
light’s mirror (prakāśa-vimarśa), has
the quality of ānanda because it
makes consciousness self-conscious, = Śakti.
This concept of vimarśa is the key to
understanding all manifestation. Static consciousness, when it becomes
self-aware, needs mirrors in which it can see itself. All the countless
phenomena , all the trillions of conscious entities, serve as mirrors for the
static consciousness, as modes of expression
of śakti.
3.
Sadā-Śiva, the “eternal Śiva”, has
intentions, will, resolve (saṁkalpa),
the “power of intention” (iccha-śakti);
represented by Ardhanarīśvara, the
“Lord who is half woman”.
4.
Īśvara, the “Lord”, is what religions call God;
consciousness feels part Śiva part Śakti. Some texts equate this level with
the primordial syllable Oṁ.
5.
Śuddha-vidyā, pure wisdom, often the divine
word. All vibrations of all mantras, the
essence of all mantras; if a yogi rises to this level, he is a mantreśvara. Hence in this tradition the
importance of mantras. This is the finest level of mantra, recitation is only
the gross form. The mantra is a hyperlink to the Goddess,= the “power of action” (kriya-śakti). All divinities are embedded in this Śuddha-vidyā
as subtle sonic , yet unmanifest, conscious energies.
6.
The
first manifestation is Māyā, “that
which measures”, and thus restricts, makes finite instead of infinite; also
known as Māyāśakti or Mahāmāyā. This is not to be interpreted
in its Advaitā Vedānta sense of “(the
world as) illusion”. The five highest Śaktis
come together in the karaṇabiṇḍu, the
“causal point”, like an open hand of which the fingers contract. Yoga amounts
to reopening the hand.
7.
The
next five are the kañcukas,
“armours”, starting with kalā,
restrained “autonomy”, limited “agency”, as contrasted with omnipotence.
8.
Vidyā, restrained “knowledge”, as contrasted with
omniscience.
9.
Rāgā, restricted “desire”, as contrasted with
fullness. Desire is not something to shun: it is the contracted expression of iccha-śakti. One can desire out of lack
of something and this leads to bondage or one can desire to express his or her
own fullness. So one should not kill desire but transmute it .
10.
Kāla, finite “time”, moment after moment, as
contrasted with eternity, the timeless simultaneity of absolute Consciousness.
11.
Niyati, which can mean determinedness, destiny,
causality, “finitude”, as contrasted with omnipresence. Niyati being causality is the force that binds the beings to their
karmas.
After these
eleven, we get the 1 + 24 tattva-s of
Sāṁkhya: 1 is the Puruṣa, the “person” or unit of
consciousness, the individualized Śiva.
The other 24 are Prakṛti, “nature”,
the physical version of Śakti. This
includes not just matter but also all phenomena that we would call “mental”,
i.e. consciousness of anything, consciousness wrapped up in any process, as
opposed to pure consciousness resting in itself. Number 1 of these 24 is pradhāṇ, the “first” or principle, 2 is buddhi, the “understanding” meaning the
power of discrimination; 3 is ahaṁkara,
the “I-maker” or ego; 4 is manas, the
“mind”. The rest consists of the five sensory organs (jñānendriyas), five action organs (karmendriyas: elimination, sex, locomotion, handling, speech), five
fields of each of the senses, and the five elements. The highest and lowest tattva are strongly united: Śiva and Prthivī, the element earth.
In Prakṛti, everything is characterized by
the 3 guṇas or “qualities”: the dark
and heavy (tamas), the turbid and
energetic (rajas), and the
transparent and weightless (sattva).
Everything
is a play of these tattvas. All these
tattvas are Ganeṣa/Ganapati, “Lord of
categories”, the offspring of Śiva
and Śakti. Their other child is Kārttikeya (“Son of the Pleiades”) or Ṣanmukha (“six-faced”), or with his
Tamil name: Murugaṇ. So Murugaṇ represents the going from gross
to subtle, the reascension to his parents Śakti
and Śiva. The “six faces” are the 6 cakras, the spear with which he is
depicted is the Kuṇḍalinī. Unlike Advaitā Vedānta, wrongly identified with
“Indian thought”, this system doesn’t see the
world as just an “illusion”. The world is an emanation of Śiva, the variety of trillions of souls
is but the manner in which Śiva meets
himself.
The whole
system is the Mother. You could call Her the zero-tattva. She is called Mātā
Tripurasundarī (“beautiful one of the three cities”) or Lalitā (“playful, spontaneous”). The
pouring-sacrifice (abhiśekam) that we
do for Her, also has a subtler level. It is ritualistic too, but interiorized:
the manas-pūjā or “mental ritual”.
But that is another story.
So much for
Dirk’s explanation in Heide (Kalmthout) on the last day of Navarātrī.
Read more!
