Transcription:
You can say there are powerful energies which are preventing the expansion of a person's consciousness into different dimensions. Every dimension is blocked by a particular energy, you can understand it in that sense. The story goes that Śiva did not agree to his wife going to her father’s yajna. Initially, she argues and says OK, but then finally she says – "Who are you to stop me?" She becomes angry and Śiva is afraid and he wants to escape. He tries to go East, he tries to go West, he tries to go North, he tries to go South, every direction he tries to go the fierce Kali is there in a different form. And he tries to go in between directions she’s also there. He tried to go up, go down …basically what it means in every dimension that you are trying to escape there are very powerful energies which are limiting you from moving in that direction. So these are descriptions of such energies.
Śrī Vidyā is concerned with orderliness, creating order and beauty and they [i.e. five goddesses] are called a Śrī Kula and the other 5 are Kālī Kula. They are concerned with the nature of disorder, lack of life. Life is a creation of order out of disorder and death is a creation of disorder out of order. So there are two kinds of energies. So you can say – positive energies and negative energies. But you have to face the negative energy sometimes, you cannot… because for every person who is born death is certain. So we have to face that someday and you have to be prepared. So we are experiencing the stark fear, stark anxiety and these things. You blend the pain when you have to actually make the transition. And the best thing that can happen is if you can experience this when you are living, if you can experience death when you are living and understand what it means then you’ve tasted what the crossover is and your whole perspective changes in life. This is what happens in the case of a great saint like Ramana Maharishi, Aurobindu. Aurobindo’s book is about how life wins over death. The Savitri goes and tries to bring back the existence, the truth of existence back into the world from the grips of disorder.
Question: Quite often people associate the main deity of Śrī Vidyā with the third Mahāvidyā, with Ṣoḍaśī, Tripurasundarī, Mahātripurasundarī and all the aspects of this deity. But this is obviously a benevolent deity, the grace deity. From these five Mahāvidyās you mentioned which belong to the order but not to disorder. Does it mean that in Śrī Vidyā, as a system, these five Mahavidya’s are more prevalent than the disorder ones or upāsaka or follower should be trained, let's say, on both sides?
Everything has two sides to it of a coin. Upāsana of Sundari is also associated with the upāsana of Kālī, you cannot completely get rid of it. More of this and less of that and more of that and less of it. But it is there.
Take a small example, suppose you are looking at the fact of Tripurasundarī, the beauty personified, keep focusing on that. After some time, you will start seeing so many different faces in that. Different different faces – some of them are very beautiful, some of them very ugly. Some of them are hard to describe. But you'll start seeing a variety of expressions in that thing. But they are parts of the meditation of the same Goddess.
In Śrī Vidyā tradition at the top is the unity of Śiva and Śakti, at lower levels the śaktis are somewhat separated from their śivas and some of them are angry, some of them are terrible. You have these names – Śabdākarṣiṇī, Sparśākarṣiṇī, Rūpākarṣiṇī. You hear sounds and they are not there. You see forms and they are not there. You feel touches and they are not there. You see, you are getting access to the tanmatras. You are interacting with entities that are not physically present there. Now, when you are saying touch, you are not defining what the touch is – it can be cutting the heart with the sword or it can be a gentle kiss. Who is there to define that? So you see, the potentialities of the others are also there even though the emphasis is a little more on this side [i.e. auspiciousness]. So you cannot completely dissociate [i.e. good from bad] because they are the two sides of the same coin – the terrible and the beautiful, the benign and the cruel.
Devipuram (February 2014)
