Goddess worship is nothing but an expression of our deep need to venerate all that we hold sacred while celebrating the awakening of dormant emotions that have been put away in the process of the home-coming to the Self.

The sheer reverence of the Goddess indicates the characteristics and the essence of that represent of our Self in the grand scheme of things. We are not different nor separate from the ideals that we worship and give deep reverence to for we comprise of every aspect of the Goddess and the sum total of all that is divine here and beyond.

We busy ourselves with getting the rituals right and immersing ourselves into the customs and the traditions as they have been handed down over to us from generations before, forgetting that we have been performing these rituals without comprehending the very basis of these rituals – merging with the Self as we navigate the merging of the Self to the Self.

In Tantra, we are taught that rituals are the pathways to our own immersion into the Self, providing us the panoramic view of how the Self expands and contracts with the experiences of the moment. With consistent practise, we eventually rid ourselves the need to spend time on rituals and simply allow the immersion of the senses to take us to the fullest expansion of our energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual Self.

I have spent one third of my life seeking the Goddess in many domains, overlooking how near She always has been and being so caught up with the physical world, I didn’t really pay much attention to the possible proximity I shared with Her all my life.

The truth is, we are divine beings living a human experience and we are no lesser than any God or divine being we give so much reverence to. That God we give so much of ourselves to is the entire humanity that we love and hate at the same time – that very aspect of the courageous Goddess who slayed the buffalo demon Mahishasura, (the deceitful demon with shape-shifting capabilities), is no different from we slaying and overcoming the challenges in our own lives as we shape-shift from one problem to another.

We venerate the brevity of the Goddess and Her relentless stamina to overcome the demon because we cannot see ourselves as something so grand nor capable of overcoming that which is bigger than ourselves as we downplay ourselves all the time, thinking that we have been sent to planet Earth to be punished for some unfinished business that needs to be settled in this lifetime.

We conveniently put ourselves in a small box to fit into and encapsulate our vessels (our bodies) with a limited mindset that traps us in our own ideology of what is right and what we are capable of – THINKING that we are NOT any greater than the greatness we worship.

We offer flowers and prepare food for the Gods, hoping our food is accepted by Them when we cast the opinion of “not enough-ness,” within ourselves as we prepare sacred offering. We are reminded that when preparing food for the Gods, we are not to taste or smell the offering (for fear that we contaminate the food with our tainted senses) and to simply trust that the food offered would turn out well. We are reminded that we need to be clean to pray to God when the word ‘clean,’ is relative, for God does not distinguish the good from the bad or the clean from the unclean – that the temple or the place of worship is not necessarily a temple, for even a temple can become barren when divinity is misunderstood by the masses. That a temple does not become powerful on its own unless we invest pure love and energy into it. That the Goddess is not just a female aspect but also the masculine aspect within ourselves in the expansion of our consciousness.

What if, we reminded ourselves that our senses are what distinguishes our level of aliveness and what we taste and feel, sacred food or not, is not contamination but the level of superior deliverance that we can offer without any doubt that we gave from the fullest of our hearts.

What if, we reminded ourselves that the time we take to pray to connect with God is actually time away for us to connect with our inner sanctuary and that the outer temple is the sacred space in which we get to hold space for our inner divinity to resurface every once in a while.

What if, we called ourselves the invincible Goddess Durga and reminded ourselves that we are She and She is us, ridding the need for us to get the rituals right but to accept what is, because we are at peace with it – at peace with all that we have done for ourselves, to ourselves and with ourselves.

Merging with the Goddess is not a ritual but an inner reflection of the potential that is dormant within all of us – we are the Goddess beyond what we profess and beyond whom we know; for we can only know Her from how we well we know ourselves.

That merging is possible ONLY IF you know beyond mind and beyond heart that YOU ARE THE GODDESS and you are fully at peace with that resonance.

It is only then, we fully embody the merging of the Goddess.

Om Sri Matre Namaha!

SUJATA NANDY WORLD GURUKUL

www.sujatanandy.com

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