Bi-Spiritual?

I mentioned to my wife the epithets of the Goddess in hymns by the Kashmiri sage Abhivanagupta, in which he addresses her as “Fair-hipped One,” and “Lady of Fair Hips.” Margaret’s comment (a midwife’s perspective) is that women with wide hips are able to give birth more easily—therefore, such epithets invoke the Goddess as a fertility image.

Victory to the Mother reads well. I love the poem that praises the Divine Mother: “O one whose hands and feet are everywhere, whose eyes, head and mouth are everywhere…etc.” I have always liked this image of “the Cosmic Person with infinite eyes,” which I have come across in other hymns. Friends of mine recently had a baby boy and I sent a congratulatory haiku:

Wide-open Buddha

Milky Way has two new eyes!

Moon glow on fresh snow.

In the introduction to Seeking Mahadevi, Ruth Erndl writes, “The statement ‘God is a woman,’ simply would not have the shock value for Hindus that it would for Christians, Jews or Muslims.” I was raised as a Jew, and I first came across the conception of the divine as Mother when I was nineteen and I read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. It struck a deep chord in me that has never stopped reverberating.  Maybe that is why, even though I had practiced Zen for twenty years and had never performed any kundalini yoga techniques, the life-energy ignited in me spontaneously when I was 41, while simply standing on my balcony musing about the divine. For several months, it took me on an irrepressible tour through the chakra system (what a ride!) and it has been a felt and potent force in my body-mind ever since. I have turned to the study of kundalini and Goddess worship retrospectively as a way of better understanding my own psychophysical process. At the same time, I have remained grateful to my Western scientific heritage (that is, I have not abandoned the metaphors of science in favor of the metaphors of religion, but have tried to glean the truth in both descriptions of reality). Therefore, it is not without sympathetic devotion that I have read academic textbooks about Ma Shakti. This is one of the reasons their tendency toward scholarly dryness is both frustrating and humorous to me. Victory to the Mother offers a more experiential tone, and it was fun reading about pilgrimage adventures.

Ruth Erndl defines Shaktism as “the worship of Sakti, the primordial power underlying the universe, personified as a female deity who is the Supreme Being, the totality of all existence. As such, it stresses the dynamic quality of the deity as both deluding and saving power.” Maya is both the power that deludes through identification with its endless forms, and the power that reveals the emptiness of all forms (and the mysterious identity of form and emptiness). As I said in an earlier paper, ya gotta love that gal!

 I enjoyed Erndl’s exposition of Goddess theology—“a kind of monism in which matter and spirit are not differentiated but are a continuity subsumed within sakti, the dynamic feminine creative principle…Shakta theology understands sakti, identified with the Great Goddess, to be the ultimate reality itself and the totality of being.” The greatest gift that Shakta traditions offer us, in my opinion, is this vision of the unity of consciousness and world. Not the doctrine that reality is reflected in the universe, which makes of the universe a phantom, an illusion, a stepped-down imitation; but the intuition that Reality is being the universe, which enjoys the whole universe as the body of spirit, the incarnation of the Beloved. Put another way, the former view (Advaita Vedanta, etc.) generates a longing for return to reality (as if the purpose of life is to return to its source.) Whereas, in the latter vision, source is never absent, but only present. Therefore, there is no dilemma, and we are free to love this. As they say in Zen, “Just this much.”

This brings to mind a Hasidic tale of a poor woodsman who fell in love with the King’s daughter when he came upon her bathing in a river. He declared his love to her with such passion and sincerity she was moved to tears. “Lover,” she said, “it is only in the cemetery that I will one day be able to join with you.” She meant, of course, that only in death could a princess and a woodsman become equals. Nevertheless, the young man, beside himself with adoration, took her words literally and went to the cemetery to wait for the princess to appear.

Day after day, as he waited, he thought of nothing but his beloved, contemplating her lovely form and qualities. This led him to feel grateful to her ancestors, who had made possible her birth, and to meditate on all the elements that supported her life. His appreciation expanded to include vaster spheres of being that gave life to the woman he loved, until, at last, it seemed to him that the One who was his Beloved was the very universe itself.

Kabir points to this understanding when he asks in one of his poems, “O tell me: Who have you loved your whole life long?”

Along these same lines, Erndl speaks of the sakti pithas, and “the worldview that the Earth itself is considered sacred and the deity embodies herself in earthly form.” Morinis says, “even at the most lowly, form-bound level, the goddess is simultaneously her cosmic, formless self, and in that cosmic, characterless aspect, she is still Durga, Kali, Tara, Uma and the rest.” You then comment, “This paradox defies distinctions between monotheism and polytheism, spirituality and materialism, ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions.” Wonderful! For years, I have regarded myself “bi-spiritual” because I seem to relate equally well to non-theisms, like Zen, and devotional theisms, like Devi bhakti.

Seeing spirit as matter, and consciousness as every natural process, it becomes easy to agree with Neem Karoli Baba’s saying: “The best form is which to worship God is every form.”