RITUALS- 1
Having once been an atheist, and having seen the evidences for the existence of the Divine, and only thence becoming convinced, I could logically see that what Hindu sages have specified for so long, could indeed be possible. And if possible, it is certainly desirable, and hence becomes rather imperative to seek that out. It so happened that I was first convinced about the existence of the Divine by the occurrence of certain phenomena that are brushed off as ‘trickery’ by the skeptics. My wisdom and commonsense told me very plainly that the woman just could not be a trickster. It was clear for all to see that she was just a middle-class housewife with no apparent ambitions for glory and recognition. And so it happened fortuitously, that I surrendered to her. She gave me a direction by asking me to read a text. I scrupulously read the text - one chapter a day - attempting sincerely to reach the goal. Subsequently she gave me a mantra which I accepted eagerly. She gave me the most rudimentary form of a ritual and asked me to do it regularly.
When I looked into the ritual that she had advised me to perform – she had materialized a Sai Baba figurine and asked me to do the abhisheka (a ritual where an icon is given a bath in water or milk or honey etc.), and offer a naivedya (a ritual whereby food is offered to the icon) to the figurine I was fortunately able to give my own interpretation to the ritual. The interpretation I gave evolved as my needs changed with spiritual growth. At first, I used to perform the abhisheka with utmost concentration and sincerity and eagerly seeking solutions to certain problems that were plaguing me. I invested considerable faith in the whole process. I viewed the abhisheka as a bath that I would give a person (one can imagine the person to be sick and with bed sores), and the naivedya as return of gratitude for I having been fed by the Divine for several years. In offering the naivedya, I would visualize the Guru accepting it. It took some several months of patience to realize that some prayers were indeed being answered in whatever way. If I asked money for satisfying my hunger, I found that money may not be given more than a certain degree, but concomitantly my hunger was being reduced too! Many of us miss out this aspect. Say if a homeless person asks for winning a lottery of Rs 15 lakhs to buy a house, he may find that someone would have willed him a fairly accommodative one worth 5 lakhs. And miraculously, he would be quite satisfied. Something like this happened to me.
Here I must add that together with the ritual, she had prescribed the reading of a suitable text. The text prepared me for what I had to accept to reach my goal. It advised me two main things – ‘Patience with fortitude’ (Saburi in Marathi) and ‘Faith’ (Shraddha). Hence the readings bolstered what the rituals did, and gave me a remarkable assurance and boldness and courage to face certain situations that could have been quite unnerving and worrisome.
As I progressed along the path, I began investing more and more meaning to the rituals that I was performing. For instance, while bathing, I attributed phenomenal curative powers to the water falling on my body, and told God that I view it as a substance created by the Universal Intelligence to symbolically purify the wrong actions of the day. I also told God to heal the split between me and God.
Prayers helped me too. I earnestly prayed for the removal of conflicts and troubles, and for the betterment of my health. I wonder if I was being guided, or whether it was a part of my nature. I attempted to pray to God to help me forgive the people who had hurt me. Frankly, I found it extremely difficult in succeeding. But then over a period of time, I was given a realization of the hypocrisy that does exist in this world. As I was given this realization or ‘knowledge’, I found it becoming increasingly easy to accept myself. Here I have to say that ‘accepting myself’ was a major problem I had faced since childhood. For various reasons related to those circumstances, I found it very difficult to accept myself. The problem had compounded as years passed, and as luck would have it, the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the society had created further trouble. My prayers helped me by God revealing to me, what the society really was like.
So now I have come to realize the value of rituals. Luckily though, I realized its full value only because I had the honesty to tell people around me for many, many years that to me, these things did not make much sense!
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