Daily Signet

Continued Meditations of the Mahavidyas…

The Beauty and Bliss of Sundari: Sundari takes the form of an impulse, an urge—the secret desire at the heart of creation and the mainstay of existence.  The divine desire seeks to give itself away in creation and then desires to receive back the Creation into itself.  This twofold desire is the basis of Love, the bond that ties creator and created.  Sundari is Love that expresses itself as Beauty. She is the eternal empress of all sovereignties and the Mother of Love, of Grace, and of Beauty.

In describing her, she is said to be as effulgent as the rising sun. She has four hands holding: a noose, a goad, a sugarcane bow and five flower arrows. The noose is love by which she binds the whole universe; the goad is wrath by which the whole creation is spurred into activity; the sugarcane bow is the mind of man; and the five arrows are sound, touch, form, relish and flavor.   

Teri Martin

From the August High Service: 

Of beautiful Tripurasundari,
Most beautiful of things I leave is sunlight
That moved at first
Then come glazing stars
As desire within
And the moon’s face
Which was the primal
…and ripe cucumbers
Seed of mind.                          Sri Aurobindo
And apples and pears.            Praxilla, ca 450 BCE

Daily Signet

Continued contemplations on the Mahavidyas…

The Sound Force of Tara:. Tara is the Mother of the Buddhas and the compassionate Bodhisatvas; her worship is at least as old as the Vedas.  She can be called on for help in disasters. Her name is derived from the root tr— to traverse, denoting one who crosses and makes others cross as well. Tara is the Sanskrit word denoting a star as it traverses in space and acts as a guiding light. It is an appellation for the guiding light in the human eye, the pupil. A boat is called tari, pointing to its action of crossing the water.  

Tara is seen as the initial, primordial throb that started all vibrations that take the form of sound – the precursor of creation of objects.  She is the guiding word – the logos of the multicolored creation. So while on one hand, Tara is connected with saving people from disasters, ferrying them across the waters of troubles, she is also connected with speech, with the acquisition of knowledge. There is no goddess like Tara in granting favors.                                     

Teri H Martin

From the August High Service:

O compassionate Tara,
She enfolds all that was, that is, that will be and yet
…break the ignorant pride of human mind, 
she unfolds into all that is new, 
and lead the thought to the wideness of the Truth
that is young, that is alive.
and rend man’s narrow and successful life
In Her timeless pattern, 
And force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sun
She carries us upon Her waves of pain and brings us to our birth.               Benjamin Martin
That he may die to earth and live in his soul.                                                Sri Aurobindo

Daily Signet

Continuing Contemplations on the Mahavidyas…

The Might of Kali…who personifies the mighty dance of Time; she is Death that devours.  Shown with ferocious fangs, Kali holds a garland string of skulls and derisively laughs, her tongue lolling as she stands mounted on a dead body. In two of her four hands, she holds a sword and severed head; the other two hold boons that allay fear.  She is the might of the Supreme; her act of destruction is a right action, not a clumsy execution. She is a skilled performer and all of her destruction is in preparation of the ground for the new. She destroys in order to create; she is time as transformer. Kali cooks everything in the cauldron of Time and the successive death she brings are the thousand gates that open out to Eternity. Her darkness is the preparatory time of the night before the dawn. 

Of Kali, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “The fear of death is what keeps man mortal…to liberate oneself death must be faced and so the tantra lays down the adoration of Kali, the time force as the first and foremost of all disciplines of knowledge.”                                                      

Teri H Martin

From the August High Service:

Of dancing Kali:
The ticking clock that devours me
All here is a mystery of contraries;
Minute by minute, day by day
Darkness a magic of self-hidden light,
Within your hands, the appalling grace
Suffering some secret rapture’s tragic mask
That taught my heart to fear;
And death an instrument of perpetual life. —Sri Aurobindo
And transforming grace, my fear relieved. —Teri H Martin

Daily Signet

In this month in celebration of the mystery of Eternal Woman, we begin a series of contemplations on the Ten Mahavidyas (Maha—great and Vidyas—Wisdoms) of whom we speak in our Prayer to the Mystery of the Eternal Feminine High Service this month.

The Mahavidyas are the powers that in India are said to live in every woman in the world. Joseph Campbell says that when he lived in India he learned that all women were considered divinities. The  greatest crimes in India, he noted, were killing a cow, killing a Brahmin and killing a woman because they all represent the sacred powers. When we talk of the Mahavidyas in our service, we’re reminding ourselves of the great mythologies of all time—of the Navajo stories where each detail of the desert is deified and the land becomes a holy place because it reveals mythological entities and forces.  It is as if Mother Nature herself is an icon, so that wherever you go, you’re getting a message that the divine power is working for you.  We think that we must go to the holy land on pilgrimages, but the Navajo might remind us that, “This is it and, furthermore—you are it as well!”  

Teri Martin

From the Eternal Woman High Service:

O Woman Eternal, you draw us on. 
The goddess is red with the fire of life:
Mountain matron, cavernous rock, mounded green, dank caves.
the earth, the solar system, the galaxy of far-extending space
And from her mountain--nourishment, healing, white milk, unwearied protection.
All swell within her womb.                                        
And from her cave—
a labyrinth of quietude and oneness 
where only one can be born and where only one can die.
For she is the world creatrix,
From mountain base to girth to mound,
Ever mother, ever virgin
She nurtures what is to remain. From womb of cave and canyon,
She encompasses the encompassing, 
desert and shore, 
nourishes the nourishing
She births what is to change. —Benjamin H. Martin
And is the life of everything that lives. —Joseph Campbell

Daily Signet

The womb is barren.
The stonecutter,
with his chisel and marble
can carve the sublime forearm of David
or the sensual breast of The Kiss.
But his stone figures have no breath.
But when man penetrates one of the many
wombs of the woman,
the womb of the body, the womb of spirit and soul,
the womb is filled, and it nourishes
the seed of the man.
A great mystery begins.
Fire and water are mixed.
From the alchemist union,
from the balance of Yin and Yang,
there is synergy.
That which is created cannot be dissolved.
It is breath, it is a new potential.                                                        

Jamie Ziegler

Image by @rtheimann on Unsplash

On This Day…

Shinto day of remembrance for those harmed in the atomic bomb attack on Japan in 1945