ko dadarśa prathamaṃ jāyamānam asthanvantaṃ yad anasthā bibharti | 

“Who has seen the primeval (being) at the time of his being born; what is that endowed with form which the formless sustains”      Rig Veda 1.164.4

This line of thinking is very integral to the yogic thought…  While the translation provides the exoteric view, the esoteric view is all about how we become conscious.  To become conscious is to be aware of the thoughts that are generated by external as well as internal stimuli , vritti, or fluctuations.  Their quest is how a thought is generated, particularly the thought of I. Where and when do we become conscious of this thought, and where was it before we became conscious of it?

Meditation and Ritual are the same, and can be mutually accessible.  That is, a ritual can be used to put the focus outside, in the external world, and slowly move it into the internal world.  For this, they started off with a translational object, or model, called a vedi that included a fire altar.  Brahmana-parts of vedas essentially center on this.

ritual setup

The process of a ritual setup (for a yajna or pooja) is essentially an interiorization process. It combines cognitive approaches and with the actual internal activation process.  The cognitive approach involves setting up the stage along with a fire altar while the activation processes involve mantras and finally meditation when the internalization process is complete.  It is at these stages of concentration that we get answers to our questions.  We decide these question/s up front, through an initiation (or samkalpa) process; no questions, intentions or desires is also acceptable, actually superior.

The cognitive process of fire altar set-up is essentially a model of reminding the performer the construction of the performer himself/herself, or the anatomy of the performer.

This fire altar construction typically starts with five layers – imitating the human physical body – hair, skin, flesh, bone and marrow.  Then the fire is lit – typically using from a fire called gārhapathya – which is one of the three fires in our body.  If this fire (grāhapathya) is extinguished, that altar, that house, that body become lifeless or die. This whole process is very elaborate, and carefully done.  In tantric methods, this cognitive approach took the shape of drawing an elaborate yantra.  The famous Srichakra is a famous example of such a yantra.  There are hybrid approaches too, the intent is the same.  To gain awareness of the body through a model construction, and internal mapping process.  During this part, most of the activities revolve around more religious methods, prayers and methods one learned.  Fasting is a major component of this.

With the excess energy (restlessness) dissipated through fasting, we are ready for the fire initiation process.  One particular set of chants called samidheni chants are famous for starting this process.  This blazes the internal fire as they are feeding the external fire with ghee and offerings.  This eventually gives way to silent repetition of mantras and eventually meditation to achieve the desire meditative states.

So, Meditation and Ritual are the same, and can be mutually accessible.

Before we move on from the vedic perspective, let’s briefly go back to the vedic story of Rishis throwing the cart chock along the river Saraswati, to reach Plaksha Prasravana  (from the previous blurb on meditation – #10).   Is that happening in the external physical world, or in the internal “mind” world?

For rishis, it can be both, because they are corresponding phenomena in both worlds; they are mirror images of each other – Tat Twam Asi (That You Are).  If we think about it, this is not rocket science – every thought pattern can translate into an action pattern, through  (somatosensory) nervous system, breath, body…

From an inner center, the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extroversion, into the physical world…

— Wolfgang Pauli, Physicist, Nobel laurate

In this model of Tat Twam Asi, everything in Twam (Thou) has a corresponding entity or a sequence in Tat (That).  A perfectly executed ritual in the physical world can make a perfect meditation, and vice versa!   This is also a key tenet in Gita: yoga is skill in action.  A perfectly meditated thought will definitely yield a perfect action (result is a different thing).  Kriya design makes use of this principle.  Hence, rishis had elaborate designs for ritual diases, altars, location of the priests, etc.  The descriptions were precise and meticulous.   More importantly, just like a residue of a meditation, residue from a ritual shall be none.   For all the elaborate descriptions of rituals in vedas, archaeologists can hardly find any traces of these grandiose rituals, probably for this reason.

It is this correspondence principle that makes their stories enigmatic,  and at the same time, rich in purport.  One of the fascinating and demonstrative stories is the relationship between Prajapati and “his daughter”, Uṣas.

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(Story as told by Roberto Calasso’s in Ka – Stories of the Mind and Gods of India)

When Atman (Self), that which observes the “I”, decided to create something distinct, a nature that would obey nature, it stretched a veil of opacity across the world.  This was to be a great secret, the ultimate gamble, the novelty that would forever prevail, that the world should not communicate with the mind from which it had issued.  But whether our antique intimacy or mere amazement at the sight of that alien, and at last, unknown being, before abandoning it to its own devices, the mind went after the world, as if it still in a position to caress it.  Such was the “incest” of Prajapati and Usas! ….

…. Rudra yelled as he let fly his arrow.  Like a flash Prajapati withdrew from Usas….

… Usas is the precondition of every offering: that flaring up of consciousness that occurs when Usas steps forward, uncovering herself….

… Awakening: this was the fine virtue of Usas, her impalpable gift…

Nothing enchants the mind more than the existence of the outside world, of something that resists it and will not obey.   Pampered by its own omnipotence, its own capacity to connect and identify everything with everything, the mind needs an obstacle, at least as big as the world – and desires it.  To pursue that obstacle and penetrate it: here was a challenge that could thrill and uplift, the riskiest challenge of all. It was the pursuit of the antelope.  It has never stopped.

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Antelope (golden deer in Ramayana)?  Correspondences and action-based words….  Such is the language of the vedas. The early translators were completely confused with these story lines.  Even now, when certain chunks of vedas are translated and interpreted in purely exoteric ways, they sound more like a bunch of drunken sailors chatting in the fourth quarter of an orgy.  But, it’s that correspondence principle of Tat Twam Asi, and the complex interactions of masculine (not male) subjective consciousness, its offsprings and the feminine (not female) objective nature that most miss completely.  Only after a few patient and erudite modern day yogis we understand a few of these intricacies…  And we can be sure that there is much more to unearth.  Every story therefore has an internal personal meaning, the esoteric meaning, and an external impersonal meaning, the exoteric meaning.

Let’s summarize this story from an personal experience standpoint…   In that story, Prajapati is the consciousness within, that emerged from the unmanifest we were, when we were all in seed form, maybe even before conception.  As consciousness develops out of the unmanifest, it starts to illuminate external objects of nature (aspects of prakriti).  The Usas or that dawn of illumination is our cognitive consciousness itself, considered its progeny.  Without that illuminating component of consciousness, there is no external world (to us individually).  The “incest” is between the mind and its own illumination reflected off of nature, that (pro)creates the external world.  Consciousness is masculine, and nature is feminine components of us.  Rudra is that force that stops this complex “incestual” interaction, and turns Usas inwards to reintegrate – nirvana.  For reintegration, we need to awaken this “god” force that resides within each of us, to break our addictive, incessant preoccupation with the external world. Either through ritual or through meditation….  Something for us to contemplate on…

Good luck to all of us! _/\_/\_/\_