During
Navarathri we
pray to Mother Durga, Luxmi and Saraswathi, and each of the deities
make up 3
days of the 9 days. But what does that mean? It doesn’t mean you
must come here
every day, sing bhajan, eat supper and leave. It means you must
come every day
and slowly change who you are so you can become knowledgeable like
Saraswathi.
We start with Durga, with all your arrogance and all your problems. For the first 3 days after hawan, bhajan, and singing to the Mother, you get some prosperity in your journey. By getting that prosperity you then pray to Mother Luxmi. After you attain the highest prosperity from Mother Luxmi, you worship Her. Luxmi does not mean finances only, it means personal prosperity and good health. After that, you attain knowledge in the worship to Mother Saraswathi. In those 3 days we're supposed to become very knowledgeable beings. Hindus do everything in 9s. In 9 days you can become super-human. But it’s only possible if you tune yourself to becoming super-human. It’s not possible when you say that you can’t wait for the 9 days to finish.
Sometimes God likes to punish, but God punishes
very subtly.
Partassi finished yesterday and Navarathri begins today which
means you must continue
your fast. Navarathri has started like this so we can purify
ourselves. That is
why we fast. For the Tamil people, they say it feels like God is
killing them!
‘God is punishes us!’ is what runs through their minds. ‘Hey,
the jol starts
now!’ is what is heard in the workplace. Why? Partasi and Pitarpak are over now,
and the pitars have been fed. Now there is the desire to feed the
human
pitars. That’s us – we are just like pitars too. But, here we
come for 9 days
to purify the mind. The faculty of the mind is the most destructive faculty that
this body has. You are better off without mind. You will be
healthier without mind.
You will be more prosperous without mind. We teach you here, and we do
the pooja
here; we do japa, recital and sing bhajan so we can excite your
bhakti, your
devotion, so you can become spiritual beings. During a
discourse in 1951
with Paramahansa Yogananda, His devotees said to him, ‘We love you
Guruji! We
love you so much, we can’t live without you.’ He sat for a moment,
laughed
aloud and said, ‘But you don’t love yourself, how can you love
me?’
That is why we've come for the nine days: we need to
purify
ourselves. When we say 'purify' we are talking about the physical
self and this
manamaya kosha (mind body). It is the most destructive thing if we
don’t use it
properly. The sages, in their wisdom, have given us the second half in
the year to pray, pray, pray. I heard someone ask not so long ago, ‘Guru, tell
me, why do
the sages do this? We've just finish Ganesha Chaturi, then we have
Luxmi pooja; we
finish Luxmi pooja then we have partasi; we finish partasi now
we have
Navarathri. Is God trying to kill us?’ My answer was, ‘I didn’t
know that if
you don’t eat meat you’ll die.’ God
doesn’t
want to kill you. God wants you to live a good life, that is why he
took
the meat away.
What we did there (in the main shrine) was
hoist the flag so
that everybody knows we are observing Navarathri pooja. This
flag-hoisting
also has another very important meaning. It means that each one of you have
come here and
developed the courage to change. This flag is your victory
flag - showing that each one
of you has made this move. In the olden days when they won over parts
of the land,
they put up a flag to say that they had conquered the land. This
flag means that
you have conquered the mind and mind stuff, and that is why you
have chosen to
observe this Navarathri pooja.
Om
