Things we do

Today is the last day of Navarathri. There are some things we don't do. We don't blow out a candle, cut a cake, or participate in Vijayadashmi. We don't blow out a candle because the Hindu religion is based on light, and when we celebrate birth we celebrate the light within. We don't want to blow that out. We don't cut a cake because a knife in anyone's hand can be dangerous. A knife symbolises danger. And we don't do Vijayadashami because we don't believe in submerging the murti. For ten days we recite hundreds of mantras and then on the tenth day we're supposed to submerge the murthi in the river. The first requirement is a clean river.

All Hindus have this power: they'll be walking, they'll pick up a stone and leave it at the lamp, and eventually the stone is equal to God. Many of you have things from your mothers or fathers, passed on to you, and you'll have one stone with a red dot, an ordinary stone. And we will set it up as a lingam. We can do anything so why should we go and submerge the coconut, figurine or murthi in the water? In India, for the first time I saw them take a papier mache Ganesha to be submerged in the ocean. They don't know why they do it – because somebody else does it. They're polluting the ocean because they use paint on the murthis which look so beautiful it's unbelievable. They've prayed for the murthi for ten days, gave it all the life they can, and after ten days they revert to the tamasic activity. They don't want the murthi there because it reminds them of the sattvic activities they performed over the ten days. We don't want to acknowledge that we are now sattvic, pure, and we no longer do wrong things like eat meat and drink. Believe me, tomorrow you should go to Nandos and sit there and ask the people coming there what they do. Many of them will be priests. On the tenth day some people even sacrifice. It defeats our purpose of fasting, of keeping the nine days sacred. They count down to the last day. Tomorrow morning at one, they'll go to the freezer and take out what they kept there. Mielie-rice breyani in the fridge. Once we do that we break the fast. The nine days are supposed to be filled with total focus on the female energy and aspects of the divine.

I know the energy yesterday was so good, take it as a compliment - I did not think that Zenita would make the walk but the energy was so good. But somebody said 'lucky the rain came, we didn't have to walk back'. So we are very tamasic in what we want to do . When we attain the state of sattva we think it is too much and we go back to our old habits. You know, we had a devotee in our ashram in the early days, and just before he joined us he went fishing, and he caught a fish and put it in the freezer on the Wednesday or Thursday. So on Thursday he came to see me and I told him to do a fast for nine days: no salt, no meat, etc. The following week we were starting khumbishegam – we talked him into participating for fifty-two days. When we had finished, we realised that we had done it wrong so had to fast another fifty-two days. He took his fish out of the freezer ten times, and then had to put it back again. That poor fish wasn't meant for him. By the time he could eat it, it was dry fish.

Life is a very strange occurrence. When I went to primary school we used to visit a place called Jake's Estate, on the beach, the North Coast, not far from Stanger. I don't even think I was in grade six yet. It was a small community of about six homes, and whenever we visited my mother's cousin we visited everyone in the area. All these years later, we have an aunty from Jake's sitting here with us, and she was here yesterday as well. Can you believe that I was a young boy, and here I am seeing someobody, at my age of sixty, who I knew then?

Hari Om