May 07, 2024 - Lesson 25
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Sloka 25 from Dancing with Siva
What Does Lord Karttikeya's Vel Signify?
The lancelike vel wielded by Lord Karttikeya, or Skanda, embodies discrimination and spiritual insight. Its blade is wide, long and keen, just as our knowledge must be broad, deep and penetrating. Aum Namah Sivaya.
Bhashya
The shakti power of the vel, the eminent, intricate power of righteousness over wrongdoing, conquers confusion within the realms below. The holy vel, that when thrown always hits its mark and of itself returns to Karttikeya's mighty hand, rewards us when righteousness prevails and becomes the kundalini serpent's unleashed power thwarting our every effort with punishing remorse when we transgress dharma's law. Thus, the holy vel is our release from ignorance into knowledge, our release from vanity into modesty, our release from sinfulness into purity through tapas. When we perform penance and beseech His blessing, this merciful God hurls His vel into the astral plane, piercing discordant sounds, colors and shapes, removing the mind's darkness. He is the King of kings, the power in their scepters. Standing behind the temporal majesty, He advises and authorizes. His vel empowering the ruler, justice prevails, wisdom enriches the minds of citizens, rain is abundant, crops flourish and plenty fills the larders. The Tirumurai says, "In the gloom of fear, His six-fold face gleams. In perils unbounded, His vel betokens, 'Fear not.'" Aum Namah Sivaya.
Lesson 25 from Living with Siva
Mitahara: Moderate Diet
The tenth yama is mitahara, moderate appetite. Similarly, mitavyayin is little or moderate spending, being economical or frugal, and mitasayan is sleeping little. Gorging oneself has always been a form of decadence in every culture and is considered unacceptable behavior. It is the behavior of people who gain wealth and luxuries from the miseries of others. Decadence, which is a dance of decay, has been the downfall of many governments, empires, kingdoms and principalities. Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, made the famous decadent statement just before the French Revolution: "If the people have no bread, let them eat cake." Nearly everyone who heard that imperious insult, including its authoress, completely lost their heads. Decadence is a form of decay that the masses have riled against century upon century, millennium after millennium.
All this and more shows us that mitahara is a restraint that we must all obey and which is one of the most difficult. The body knows no wisdom as to shoulds and should-nots. It would eat and drink itself to death if it had its way, given its own instinctive intelligence. It is the mind that controls the body and emotions and must effect this restraint for its own preservation, health and wellness of being, to avoid the emptiness of "sick-being."
According to ayurveda, not eating too much is the greatest thing you can do for health if you want a long life, ease in meditation and a balanced, happy mind. That is why, for thousands of years, yogis, sadhus and meditators have eaten moderately. There is almost nothing, apart from smoking and drugs, that hurts the body more than excessive eating, and excessive eating has to be defined in both the amount of food and the quality of food. If you are regularly eating rich, processed, dead foods, then you are not following mitahara, and you will have rich, finely processed, dead, dredged-up-from-the-past karmic experiences that will ruin your marriage, wreak havoc on your children and send you early to the funeral pyre.
For the twenty-first century, mitahara has still another meaning. Our rishis may have anticipated that the economy of mitahara makes it a global discipline--eating frugally, not squandering your wealth to overindulge yourself, not using the wealth of a nation to pamper the nation's most prosperous, not using the resources of the Earth to satiate excessive appetites. If all are following mitahara, we will be able to better feed everyone on the planet; fewer will be hungry. We won't have such extreme inequalities of excessive diet and inadequate diet, the incongruity of gluttony and malnutrition. We will have global moderation. The Hindu view is that we are part of ecology, an intricate part of the planet. Our physical body is a species here with rights equal to a flea, cockroach, bird, snake, a fish, a small animal or an elephant.
Sutra 25 of the Nandinatha Sutras
Warnings Against Anger
Worshipers of Siva who are victim to anger or hatred refrain from meditation, japa and kundalini yoga. They confess sins, do penance and engage in bhakti and karma yoga to raise consciousness. Aum Namah Sivaya.
Lesson 25 from Merging with Siva
"Nobody Understands Me"
In practicing affectionate detachment, we are learning to live in the here and now, right in the moment. We are awakening the power of direct cognition, the power that enables us to understand what happens, when it happens and why it happens. We are tuning into the river of life, the great actinic flow. This river flows directly from the essence of being through the subconscious basement and the conscious-mind main floor, creating life's experiences. Along the way, our cognition of these experiences completes the cycle of its continual flow. That is what we have to learn to tune into. All of our higher teachings give us that wisdom. It is a great step to learn it intellectually and to be able to talk about it, but once that step has been taken, it is not a great step anymore.
This wisdom must first be applied at home, then at work. Then it has to be applied among all of your acquaintances and friends. Everyone should understand you and about you, and if you feel there is someone close to you who does not understand you, that signifies that the part of yourself that this person represents does not understand what you think they do not understand. If someone who is close to you does not understand your inner nature, you do not understand your inner subconscious yourself. Why? Because you have only intellectually grasped certain things; you have not fully realized these concepts. They, the friend, as a reflection of yourself, therefore, will not quite grasp your studies or your concepts. As soon as you understand yourself, by having purified yourself, you can explain your realization to your friends in a way they will understand.
When explaining yoga teachings, use common examples like the following: "If you plant a seed and water it, you will eventually give birth to the flower." That is simple and complete. Anyone can understand it. Use little examples and stay away from big terms, mysterious words, for little examples of life are powerful. Talk about trees and how they grow. Talk about children and how they mature into adulthood. Talk about flowers and how they bloom, and relate these to the laws of life. Talk about the mind and how it can be opened up through yoga techniques of concentration and meditation, and you'll become a great missionary of Hindu Dharma and do much for yourself as well as others.
Those who say "Well, nobody understands me. I feel all alone on the path" are going through a period in which they have memorized everything but understand very little and therefore cannot explain or convince their fellow man of these great truths due to the fact that their subconscious basement is still full. When we only learn intellectually and have not put dharma into practice, our subconscious is still cluttered by uncognized memories.