Hindu Gods and Goddesses

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Dimensions of the Divine as a Lover . . .




In the fluctuating reality I have been experiencing of late, things destroyed by fire seemingly miraculously restored (see post entitled, "I Now Have Confirmation: This Isn't the Same Laramie I Left Behind (or somebody's playing tricks on me . . .)" and so forth, I have yet to discern if I am still in that dimension wherein Devi or some other benevolent deity is merely "working with me"/doing karma-yoga with me/etc. serving as explanation enough for dissettling anomalies, and not displaced to some new or old place in time-space wherein other storylines are presuming to supercede the story of the eternal romance of my Self and the divine feminine, however She might incarnate or manifest in and through illusion/maya/Maya in my life, that for most my years on the road has sustained my soul.

DOn't mistake a presumption in the previous, as the understanding of a relationship between practitioner and the divine even physically embodied as a lover is not uncommonly reported (and is sometimes a central theme) throughout world religions. From the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions there are many accounts of the meeting of human and divine described very sexually (Song of Solomon, church as "bride of Christ," Catholic nuns reporting being entered by the spirit of God underneath layered habits and between otherwise chaste thighs, the "beloved" lauded in Rumi and Gibran and some Muslim notions of heaven), to the more ancient expression of the three divine couples of the Hindu Trimurti, tantra and so forth to fertility cults throughout the globe, it grows obvious that love and romance and various expressions of sexually expressed devotion are central to most mythological paradigms.

The patriarchal religion I'd known previous to on the road explorations and renunciation, and the rather droll and repressed reality that seemed to accompany said system, were an influence and a reality I had assumed largely dispelled from my life, or transformed and properly reordered. I believed myself liberated to a mode of existence wherein the eternal romance of Deva-Devi was manifest in and through life lived, and the playful lila of Siva and Parvati, Radha-Krishna, etc., influenced, and informed and infiltrated my personal life stories (and other's life stories, too).

In discerning and verifying out-of-place objects and other aberrations and anomalies upon my return to Laramie after three-years-gone, I have to wonder if some of the operative assumptions I've made of my relationship to my surroundings previous to these "changes" (inexplicably altered doorframes and seeming deaths and other indices of space-time shifts) still apply as they did previously.

I've no doubt that Devi is present somehow and somewhere, as I am certain the good Self (अत्मन् atman) yet resides in my form, but after such displacement and disorientation as I've yet to adjust to, one year "back in town" after three-years on the road, I'm less certain of where I stand with my eternal Beloved. Signs are uncertain and confused where they were once rather readily read, and indications are something's more than a tad out of place in the place I've mostly called home for most of this life.

A plea I've made on occasion: Oh, for an interdimensional GPS or a chart or charts of all facets of reality that might be traveled, and not merely the two-dimensional representations of overt geographies you can buy at a bookstore or look at online. Rather, a mode of locating subtle positioning, and through which one might find the portals and keys and Shangri Las hidden throughout the globe and amongst the world's many layers. Perhaps some sort of hand-held instrument designed to locate the positions of lost friends or lost loves or to find wherever it might be "home" has been moved to . . .

If any of you have access to such an instrument or set of maps, please leave a comment below . . .

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