The Mountain Logs Day 4C - Gangotri, next!

The Char Dham means “The Four Stations”. Why “The Four Stations” is because it is not just a reference to the four places in Geography. It is also a reference to the four stations of artha, kama, dharma and moksha. The four stations of a well lived life namely acquiring of prosperity or means, fulfillment of desires and passions, living a life of coherence with Nature, Nature out there and one’s own nature, and finally the station of transcendence where you get established in your own sense of being. 

On this pilgrimage, the four geographical stations of Gangotrti, Yamunotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, the pilgrimage seeks to get insight into the truth of these four stations of life through a combination of physical and mental effort, emotional aliveness, openness to the spirit and surrender to Nature. 

It’s quite beautiful, profound, intense and transforming. It’s unique as a pilgrimage, as an experience and breathtaking in its conception. 

In the following Episodes, Dr. Bharat Thakur takes you along this pilgrimage over 10 days, sharing the daily logs and some insightful blogs that will have you want to experience the Yatra for yourself.  

Transcript

Day 4 Blog: We go to Gangotri next.

Between one dip in the river to the next, we move in a rhythm, wake up in the lap of the mountains, break our fast, sit together, travel, walk to the river, walk back, eat, do a havan, sleep. Between two intense points, the dhams, the cycle is about preparation, immersion, absorption, silence and through all this passes the thread of witnessing.

In the repetition of the cycle, we become a chant, a rhythm and we begin to sync up with the rivers, with the mountains, with the forces of nature.

Here we can see many rivers of knowledge; like the snows that fall from the same sky and yet, when they form into glaciers and melt. Each river brings with it a distinct flow and has a unique meaning for us and yet they all merge into the Ganga somewhere in its 2,600 kilometer journey towards the ocean.

There are many paths to happiness and within each path, every individual has his or her own unique stream and yet they all have to one day merge into the same ocean.

According to tradition, Badrinath is a form of Lord Vishnu who represents the principle of maintenance, of action, of running the show of life. Kedarnath is Lord Shiva who represents transformation, endings and closures. Ganga and Yamuna are manifestations of the feminine principle of Shakti or energy.

The river Yamuna runs very deep in our collective consciousness. While we saw that she is a symbol of the origin of life and passion and on the other hand having the power to bring us to the very root of our fears, legends say that she puts in a good word to Yama, the Lord of death to make the final journey easy. This archetype is also closely linked to a deity called ‘Niritti’ also Yama’s sibling, in the Vedas, who is also called  the inauspicious one or ‘Alaskhmi’. She is called ‘Dhumavati’ in the Dasha Mahavidya so we can see how in these legends, even the inauspicious is accepted as part of life because to heal, to become happy, we have to embrace the whole. So that we can develop what Yoga calls ‘Viveka’ or discernment, the ability to know the real from the unreal.

In our bodies we have agonist and antagonist muscles. For example, to grip a pen we need muscles to oppose each other in the fingers. Similarly, there is always a play of opposing energies in life representing the processes of initiation and closure. Everything that has a beginning has an end. That is why the ‘katha’ has so many layers. The deities have the sides of light and dark and so do we. So when we invoke a deity, it is more about becoming aware of the play of these opposing energies in our minds and in our lives. It simply gives us access to the deeper layers which we may not be aware of and as we get to know them, the process is healing.

An accomplished American psycho therapist Fritz Perls, who was the renowned founder of a school of psychotherapy called Gestalt therapy used to say that when you see a dream with many opposing characters, the dreamer is all of them and owning all the characters as ‘me’, not seeing them as good and bad or right and wrong is a process of integration. It allows us to stop being controlled by these energies in our unconscious. So when we hear about deities we have to remember, in the end, all the characters, the conflict and the good and the bad, it is about me and the idea is not to get enslaved by these strong psychic forces but to transcend them.

The legend of Ganga begins with the committing of a great Sin on earth. Rishi Kapila is one of the greatest seers. He is the first who spoke of numbers. He gave us the ‘Samkhya Darshan’ the analytical vision of the cosmos, the philosophy of Yoga is based on this vision, the story goes.

In ancient times, one of the ancestors of Lord Rama, King Sagara decided to perform the ‘ashvamedha yagna’, a fire ritual. A Yagna is a much bigger version of the ‘havana’ that we do. While the havana is done for the benefit of a person or a group of people, the Yagna is done on the scale of humanity. King Sagar did it to proclaim his undisputed status as  emperor. In this ritual, a horse was let to freely roam for a particular period and wherever it went, the ruler of that land had to either accept the Lordship of the King who owned the horse or had to challenge him. King Sagar’s horse disappeared for a bit as the King of the Gods Indra weaned it away to a place in the hills where Rishi Kapila was sitting in a deep state of meditation; the lord of the gods wanted this Yagna to fail as he was insecure of the power of king Sagar.

King Sagar had two wives and one of them had 60,000 sons, who went in search of the horse. When they saw it tied to a post close to where Rishi Kapila was seated in meditation, they thought it was he who had stolen it. Disturbed his meditation and abused him, mistaking him to be a thief. Rishi Kapila opened his eyes and the intensity of his anger burned them all down to ashes.

The King’s son from his other wife was ‘Asamanjas’, the meaning of this word is confusing. Asamanjas was not a great ruler but he had a son ‘Amsuman’ who was known to be wise. The word ‘Amsuman’ has the connotations of “one who has a portion of humanity”.

Amsuman prostrated in front of Rishi Kapila and got to know what happened. The problem was his uncles had committed a terrible sin. How to have them released from the curse. Rishi Kapila told him that the only way to do it is by washing their ashes with the waters of the celestial river Ganga. For this, Ganga had to be brought down to Earth.

So far we see the play of how these 60,000 children got deceived by their sense organs. As Indra is the lord of the senses, they lost their balance. The aspiring emperor of the world, Sagar was done in by his attachment to his children, Moh.

This delusion made him vulnerable to their follies, the King had conquered a lot but at the root, Moh was still there and at the right time, he was destroyed and only Ganga could save them now. So right at the origin itself, the legend of Ganga is about the savior.

Ganga is supposed to have released Lord Vishnu’s touch. She flowed in the celestial realms as the milky way. Ganga is the original goddess who appeals to the human being who while being aware of his animal nature, yearns for a union with the beautiful, the sublime which seems to be almost out of his reach but just within his reach.

To have her come to the earth, Amsuman struggled but failed. His son the very able Dileepa tried and failed. Dileepa’s son’s name was Bhageerath, he was the man of destiny for the human race.

Bhageerath prayed desperately and had to wait for eons before he could get Ganga released from the abode of Lord Brahma, the creator but as she descended, there was fear that she would destroy the earth with the fierceness of her descent. Bhagirath prayed to Lord Shiva for help.

Lord Shiva took her in his locks and absorbed the whole shock of her catastrophic descent but then he went into a meditative state, as was his nature. Ganga lay trapped in his Jata, his knotted hair, Bhagirath had to pray for eons to get Lord Shiva’s attention and have him release her.

As Ganga came cascading down from his hair, She destroyed the abode of a great sage called Jahnu, who drank her up. Showing to all of us, who the Rishi, the ancients really were, why they were called the ancients. Bhagirath, the evolving Man did well to bring Ganga down. He needed Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva help but Rishi Jahnu, he just swallowed her, all that force meant nothing to him. That is the power of the ancient babas, they will always remain a mystery.

Just that Bhagirath had another problem now. Ganga was swallowed, he prayed to sage Jahnu to release Ganga and he released her through his ears. Bhagirath then took her through the spot where his ancestors had been reduced to ashes. She then washed away the ashes and the sins of Bhagirath’s ancestors finally granting them liberation. 

If we hear this story in all its details, we will find that it will practically cover all aspects of our creation and our lives and many lessons of the deeper sadhana are there in its details. That is why the Katha is always repeated. In many variations, every time there is something new to learn depending on where the listener is.

Coming back, so much effort went into getting a closure to an act that was about showing disrespect to a Rishi, who is a symbol of wisdom in us.

Bhagirath was born very ugly and he had already done much to rise to be a wise person. Even his body had transformed, making him very pleasing to the eye. Bhagirath is the archetype of ‘Shraddha’ or devotion. Where his warrior ancestors had failed, his devotion had prevailed. His devotion was severely tested. He had to knock at many doors, he had to be eternally patient, he had to work with all the forces of creation, sustenance and destruction to heal his ancestors and take up his inheritance.

Ganga we can see is not trying to please anyone. She is just the flow of life, of energy, of a vibrant current and as Bhagirath, we need to persevere through a whole series of actions, appeal to practically all aspects of our being, to be able to harness this life current, to be able to heal.

Gangotri is the the closest point where common people go to glimpse Ganga at her origin as Bhagirathi, the epic of Ganga is supposed to have happened around this area. The very purpose of the descent of Ganga called ‘avataran’, the word ‘avatar’ comes from ‘avataran’. The purpose of the descent of Ganga symbolizes the culmination of our effort to awaken the subtler forces that operate in our beings.

From the perspective of evolution, Bhagirath was a huge leap from the animal to the human. The descent of Ganga is about learning to invoke the powerful human to activate its qualities. It has the power to wash away the consequences or the habits of the animal which we have inherited from our animal ancestors over millions of years.

Sagar’s 60,000 children, the various animal archetypes that are there deep within us remain as habits, as tendencies and when we can awaken the qualities of clarity, reason and insight of the human side, which is there in the higher brain. The cerebral cortex, these habits are washed away. The ancients have always called knowledge as Gyan Ganga because our dip in the Gangotri is meant to immerse us in the waters of our own wisdom  body.

So yes, Ganga washes away our sins but we hope that you have seen the process in it and what really the sins are. Actually the word is ‘samskara’ which are the memories of the collective unconscious what we as humanity share because we are one and we bear the consequences of whatever has ever happened in the course of our evolution. That is our inheritance. The course of happiness is an involution where we try and find a way out to this like Bhageerath did.

Let’s take a dip.

Lots of Love

Bharat Thakur