Puja

Yeah, yeah, yeah

... forget Bangalore for some time He said that, uh, Durga Puja you cannot have, uh, alcohol.

Like zero alcohol will be served.

As in no one can serve alcohol, no question of drinking it.

... something a little ca-

This week only, oh, I'm in Kolkata on Saturday.

Are, are, are you there during the Puja?

Saturday I'm there for a show.

The feelings are important.

So even when you do Puja, what is important is not merely the rituals, but how much feelings you can, you can invest in that.

That's why Bhagwan says, " Bhagavan says, "Aham bhakta paradhina." Devotees, they worship God.

Whom is Bhagavan worshiping? Bhagavan is worshiping the devotee.

So when you're offering camphor, not just to Shivji, but sometimes to any deity.

Like you'll see even in the Shakta Pujas, and you're worshiping Kali and you're offering the camphor arati.

Uh, it's very common.

You'll find in many temples and in many worship settings and households they'll chant that [singing] karpura gauram karuṇāvatāram.

Just an everyday object.

The, the ceremonies done around animals and how they're celebrated and day-to-day prayers like Puja.

There's also a lot of color, so it's really hard not to be influenced by color in the Indian culture.

And another thing we have in common is that I have my collective here, the Just Art 24.7 Collective, and I find that there's something quite lovely about bringing together creatives.

And then Swami spoke about, as I said, that King were to realize that spirituality can never be practiced without letting go of some sensual pleasures.

Then Swami speaks about that disciple who does that Puja, where you have to give up the idea of your idea of worship, that detachment that comes in devotion, where you have to progress to the state where you give up your idea of how God is to be worshipped and then see how God wants to be worshipped.

That is the detachment in the path of devotion that you take.

And finally, that story that we heard last time about the prayer for a big nose and a small nose, where you make a prayer and but you have the detachment to the object that you are praying for also.

These would be the subject of their kind of veneration of the gods, so they would have them in their houses.

They would place them in or above their Puja shrines, their, their domestic spaces of worship.

And it became the image of the gods that they prayed to every day, that they thought about.

You could see these gods.

She couldn't even light a lamp because that would be too, like, pagan for her community.

So, this Manasa Puja becomes so important for people who are either disinclined to do external worship or who would also benefit from both external worship and internal worship and, most importantly, for people who cannot do external worship.

It's the most accessible form of Tantra, Manasa Puja.

And so we'll just look at that real quick.

So the verses that we looked at yesterday, Ratnaya Kalpita Masanam, that's a very famous, by the way, if you just like YouTube it or like Google search it, you'll see many different renditions of it by many different singers in different styles.

He's God.

And what I'm going to suggest today is that Shiva includes this Shiva, this guy.

So you can visualize Shiva like that in your heart and do Manasa Puja.

We go for, go do our Japa together.

And, um, we do a Puja together.

And for us, that's our, like, our connection.

So it is nice when you live near a temple because you get sort of swept up in the current of everybody's joy.