Chanting the Tantra Devi Suktam
For maybe the last year now, in our online classes, we have been chanting parts of the Tantra Devi Suktam, along with some explanation. Some of you have expressed enjoyment and wish to understand the translation and meaning behind it more deeply. You can click on the chant in this blog to Access the full mantra and with translation and I will talk about the understanding I have of it, based on years of chanting it as a practice. Perhaps we will move on to learning the more complicated beginning and close.
Yā devī sarvabhūteṣu xxxxx rūpena samsthitā
Namastasyai namastasyai namastasyai namo namaḥ
This is the main body of the mantra, the xxxxx in each stanza with a different aspect of human experience to meditate upon. In India, Tantra developed in response to a religious system that was dominated by a Brahman hierarchy (a clergy that stated it was necessary to reach 'God') and a spiritual system of usually celibate and predominantly male, monks. These pathways bothpresupposed that spiritual practice was something separate from and above society.
There are many Goddess in the Hindu pantheon and the different religious sects are overlapping in their objects of worship. While all the Goddesses are worshipped in Tantra, their expression is more sympathetic to the human condition. My favourite is Kali, who is definitely the Goddess of the minority, for one she is Black. Her fierce appearance and the seemingly wrathful myths about her are misunderstood, without understanding the underlying symbolism. But, that is another Blog.
Anyway, so the Tantra Devi Suktam invites us to see our 'mundane', ? 'complicated' social worlds as equally spiritual and as a pathway to 'God' or Realisation of 'oneness' or whatever you preferred semantic to describe this awakening is. We can do this thru contemplation using our intellect or ideally we can meditate on a deeper non-dual potential. Again religion tends to stay in the Dual – Spiritual aspirant worshipping the Transcended. The mantra is still devotional (We bow to you, we bow to you...) , but it invite us to experience the Non-dual directly through our human experience, where we realise we are bow to our own inner Divine Being. As a meditation therefore the focus is to directly know this, by feeling the energetic origin of all manifest being. If we can switch off the intellect for 2 secs :), and feel into our bodies' we see that all our experience is ultimately energetic and that carries us back to the Non-dual potential.
So that's it!. Jai Maa! (My favourite Indian greeting – Victory to the Goddess!)