Spiritual Import of Religious Festivals : 13.7.

19/03/2017.

 Chapter 13 : Lord Skanda – The Concentrated Divine Energy -7.

Skanda-Shashthi message given on the 9th of November, 1980.

1.
The religious history of this event commences with a magnificent portrayal of the great God Siva absorbed in meditation and deeply immersed in Samadhi, oblivious of what we may call darkness, evil or the centrifugal forces.

2.
God's absorption in Himself in the 'I am that I am' is the total cosmic opposition to the multifarious dark activities of the urges in the direction of the senses whose leader is the ego and whose colleagues are desire and anger.

3.
The greatest forms which this impulse of externality can take in us are these three. The ego is the centrality of the urge, the central dynamo, as it were, which pumps the energy necessary for the movement of this impulse outwardly.

4.
And, desire and anger are like the two arms of this adamantine centrality of individuals. So, in a way, we may say that there are only two forces, and we may not be wrong when sometimes we say that there are three forces.

5.
We have the Supreme Creator and the Satan in the Paradise Lost of Milton. We have the description of the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso in the comedy of Dante.

6.
We have Ravana and Kumbhakarna in the Ramayana, Duryodhana and Duhsasana in the Mahabharata.

7.
Mostly they are forms of a dual force, like Sumbha and Nisumbha in the Devi Mahatmya, and Sunda and Upasunda in the Mahabharata. They are invincible for all practical purposes.

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued ...