Spiritual Import of Religious Festivals -13-12.

20/05/2017.

Chapter 17: Lord Skanda – The Concentrated Divine Energy-13-12.

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

1.

Without going into the details of the whole story here, I would like to pinpoint only the significance of the occasion, viz., the impossibility to confront evil without the help of God, the power of Divinity. No one can face the world except with the help of God. Armaments, military and police are nothing before the evil of the world. No one can overcome it, and it shall continue.

2.

So, the Skanda Purana says that the War-god was born from the universal contemplation of the great Creator Himself. The Samadhi-Bhuta Sakti or the energy born out of the great Samadhi of Lord Siva, whom we call Skanda, is the answer for all the evils of the world. The force of cosmic desire became a cumulative focussing weapon, as it were, and with a sixfold face the divine energy began to confront the multifaceted dark forces.

3.

We have a sixfold psyche within us. The central, pivotal feature of it is the ego, as I called it, or we can say the mind, which expresses itself as the five senses. The five senses energised by the mind drive us outward in the direction of the objects of the world. You would have heard it said that the occasion for the birth of Skanda or the War-god was the stimulation by the god of Love, who darted his weapons towards the great Siva, who was then in a state of deep absorption, in Samadhi.

4.

These mysteries are difficult to understand. Ordinary minds are not made in such a way as to probe into these intricacies of Divine action. The energies that are required to face the evil of creation are potentially present inside us and they have to be worked up by a particular means. Desire is neither good nor bad.

5.

But, it can become bad or good according to the circumstances and the way in which it operates, under given conditions, in the history of creation. The birth of Skanda had to be occasioned by the activity of desire personified as Kama or Cupid, for the sake of overcoming the evils, one of which is desire itself, whose comrades are anger and other manifestations of egoism.

6.

The Bhagavadgita says, "Dharmaviruddho bhuteshu kamosmi." Here God refers to Himself as desire, bereft of or free from any contravention of Dharma. Here is a clue to the mystery of how it became necessary for the gods to employ Cupid as an instrument to rouse the divine desire in Siva for confronting the evil desire of the demons. Desire is like a diamond which cuts itself.

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued ..