KATHAM️
It’s party time. Refresher: We ended the previous post with “ b(h)um budhāya namaha!“ The silent ‘(h)’ therein was hesitatingly added to avoid some unintentional bodily humour that the non-phonetic language of the British Queen can elicit !!!
Wish y’all an intellectually-satisfying, well-organised, mercurial, business-like, transactional, communicative & yet detached (vairagya) green budha jayanti (well, it’s the b’day of the figurative embodiment of our solar system’s tiniest planet with the smallest orbit, Mercury, perhaps not that of the element Hg, & definitely not of Mr gautamā, the buddhā, whom we already wished with gusto as recently as last month! I don’t know if budhā shares his b’day with the messenger of the Roman gods, Mercury either!); muddā-pūra śiva-linga thāthā’s punya-dinā: well, bhāratīya culture celebrates death with even more pomp & fervour, understanding its true implications, especially in the case of lives which’ve been fully involved & well-lived like this rural spiritual grandpa’s.
Additional wishes for a kundalini-elevating smārta yōgini ékādaśi, from Tue 4:49AM to Wed 6:48AM IST, the times mentioned being for namma béngalūrū, with slight variations for other bhāratīya locations. Also, vaiśnavās, śrīvaiśnavās & bhāgvatās, devotionally preferring proximity to dvā-daśi rather than daśami, will engage in their vratā the next day. Like the smārtās, I prefer the higher-order accurate astronomical data to time mine! Emboldened by my no-brainer debut@49 with nir-jala ékādaśi last fortnight, I’m all set for another 48-hour detox sādhanā, but with a generous sprinkling of jalā this time! yõgini ékādaśi is timed well... 5 days prior to Sunday’s 6th International yōgā Day, which also happens to be a solar eclipse on summer solstice this year! More on those, hours before we resonate with their energies!
Exploring budha jayanti for now. Being one of the nine grahās (literally, subjectively & even functionally, referring to the ‘consumers’ of various aspects of our life, but objectively & effectively, the most influential &/or influenced planetary bodies, depending on our perspective & level of spiritual evolution!), budhā or Mercury is associated with the especially pure vi-śuddhi or throat cakrā, amongst the seven major cakrās (subtle energy transfer nodes/wheels), as well as the space element, subtlest amongst the panca bhūtās (five elements/phases) whom we encountered in our discussions in this series just y’day. If you‘ve already forgotten, don’t blame li’l Mercury, just re-read the post!!!
Regarded as the primal or ādi cid-ambaram, ~60km from kumbha-kōnam, TN, an ancient temple of śi-va nata-rājā (nothingness dynamically ruling the universe via cosmic dance... more on that in 12 days from now... the countdown has begun!) at tiru-vén-kādu (śrī śvéta-aranya or sacred white forest) is jubilantly consecrated with brain-busting mercurial energies, reflecting the ultimate education of creation personified in dévi brahma-vidyā-ambāl, using sophisticated technologies, yet to be deciphered or accessed even by modern Western scientific devices, belying their nascency, till date. As it’s viṣṇu amśa-avatar budha’s b’day, do consult Google-ācāryā for the titillating story of its birth, involving significant idiosyncrasies!
Deconstructing the wonderful paurānik symbolism, however, our sharp intellect (Mercury) is very interestingly born out of our own lusty mind (Moon ) which has been extramaritally wooing the gross material world (tārā dévi) around us. But, our illegitimately-born sharp intellect (Mercury) is eventually raised by the forbearing & forgiving lord of our material world, namely our own detached wisdom (Jupiter, husband of tārā). What a fascinating metaphorical account of something that happens within every human being every moment! Let’s begin to contemplate & meditate on this electrifying drama that’s going on here & now. Repeatedly practised, over time such a meditation on this story will help us to clearly distance ourselves from identifying with our awesome yet temporary tools of mind & intellect, & eventually our wisdom too, en route to re-identifying with who we really are, & breaking the suspense, that’s no-thing: śivōham śivōham... śi-va sva-rūp-õham!
Partying for the b’day of an internal consumer (grahā) who’s responsible not only for our verbal communication but also our mathematical prowess, we can’t miss the emerald opportunity to discuss a far more recent genius! Guess you’d have seen the 2015 movie, “The man who knew infinity.” The protagonist of that movie, śrī-nivās-an rām-ānuj-an, will continue to baffle the world forever. When his self-chosen mentor at Trinity College, Cambridge: the number theory stalwart Prof. GODfrey H. Hardy wondered about the source of & the methodology behind these amazing derivations, rāmānujan used to nonchalantly admit that his favourite goddess nāma-giri thāyār (நாமகிரித்தாயார்) bled mathematical equations into him, as we discussed in Sunday’s post. On one occasion, he apparently elaborated “While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.“
Some of his equations are apparently mathematical models for black holes, which themselves weren’t even known to exist during his times!!! Usually, mathematical models are established only after a phenomenon is observed but this is just reverse chronology ... yet another unsolved puzzle for modern human psychology. nāma-giri dévi namo namaha! Though absolutely nothing as remarkable or even comparable, I had a very interesting experience when I was close to winding up my doctoral research at Georgia Tech but was stuck up for many weeks on a particular problem while analysing the bending of composite tubes whose cross sections flatten out as the curvature increases & thus become easier to bend & finally snap through. Most of us would’ve noticed such nonlinear flexure & unstable behaviour with bent drinking straws & garden hose pipes, for instance.
As my never-say-die efforts towards the solution further intensified, it was appearing even more insurmountable. It engaged me day & night, many of them sleepless non-śiva-rātris & foodless non-ékā-daśis! To attempt a different perspective, I also dragged my véd-ācāryā śrī ānjan-éya śāstri-gāru into the problem, only to add to his own count of sleepless nights! Finally, late one night, I dreamt of a versatile elephant trunk which bent into innumerable configurations with outlandish flexibility, obviously putting to utter shame what I had all along imagined to be my ‘sophisticated’ composite tube for helicopter applications, nonetheless into similar forms. And lo... the elephant then morphed into my favourite gaṇ-éśā!
The very next day I hit upon a breakthrough idea to work around the challenging problem & actually ended up solving it. Like Prof. G. H. Hardy (GHH) across the Atlantic eight decades apart, when my thoroughly impressed advisor Prof. D. H. Hodges (DHH) asked me how I got the brilliant breakthrough, I hesitated to answer as he was an ultra-staunch Christian conducting Bible classes on campus & knew that I was an equally effervescent & enthusiastic Regional Coordinator (Southeast USA) of the Hindu Students Council, so we had an unwritten & unspoken rule not to discuss religion & spoil our beautiful guru-śiśya relationship, both of which gracefully last till date. Nonetheless, I did sheepishly answer him then about the dream but only until the majestic elephant trunk scene & he spontaneously remarked that maybe we should write a research grant proposal to National Geographic!!!
The short-term result: launching into the third attribute we both share... gregariously loud laughter which when synced could pull the building down! BTW, laughter & a sense of humour are also formally attributed to our b’day boy: budhā!!!
