KATHAM️
32 days after today’s commemoration of a💦purifying gaṅgā saptami, we’ll also be celebrating🥳a 💧 refreshing gaṅgā avataran/dusséhra on May 30th 2023. But in actual historical & yōgik chronology, today’s event follows eleven months after the May bash! Would you trust that mother gaṅgā has 2️⃣ birthdays 🎂 ?!!! Well, that’s in 2️⃣different births! Then, what does it actually mean for a river to be born in the first place &, to get things more complicated, reborn as well?!!!
Resolving these puzzles requires us to revisit emperor bhagi-rathā (whose b’day we celebrate 🎉 today) & the lesser-remembered r̥ṣī jahnu (जह्नु) respectively responsible for the double b’day conundrum, thro’ a small portion of 1 of our most popular of the 18 purāṇās composed by vyāsā, namely the śrīmad bhāgavatam̐. Those interested can easily access these stories in detail through Googlācāryā’s search engine of discoveries!
To cut the long story short to enable our own storyline here, while sūryavam̐śī bhagi-rathā engineers gaṅgā’s descent to planet earth (via the triple blessings of our Self-creativity’s 🏺kamaṇḍaLā or sacred water pot, our Self-preservation’s feet 👣 & our Self-dissolution’s matted hairs) to redeem only his own ancestors, r̥ṣī jahnuabsorbs her into himself & releases her after 11 months, further sanctified with an all-inclusive wisdom capable of purifying one & all, not merely the sūryavam̐śīs! She’s thus rechristened as jāhnavi. BTW, while extolling the ultimate in every category as Himself, śrī kr̥ṣṇā claims in the bhagavad gītā that amongst all the rivers, He’s jāhnavi. That’s the doubly-born gaṅgā for us!!!
Also pertinent to the dual birthdays is the fact that gō-mukh & gaṅg-ōtri are dual origins of (tributary bhagi-rathi& therefore of) gaṅgā. Finally, a self-discovery in my meditation that I personally cherish: notice that the most important gaṇēśa mantrā from the gaṇapati atharvaśīṛṣa upaniṣad ॐ गं गणपतये नमः contains the sound “gaṅgā,” embedded right up front. Moreover, gaṇēśa is said to be twice-born too! Literally, this means once with a human head, thanks to pārvati, & then with an elephantine 🐘 head, thanks to that 🕳️ which is not! But, esoterically “twice-born” refers to a physical birth followed by a spiritual birth during initiation into sādhanā or practices to unravel one’s true universal identity. bhagi-rathā literally engineered gaṅgā’s physical birth on gaṅgā Dussehra (gaṅgā-avataran on jyēṣṭa śukla daśami) while sage Jahnu enabled its spiritual rebirth on gaṅgā jayanti (today’s vaiśākha śukla saptami), eleven months later.
The difficulty in bhagi-rathā’s engineering feat has resulted in a pseudonym for impossible attempts as “bhagi-rathā prayatna!” That’s human to render the impossible possible, especially if you’re an engineer!!! Seer🪬jahnuon the other hand turned another proverb “Man proposes, God disposes!” on top of its head to reveal that in the case of a r̥ṣī, it could as well be “God proposes, man disposes!!!” While it’s unanimously accepted that “the child 👶🏻 is the father of man 👨,” most of us are yet to realize analogously that “man is the creator of God!” Let’s all quickly recognize & strive to realize that enormous human potential latent within us, well before it’s too late in our short lives. Achieve the impossible as long as it’s significant for one & all.
Today (Thursday, April 27th, saptami7️⃣tithi) is🙌celebrated🎊in🙇🏻♀️honour🫡of the majestic gaṅgā, representative of all🏞️rivers & thus of all fresh🌊flowing💧water💦 , in particular, & liquid, in general, which is the most dominant of the 5️⃣bhutās/elements that our bodies as well as our🌎planet🌍are composed of & constituted from. Our health & purity & those of the planet🌏too are thus mostly reflective of the health & purity of the water🧊 we consume, use or even interact with.
Belying real life experience, rudimentary school science has ironically left many of us under the simplistic impression that water is merely H2O! Modern science however has long been unraveling a far more intricate structure, nature & behaviour of this wonder that’s water.
More significant than the well-established scientific evidence (of biological activities influencing electromagnetic dipole-induced entropy & thus information-storage capacity of water & vice versa) is that in every one of our deeply-subjective experiences, water is the very essence of life.
Thus not only gaṅgā herself, but even the groundwater of the entire Gangetic plains is packed with biophysical (molecular structural) memory of many millennia of vēdik chantings, āratīs & other potent spiritual sādhanās of r̥ṣīs on the banks of the gaṅgā.
Around gaṅgā saptami in the last few years, thanks to a mere few-days CoViD-19 lockdown-induced reduction in industrial effluent discharges, gaṅgā exhibited her famed grace & pristine glory. We celebrated it while it lasted. More significantly, that celebration in turn inspired at least a few of us to ensure it lasted beyond the lockdown too!!! It’s indeed myopically silly & suicidal not to sustain what sustains us. https://youtu.be/cRmKqKHlyk0
gaṅgā saptami special offering: śankara jayanti gāyatrī invocation: Episode 7 of mAs-sage n mEs-sage: https://youtu.be/ByYp2rn3blI
Pollution is just a dis-ease. But today on the occasion of the refreshing gaṅgā saptami, I’d like to remind of an even more critical existential problem faced by gaṅgā as she’s now listed amongst the ten most endangered rivers worldwide. Global warming has adversely affected most glacier-fed rivers like gaṅgā, which originates as bhagirathi@gōmukh, the tip of a glacier retreating @ 35~40 m/yr. This means today, one can even trek into the gōmukhice cave! While sounding adventurous & lots of fun, it also sadly means that yet another great perennial river of India could become seasonal by the 22nd century rendering our future generations’ lives unimaginably disastrous, if most of us don’t change our prodigal lifestyles. Shall we?!
