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Connecting with a Higher Awareness

Swami Shankardevananda Saraswati

The yajna showed the power of the guru, as an accomplished human being, to take the various elements of existence, normally in chaos, and to amalgamate them into a divine experience. It was a very powerful teaching about how we can and should live our lives with this higher understanding and higher awareness.

Within each of us the ego is like a dark, never-ending chasm of individual need, like a gravity, constantly wanting, constantly needing, and always centring back into itself. We come to these events to try to free ourselves from this kind of bondage. In the presence of a guru, in the presence of this tantric ritual, we are able to be linked to some higher experience. When we are linked we are able to see the complete vista, the complete panorama of the human personality, which is both divine and demonic. When the light is shining on us, there is no hiding from ourselves. We see all the wounds and all the darkness, but we also see the potential within each of us. As we are transformed by this process, we are able to see ourselves, to see what work we need to do and also that we have the capacity within us to do it.

In the end, everything that we get in this material world becomes ashes. It is put into the fire and this existence ultimately ends in ashes. But if we are able to connect to a higher awareness, something else is generated which creates an invisible force, an invisible power, something which is eternal and enlightening and which has true meaning and a true higher level. The invisible becomes palpable. The material is put into the fire.

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