Sri Lalita Devi!!!

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Sri Lalita Sahasranama 1-100

 

1) Sri Mata

 

& #8212; Sacred Mother (feminine); the Seer, the Seen and the Seeing.

& #8212; The Knower; the Measurer (masculine)

& #8212; " For Whom all creatures are born. " Taittiriya Upanishad 3. 2

 

Sri Lalita Sahasranama

(Sri Lalita Sahasranama, C. S. Murthy, Ass. Advertisers and Printers,

1989.)

 

 

" O Goddess, who removes the suffering of Your supplicants, be gracious!

Be gracious, O Mother of the whole world!

Be gracious, O Queen of the universe; Safeguard the universe!

You, O Goddess, are Queen of all that is movable and unmovable!

 

You alone has become the support of the world,

Because You do subsist in the form of Earth!

 

By You, who exists in the form of water, all this universe is filled,

 

O You inviolable in Your valor; You are the Gem of the universe,

You are Illusion sublime! All this world has been bewitched, O Goddess;

 

You indeed when attained,

Are the cause of the final emancipation from existence on Earth! . . .

O Goddess, be gracious!

Protect us wholly from fear of our foes perpetually,

As You have at this very time saved us promptly by the slaughter of

the demons!

 

And You bring quickly to rest the sins of all the worlds,

And the great calamities which have sprung, from the maturing of portents!

 

To us who are prostrate be You gracious,

O Goddess, who takes away affliction from the universe!

 

O You worthy of praise from the dwellers of the three worlds,

Bestow Your boons on this world!

 

 

Markendeya Purana, Candi Mahatmya 10

 

They ask thee concerning the Spirit.

Say: " The Spirit (cometh) by command of my Lord:

Of knowledge it is only a little that is communicated to you. "

If it were Our Will, We could take away that which We have sent thee

by inspiration:

Then wouldst thou find none to plead thy affair in that matter against Us.

 

surah 17: 85-86 Al Isra & #8217; (Night Journey)

Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qur'an

 

" The West is exiled of the Goddess & #8212; her features are unknown to us,

guessed at, hoped for, rejected as aberration, feared as monstrous or

deformed. We in the West are haunted by the loss of our Mother. Our

mother country is a place many have never visited, though it is

endlessly projected as a golden matriarchy, or paradise, but though

the house of the Goddess is in disrepair after so many centuries of

neglect, some have begun the work of restoration while others have

already moved back in and are renovating from within. . .

 

Sophia is the great lost Goddess who has remained intransigently

within orthodox spiritualities. She is veiled, blackened, denigrated

and ignored most of the time: or else she is exalted, hymned and

pedestalled as an allegorical abstraction of female divinity. She is

allowed to be a messenger, a mediator, a helper, a handmaid; she is

rarely allowed the privilege of being seen to be in charge, fully

self-possessed and creatively operative.

 

& #8220; " The mother is the most lovable person for a living being. A child

always calls upon his mother first when he is in difficulty. But a

biological mother, though a symbol of divinity, can only remove

physical difficulties and that too only partly. The Holy Mother is the

causative and creative force of the entire universe. She is infinite

and limitless. She is omnipresent both in forms and as formless. She

is all powerful to remove all kinds of sorrows and sufferings.

 

Sri means Laksmi (goddess of wealth), Sarasvati (goddess of learning),

prosperity, beauty, success, decorated with jewels, supreme intellect

and one who can impart knowledge of vedas. Here Sri refers to the

power of speech and Sabda-brahman.

 

Sri-mata is the progenitor of all - whole universe, Nature, Brahma,

Vishnu, Mahesa. She is all supreme - Parabrahman. The three names of

the Divine Mother - mata, rajni and isvari refer to the three

phenomena of creation, preservation and destruction of the universe

due to three aspect of the supreme.

 

" Om Sri-Matre namah & #8221;

 

R. Prasad, Lalita-Sahasranama

 

Sophia is the Goddess for our time. By discovering her, we will

discover ourselves and our real response to the idea of a Divine

Feminine principle. When that idea is triggered in common

consciousness, we will begin to see an upsurge of creative

spirituality which will sweep aside the outworn dogmas and unlivable

spiritual scenarios which many currently inhabit. When Sophia walks

among us again, the temple of each heart will be inspirited for she

will be able to make her home among us properly; up to now, she has

been sleeping rough in just about every spirituality you can name. .

 

Yet the Goddess of Wisdom is not a newcomer to our phenomenal world,

so how is it we have failed to notice her? The Western world has been

so busy about its affairs that only a few unusual people have had time

to comment on her existence. When they have talked or written about

her, it has been in such overblown esoteric language that few had

taken notice. Wisdom trades under impossible titles: Mother of the

Philosophers, the Eternal Feminine, Queen of Good Counsel and other

such nominations do not inspire confidence. . . . Frequently reduced

to God & #8217;s secretary, who nevertheless still supplies all the efficiency

of the divine office, she is from all time, the treasury of creation,

the mistress of compassion.

 

When we speak of God, no one asks, & #8216;which God do you mean? & #8217; as they

do

when we speak of the Goddess. The West no longer speaks the language

of the Goddess, because the concept has been almost totally erased

from consciousness, although many are trying to remember it. Our

ancestors were very young when they were taken from the cradle and it

is now difficult for us, their descendants, to speak or think of a

feminine deity without the unease of someone in a foreign country. We

have been raised to think of Deity as masculine and therefore a

goddess is a shocking idea. But we do not speak here of a goddess,

rather of the Goddess, and we speak it boldly and with growing

confidence, because we find we like the taste of the idea.

 

& #8220;Shakti is the hidden power that turns matter into life. She is the

divine spark, the flow of God & #8217;s love.

 

Anyone who is connected with spirit has Shakti, which manifests in

five ways that the God Herself manifests. (For the sake of simplicity

I will use the word God and apply feminine pronouns whenever I have

the goddess Shakti in mind.) As described in the ancient Shiva Sutras

& #8212; " teaching about Shiva " & #8212; these are five powers:

 

Chitta Shakti: the awareness of God

Ananda Shakti: the bliss of God

Icha Shakti: the desire or intention to unite with God

Gyana Shakti: knowledge of God

Kriya Shakti: action directed toward God

 

If the voice of God spoke to you, Her powers would be conveyed in

simple, universal phrases:

 

Chitta Shakti: " I am. "

Ananda Shakti: " I am blissful. "

Icha Shakti: " I will " or " I intend. "

Gyana Shakti: " I know. "

Kriya Shakti: " I act. "

 

If a child came to me and asked, " How did God make me? " these five

things would be my answer, because this is how God made Herself, or at

least made Herself known to us, and at each stage of giving birth a

new exclamation of discovery emerged. First She experienced Herself as

existence ( " I am! " ), then creative joy ( " I am blissful! " ), pulsing

desire ( " I will! " ), cosmic mind ( " I know! " ), and finally the shaping

force that molds all things ( " I act!). Because none of these except " I

am " had ever existed before, each came as a revelation.

 

All of these qualities have universal application . . . These five

powers form a cascade, spilling like water from unmanifest spirit to

the material world. Tagore employed almost the same analogy when he

poetically asked, " Where is this fountain that throws out these

flowers in such a ceaseless outbreak of ecstasy? " In one beautiful

line he states the mystery precisely. What is the origin of the

infinite display of nature & #8217;s abundance? The flowers are outside, but

the fountain is inside, in divine essence. To realize this you must

become that fountain; you must have the assurance that the flow of

life can gush through your being at full force. This state of

connection is supreme existence. When you join the cosmic dance, the

powers of God as creator-mother fully infuse you. & #8221;

 

 

Deepak Chopra, The Path of Love

 

When did we make up this idea? some ask. We didn & #8217;t invent this

Goddess. She was always there, from the beginning, we tell them.

Somehow, humanity left home and forgot its mother. Perhaps our

ancestors took her for granted so much that they lost touch? Well, our

generation wants to come back home now and be part of the family in a

more loving way, because the West has still got a lot of growing up to

do and the Goddess has a lot to teach us.

 

What or who is the Goddess then? Deity is like colourless light, which

can be endlessly refractured through different prisms to create

different colours. As the poet William Blake said: & #8216;All deities reside

in the human breast. & #8217; The images and metaphors which we use to

describe deity often reflect the kind of society and culture within

which we have grown up. After two thousand years of masculine images,

the time of Goddess reclamation has arrived. The Goddess is just as

much Deity as Jesus, or Allah, or Jehovah. She does not choose to

appear under one monolithic shape, however. Each person has a physical

mother; similarly, the freedom of the Divine Feminine to manifest in

ways appropriate to each individual has meant that she has many

appearances.

 

The re-emergence of the Divine feminine & #8212; the Goddess & #8212; in the

twentieth century has begun to break down the conceptual barriers

erected by orthodox religion and social conservatism. For the first

time in two millennia, the idea of a Goddess as the central pivot of

creation is finding a welcome response. The reasons are not difficult

to seek: our technological world with its pollution and imbalanced

ecology has brought our planet face to face with its own mortality;

our insistence on the transcendence of Deity and the desacralization

of the body and the evidence of the senses threatens to exile us from

our planet.

 

& #8220;Goddess Revival

 

UCLA archaeologist Marija Gimbutas turned historical scholarship on

its head in the & #8216;70s and & #8216;80s with the research that depicted

peace-loving, cooperation-based, Goddess-worshipping societies in

ancient Europe & #8212; which were overrun in the Neolithic era by

Indo-Europeans who imposed patriarchal order. Gimbutas & #8217; vision of an

earth-friendly, feminine-centered spirituality has sparked a religious

awakening; an estimated 400,000 Americans now declare themselves

neopagans, and many more with feminist or environmentalist leanings

are helping revive the Goddess worship. & #8221;

 

 

Unte Reade, May/June 1999

 

The Goddess appears as a corrective to this world problems on many

levels. In past ages she has been venerated as the World-Soul or

spirit of the planet as well as Mother of the Earth. Her wisdom offers

a better quality of life, based on balanced nurturing of both body and

spirit, as well as satisfaction of the psyche. But we live in a world

in which the Goddess does not exist, for a vast majority of people.

They have no concept of a Deity as feminine. As Bede Griffiths has

recently written: & #8216;The feminine aspect of God as immanent in creation,

pervading and penetrating all things, though found in the Book of

Wisdom, has almost been forgotten . . . The Asian religions with their

clear recognition of the feminine aspect of God and of the power of

God, the divine shakti permeating the universe, may help us to get a

more balanced view of the created process. Today we are beginning to

discover that the earth is a living being, a Mother who nourishes us

and of whose body we are members. & #8217; . . .

 

Significantly, the major mystics of all faiths have perceived Sophia

as the bridge between everyday life and the world of the eternal,

often entering into deep accord with her purpose. But though such

mystics as the medieval Abbeses Hildegard of Bingen or the Sufi, Ibn

Arabi, are hardly considered to be & #8216;Goddess-worshippers & #8217; in the

feminist sense, they nevertheless show that the channels of the Divine

Feminine have been kept open and mediated upon by many so-called

patriarchal faiths. "

 

Caitlín Matthews, Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom

(C. Matthews, Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, The Aquarian Press, 1992, p.

5-9.)

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