On Ishtadevata & Meditation

[Guest guest]

Dear Girish,

This is in response to your querry on Ishtadevata and Meditation appeared in the Ramakrishna list today. Here is my humble opinion on the subject.

Hindus are, in a way, the most fortunate souls among the human races as they have a very rich and unique heritage of spiritual seekers and illummined spiritual leaders among them all the time. They have laid down limitless and proven spiritual paths also to Hindus to follow to reach God.

But this abundance of spiritual wealth baffles many a times a seeker in his/her initial days. Let us take the case of the sacred spiritual emblems or objects of meditation available to Hindus in the forms of Gods and Goddesses. We have no dearth of them! We have millions to choose. Gods and Goddesses are the objects of meditation with form and with attributes.

We can even select objects of meditation without specific forms and specific attributes, if it suits to us. This sort of supermarket type of show-casing of infinite numbers of sacred objects of worship and meditation in Hinduism and the limitless freedom to follow various paths is the beauty of our religion. But this beauty can be a curse if we are not properly guided to select one path for our personal spiritual practice.

Neverthless, we can overcome this meloncholy by discarding the general approach to religion similar to a mere window-shopping. We have to become a bit serious in our spiritual lives. Serious pursuits of spirituality was always there in our religion. But, it was Swami Vivekananda, who took the message of leading a serious spiritual life to the masses. All his books will give us a powerful attraction and inspiration to lead a spiritual life.

In the contemporary world, if we are seriously interested in spiritual lives and if we want to follow a path in line with Swami Vivekananda's teachings, there are many ways to get guided in the right direction. We can approach any of the monks in the Organisation started by the great Swami Vivekananda; I mean the Ramakrishna Mission and Ramakrishna Math or any monk or nun in the Ramakrishna Order.

As a tradition, the President of Ramakrsishna Math and Mission and the Vice Presidents are empowered to "initiate" the earnest spiritual seekers into spiritual lives. They will guide you and instruct you to follow and meditate on a specific "Ishtadevata" and would impart you an "ishta mantra" to repeat during meditation for the rest of your life. The mantra normally is very short with a name of a God and some sacred syllables. The President of Ramakrishna Mission normally initiate people by giving Ramakrishna Mantra for meditation on Sri Ramakrishna.

The person, who gives the mantra is the GURU and the person who receives the mantra is the DISCIPLE.

But until you find such an opportunity, you can worship Lord Shiva and meditate on Him. There are a lot of famous and short mantras on Lord Shiva. You can repeat one among them and pray sincerely to Shiva to show His kindness to get a Human Guru to take you to spiritual realizations.

A large number of aspirants believe that Swami Vivekananda is none other than an Incarnation of Lord Shiva. Also, they believe that it was Lod Shiva, who incarnated as Buddha, Shankaracharya and now in the modern times as Swami Vivekananda. I shall also pray for you in my humble way to get an enligtened Guru, who will guide you to God.

Prakash Kamanat