Madhu and Kaitabha vs. God and the parents

[Guest guest]

Dear Holy Family,

 

Every soul knows who its true parents are, but when it is born on

Earth, and takes its first breath of the "air of forgetfulness", it

screams bloody murder because the freedom, love, and understanding it

had a moment before is gone, giving place to suffocating confinement

in a small body, and total ignorance of what is going on.

 

What remains for a newly embodied soul, in place of a clear image of

its Divine Parents, is a sort of psychological "space" that would

contain the images of Divine Father and Divine Mother---if they could

be remembered. And remembering Them can be a life's work for the

embodied soul, or jiva.

 

When the newborn baby opens its eyes, it usually sees its mother, and

soon it meets its father as well. To the child, the human parents

seem all-powerful, all providing, and all-loving, so they very soon

fill that archetypal "space" reserved for Divine Mother and Divine Father.

 

Western psychology has been aware of this for a few decades, but older

and wiser cultures have known it for much longer, and many of them

have provided ceremonials and teachings which, at the appropriate

time, help to ween the jiva of its relationship to the parents as God

and Goddess, and reintroduce the real and eternal Parents.

 

In our modern cultures, we are left to do this work ourselves. We

have to somehow approach our true Parents, request Them to occupy that

"archetypal space" which is theirs eternally and by right, and somehow

systematically withdraw the "God image"-albeit it unconscious-from our

perfectly innocent, but bewildered parents.

 

This is work that should be done by realitive young people, so that

they can get on with their lives-perhaps to be parents themselves. But

it is often the case that even old folks are still wrestling with the

problem of expecting too much from the parents and too little from

God, while perhaps watching hours of soap opreas---taking some solace

in seeing their problems depicted on the screen.

 

I know that what I'm writing sounds dry as dust, so I'll add something

more personal. My father is still living, but my mother passed away a

couple of years ago. When I visited her at the end of her life, she

was, for me, just an ordinary woman who had given birth to me.

 

That didn't detract in any way from the love I felt for her, on the

contrary, I then fully understood all that she had done for me. And

that it had all been done by an ordinary jiva, not an all powerful

goddess, who struggled and sacrificed, just as we all must do on this

Earth. I had no (unconscious) divine expectations from her, and so I

could appreciate her true gift to me, and love her profoundly for it.

 

She told me, for the first time then, that because she had had to work

so hard during the early years of my life, she had always had a sense

of guilt that she had not been a good enough mother to me.

 

But I assured her that she had been the best of all possible mothers,

and that I could think of nothing that she could have done better. It

was a hard sell, but I think that, at last, she believed me, and I

like to think that she was then able to accept her life as well-lived

and complete.

 

Some days later I was told by her caretaker that that morning, my

mother had turned to her and said very peacefully, and very sweetly,

"I don't want to be here any more". Then she lay back on the pillow

and closed her eyes. The caretaker said that during the following

hour all her vital signs slowed, and then ceased.

 

The great poet of the Mother Goddess, Ramprasad, said that we are all

children playing and learning and loving on this beautiful Earth, and

that "Mother Kali is my Mother and Shiva is my Father".

 

Respectfully,

 

Tanmaya