Yoga Sutra Reflections Session 72: Kundalini Shakti – III

Integrating Ancient Wisdom in Modern Life: The Tirtha and The Temple

1. Indian Scriptures and Sanatan Dharma are guiding us from this objective world to move towards self-realisation. All our temples are guiding us how we can grow from our animal nature to Universal Self.
2. The tirtha and the temple have their own science, and that science has specific rules for the whole process. The second step follows the first, and the third follows the second; even if one step is missed, the result will not be the same. It should also be understood that once a civilization is highly developed, when science is properly understood, the ritual and methodology becomes simplified, they don’t remain complex.
3. Temples are not places where God resides, they are means for us. Godliness is all over the space, everywhere, but to be so overwhelmed, so possessed and enchanted by it that every single moment becomes flooded with Him needs courage, needs guts, needs a heart uncluttered – open, available, receptive. We have created a condensed environment called the temple to experience the Godliness within us. These temples are not to find God, but to find Godliness within us. Religion is reverence for life. And if you don’t have reverence for life, you cannot conceive the whole of existence – the trees and the birds and the animals – as different expressions of the same energy. In the source we are brothers and sisters with the animals and the birds and the trees; and if you start feeling this brotherhood, this sisterhood, you will find the first taste of what religion is.
4. Why do humans need so many temples and places of worship when the whole universe is the temple? This colourful, stupendous, vast temple called life is already created around us, for us. Who is the creator?
5. Temple is a map and guidance from our Rishis for our Kundalini Energy to move upward through our spine. It is asleep in our Muladhara Chakra. It will pass through each Chakras and purify and transcend our lower to higher.
6. Architecture of the temples are such that we pass through 7 different doors, which represent our Chakras in the body. If at each door we enter the temple with self-awareness, we raise our Kundalini Energy from lower Chakras to Higher Chakras so that we transcend ourselves from lower to higher.
7. At the entrance we enter as a body which is made up of Panchmahabhoot and when we move in the Womb Chamber we become emptiness. We are reborn here. Then we start growing in Consciousness. From here our vertical growth starts. We realise our Bharma Form. Once we realise our Bharma Form we connect ourselves to the Universal Self through Sahastra Chakra. This is time we become capable of seeing ourselves.
8. Going to temple is not rituals or formality or asking for our desires to be fulfilled but to find Godliness within us.