During a discussion with a friend recently, we talked about how he’s seen beautiful miracles and been ‘rescued’ several times when he chanted a mantra meant to invoke a certain Goddess. When I asked why he didn’t chant regularly despite seeing the difference, he said that he found it hard because he couldn’t surrender to another ‘being’. It felt like he had to depend on an external force to be protected and rescued, and that just felt wrong. ‘I relate to Taosim more, it just takes Nature as God’. The next morning I woke up with an insight about this, and I felt others might resonate with it, so I share. (Name changed for privacy)

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There are people who see you at work. How much do they know you? But then, do they ‘not’ know you? How much do your parents know you? Everyone in a way, ‘knows’ you, but everyone, including anyone who knows you ‘very well’, only sees a part of you, one ‘face’ of you. When someone says I know Aditya, or I like Aditya, they’re not professing to knowing all of you or loving all of you, because to know another human being, or even ourselves for that matter, is inconceivable.

Then how can we ever know or understand divinity? If you have a dozen ‘faces’, the divine has infinite. You are one of those faces, I am another. But just like someone who just sees you sipping coffee at Starbucks once a week knows a very ‘small’ face of you, and someone who sees you in your element knows you more, there are some ‘faces’ which are more reflective of that divinity than others are.

That’s why people fight about God. It’s the same as one person saying Aditya is an athlete, another saying he’s Marathi, another saying he’s an engineer, and then all fighting over who knows him better. They’re all partially right and mostly wrong because he’s all this and more.

Even ‘nature’ as they see God in Taoism, is Goddess Bhumi, in Hinduism and we pray to her every time we ‘hurt’ her to build a house. So you’re just seeing the same thing but without a face, just the same as if someone knew you through your code at work and had never met you. For them you are just the code.

Now one of the biggest reasons you cannot surrender to the goddess is because while you crave for the love of a mother, you’ve also experienced a mother to be manipulative and hurtful. So you’re resentful towards her, because you believe she demands submission (as opposed to surrender) and you’re afraid you’ll have to place your self esteem at her feet. That’s not true. This is THEmother. She loves you unconditionally, whether you worship her or not. She will take corrective action if you go off the path, to bring you back – if you surrender and ask her to keep you on the path, but it is never through anger or hate, it is love.

This is not to say one can only surrender to the Mother, because there are multiple facets. It just depends on what facet you can connect with the most deeply, just like your son might also be your subordinate at work and maybe your ‘partner’ when you play badminton. But maybe to relate to him, you see him as a friend, because maybe that relationship gives you access to the most parts of his personality. Whereas his wife may be able to access him most deeply in the role of a husband.

Ultimately as I said, you also are nothing but a face of that same Divinity. But when we allow ourselves to surrender to the Divine through a ‘face’, we allow ourselves to indirectly get more deeply in touch with our own divinity, and eventually remove all wrong identification.

And on that note, how can I resist leaving you with this?