Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Siva force is less comprehensible to the Christianised Western
mind, which invented a devil to perform those functions of Unity it
disapproved of and which it did not really understand. Among the
many 'works of the devil,' remember, were anything that had a
tendency to reconcile opposites: science, for example, or sex.
Saraswati is the goddess of music, as well as wisdom and
inspiration. Kali is the implacable goddess of death, whose thirst a
river of blood will never quench. They are one and the same -
consorts,
shakti
forces activating two gods, who in turn are attributes
of an ultimate truth.
One plus one is always three, not two, the process of one becoming
two implying a third presence: the force of becoming itself.
Pythagoras explained it, as did the ancient Egyptians he'd learned it
from. Such ineluctable features of the universe, say the Vedas, are
the inexplicable unity, something susceptible only to direct
experience, the merging of subject and object - but they can be
portrayed through the mystery of number, and through the physical
forms of number: music composed according to the laws of
harmonics, and architecture based on the understanding of
proportion and harmony that comes from studying natural laws
just as clearly evident out in the galaxies as they are deep within
atomic structures or Mandelbrot's fourth-dimensional sets.
If you drop a chunk of burning camphor down into the deep
darkness of a well in Kashi Karavat, a shrine near the golden temple
of Vishvanatha, you can glimpse the image of its god; and beside
this dim and awesome form you may also see, in that pulsing,
variegated, endless night, the coldly glinting metal of a huge and
sinister sword. This was the tool provided for devotees to sacrifice
themselves, when the moment arrived, in a final all-consuming
passion to please the fierce Lord. No one is permitted to descend
into that well anymore, a Brahmin priest told me.
Rivers of blood, rivers of life: Benares is where you are supposed
to learn to resolve mighty opposites.
On the banks of Mother Ganga, the sadhus sit motionless for days,
meditating on the funeral pyres that continuously burn alongside
them, and meditating on the great life-giving waters into whose
