I recently shared pictures of my pilgramage to India with friends of mine who are not practicing devotional service. The pictures included the bathing of the Panca-tattva deities in Mayapur. After looking at these pictures my friends expressed some confusion--"That seems strange." I was wondering how you all would personally explain the significance of deity worship.
God is everywhere and unlimited. He's so unlimited that even his personal form is everywhere and unlimited. Our mind is not, and we've spent millions of lifetimes dealing with bodies and forms. Everything is so "defined" in the world of Maya.
Ma ya: "not this", that, not that, the other. Of course, maya means "not this" mostly in the sense of "what is not", it looks like what it's not, looks like happines, love, enduring, but it's not.
However, Maya also means to classify, or analyze, measure, in other words, limit.
I'm taking it from very far away to try to say that the murti is a limited (easier to grasp) form of God, because in actuality it's not. The murti manifests from the heart of a pure devotee, like our Gaura Nitai at Audarya, or like Radharamana from Gopala Bhatta Goswami's heart's desire.
But of course that's not what you explain to your friends.
The tendency to worship and serve physically can be seen so easily and frequently around the so-called non devotees. They get the best cookies for their dogs, the best shampoos for their cars, they hang the poster of their favorite group or singer, they spend money to go to a concert or to get a piece of Elvis Presley's underwear.
We just do all this in relation to the absolute Good, try to blame us.
Like i said, God is everywhere, just like water is present everywhere in the atmosphere, or radio waves in the ether, but when you are thirsty or want to listen to the news, you just go to the tap or turn on the radio, because it's simpler for the kind of body you have. Some other plants and animals can absorb water from the atmosphere or tune into finer sound waves, but not humanity at large (some yogis can, but at the cost of so many austerities, and uttama adhikaris of course can see God in everything, but they are not exactly humanity at large).
Sridhara Maharaja says Guru is when the infinite comes down to embrace the finite, so, based on what I said before, the same could be said of Sri Murti. The mind is constantly resting on things, like a butterfly on flowers. Sri Murti is there to "channel" (boy, you're gonna be popular if you use THAT term) our mind's tendency to rest on things, and our heart's tendency to worship.
These forms correspond to a certain iconography based on scriptures, as funky as they may look to the material eyes, but we are about developing devotional eyes anyway. In Italy we say that every cockroach is beautiful to its mum's eyes, so our material friends may look at our deities and just say they're out of proportion, but we know better. Love is what their eyes lack, and the knowledge that that love begets.
Once I was in Baleswar, where Ksiracora Gopinath is. I was very happy to be there and take that khir. It was one of my dreams. At one point I was having darshan of the deities: Gopinatha was there, with those playboy eyes, looking straight at me, holding the flute in a seducing way. I was imagining the Gopis just fainting around him. Govinda was on his side. He looked up dreamingly, thinking about what to play next with his buddies, when to sneak away and meet Radha...
Madana-mohana was on the other side, he who enchants Cupid, he had a beautiful tribhanga form, very elegant, forefinger and little finger sticking up.
I just could not take my eyes off them. My eyes wet with love and knowledge. But one of your friends would probably see some rough black stone statues with stunned conch eyes and maybe dirt everywhere.
So, don't hold your breath, but then again, I don't have the love and knowledge to appreciate a painting by this or that artist, so... so easy to find parallels.
As to the upacaras, or the items of worship, most of that is tradition lost in time. The bottom line is that we offer God the best items and ingredients.
Cows are dear to Krsna (I think they should be dear to everyone) and milk is supposed to be the liquid form of Dharma, so naturally it's used in relation to God. Butter is the cream, the richest part of that milk, that gets churned. Ghi is the essence of that, and so on and so forth.
Anyway I'm getting distracted, I'll probably write more later.
I hope this little helps so far.
Dasanudasa
The tendency to worship and serve physically can be seen so easily and frequently around the so-called non devotees. They get the best cookies for their dogs, the best shampoos for their cars, they hang the poster of their favorite group or singer, they spend money to go to a concert or to get a piece of Elvis Presley's underwear.We just do all this in relation to the absolute Good, try to blame us.
Good point. I don't think people realize that this is such a systematic and thoughtful process, comprehensivly recognizing all human tendencies while providing the means to transcend material identification.
A good way to talk about deity worship is to frame it as participation in the realm of ritual. In fact this is what it is. It is a meeting ground between the material and spiritual that has its symbols representing the spiritual realm, its rules of conduct, and so on, participation in which transports one to the world of actual spiritual experience. When our ritual is explained in this way, inteligent people stop imposing their own sensibilities upon what goes on during the ritual, the bowing down, bells ringing, etc.
Audarya-lila dasa recently visited here with friends and family. One night I gave a lecture on this, and during every function thereafter all of the guest followed the lead of the regular participants and bowed, folded their hands etc., I could see that they had overcome previous inhibitions and wanted to have the full experience, thus adopting the appropriate behavior that had previously left them feling a bit awkward.
I appreciated Swami's context of "ritual". Actually, in my anthropology class we've been talking about religion and ritual too. Perhaps we could talk a bit more about that. It's really interesting to me. We discussed a few different types; ad hoc (as needed), calendrical, rites of renewal, rites of intensification, etc. I guess Deity worship would be considered a calendrical ritual because it is predictable and consists organization and preparation (daily, at certain times, various items are arranged on an arati tray and offered in a particular order, etc.)
Some notes I took:
Ritual - process; there is repetition within the ritual iteself as well as outside; the structure brings comfort and an element of control.
One thing I took away from class that was interesting were the two types of information found in public rituals:
Indexical information - the social circumstance; readily observable facts of a ritual; no need for experience or knowledge
Canonical information - the elements that make it meaningful for practitioners; symbols, idols (Deity), imagery, etc.; these can be multivocalic (mean different things to different people).
So, it would be really cool if someone could (using these little notes) explain the canonical significance of the arca-vigraha versus the indexical (statue, paint, decoration).
I would love to write something for my class about this topic, but can't quite wrap my brain around it yet.
Jason