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MOM first! But why?!
In the Vedic tradition,ritual celebrations start through an expression of gratitude and recognition to the mother, then the father, and finally the guru. The verse goes:
In and through you, mother, I identify/recognize/invoke the divine.
And then, similarly, we acknowledge our father – In and through you, father, I identify/recognize/invoke the divine.
And last but never least, we acknowledge the guru, our teacher, who removes the shroud of darkness hindering us from accessing our own enlightenment:
But why do we start with mother? Why this preferential treatment?!
Women are embodiments of shakti in the vedic tradition. Shakti stands for the organizing power that materializes, manifests, and structures. It is the power of dynamic creation. On the other hand, men are “shiva,” or silent un-folded potentiality. The ancient puranic stories tell us that this universe results from the joyful everlasting play of shiva and shakti. Men and women, on earth, are personified expressions of these cosmic energies.
Shiva, or silence, is inert and exempt from the play of time, change and transformation. He’s the ocean of full potential but that ocean remains un-folded.
Shakti, or dynamism, unfolds that silence, awakens it. It is the spark that sets creation into motion, that gets the wheels of time rolling. Shakti, personified as the goddess Kali, is time herself – impermanent, always becoming, transforming. She devours her own creation. Together, shiva and shakti, form the one ALL.
But still, WHY do mothers supersede fathers and teachers? Simply because as expressions of shakti, without mothers there would be literally nothing! Without the materializing power of shakti, there would be no existence, only an eternity of silence, deep, dark, un-manifest.
Vaidya taught us that upon conception, when the soul enters the mother’s womb, it is shiva, full of silence. It is the mother’s shakti energy that moves it into being, makes the seed sprout, so it unfolds into dynamism – gives it a body that will be fit for life on earth. Mothers as shakti are the first and only enablers of life in this sense. But more than that, mothers are bhumi, mother-earth, from conception unto our timed dissolution – they hold us, shelter us, nourish and sustain us. Mother is the powerhouse of dynamism but she is also bhumi as the platform where the highest spiritual desire, the achievement of unity or yoga, takes place: the yoga of silence and dynamism, of shiva and shakti, that occurs in shakti herself…
