Re: pūjā & abhiṣeka
Originally Posted by
Divine Kala
I sincerely love and adore Shiva and all the many manifestations that Parvati Ma takes but whenever I perform worship I feel like a fraud. Do you have any suggestions on how I can deal with this?
It is not intended that everybody perform an elaborate puja with lot of display or ritualism. You are not alone in the feeling of commiting a fraud while doing puja, since very few people would be actually be able to perfrom a lengthy puja with 16/64 upaacharas with correct mindset throughout. Puja more often than not becomes a mechanical display of gestures and mantras. I have seen many people doing extremely lengthy pujas and homams mainly for pomp and display. With practice anything is possible, one can may be sit for 6 hours doing constant homas and puja, but without any real feeling and experience of the divine within. It would be completely worthless endevour. These sata-chandi, sahasra-chandi, lakhsa-chandi, koti-chandi homams (doing homam on entire saptasathi 100,1000 or 100000 etc times )which are very popular down here are mainly to serve this purpose of pomp and display.
In my case I was not asked to perform puja but do the japa at least once. I have slight experience with pujas, but I have not performed the puja associated with this japa because it is extremely lengthy and I am sure I will be in danger of dry display if I perform it without preparation.
In tantra, japa has been taken as the primary vehicle. With japa and meditation love and expereince of God automatically should be felt more and more inside onself. When one is established in such an experience & feeling for God, puja will become a natural adoration of the same.
I think for most of us beginners, daily japa on fixed times and as much as possible is the key. If you are adept and comfortable with meditation, even better. Apart from doing japa in the morning-evening fixed times, one can do it any other time during the day when one has time to spare.
You can do a very simple puja of offering lamp, incense and food after japa in your shrine and avoid any elaborate ritual for the moment.
Do puja only when you are comfortable with it. One can not rule out "osmosis" of christain practices, but in that case, I would assume you would also find temple rituals, attending temple etc in vain also.
What is Here, is Elsewhere. What is not Here, is Nowhere.
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