Parivaar🌺

Thank you!

There isn’t anything wrong with the essence of motherness or fatherless. All living beings have atleast a mother. And mother, or the personified creation source, is an available paradigm to relate all of reality to God, both its apparent dual thing-like experiences and formless emptiness type experiences. And everything in between. It’s all mother for everything gives birth to everything else and it’s constant. The love a parent has to a child is a beautiful way to relate to God. And a very high vibrational way of relating your place in nature in the constant impermanence everywhere. Relating to god as a person is ultra personal. There are no rules to relate to god in anyway. But if you still operate like a person in the world, it’s helpful to relate to god with a name and form (which is inseparable from the formless just as you are) so all experiences can be accommodated from all perceptions arising from personhood. If you have bad associations with parents, you can relate to god as a friend, a lover, a child, a boss, a king, a pet, a servant, a teacher, as aliveness, etc. You can see God in all people and carry your devotion there and rise all the living beings around you with the love everything deserves. You mentioned terrible, terrible to who? Isn’t reality terrible sometimes? I see no point in denying this reality from the aspect of God. God is the only reality after all. Why not embrace this aspect of God? Not all natures in the world are for you and me. Suffering is a reality deep within every living being. When one learns to actually surrender our will to God (nature, reality) with love, suffering is less. You already are reality, it’s not escapable. Shiva (the formless god you described) and Shakti are inseparable beyond duality or nonduality. Devotion is another expression of life, but a very beautiful and useful one. Is it necessary? Nope. But it definitely adds a certain magic to this experience of existence

Thank you for your sincere response. Did you listen to her say humanize the divine? This means see divine as a human mother or father, if it is understood correctly. Clearly a human cannot identify with a dog as his/her mother. Correct me if I'm wrong. What if the human mother/father are true monsters, then the divine becomes associated with monstrous beings. Perhaps your mother/father experience was divine, but for some, it was pure evil. Best not to humanize the divine. As for suffering, that's either karma or doing violence to the self. If one suffers, it's the result of past actions or recalling past sufferring. If one can relieve suffering, do it, but no need to see the divine as something that disturbs the atman, e.g., mother/father. Suffering stops when the divine is see in all things including suffering. Best to see the divine as energy that can be used for constructive or destructive purposes. No need to humanize the divine. No need to worship anything but to realize truth, which is the divine. Some require a god to worship. Some recognize that s/he is god. That's the point being made. Hariom tat sat.

@@2967_ Haha I see the confusion now. youre equivocating the word humanize as meaning literal human. She doesn’t mean that god IS a human. It’s not as if the god being worshipped has a human genome, living in some town, with a human job, with literal human psychology. To see god as a mother is to humanize. By this she means relating to god with a like-nature as you are being a human. It’s easier to relate to the divine as a person from a person perspective. Of course, you could over analyze this. With Shakti nondualism/vivekananda “man is god” sense, where everything, nothing, and every vibration in between is every other thing and all of this is mother, emptiness and fullness a like. Mother is entirely a sand grain, as much as she is entirely the universe, as much as she is the subtle phenomena’s of the mind, as much as she is the noumena of phenomena, as much as she is pure awareness/undifferentiated consciousness. Much like people have different aspects to us or have different parts to our body, or call the same thing by a different name or from a different perspective. But this is an advanced understanding of Shakti that a saint like Ramakrishna would understand and speak from. Think about how much easier it is to contain information about people compared to a textbook concept. If your name was Bob (😂?), and we were buds, your name would trigger a whole bunch of associations relating to our friendship and they wouldn’t necessarily be expressed as verbalized thoughts but also feelings and impressions. People are very complex, but this complexity comes together in a simple way our minds can apprehend in a way that isolated theory on human nature with many parts can not. The deity is to replace theory. The mere mention of Hari should stand your hairs on end with the immensity of impressions this or any other name of god is. It’s a helpful conceptualization for the same formless reality you are talking about. The purpose of Bhakti/tantra sadhana is to build this kind of relationship to reality to our mind in the same way we would to a human (or pet, or fictional character, etc) would do for us. Infinite ways to relate to the divine. The entire reality is divine. So one embraces fearlessly our super individual subjective relative sense of reality and tethers it to the absolute. This just so happens to bring great peace and a certain vibrance to life. It’s not a paradigm that is necessary, it’s just helpful for spiritual practice and cultivating love which is a more direct route to those more popular shiva (pure awareness/formless god/being/etc) nondual or mystical experiences. ❤️