Sri Meru Navavarana Puja (Sri Vidya)

[Nuralshamal]

Dear Dao Bums,

Let me share some of my experiences with the highest level of Sri Vidya: the Navavarana Puja done on the Sri Meru (3D pyramid version of the well-known 2D version Sri Yantra also known as Sri Chakra).

I'll share in 3 points:

1) Intro to Sri Vidya and Sri Meru

2) My own path to Sri Vidya and experiences from each level

3) My experiences with the Sri Meru Navavarana Puja

 

1) Intro to Sri Vidya and Sri Meru

Sri Vidya translates literally as "auspicious knowledge" and is related to Goddess Worship.

Sri Vidya has been kept secret for millenia because of its unique methods allowing the accomplishment of both yoga (spiritual liberation) and bhoga (material enjoyment and success).

Sri Vidya has several origin stories:
1) It was given by Shiva to his most beloved consort Shakti as the ultimate means of acquiring everything both spiritually and materially,
2) It was given to saint Agastya as a boon by Vishnu's Hayagriva form, because Agastya asked for a way common people could easily and quickly reach ultimate liberation without renunciation and multiple-life spiritual practice,
3) It was given directly from the joint incarnation of the Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu & Shiva) Dakshinamurti to a student, who then passed it on to Parashurama (Vishnu's 6th incarnation out of 10 incarnations).

Adi Shankaracharya a very famous preacher of advaita vedanta & an unparalleled yogi personally installed Sri Yantra in temples all across India.

Sri Vidya gives unique methods of reaching both bhukti (material enjoyment and success) and mukti (spiritual liberation) in this current incarnation.

What is then the Sri Yantra / Sri Chakra? It's a 2D version that is called "Yantra Raja" or the "King of all Yantras". The 3D version is called Maha Meru and is in a pyramidal shape.

The story is that this yantra holds all other yantras in it, it contains all Gods, all Goddesses, all Gurus, all spiritual powers (siddhi) as well as all the necessary means for complete fullfillment of purushartha (dharma, artha, kama and moksha, the 4 goals of human life).
 

2) My own path to Sri Vidya and experiences from each level

I was exposed to Hinduism from early childhood, and it was always a big part of my life in early childhood as well as my teenage years. This was due to family.

In my twenties I followed along the footsteps of my family and got mantra diksha (mantra initiation) and performed a "maha-purascharan" which in my case took 4 years of daily mala japa (mantra chanting with a rosary) to complete.

At the completion of each purascharana, like clockwork, that very night I got a dream of the form of Almighty God I was worshipping. I would get life guidance.

After performing 6 purascharans and getting these dreams I was quite content spiritually. At that moment I came into contact with SKY (Simplified Kundalini Yoga) which is a direct energy and transmission based meditation system.

SKY blew my socks off; on top of deep meditation, I felt it gave "tangible benefits". By meditating on the chakras I got much better health, sleep, energy levels, mood and even better meditation than before, whereas with mantra japa I got a dream once or twice per year, but other than that it was adrishta-phala (unseen fruit) for me. No visible, tangible result.

The tangible benefits of SKY reeled me in, because it seemed to give much more much easier and with lesser effort, so over time I slowly tapered down my japa until I completely stopped.

After several years, my hindu family member sent me an invitation to an online Sri Vidya workshop with mantra diksha. It had no impact on me whatsoever - inside myself I thought "I've already tried mainstream religious hinduism with my years and years of mantra japa. It's a great way, but it seemed that SKY was simply superior in all ways.

However, for some reason I read a bit on the webpage over a few days, just to give my family member and Sri Vidya the benefit of the doubt. At that point I saw a photo of Bala Tripura Sundari (the teenage form of the Goddess) and something deep in my soul stirred.

 

I couldn't say what it was, but I felt something very deep and profound stirring. I felt a kind of attraction unlike anything I've ever felt before.

After a few days of this deep feeling I decided to give it a go.

Since then I've completed the rituals and mantras of each level of the Sri Vidya given by Parashurama and freely shared with the public by Guru Amritananda Natha. It's taken me several years of blood, sweat and tears to complete, it's been quite tough and demanding to be honest, but worth it.

Level 1: Removal of Obstacles, Starting the Worship of the Goddess, Protection
Ganapati the elephant God removes obstacles from your spiritual and material path and grants stability
Bala Tripura Sundari is the teenage version of the Goddess, so you start your approach towards the Goddess
Chamunda (Durga) gives you material and spiritual protection

Level 2: Attraction, Joy, Love & Acceptance
By worshipping Raja Shyamala Devi, the feminine side of the Goddess, you become enormeously attractive. In a group of the opposite sex, at least one from that group will be attracted to you after you've worshipped Raja Shyamala.

It gives you profound pleasure in meditation. Further, it attracts more goodness towards you, materially and spiritually.

In the end, this attraction and pleasure is said to actually be the Goddess' way of attracting you further towards her!

Level 3: Healing, Protection, Destroying Bad
Here you worship Varahi Devi, the masculine side of the Goddess. You heal your physical body, destroy black magic, protect yourself from enemies and spirits.

You destroy and push away badness and bad energy from your spiritual and material life.

Level 4:
Here you finally worship Tripura Sundari in the Sri Meru with Navavarana Puja with her panchadashi mantra.

Level 5:
You get a higher mantra for Maha Tripura Sundari called Maha Shodashi, it's simply an add-on to the Navavarana Puja, and a big level up spiritually when you meditate with it (japa)

I've detailed some of my personal experiences with each level in this thread here: https://www.thedaobums.com/topic/53122-sri-vidya-yantra-mantra-tantra-mudra-guru-karunamaya/

3) My experiences with the Sri Meru Navavarana Puja
I've recently started my first mandala (41 days) of Navarana Puja.

I'm blown away!

There are 9 layers or levels in the Meru, each called an avarana.

The first 3 levels are one group and represents you as a seperate individual
Level 1 represents the waking state and the feet. By worshipping it you're no longer helplessly thrown around by 8 negative feeling as a spontaneous and uncontrollable reaction to what you see and experience in the world, namely anger, lust, delusion, jealousy, greed, envy and possesiveness. Furthermore, it gives the 8 siddhis.

Level 2 represents the dreaming state and the thighs. By worshipping it you eventually gain control of your dreams and get guidance in your dreams. You get aligned to cosmic cycles, namely the cycle of the moon. It is also said to satisfy all desires when worshipped.

Level 3 represents the deep sleep state and muladhara chakra. It is said to end all agitation. 

 

The next 3 levels are one group and represents the powers working in the universe
Level 4 represents the 14 worlds (chaturdashi loka), where we live in the 8th world (Bhu Loka or the Earth), as well as the swadisthana chakra. It is said to bless you with all auspiciousness.

Level 5 represents the 5 karmendriyas (action organs) and the 5 gyanendriyas (knowledge organs) and the manipura chakra. It is said to bless you with all wealth.

Level 6 represents the 5 elements and their 5 attributes and anahata chakra. It gives all protection.

The final 3 levels represent Almighty God and his powers

Level 7 represents the 8 most basic constituents of energy, the first outpouring from transcendent reality into primal, material existence, as well as the vishuddi chakra. It gives all healing. Further, it gives astral powers (seeing the past and the future, seeing every on planet Earth through your third eye, and later it gives the power of astral travel, i.e. leaving your physical body behind and travelling freely in the universe with your astral body. Read more here https://forum.amritananda.org/d/349-spiritual-reality-meditation-journey-within-by-guruji)

Level 8 represents iccha (will), gyana (knowledge) and kriya (action) shakti, as well as agnya chakra. It gives all siddhis.

Level 9 represents complete, pure bliss, God, sat-chit-ananda and the sahasrara chakra. It gives God realisation. When you add the Maha-Shodashi section on top of the regular puja, also on the same level of the Meru, it also opens dwadasangham chakra (above your head), allowing you to reach Thuriya-Teetha or the state even more beyond.

My Personal And Tangible Experience
The Navavarana puja takes between 1.5 and 2 hours to complete, so it's really, really long compared to the earlier pujas, where the longest (Varahi puja & Varahi tarpanam) took me about 50 minutes.

The very first day I tried it, I got kind of tired because there are so many preparatory steps, new and unknown mantras as well as parts of the vedas and much more.

However, the higher I reached on the pyramid, the higher I found a feeling of bliss and pleasure increasing at the corresponding chakra.

When I reached the throat chakra, it was so intense that I could only describe it as a mix of deep meditation, ultimate sex, explosive orgasm and feeling drunk. When I reached the agnya, sahasrara and dwadasangham chakra, I was so slow in moving the spoon to give the Meru milk, because I was so incredibly blissed out.

It isn't like that every day, but the more days of the 41 day mandala I complete, the stronger and more intense it grows, and stabilises more and more from day to day.

I'm so incredibly surprised! I really feel "it was worth it" to go through years and years of blood, sweat, tears, rituals, mantra japa, purascharana and much more to get here.

So far my feeling is that they weren't just marketing when they said the Meru is the ultimate.. I feel they were right!

All the best!

Sri Matre Namaha (salutations to the Goddess)


 

[dino]

so you have all 8 siddhis,wanna share?

[Bhathen]

@Nuralshamal do you know the origin or time period in history of these practices? Not a history person, but curious to know if the worship of female gods was predominant for a certain period of time before Adi Shankaracharya.

 

Interested to know what aspects of the self these Gods represent? Or are they something else entirely?

Edited November 29, 2023 by Bhathen

[Nuralshamal]

8 hours ago, Bhathen said:

@Nuralshamal do you know the origin or time period in history of these practices? Not a history person, but curious to know if the worship of female gods was predominant for a certain period of time before Adi Shankaracharya.

 

Interested to know what aspects of the self these Gods represent? Or are they something else entirely?

Hey, @Bhathen, let me try to answer your very interesting questions

I'll do it in 3 parts:
1) Intro 
2) Female Gods Predominant
3) What do these Gods represent?
 

1) Intro about time periods
I personally don't know for sure, but I remember reading somewhere (or maybe it was a documentary I saw) that they've found yantras inscribed on rocks and stones all the way back to 10.000 years before Christ.

Furthermore, if I remember correctly, it seems there was a worldwide trend of the cult of the "Divine Feminine" for many years in world history, in both Europe, Africa and Asia I believe they've found different cult objects etc., also in India of course.

I do have a hypothesis of my own using the Cosmology of the Danish mystic Martinus as to why the Divine feminine was predominant in ancient times, whereas later there was a sudden worldwide shift more towards the masculine and patriarchal ways.

2) Female Gods Predominant
According to Martinus, the microcosmos and macrocosmos idea is central to understanding reality, which he describes as "life within life within life". In his perspective the Earth itself is a living being undergoing its own spiritual evolution, similarly to us, albeit it at a macrocosmic level (from our perspective). Evolution happens via karma and reincarnation from minerals, to plants, to animals, to true human beings and beyond into the spiritual worlds.

He says that we all carry both poles, the masculine and the feminine.

As minerals and plants, we're double poled and therefore much more "at one" with the Divine.

As animals one pole stagnates, and the other dominates completely. According to him, spiritual evolution as a human being is simply growing these two poles back into balance. That's what will take us from animal to human being.

A man grows his feminine pole to match his masculine; when this happens he gets cosmic consciousness and is ready to move on to other worlds. Similarly with women, just the reverse.

We're all living cells in the body of the Earth.

I believe the reason Female Gods were dominant across the world in ancient times was because the Earth itself is a female. That's why the Earth was called "Gaia", "Mother Earth" and other feminine names when worshipped in many ancient cults.

As cells in the Earth, we represent and follow the lines of feeling and thinking produced by the Earth. With the Earth being predominantly feminine in ancient times, feminine ways of seeing the universe and life predominated. That is, Feminine Gods.

Some thousand years ago, the Earth entered from being mostly "one-poled" and feminine, into the phase of having to upgrade her masculine pole, in order to reach cosmic consciousness herself (which according to Martinus will happen in about 2000-3000 years in our time, however, it only feels as about 15 minutes for the Earth).

When her maculine pole got activated, at first it's quite crude; it's about war, domination, power etc. That's when all the masculine values and perspective started to dominate more on a global scale, and we got the patriarchal religions (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, Islam etc) (not to say these religions are crude, it's just highlighting the masculine aspect. I personally grew up very much revering all 3 religions, and still do to this day. It's simply to give an example of patriarchy focusing more on hierarchy, power etc).

The "left path" or feminine path is more powerful and gives magical powers and material results much quicker, because feminine logic is simply more available in the atmosphere of this planet, due to having dominated for many Eons of time.

The "right path" or masculine path is newer, is more strict, more about discipline and morals, and doesn't easily produce spiritual powers and material results. It gives more "an inner" result, e.g. patience, forgiveness etc, the virtues preached by the more patriarchal religions. Further, the patriarchal religions all in some way contribued to removing the "old ways" of magical powers from the world as best they could, e.g. through witch burning, the inquisition etc.

All the above is simply my own personal hypothesis and analysis.

3) What do these Gods represent?

Okay, so what do all the Gods and Goddesses in the Sri Yantra represent?

Here are some of my own perspectives so far.

I would say you can view these Gods in several different ways. How I personally see it:
1) A material, scientific explanation of the universe,
2) A both spiritual and scientific map of your body, the universe and God (the microcosmos and macrocosmos idea),
3) Different energies available to be used for different purposes

Let's start with the first one: 1) A material, scientific explanation of the universe.
In this perspective, the pyramid is grouped into 5 "Gods": Ganesha in the lower right corner, Surya in the lower left corner, Vishnu in the upper left corner, Shiva in the upper right corner, and Shakti at the top of the pyramid.

In ancient times they cloaked science in religious terms to help lay people understand. Materially Ganesha is simply the physical Earth. Surya is the Sun. Vishnu is the universe itself, Shiva is God or awareness inside each being, Shakti is the interplay in between all these factors.

In this perspective, each avarana is simply a scientific mapping of life:
1st level: physical everyday life, you go about your business, and you compulsively react to sense-impressions in 8 ways (anger, delusion, envy, lust, jealousy, greed, pride etc). You're like an animal impulsively being thrown around by life with no control. However, you can rise above this by self-development, by developing patience, kindness, forgiveness etc.

2nd level: the dream world. This was much more a factor in ancient times than today. You see both in the Old and New Testament, as well as the Qur'an, people often had very vivid and lively dreams. Tribal people to this day still do. So this level simply scientifically describes what goes on when you're dreaming; there are 16 factors present in a dream: 5 senses, sense of a body, of a self, of form, of name etc. They simply scientifically "mapped" what a person experiences while dreaming.

3rd level: deep sleep. This is when we black out and have no concept of time. We sometimes feel like we close our eyes, and 1 minute later it's morning, even though we've sleept 8 hours. Where did time go? You don't feel the passing of time in deep sleep. However, these great ancient yogis still mapped exactly what 8 factors are present during deep sleep in order to explain this aspect of reality.

4th level: there are more planets than just Earth in this galaxy. Some are on lower evolutionary stages than Earth, some are on a higher stage. Somehow the ancient yogis mapped which planets in our galaxy have life and described it. There are 14 worlds, Earth is no. 8. There are 7 planets below us, and 6 planets above us.

Earth is in "the middle" in its evolution, but also physically if you look at the galaxy. We're in the middle between the galaxy center and the most outer periphery. The lower planets are further out from the middle than Earth, whereas the higher planets are closer to the center of the galaxy. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what Danish Martinus also says.

5th level: there are 5 action senses employed in daily living, and 5 knowledge senses.

 

6th level: there are 5 elements in this material universe, and these have 5 attributes.

 

7th level: everything at the base level is composed of energy and vibration, there are 8 basic forms of vibration as the foundational building blocks for this universe.

 

8th level: underlying creation are immaterial principles governing creation.

 

9th level: immanent yet transcendent, penetrating everything and everyone, yet above and beyond everything and everyone, here lies the great mystery responsible for creating, upholding and destroying creation. We could call it God, the Goddesss, the Divine, they called it Sat-Chit-Ananda. It's eternally mysterious, yet what you can say about it is that it contains truth, consciousness and bliss.

2) A both spiritual and scientific map of your body, the universe and God (the microcosmos and macrocosmos idea)
If we go this explanation, we take the scientific and material explanation from above, yet now we apply the microcosmic and macrocosmic idea to it. Creation repeats the same principles at each level. This means that the Meru describes your physical body, your energetic body, nature and the universe, every level thinkable.

Making it "spiritual" simply means you can awaken each of these divine powers of the universe within yourself as well. You can awaken the energies in your physical body, energetic body, mind and soul.

You can become a "junior God" or miniature God. You can open your third eye, astral travel, control the weather, heal diseases, predict the future, command spirits, go beyond life and death and much more.

In this case each "God" or "Goddess" represents the powers of the universe, and the Meru allows you to awaken those same powers in yourself.

Instead of simply being a material, scientific explanation or theory, you can now spiritually experience each of these principles actively and practically.

3) Different energies available to be used for different purposes

In a very pragmatic and practical perspective, the Meru is simply a tool for improving practical, day-to-day living. Using it you can channel the powers of the universe for whatever need you currently have.

It's pretty similar to the above idea, however now it's seen from a non-religious lense, a simple, practical tool.

You can "order" more money from the universe, health, success, love, the weather needed for your specific purpose and much more.

It's a magical tool for "managing" and improving your life however you wish to.

 

Conclusion
These are some of the ways I personally view it so far.

Feel free to comment or question more, if there are any specifics you'd like to dive into deeper, or maybe start to dive in to some of the individual Goddesses and what they can do 

Edited November 29, 2023 by Nuralshamal

[Bhathen]

Thanks @Nuralshamal. I might need some time to dwell deeper into the details of your post and maybe discuss the Devi Mahatmyam later.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Bhathen

[Nuralshamal]

On 29.11.2023 at 6:57 PM, Bhathen said:

Thanks @Nuralshamal. I might need some time to dwell deeper into the details of your post and maybe discuss the Devi Mahatmyam later.

Sure, let's do it

I don't know too much about the Devi Mahatmyam to be honest, mostly what I learnt from Devipuram.

What I grew up with was more of the Ramayana. But I do see some commonalities in all mythological stories from around the world relating the same basic truths about the ego's journey back to the soul, and the soul's journey back to Almighty God.

Regarding the Devi Mahatmyam, my interpretation would be that it's a joint story relaying multiple truths at the same time:
1) actual explanation of things in the material world and material universe cloaked in mythological language,
2) inner explanation for stages your soul goes through on the path to liberation,
3) actual historical facts and accounts weaved in here and there.

We can explore more together if you want to 

[Chang dao ling]

On 12/3/2023 at 5:31 PM, Nuralshamal said:

Sure, let's do it

I don't know too much about the Devi Mahatmyam to be honest, mostly what I learnt from Devipuram.

What I grew up with was more of the Ramayana. But I do see some commonalities in all mythological stories from around the world relating the same basic truths about the ego's journey back to the soul, and the soul's journey back to Almighty God.

Regarding the Devi Mahatmyam, my interpretation would be that it's a joint story relaying multiple truths at the same time:
1) actual explanation of things in the material world and material universe cloaked in mythological language,
2) inner explanation for stages your soul goes through on the path to liberation,
3) actual historical facts and accounts weaved in here and there.

We can explore more together if you want to 

Do you practiced astakshari mantra ?

[Nuralshamal]

@Chang dao ling

I've not practiced astakshari mantra.

I've a tiny bit of experience with dwadakshari mantra. I felt it brought peace. But maybe that was also because I prayed to God that it would bring peace to the souls of my ancestors.

I found it very powerful.