For all those who think ritualistic form of worship is some juvenile past time, Swami Chinmayananda, the great master of Advaita Vedanta has this to say. He classifies the evolution of human beings into four categories. The first stage is the age of perception when the man understands everything through the five sense organs. He engages when situations outside are conducive and withdraws when they are not. The next stage is the age of observation. Here, with every result or effect happening around him, he tries to figure out the cause through keen observation.
Then there is the age of scientific enquiry where the intellect looks into the world of names and forms outside and arrives at scientific data, facts and conclusions. However, the fourth and the final stage is the age of contemplation. In Swami Chinmayananda’s own words, “The men of contemplation were not content with the mechanical discovery of the laws, but endeavoured to understand and discover, the lawgiver, the controller and regulator of all laws. Philosophy and religion are far ahead of science and its proud discoveries, and those who treat them as ancient and old-fashioned, have failed to understand their place and significance in the history of human development.”
It is to this highest state of contemplation that the ritualistic form of worship can lead the mind too. On the 1,000th Jayanti of the great Vaishnavite reformist saint Sri Ramanuja, the Chinmaya International Foundation released a book, authored by Dr Prema Nandakumar at Chinmaya Mission, Srirangam, the place which has the Jeeva Samadhi of the saint in the main temple complex of Sri Ranganatha. In the book, titled Sri Ramanuja: The Great Integrator, the author mentions the importance Sri Ramanuja placed on ritualistic worship in temples and at home in the Nithya Grantham. The worship of the deity brings divinity into the households and also inculcates the discipline of growing and gathering flowers, trying to do much of the work by their own hands.
Whether it is a simple ritual of bringing our hands together in a Namaste position and bowing down on the ground in a five-part or eight-part Namaskara, or the elaborate rituals observed in some homes and temples—the repetitive action done with devotion quietens the mind and leads it to a meditative state.
Having an altar for your own self with just a couple of pictures or symbols that you will remember wherever you go out of your home, a lamp and an incense stick stand are good enough for daily ritual to begin with. Cleaning up the altar, lighting the lamp and the incense, just sit before the idol or image in contemplation. If done consistently for a long period, the simple process brings immense benefits of making the mind meditative.
Brahmacharini Sharanya Chaitanya
(www.sharanyachaitanya.blogspot.in)