We may ask another question - “What is Lord Vishnu, who should be slaying the demons, doing inside us?” Immediately Lord Vishnu says - “I am unable to do anything because of all the ‘Vam-pires’ [punning vampire with the seed syllable ‘Vam’] inside you.” We may ask again - “Lord, why
don’t You use Your conch, disc and mace to vanquish these vampires?” He in turn asks - “Why didn’t you use your will power to stay awake for sometime or wake up early this morning to do manana on the three truths given to you by the Divine Mother?” We should take what Lord Vishnu says very seriously. How much did we contemplate upon these truths? Not much at all. That is why the Divine Mother is saying - “You are not able to assimilate what you are supposed to assimilate. Your mental and intellectual Chaitanya or energy is severely depleted because you feed the demons with your thoughts and vasanas [egoistic tendencies]. So, your mind continues to be attracted by the objects of the senses. Sensual attraction is attracting you and you are attracting sensual attraction. Attraction leads to attachment and attachment leads to detachment from Divinity.” Mother is deliberately making this difficult for us to understand because we did not value the
Jnana that She phrased so simply for us till now. Where is our Shakti Peetha - the seat of our whole well-being? It is not in our head, mind or intellect. It is in our heart. Devi is sitting there in the Guru sthana or in the position of our Guru and is telling us these truths in a different way as our Guru. She is asking us - “Are you aware of the powers that you are blessed with? Then why are you unable to understand your own power?”
The Divine Mother begins to explain what is preventing us from enjoying our powers. We are just regurgitating our lives like a cow chewingthe cud. Each time we get a fresh janma, everything begins all over again.
Let us take a simple example. If we don’t cook for six months, we get out of touch with it. Then, it takes us several weeks to get back to our old form.
Again if our arm is fractured, it takes many weeks for all our muscles to come back to normal after the cast is removed. If we discontinue any activity for too long in the Kali Yuga, it takes at least three years for us to get back to the same level of expertise. The older we are, the longer it takes. So, in each lifetime we first have to relearn what we learnt earlier.
Even on a Cosmic scale, at the beginning of each epoch, all the truths have to be re-established. That is why the Sages have gathered in Naimisha Aranya. They discuss spiritual truths and Devi’s glories in their Satsang during Navaratri every year in order to re-establish them for us.
As Devi is scolding us, Suta Muni is astounded and thinks - “Each Navaratri, Devi tells us the same truths in different ways to make us understand, because the mental and intellectual Chaitanya of human beings goes on decreasing every year in the Kali Yuga.”
The only solution to this problem is manana or contemplation. The more we contemplate upon a truth, the better we assimilate it. However, manana should always go hand in hand with sadhana.