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Ferre
Cannabis Sacrament Minister.
Joined: 14 Apr 2003
Posts: 7295
Location: Amsterdam
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 Posted: Mon Nov 17, 2003 12:54 am Post subject: The River of the Sadhu |
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The entire world owes a profound debt to the Eastern tradition of philosophy and its radiant and awesomely penetrating apex in the Indian spiritual heritage. It is a tradaition which has delved into the void of the self to a depth of personal experience and sheer concentration that makes the Judeo-Christian tradition amateurish and petulant by comparison. Pervading this ancient heritage is an appreciation for the transient nature of mortality and subjective experience and the deep creative far within the soul, which is at once the very motivating force, not only for this universe, but for ages and epochs on a scale which stands beyond and before time in the eternal existential condition for which the very universe comes into being. It has spawned many other great religions such as Buddhism and Jainism, which despite being centuries older than Christianity, stand as relative newcomers. t has withstood the Aryan invasions and the Mogul conquests of Islam. It is perhaps the only remaining fully-fledged ancient religion of many Gods and Goddesses which contains within its gambit all the extremes from the pinnacle of chauvanistic male aristocracy burning their wives on their funeral pyres to the unrestrained Goddess at her most bloodthirsty and destructive. Yet within these extremes lies a path of meditative renunciation from worldly attachments which carries philosophy of mind self and consciousness to its deepest and most profound.
This tradition has a risen from a cultural dissonance as great as any imaginable, the repression of the ancient cultures of the Indus valley with their planter Goddess queen and her rustic sacrifical consort and Lord of the animals by a warrior caste of Aryans with a new and different breed of warrior Gods casting bolts of lightning upon their defeated opponents. However, instead of obliterating these traditions they have superimposed as ripples and eddies to create a cultural martix perhaps more complex than that of any other society, riddled with extremities and inconsistencies but echoing with rich mythopoetic imagery in which human life passes on the great yugas of time like a spring sunshower passing on a breat of breeze.
Woven into the lives of the Gods and the the Mahadevi is the mighty Ganges, that ancient river from which time and culture itself springs, herself a Goddess and the life of her people from her tumbling Himalayan cataracts to her sultry and treacherous deltas as she finally flows like the snake Ananta in a hudred mouths to the ocean an eternal cycle of death and rebirth.
Closely associated with her is a sacred herb, the province of the Lord of death and of altered states Shivai, a tradition as ancient as the river which bears its name and central to the spiritual life of many of the sadhus or holy men who wander the continent in saffron robes in the name of God, from the mountain caves to the alleyways and burning ghats of the river's ancient city Varanasi.
Read full article here : The River of the Sadhu
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This is another very interesting read about the use of The herb for spiritual reasons  
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