Diwali meditations (6)
A very important festival within Diwali is Lakshmi Puja Lakshmi refers to wealth or more specifically the goddess who provides wealth, if you look across the world every one of us is in great need for wealth and our appreciation of the divine comes not just by directly thinking of the divine but by thinking of the things that we need as gifts from the divine so we start thinking of God not just by waking up one day and getting a realization about God but by thinking about the things around us and seeing how they are not always in our control there is a higher provision which provides them to us so the goddess who is in charge of wealth is known as Lakshmi Devi and one of the beautiful aspects of the broad bhakti tradition is that God is depicted in a gender inclusive way that there is a feminine aspect to God and a masculine aspect to God and in the mood of inclusiveness is such that neither the masculine aspect is worshipped alone nor the feminine aspect is worshipped alone so Lakshmi Puja when Lakshmi is seen as a goddess who is independent in her capacity to give blessings then she manifests in the world as restless when she appears by her lord who is Narayan then she becomes steady so the way to worship Lakshmi in a holistic way is to worship her with her lord when we seek wealth as a resource independent from God then the result is that wealth may give us a temporary sense of prosperity and power but that will not last for long whereas when we see wealth as connected with the divine source Lakshmi is always by the side of Narayan when Lakshmi is worshipped as the consort of Narayan when Lakshmi is sought as a means to increase our service to Narayan then that worship becomes inclusive all of us seek wealth but more than wealth more important than making money is making something worthwhile with money how much we have doesn't determine our happiness as what we do with how much we have and that purpose of life is what is revealed by lord Narayan by lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita the Bhagavad Gita helps us understand our own spirituality and our own eternal destination in fact when we study the Bhagavad Gita and with that philosophical understanding worship Lakshmi with it the result of such worship is that we become infused with a sense of devotional purposefulness and Lakshmi she can bless her with material fortune and with spiritual fortune while we are in the world we do need material resources and Lakshmi will give those to us also however if that is all that we seek from her and material fortune sometimes come and sometimes go but when we seek her blessings so that we can increase our service to the lord then that service attitude that mood of devotion is our spiritual fortune and then the material fortune becomes a resource for increasing our spiritual fortune and thus we get both material enrichment and spiritual enrichment and even if circumstantially the material wealth does not stay with us Lakshmi's blessings in the form of spiritual wealth in the form of devotion to her lord will always stay with us and thus Lakshmi puja when done with proper understanding in a holistic mood of worship of Lakshmi and Narayan can propel us forward on the path to eternal spiritual enrichment Thank you.