AGNI - 3

Why is there creation? Because of friction. Without friction there is no creation. And whenever there is friction, there is FIRE. You can't produce fire without friction. No, unless you take it directly from the sun, using a magnifying glass for instance. Fire is created for Vedic sacrifices by friction, by rubbling two sticks together, much as the American Indians used to do.

Friction may possess an excess of any of the three Gunas: Tamas, Rajas or Sattva (the three "gunas" are an important part of the Sankhya philosphy, where the material world is classified into these three "gunas" or three tendencies of conciousness manifested through the mind. Sattva is equilibrium, Rajas is activity and Tamas is inertia. The mind fluctuates among these three states continually until, by dint of sadhana it is brought under control and focussed on a single point). "Tamasic" friction is argument, discord between people. It creates fiery emotions like hatred, anger, revenge and violent frenzy. "Rajasic" friction is sex, which is due to the fire of lust. The Upanishads explain that the woman is herself the fire, the penis is the fuel and the pubic hair - the smoke. The vulva embodies the flames, the friction is the coals, and the pleasure is the sparks. This is much better than the tamasic friction because the two people who are involved in the act of sex atleast derive some pleasure out of it...even if it is momentory...and unlike the case in tamasic friction, which only brings forth complete negativity. But what gets created out of the act of sex is more lust and children! "Sattvic" friction, which is "sadhana", is the best of all. When you perform sadhana, you are working against your all your old tendencies and habits caused by the karmas of the millions of births that you have taken. This is bound to produce friction and you will heat up. The word for penance, tapas, literrally means heat. I have read this about people who do deep meditation or mantra recitations...actually feel their body heating up and at times there is a physical manifestation of the same outwardly through burning sensations and reddening of their skin around the chest and throat areas.

Enlightenment is achieved by the "burning" of your karmas through tapas. When you do plenty of penance your mind heats up and you become irritable. During such times (when you are doing plenty of penance, that is), if you indulge in sex or lust their fire will burn away the shakti that you have accumulated, but if you follow on your vows and control your temper and your passion, the resultant enlightenment will make the whole thing worthwhile. Remember that the fire's basic quality is to burn. Did you know that the fire which is the tongue burns whatever it speaks? What this means that you should always confess any nad karmas that you perform. This will free you from them, they will be "burned" up. And you should never speak about any good deeds you do, or about your spiritual experiences, because if you do, they will be destroyed just as surely. Unfortunately this is the kali yuga and most people do exactly the opposite. They hide their sins down deep in their hearts where they can't be cleaned out and they boast to everyone in sight of their accomplishments and spiritual achievements.

Fire purifies whatever it burns, but it takes on some of the qualities of whatever is offered to it. The purity of offerings extends to the wood used (each piece of wood should be inspected to make sure that there are no insects that might be cremated when it begind to burn) and also all the offerings materials that insludes clarified butter (ghee), barley, wheat, rice, seasame seeds, dry & fresh fruits, honey and sugar. Each material should be thoroughly inspected, carefully sifted and screened so as to remove dirt and insects before they are combined together in various proportions into the final offering mixture - the samagri. The choice of offerings in a homa depends on the work, both spiritual and mundane, that you have for the fire to do. Generally the offerings are sweet in nature...because we want the fire to give is mundane prosperity as well as spiritual advancement (one can add sugar cane pieces also, which is very dear to elephants. This propitiates Ganesha, who must always be propitiated first whenver you do any sort of worship. One can also use medicinal herbs, which makes the resulting ash medicinal).

Note: The homas that are done as part of the Six Rituals of Tantra - rituals performed to cause death, delusion, discord, hatred, obstruction and enchantment - are quite different. Each rituals require a specific set of mantras and even clothing. Worship materials like oil, salt, chillies and other intense, spicy substances are used.

Warning Note: Don't experiment with these rituals, terrible karma is involved and never try adding such substances in your own fire. Since you don't know what you are doing...you will end up harming yourself.

Homa: One begins the homa by remembering the "mother"...first the cosmic mother and then your own mother...after all you are here because of her. Then the family's rishi (each family has the gotra which is basically a rishi lineage...not many in the modern days remember, hence remembering the seven rishis - the sapta rishis - Pulaha, Pulastya, Devala, Asita, Kratu, Bhrigu and Angiras - is beneficial), next teh various gods and goddesses, the planets and all the demigods. Some also make offerings to other benign etheral beings like the Yakshas, Kinnaras, Gandharvas and Vidyadharas, as well aso those who are more malevolent like the Brahma Rakshasas.

You then turn to the fire and request it to enter your body and enkindle the bhuta agni (the Bhuta agni is the fire of the subtle body, the fire which MUST be ignited inorder to make spiritual progress). One important reason for doing homa is to awaken the bhuta agni. If you really want the fire to enter you then your 'I' must disappear, a spiritual vaccuum must be created.

After all these preliminaries are over, you request your deity to be present in the pit and then begin the offerings (samagri) alongwith the requisite mantras to propitiate the particular deity. As the homa proceeds the fire will sometimes, crackle, hiss or make other noises. This is the fire's ways of trying to talk. You need to generate/develop a certain level of subtle perception and connection with fire...before you can actually interpret what the fire is saying to you. It also tries to communicate with you in other ways. Its colour is especially significant.

Modern science has itself proved that each different colour of light has a different effect on the body and the mind, by stimulating the pituitary, pineal and hypothalamus, which then influences the rest of the organism. One colour may cause anger, another joy and the third may improve concentration. When you get close to the fire and embrace it (mentally), you offer yourself to it and it enters you. Then the external fire acts as a barometer of the workings of the internal spiritual fire, the bhuta agni. One must bring the bhuta agni under complete control, before even thinking of controlling the external physical fire.

When you are finished with the number of offerings, which you plan to make, at the end of the homa, one must put a coconut into the fire. The coconut represents the worshipper's head, with its three eyes. Also it is full of water, just as the head is full of blood, cerebrospinal fluid and glandular secretions. When you offer the coconut, it represents that you are offering you are offering your entire conciousness to the fire with the request that it be transmitted into a divine conciousness (you offer your own head to replace it with a divine head). Then you bow to the fire and request the deity to return to His or Her home...after that the homa is completed. One must sit near the fire for sometime and try to commune with it.
Always rememer, fire is a living being. Once you bring it to life you are responsible for it. For example, you don't dare smother it any more than you would dare to smother any other living being. Hence you must permit it to die out by itself. Don't smother it with milk or water...as many people do. After you collect the ash...wash the place of ritual so that nobody steps on some ash remnants accidentally, and any ash that you don't use should be disposed off in flowing water - like a stream, river or an ocean and not a drainage ditch! And one other thing, it seems like the fire is about to go out during your homa, don't blow on it directly. Always blow on the palm of your hand abd that sir fall into the fire.

As your conciousness progresses from that of a limited human being to that of an unlimited being, you will experience all sorts of things - wonderful and apalling alike. Don't ever become attached to any of these experiences...these are mere guide posts to tell you how far you have come and how far you have yet to go!

-----------Excerpts from Aghora Part II - Kundalini, By Robert Svoboda

AGNI - 2

When you worship anything even a rock, you will always get a better result if you personify it (that's why the hindus worship idols...those are rocks personified into personalities & then archetypes...but more about it later). Fire is no different. Give it a personality and then you can love it., play with it. How can you love fire as fire...it will burn...destroy! You have to bring it to a level where you can relate to it...love it. All 'sadhana' (the collective name for any method of spiritual development; a 'sadhu' is a renunciate who practices 'sadhana') is just the preliminaries for falling in love with your deity.

By doing homa you make progress in the spiritual field inspite of so many defects in your body and mind. In fact the fire gradually burns away all your defects ('ripus'- deficiencies that are by nature). After doing a homa you always feek light and energetic because of all the bad karmas that the fire burns away. This will not happen if you worship AIR, which you do when you control 'prana' - the life force...in the practice of 'pranayama'. If you make a mistake in 'pranayama' you run the risk of becoming physically and mentally ill; you may turn completely to the mundane world or you may lose contact with the mundane entirely. Neither state is healthy. The Patanjali Yoga Sutra says to practice 'pranayama'...but Patanjali was not a 'rishi' (ancient seers - through time immemorial), he forgot that people would slowly move towards 'kali yuga' (the dark age in which we live - as per ancient hindu texts). In 'kali yuga' it is actually dangerous to practice 'pranayama'. Our water and air are polluted...our nervous systems are bombarded by noise and radiation. Very few places today have the peace and purity essential for successful 'pranayama'. Worshipping fire is therefore much better.

FIRE is essentially one of the five great elements - earth, water, fire, air and ether. These great elements are not elements in the chemical sense that hydrogen and helium are...but they are rather states of matter. The Earth elements predominates in everything that is solid in the universe, the Water element in that which is liquid and the Air element in the gases. The Ether element is the space in which things occur and the Fire element is the force which changes solid to liquid to gas and vice versa. Everything in the manifested universe, including the human being, is made of these five elements. As long as you are alive, your conciousness is limited by the vessel in which it is kept - the body. And since the body is made of these five elements, your conciousness is also limited by those five.

The essence of Tantra is purifcation of the five elements, to awaken the Kundalini Shakti (primordial energy) which is your personal 'shakti' (power, energy). Any spiritual practice in any religion, is basically some process or other of awakening 'Kundalini'. And 'Kundalini' can only be awakened once the elements of your body are purified.

One can make spiritual progress by worshipping the any of the five elements. Worshipping Earth may take you eons, because the chief characteristic of Earth is stability. Worship of Water is unwise nowadays because water is the main substance which makes up the body and most of us identify too strongly with our bodies anyway. Worshipping Air is likely to make you seriously unstable and there are difficulties in worshipping the ether element. Therefore FIRE is the best.

The first word in the Rig Veda, the most ancient of the Vedas, is 'agni', fire.The vedic religion is basically a religion of fire worship. The Rishis who wrote the Vedas worship the fire because it is the representative of the sun on earth. Life cannot exist on earth if we don't have the sun. By their fire worship, they propitate the sun. In fact they are feeding the sun. If they were ever to stop their continuous offerings of nourishment to the sun, all creation would go to hell. As a by-product of this service that they perform for the benefit of all embodied beings, they obtain the might of the sun.
The 'rishis' use fire in their worship because fire both purifies and amplifies what is put into it. Even NASA has realised that the flames of its rockets amplify whatever sound is fed unto them (Scientists have now developed a combustion chamber which resonates with sound power, so that a furnace's own roar fans its flames). For those of us who are not 'rishis', worship of the fire is meant to purify the Fire Element in the body and to purify the conciousness by amplifying the mantras (words of power that may or may not have meaning in known human languages) that we repeat.

AGNI - 1

"Awakened in the FLAME by the kindling of those who are born in the body (jana), towards the dawn he moves, who in return is approaching him as nourishing cow. We too like the flames of light rise full of power, springing upwards towards heaven." __________________________________The very first hymn in the Rig Veda (Hymns to the Mystic Fire) Interpreted most appropriately by Sri Aurobindo (by far the best interpretations available of the Vedas are by Sri Auribindo)is as follows:

"There is an interesting subtle association of AGNI with beings who are born here on earth in the material body. They kindle HIM from within themselves, for AGNI is their inner and innermost nature. That's why the Rishi says - 'we too rose up like the beams of the light of AGNI straight towards heaven.' This first verse makes association with AGNI completely subjective, for it speaks about us, those who are born in the material body."

My first tryst fire (AGNI) was over two years back. As a novice I had bought an aluminium hawankunda and in the most simple form of hawan without any mantra or any other preliminary rituals i used to do homams once in a while. Simple prayers along with the offerings of ghee, wood, flowers or sometimes hawansamagree (a mixture of herbs that are offered in fire...and it smells beautifully). Never realised at that time that its not all common to be so comfortable with fire in the first place. Many people would think twice before conducting any kind of fire ritual and hawans are generally the prerogative of the priests and generally done when there is a 'big' puja to be done. FIRE to me was though not yet a friend but I had neither any discomfort nor any pre-conceived notions about indulging in a fire ritual. Thankfully I also had the solitude required and a different room (otherwise mom would throw a fit...with all the walls, ceilings and utensils getting blackened with soot). Ofcourse there are the practical problems with fire. The foremost being....it burns and all the others are just the side effects...I mean the soot, the sweat, the smoke, the uncontrolled rage when there is a whiff of air,...etc...etc...But all these can be overcome with patience and an honest attempt of befriending the fire with ofcourse upholding the deepest respects for its innate nature. Once there are genuine efforts from your side...fire responds likewise. It may sound preposterous but I have seen a novice putting her hands in fire and she did not even feel the heat. That's also because she must have been an adept in fire rituals in her past births but all are not so lucky. Nevertheless initial apprehensions and the basic fear gone...fire can be nice and good. I had heard that a good sadhu lives for his fire, an Aghori is always near a fire. Every Sadhu maintains his own fire, which is called a 'dhuni' and no one else but only the Sadhu can sit there. You enter into such an intense relationship with the fire that only you two can share the experience (do you invire a third person into your room when you are making love?...Its something like that.). After two years of my consistent relation with fire...I realise this truth. So much so that I have intensely possessive about my hawankund now (I have bought one huge copper one now for myself). And my relationship with AGNI? Its a bond that I have developed for now two years and hopefully would continue do so. It still burns me when I am careless though but its a friendly nudge that it gives me...as in all relationships...you need to be attentive! Nevertheless with AGNI you can't take HIM for granted :-)