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.