This week marks Diwali, the festival of light. The most obvious display of Diwali is the lighting of lamps, in people’s windows, doorways to illuminate their homes and communal areas.
One of primary origins of Diwali is the celebration of the return to Ayodhya, of Rama, Sita and Lakshmana after their fourteen years of exile, as told in the Ramayana. symbolizing the spiritual victory of light over darkness, dharma over adharma, knowledge over ignorance.
The lamps lit, are representative of those burnt by the inhabitants of Ayodhya to guide Rama and his companions back home.
The Ramayana, like all mythic epics contains a phenomenal level of layers within it, speaking to the social and personal, the physical and the subtle and it communicates many truths at once.
Just like Rama having to exit his home kingdom, to finally return after years of challenges and difficulty, we can appreciate that this is the movement, the cycle of all life, an expansion outwards, into form and then a return to source.
In manifest form, it is often very hard to perceive the formless that it arises from. In the challenges of our lives, the source, beneficence and support of life may also appear to be imperceptible or difficult to connect with at times.
Just as the story of Rama, indicates how different life in exile, in the forests, was for the regal couple, Rama and Sita, how they felt their absence from Ayodhya and were missed by it’s inhabitants.
Yet you can imagine the delight of returning home after all that time.
The same delight known by a Yogi or Yogini when they encounter their own source nature, when they merge in the formless counciousness and being that all life comes from.
This source, often described in texts such as the Gita and Upanishads as light, or a point of light and radiance within oneself. Likewise, in many of the Hatha Yoga texts, the effects of practice upon the individual is said to be evident by the presence of lightness and radiance in their body, mind and whole being. The realisation of this being the motivation of Yoga.
So the lights that were lit in Ayodhya to guide Rama home, may also be understood as the light within ourselves, that guides us home to the self, the source of both us and all of existence.
May you know this radiance in your whole self.
Happy Diwali!
