Love is multi-dimensional. It is vast and enormous. Love is magnanimous and so many sages have viewed it from many different angles. And they glorified one aspect of love. Worship is one such aspect - pooja or worship. In a society which is bound with ego, worship is looked down upon. Worship is considered a sin in an ego-bound society.
Honouring is considered to be something not very nice in a stiff and competitive society. But in a society or in an institution where love is honoured, love blossoms. Honouring, worshipping is held very high. In the East, you can find people honour the trees. They worship trees, they worship people. People worshipping people are looked down upon in the West. Honouring someone seems to take out someone’s prestige or self-esteem.
But in the East the value is completely different, the one who is honouring gains more prestige. What they honour doesn’t matter. You may honour a cow, you may honour a snake, you may honour or worship a tree. But the value of the one who is honouring goes up. The worshiper is glorified, not what he worships, because the worshiper exhibits the quality of his own consciousness. If you praise someone, it is your generosity, your magnanimity that comes through in the praise. There is a proverb in Sanskrit which says, “Gods praise each other, human beings simply live in peace and demons curse each other, they blame each other.”
One of the characteristics of love is worship, adoring. When people are in love with any celebrity, they adore them, they worship them. It just indicates the degree of love. One who is in love with this entire universe would worship everything in this universe. Because every little bit that is in this existence is part of one divinity. And worshipping this universe only makes you more Divine.
God worships you every day, the divinity is worshipping you every day. That is what pooja is. This existence is offering you flowers, it is offering you fruits, it is offering you grains, and it is taking the sun and the moon around you. It is doing aarti to you. (They call it aarti when you light camphor, or a wick or a candle and move it around the altar.) The divine is doing your pooja every day. The worshipper and the worshipped become one, that union is love. Adoring the divinity in all the forms is divine love.
It begins with you, where you are. Worship is condemned in a society which is individualistic and which is ego-centric. But in a society, which honours the entire existence, which honours every little thing in this world, worship is adored and held high. Adoration is one of the signs of love.
— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, spritual leader and founder of the Art of Living Foundation
Honouring is considered to be something not very nice in a stiff and competitive society. But in a society or in an institution where love is honoured, love blossoms. Honouring, worshipping is held very high. In the East, you can find people honour the trees. They worship trees, they worship people. People worshipping people are looked down upon in the West. Honouring someone seems to take out someone’s prestige or self-esteem.
But in the East the value is completely different, the one who is honouring gains more prestige. What they honour doesn’t matter. You may honour a cow, you may honour a snake, you may honour or worship a tree. But the value of the one who is honouring goes up. The worshiper is glorified, not what he worships, because the worshiper exhibits the quality of his own consciousness. If you praise someone, it is your generosity, your magnanimity that comes through in the praise. There is a proverb in Sanskrit which says, “Gods praise each other, human beings simply live in peace and demons curse each other, they blame each other.”
One of the characteristics of love is worship, adoring. When people are in love with any celebrity, they adore them, they worship them. It just indicates the degree of love. One who is in love with this entire universe would worship everything in this universe. Because every little bit that is in this existence is part of one divinity. And worshipping this universe only makes you more Divine.
God worships you every day, the divinity is worshipping you every day. That is what pooja is. This existence is offering you flowers, it is offering you fruits, it is offering you grains, and it is taking the sun and the moon around you. It is doing aarti to you. (They call it aarti when you light camphor, or a wick or a candle and move it around the altar.) The divine is doing your pooja every day. The worshipper and the worshipped become one, that union is love. Adoring the divinity in all the forms is divine love.
It begins with you, where you are. Worship is condemned in a society which is individualistic and which is ego-centric. But in a society, which honours the entire existence, which honours every little thing in this world, worship is adored and held high. Adoration is one of the signs of love.
— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, spritual leader and founder of the Art of Living Foundation
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