The kinds of worship

“WORSHIP is of three kinds:  those that are performed daily, that are offered on particular occasions, and that are made for the attainment of special aims.”  (Rudra-yamala Tantra [614].)

The daily rituals as well as the rituals ordained for certain days of the year should be performed by everyone.  They are man’s religious duties, his participation in the cosmic life and its cycles.

“A man must have a chosen deity, but he must also honor the family deity, the village deity, the village guardian angel, the village genie (naga), on the prescribed occasions.”  (Vijayananda Tripathi, “Devata tattva,” Sanmarga, III, 1942.)

On the other hand, worship performed to obtain the realization of a desire has no compelling character and is done only by those who feel the need for it.  Yet if we use worship as the instrument of gain, whether spiritual or material, it is essential to know which kind of divinity we should propitiate and through which procedure. The divinity worshipped and the techniques of worship are different if the aim of worship is to achieve a particular result, obtain a particular quality, and reach a particular stage of worldly or spiritual accomplishment.  When the saint prays to obtain liberation, the thief to succeed in his enterprise, the soldier to kill his enemy, although each may address his prayer to the same divine name, the divinity which may acknowledge it is in fact a different state of being, a different god.

When we invoke an abstraction in the hope of saving our life or winning a war, our prayer is wrongly addressed because an abstraction can have nothing to do with the forms and interests of the manifest world.  It cannot answer prayers, much less favor worshippers.  Only the minor deities, the subtle beings who are part of the inner life of things, can co-operate with man in such matters, and it is these deities which should be approached through the proper ritual channels.  A forest deity, however, will have no power to help man in spheres of abstract realization.

Man becomes what he worships.  His desire is the essential form of his becoming.  Krishna, the embodiment of love, says in the Bhagavadgita (9.25 [615]):

“Those who worship the gods become gods; those who worship Ancestors become Ancestors, those who worship the elements master the elements, and those who worship me gain me.”

Those who worship Yamraj become Death-like; those who worship the Devil become like the Devil and so lives like one…

In the West, and in some places in India, people have been misguided by many false priests who encourage them to worship the Lower Spirits, or Ghosts, who may have been people who were accidentally killed or willfully sacrificed by others, and for which this lost soul never found freedom to go to the heavens. Such souls require someone to worship them before they can be freed, so they appear in people’s dreams assuming the appearance of Swamis, Pundits, and Devtas and courage them to do wrongful worship.

By the time the person realizes that he has sold his mind to the devil, it is usually too late and the spirit would already have attained some freedom to heaven. Incidentally, after one year, because he or she had tricked the human person, the soul is in misery again, and continues to look for more human pretty to trick for another year of Moksha.