Happy Ganesh Chaturthi!

We wish all our readers a very happy Ganesh Chaturthi!!

Significance of Ganesha Chaturthi

All Indian festivals, beneath the aspect of delight and celebration, hold the underlying essence or the spirit which has to be captured to grasp the eternal truth. So it is with Ganesha Chaturthi.

The very story of Ganesha's manifestation holds the essence of Advaita Vedanta. He has been manifested out of the divine essence of (Parvati). This is a reminder that we all are made up of the same, all pervading essence or the spirit though we may vary owing to the disparities in shape and form.

Ganesha is the manifested form of the divine. The formless divine is ever present though it takes on a manifestation or a form,owing to our identification of ourselves with a form. Having manifested with a form, the divine also assumes a name due to our association with a form and our wrong notion of separate existence, in order to distinguish ourselves from others.

The truth or the essence is but one, the formless spirit that pervades all destroys the disparities. The celebration of Ganesha Chaturti reveals that while we worship the divine with the form, we ought to bear in mind our formless reality. This is depicted in the elaborate worship that is carried out on Gnaesha Chaturti and finally dissolving the form that we endear in a water body in remembrance of the divine as the formless reality even beyond the manifested form.

It is not to be considered that worship of forms do not have any value. Since we identify ourselves with a form it is imperative to seek the truth with a manifested form in order to proceed to realise the formless reality. This ultimately merges oneself with the realisation of one's true self, the formless reality thereby in eternal mergence with the divine.