I recently heard the story of how the Boy God Ganesh got his elephant head. If a passing by elephants head could be chopped off and attached to the boy, why couldn't the boys own head be reattached? Defies logic a bit Cheers! looking forward to hearing your replies HRH Prince Ry Kingdom of Newcastle Business School
vedic surgeons technology is far beyond what is available today in their ability to put an animal's head on a human
It had to happen because that was the elephant's karma. The elephant was not just an elephant, it was actually a demon who was killed by Shiva.
The way I read the story was like this: Shiva was long gone in one of his usual pilgrimages and Parvati his wife told her son Ganesh (who was very young when shiva left), not to let anyone in the house while she was taking her bath. Shiva happens to come that evening and Ganesh asks Shiva? what do you want? Shiva says: "I wanna come in... I'm Shiva ruler of worlds, this is my house and you are my son!!" Upon hearing this, Ganesh gets very angry and says, "Well then go about and roam in your world, I know a hippie when I see one-- this is my mother's house and she wont allow beggars to come in while she bathes". At this Shiva loses it, and immediately cuts off the head of Ganesh, and in anger casts it a thousand miles away. So as the story goes, Parvati gets out of her bath to see Ganesh on the floor bleeding and headless. Now she loses it and screams "You good-for-nothing-husband, you go about roaming about in the world like a tramp and then come home to do this?" Shiva reacts like a frightened husband who just blew it,(no pun intended) and sees the head of an elephant nearby or on the wall, and puts it on Ganesh and says: "An elephant never forgets, son....so Never forget who is your real father".
thank god the next animal passing by wasn't a rabbit instead of an elephant... no one would of ever that taken this religion seriously
Perhaps a certain scepticism is healthy, esp. where things like transplanting animal heads onto humanoid bodies is concerned.....credulity leads only to further credulity.
Yes, but It wasn't exactly Dr. Killdare that did the operation. We, to believe in the Gods MUST believe they are superpowerful. Why even superheroes must have some abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Clark Kent or Peter Parker alone would not make a good adventure stories.
Even if you believe in beings with higher powers, that still doesn't turn myth into fact. Super heroes are a figment of the imagination. Many myths too probably have their roots in the power of imagination.
Its ok for you to think and believe anything at any stage of your life and in time change it to whatever suits your mood. In my belief structure as of now, Gods are as real or perhaps more real than us (smarter, far more aware, strong, etc) but that took me as long as Star Wars has been around to cement. I use to separate myth and fact, but now I'm convinced that from fact myth is born and not the other way around.
That must be a difficult position to sustain as there are so many different myths from different cultures, and as I said previously, they're all contradictory.
That contradiction is a key point in all of this, and the way I aproach the issue is by separating the wheat from the shaff or the bull from the bull****. Not easy... but worth it. In this case the bull is the truth; but from the truth other things come out that is and is not always the bull.... follow me? In a court of law, it is a matter of life and death to separate those two, and in our personal lives, it is by far more important to separate imaginary tales from super-reality-- or dreams from waking life, since they can give us a false guideline by which we decide to live our lives, while it could also be a very important key point by which we decide to make your life more even, and far more perfect. This is a good example: In dreams-- though they being all absolutely false, you entertain the notion that everything is absolutely real, and discover that nothing has been real all-along, just by once opening up your 'real' eyes. Myths are not all contradictory, but they just have been embelished or distorted badly by Hollywood and the media, and at other times when being passsed from mouth- to- mouth, they get badly interpreted in the end. UFO's... are by some, real visitors from outerspace, while to others, they are just weather balloons...which side is right? Who has made the right identification? Who was fabricating a fable? the guy that declares the thing is from earth, or the guy that knows what he saw? whom can you believe? still you have to believe one, and not the other. That people tell the same tale in two or more different ways, it is a well-known fact. If you were to see a movie just once, and with a hundred other people as well- in the same movie house- and all of you at the same time...no matter how much atttention you all paid to it, you all will- by default, tell it differently; and perhaps even come out with a different moral and perspective of what the writer himself was trying to say. This is acceptable, since people come in different ages, backgrounds, educational levels, and moral upbringings. We do try to syncronise our realities in order to agree that we're all living the same one, but are we succeeding? Even while awake we still live in a private dream-world, and we make the real unreal, and the unreal real, and stick to those firm ideas until another reality comes crashing in, and by force destroys everything we have built all-along. Still.... we can be so convicted. We live by our self-made convictions... and wether these convictions are true or false, they will guide our lives till the day we die. Unless we get lucky....
Mr. SS, as long as we are in these human bodies, we will not be able to see the other realities. We cannot claim that only this realm exists. If you read hermeneutics, in the haideggarian sense, truth is manifold, defining something to be absolutely true, and another to be myth will basically make that statement "false". The truth discloses itself to different people differently. you may think somethings are contradictory because those things do not fit the rules of a system of analysis even when they are not contradictory.
How typical of humanity that we get so engrossed in the superfial trivialities and lose completely the essence.
Supreme Consciousness? Love? Our true Selves? (just making guesses...I have no idea what Bhaskar might mean)
Yes - but I meant the essence of the Ganesh myth.I though that perhaps there might be some symbolic meaning I'd not seen.
