General Purpose of Ceremonies

In general, the reason why I do ceremonies is (more specific reasons for this ceremony are presented in a section below):

• It allows me to bring change to myself because it makes me look into the past and think deeply about the future.  This allows me to connect with my larger subconscious desires and emotion and then set big goals that sometimes can completely change the trajectory of my life. 

• Planning for the ceremony is the most important part because it demands that I really deeply think about the themes and how to symbolically represent them.  The actual change within me happens during the planning phase and the ceremony itself is not all that important...it is just a focal point for my attention. 

• A ceremony helps rupture the normal flow of my routine.   

• It allows me to bring the community together and have them collaborative and explore meaningful ideas with me

• It allows me to create a bridge between this world and my world (SOMDEland) by using symbols and ideas that are expressed in my artwork.

The reason why my ceremonies often focus on cutting hair is:

• Hair is a record of time, so when I harvest the hair, it represents the passage of time and the summation of all the Vivekanands that existed in that duration. 

• After harvesting the hair, I sow seeds of destiny (ideas) and then as my hair grows I am reminded of those ideas and goals. 

Introduction

In February 2022 I went to Mirzapur to sit next to my grandmother who lay close to death.  For two weeks, I spent every day and nearly every hour sitting by her side and looking at her, and when the nights came, I slept next to her.  Immersed in the churning cycles of passing time in the fall of Death, my old life lost meaning: I no longer cared about the growing pile of emails or the long list of things-to-do that gave me anxiety or the drive to accomplish big things.

With each passing day, as I watched my grandmother and as I thought of life and death, of the past and the future, of the impermanence life, of the meaning of existence and of the depth of nonexistence, the only thing that seemed to matter was finding a way to synchronize with the deeper spiritual river of life.  Each of those days was a universe in itself and at the end of the two weeks I felt that my metamorphosis was still incomplete as I watched smiles spontaneously nucleate across my grandmother's face.  I could not comprehend the source of those smiles, there was sadness and there was so much breathtaking beauty and there was real meditative depth (I will write about this in the Meditation section eventually), and so, I decided to stay for 3 more weeks. 

As I extended my stay from 2 weeks into 5 weeks, I thought about how most people, because of their jobs, can never afford the 'luxury' of extending their 'vacation' time to allow them to spend time sitting next to a dying loved one.  Progress and technology were supposed to be our savoirs, giving us free time to truly experience and contemplate the depth of life and death which are the most fundamental aspects of our Humanity.  Instead, progress and society have stripped away one of the most fundamental meanings of existence and have deprived vast portions of humanity the spiritual experiences of Life (such as raising an infant) and Death (such as taking care of the elderly).  I know of so many people who are forced to go back to work only months after giving birth and nearly immediately after the death of a loved one.  What a tragic shame and what a destruction of the spirit, soul and identity of our Humanity.  What are we living for?  What is the meaning of this type of progress? What are we getting from it? Where do our deep emotions and feelings come from now? We have no time to feel, no time to digest, no time to mourn, no time to spiritually heal, no time to be human...and no time to disrupt and change our sense of 'Reality' which is mostly defined and governed by 'things-to-do' dictated by jobs that are abstract and far from the primal flow of the movements of Nature.  With this 'progress', our collective perception of 'Reality' and our collective Human Experience are fundamentally changing as the structure of society forces us to drift further and further away from the beauty and brutality of Nature. 

When I arrived in Mirzapur, I knew that I wanted to do a ceremony to honor my grandmother and I knew this would be my final beard ceremony when my grandmother would be alive.  Over the years, my grandmother had participated and collaborated on many beard ceremonies. A few examples are below, where the upper pictures left to right are from 2006 (in Lexington) and 2013 (in Varanasi); and the lower pictures left to right are from 2015 (in Mumbai) and 2018 (in Mumbai).

Sometimes, if everything lines up, closeness to death can slow everything down and change how one senses, experiences and feels Reality.  The same world can feel completely different.  Our sense of Reality is paper thin and never a complete representation of the truth.  Our perspective of reality is guided by what we prioritize as being important and where we allocate our mental bandwidth.  As I sat next to my grandmother, disconnected from my work and my artwork, my full mental bandwidth was focused on watching death consume my grandmother.  In those moments, I imagined myself on my own deathbed and I began seeing the passage of history.  More than half a century ago, my grandmother gave birth to my mother and aunt and raised them in Mirzapur.  After my mother's marriage, everyone eventually scattered. Tangled, interwoven and often dipped in tragedy, time passed, and then a dying mother and her two daughters reunited for one final time in Mirzapur.  Birth and death reconnected in a historic circle of destiny.  

I had visited Mirzapur many times before but never with my mother, which is what made this visit so special.  As my mother's old friends came and as the whole joint family assembled and shared old stories spoken in the regional Mirzapuri dialect, I saw a new dimension of my mother's journey.   My mother's birth place and especially the memories of her, stored in people's stories, were like a time capsule. It is hard to describe but I felt my perception of time dissolving where I felt like I existed both in the past and the future.  I felt like I could see my mother's childhood from the perspective of a 41 year old observer and I could see my grandmother as a 41 year old looking after her daughters and I could see my nephew as a 41 year old looking at me on my deathbed similar to the way I looked at my grandmother. 

Preparations for the Ceremony

Finding the Ceremonial Cow Dung

While I appreciate some aspects of globalization, it has become an omnipresent beast whose onslaught has deep fried everything within the same vat of homogenized ideas.  When I visited India in middle school, within the small cities and villages, it was as if the fabric of Reality was different...as if the manner in which people perceived Reality was different.  It is so hard to describe.  What we feel is the 'truth' and 'reality' is really the product of conditioning and interpretation.  Other interpretations exist out there.  My grandmother and her sister represented that different Reality of an older India. 

One example which will not convey the depth of what I want to express, is cow dung.  In the modern world, most people react with deep disgust when they see cow dung. They see it as dirty and would never touch it with their bare hands.  And yet, in India, people see purity in cow dung because it represents the circularity of nature through life and death. It represents how a cow's waste can be used to create life (e.g. fertile crops). This circularity of nature is often forgotten in the linearity of our consumer world where trash is dirty and a waste and meaningless. Cow dung, as we all  know, is a great fertilizer.  More than that, in an agrarian society where much of the land has been deprived of wood, the fibers in the poop can be used as fuel to make fires during the winter.  This property also allows it to be mixed with mud to create structures like huts.  Many Hindu rituals and poojas, including those of marriage and death, have the burning of cow dung.  

For these reasons, I wanted to burn some cow dung at the beginning of my ceremony, in a way, to bring the reality of my grandmother's universe.  With my aunt and mother, we went on an adventure and found a woman who had recently collected and dried dung from her cow who had eaten from the earth of Mirzapur.  

The Birth of the Grandmother-Vessel 

One of the reasons for holding this ceremony while my grandmother was still alive was to motivate deep thinking on the  meaning of her life and her legacy while she was surrounded by the joint family. For the ceremony, I wanted to create a symbolic representation of my grandmother's reborn spirit.  Some see the human body as being a vessel of the immortal soul, and so, I decided to create a vessel that would hold elements of her family (which is one method of being reborn) and her dreams that we would implement  in the coming future (another way of being reborn). 

I wanted the vessel to be made from the Earth of Mirzapur because the Earth represents the body and also because Mirzapur is where my grandmother raised and gave birth to my mother and aunt.  To do this, my mother, my aunt and I went walking looking for a potter. 

One of the many things that I find beautiful in Mirzapur is that it still retains a vibe of old India that sadly no longer exists in the bigger cities.  Before plastic cups, potters would make disposable clay cups that could be thrown on the ground after use and would eventually be consumed by the Earth in an environmentally friendly way.  Drinking from clay cups adds an extra heavenly flavor that cannot be acquired from anywhere else.  There are also large clay vessels in which you can keep water and not only does it taste magical, the water remains very cool because somehow the clay vessel almost perspires some water.  Because some vendors still use these clay cups, there are still potters throughout the city. 

With the help of the potter,  my mother, my aunt and I made the vessel above.  I wanted the vessel to have a womb shape which is why it is tapered at the bottom and top. I also wanted it to have three eyes.  This three eye motif is common in Hinduism and, in a way, this ceremony is like a goddess-birthing ceremony.   To me, the third eye represents both Life and Death and both the creation and consumption of information.  In the mythology, the third eye can not only see a deep spiritual world (i.e. input information) but can also emit vast energy (output energy).  If you look at depictions of the third eye, it is never horizontal but rather is always vertical giving it a very vaginal vibe (which also takes in information/energy and outputs it).

During the ceremony, each member of the joint family deposited a small item that represented them into the vessel (the symbol that represents my reborn grandmother), conveying the idea that my grandmother is reborn through her family. Then,  after she had passed, in my Rebirth Ceremony of 2022, attendees deposited ideas on how they wanted to make the world a better place.  My goal is to implement these ideas and therefore my grandmother's dream of doing seva (devotional work for the world) will be reborn in these implementations. 

In my right hand is the ceremonial dried cow dung. 

The Ceremony

Location and Date: The ceremony took place in Mirzapur on February 27, 2022

The Purpose of this Ceremony (Grandmother ReBirth)

In addition to the general purposes listed at the top of the page, the purpose of this ceremony was:

• To gather the joint-family and hold a ceremony in honor of my grandmother to further their appreciation of her while she was still alive.  It was a beautiful experience sharing such a cermony with the joint family which included my grandfather's brother's family and my grandmother's sister's family. 

• To communicate some of my thoughts on statements like "She has no purpose to live anymore and she should just pass"  or "she must be suffering for past sins which is why she is still here" which were made by some visitors. 

• To create a symbolic vessel that represents my grandmother's rebirth and set a pathway to create her legacy.  During the ceremony, this vessel was filled with items that each family member chose to represent themselves.  In this way, my grandmother was reborn through her existing family and I was connected to them through these items.  Then, months later, in the Rebirth Ceremony of 2022, people placed their ideas and actions for doing devotional work for society (seva) which I will implement in the future.  One of my grandmother's main teachings was to do seva and by doing these actions I will have reborn her will. 

1.  Sharing with my Grandmother the meaning of the ceremony

My grandmother was unable to move to the roof to attend the ceremony, so I began the ceremony in her room.  With her two daughters on each side, I told her that I was going to do a beard ceremony in her honor and I showed her the vessel that my mother, my aunt and I made.  

I also recited the 'Grandmother Mantra', which is something I had written and tried to recite directly into her ear.  I wrote this mantra because sometimes people would come by and say things like "She has no purpose to live anymore and she should just pass"  or "she must be suffering for past sins which is why she is still here".  I could understand their perspective, it was their way of offering pity.  My grandmother was mostly unconscious and deaf (unless you spoke into her ear) and so most likely she did not hear what was being said, nevertheless, I felt that the underlying emotion would infect my grandmother's deep meditative state. It would be truly tragic if she passed away with those words and emotions lingering in her mind. Here is the mantra:

• Your life has meaning, because of you, the entire family has gathered together and our bonds are strengthening. 

• Your life has meaning because you are teaching me how to enter into a deep state of meditation.  When you often smile while meditating, I find it very beautiful and full of wisdom and I want to learn to do that.

• Because of you, in your name, we will do seva (devotional work to improve society)

• We all love you

2.  Preparing the Sacred Space

As mentioned previously, I decided to begin the ceremony by burning cow dung because it is often traditionally done in Hindu ceremonies including those of death.  More importantly, for  me, the cow dung represents the circularity of nature and energy  (Life into Death and Death into Life).  Ghee (indian butter) was placed on the cow dung and on top of that was kapoor (camphor) which produced a purifying smoke.  The clay pot to the left represented Death and contained the perfumed ashes from Varanasi.  The clay pot to the right contained sindoor which represented fertility/Life.  I poured water from the Ganga, which flows through Mirzapur, into the metal dish and then placed the vessel that my mother, aunt and I made into the water. The water from Ganga was important because we collected it from where my grandmother used to bathe and the water has ritualistic signicance and is considered sacred. 

To create the sacred space, I represented all of the elements:  Water (Ganga), Fire (the burning cow dung), Air (smoke from the cow dung), Earth (clay pot made from the Earth of Mirzapur), and Space (the sacred space encircled by family members). 

3.  My Introductory Remarks

My introductory remarks included the following things:

• A few reasons why I do hair harvest ceremonies (listed above more thoroughly) include: a nonjudgmental review of my past (failures, successes), goal setting for the future (i.e. planting an idea seed in my field of Karma), and feeling life deeply. For this particular beard harvest, I had set the goal to visit my grandmother and undergo a rite of passage of devotional care and go through a spiritual transformation. 

• Some say that my grandmother's life no longer has meaning, however while she is alive, I feel that her life has significant meaning. First, because of her, Mother, my aunt, myself and everyone attending all came together. Because of my grandmother, my bond with everyone in the 2 joint families has strengthened and will eventually fruit in collaborations which I find very beautiful.  It has been the first time I have seen my mother in her village and there is something beautiful about having my grandmother and her two daughters reunited together where she gave birth to them. There is a certain feeling of beauty and circularity to it. 

• Others, I have heard, have said that the reason she is not dying and the reason why is trapped in this world is because of her past sins which are making her suffer longer in this world. I disagree with this perspective. From my point of view, she is here to teach all of us a deep lesson.  I am learning from everyone how to do devotional care for the elderly. When I look at her, I see her in a deep meditative state. She generates smiles, sometimes several times a minute without any sensory stimulation from the outside world.  She is in a state where she cannot control anything, where sometimes she cannot breathe from asthama, where she feels weak and yet somehow she still has the ability ot smile. It is, in my opinion, the deepest form of meditation...one that I strive for.  I also see her as a living prayer. Because her everyday is the same and because she doesn't experience too many new things, it is as if everyday she is a living prayer. When she is able to communicate, she says that she becomes one with divinity.  

• My future goals

  • I will extend my stay from 2 weeks into 5 weeks to deeply learn, absorb and live next to my grandmother and the family. 

  • I will try to provide devotional care to my grandmother: massage, sitting, encouraging people to sing bhajans

  • I will try to get into a deeper meditative state by absorbing and learning from my grandmother's meditative state where she is able to nucleate smiles. 

  • Strengthen my relationship with everyone in the two joint families and plant idea-seeds that will lead to meaningful collaborations that bring all of us together and make a positive impact on the world. 

4.  Grandmother Vessel Ceremony

In this part of the ceremony, each person:

1. dipped their finger into the left clay pot that had a mixture of oil and sindoor which represented fertility and life.  They then pressed a dot onto the left side of the Grandmother Vessel where there was an outline of the Creature of Life.  

2. dipped their finger into the right clay pot that had perfumed ashes which represented Death.  These ashes were collected from the sacred city of Varanasi which is close to my Mother's village and are often used in rituals, where the ashes represent the cremated body.  Symbolically it reinforces the idea that the soul is part of the vast spiritual river of energy whereas the body is just a manifestation of maya and people should not get attached to the body.  Death, like Life, is the dance of energy.  After dipping their finger into the ash, they then pressed a dot onto the right side of the Grandmother Vessel where there was an outline of the Creature of Death. 

3. deposited an item into the Grandmother Vessel that represented themselves

4. shared a story about my grandmother or about the meaning of their item. 

Here is the finished Grandmother Vessel and it is composed of two Creatures of Destiny that are a lietmotif in my artwork.  They were originally motivated from wood lice that I find in my backyard, who are inherently very weak but once they land upon wood they make destiny by breaking down the dead wood and turning it into Earth.  I see myself as being weak and adrift in the winds of destiny but also as being able to create beauty wherever I land.  The creature to the left represents Life (in sindoor) and the one to the right represents Death (in ash).  In union, they are the dance of divine energy and they come together, at the beginning and ending of life, to become a reborn seed of Destiny. My grandmother is reborn through her family (who placed representative items into the vessel) and through her dreams of seva (devotional work for society; ideas which were placed into the vessel during my rebirth ceremony). 

On the other side of the Grandmother Vessel are 3 eyes.  Painted in the orange sindoor, which represents fertility and life, are the two traditional eyes of the human that see the world of maya (illusion).  Painted with white ash, which represents death, is the third eye that has divine vision and sees the world of truth and how everything is a manifestation of the same flow of energy.  In the mythology, the third eye not only has divine vision (which inputs information) but it also emits  destiny/action/energy (which outputs information).  This vessel inputs ideas and outputs actions for seva (devotional work for society).  In my Rebirth Ceremony of 2022, people placed ideas of positive intention into the pot and I will eventually implement those ideas in the name of my grandmother. 

As mentioned before, the pot is made from the Earth of Mirzapur and so it represents the identity of my grandmother.  Additionally, the mud from the Earth of Mirzapur  which makes the pot represents the body.  The soul  is represented by the ideas placed within it.  And the rebirth is represented by the implementation of the ideas.  

5.  Beard Harvest Ceremony

The ceremony finished with a beard harvest. As mentioned above, one reason why I do hair ceremonies is because hair is a record of time that chronicles my goals, successes and failures.  The cycle begins when I set goals that are like seeds and then my hair/beard grows like a crop that is harvested when the time is right. 

The Beard Harvest began when my mother poured water from the Ganga on me while I was in my symbolic nastypose. Then, one by one, all of the attendees cut a portion of my beard and made a wish and then offered it to the fire that was burning cow dung. 

In addition to the symbolism behind harvesting the beard, one of the main reason for shaving my hair is to induce a physical transformation that reminds me of my spiritual transformation. When my hair harvest started in high school, shaving my head hair was a way of sacrificing what society found beautiful and detaching from their, and my, expectations.  

Especially when I was younger, I couldn't even recognize myself after a hair harvest and would often surprise myself when passing by a mirror. It would take 2 weeks to really feel normal again.  During this time, everytime I would feel surprised by the novelty of the physical transformation,  I would remind myself of the goals of my spiritual transformation.  This would be reinforced, like a mantra, everytime I would meet someone new who would remark about how different I looked and ask why I shaved all of my hair. 

Now, in my middle age, I no longer feel any surprise.  But what is really beautiful is that I no longer need a physical transformation as a driver for a spiritual one.  The spiritual transformation occurs in the designing, planning and implementation of the ceremony and then again during the planning and writing of the documentation. 

6. The Future

Eventually I will link this to my rebirth ceremony of 2022 which I did after my grandmother passed. In that ceremony I made the intention to make a positive impact in the world in collaboration with people.  Many people at the ceremony made similar intentions and placed pieces of paper within the vessel. 

Seeds of Destiny

My grandmother would be reborn through her family and at the ceremony my mother, my aunt, my grandfather's brother's joint family and my grandmother's sister's joint family attended.  Each person gifted a seed of destiny that represented themselves and placed it within the Vessel.  All of these items traveled with me back to my home in Lexington and sit in my room.  They include: 2 homemade dolls, a rudraksh necklace, a large rudraksh bead, a handmade bracelet, the feet of a goddess, a jeweled turtle ring, an ancient 1 rupee, a coin with Durga on it, handmade lacework, 6 pieces of artwork, an image of Saraswati, 2 letters, a mug with a picture of my grandmother and myself, and a container of sindoor.

Made by my nephew and nieces, this unbelievably gorgeous artwork is my maternal grandfather's family tree.  Growing up in the US, I always felt as if I were shrouded in isolation, on an island, disconnected from community,  family and history.  In the 1980s, the vibe of the US was very different, and everyone saw me as a foreigner and so I never got that feeling of belonging.  Without any direct family around, I didn't feel as if I were part of any larger storyline, nor was my brain wired to see people in the context of family. Then, when I visited India for the first time in middle school, it was mindblowing to see the vastness of my extended family and how beauty, complexity, drama and trauma ramified across each branch of the family tree. 

As I grew older and interviewed my family, I became like a flying bird who could see the entire landscape upon which my family tree grew and I could see the generational trauma, struggles, pains, sacrifices and victories tumbling down the branches.  I could see patterns appearing and disappearing and repeating and mutating.  I could see how we are all variations on a theme.  I could see the beauty of our collective human journey.  

This breathtakingly beautiful shirt was made by my niece. She had everyone in the joint family put their hand prints on the shirt and even had my grandmother's hand print in the center and the family's infant's footprints on the back!  By relation, I am a grandfather of the infant! I see clothing as a representation of identity which is why it feels so good to wear this and carry with me the entire family.  

Video Summary