Ganesha, The Remover of Obstacles

The day Ganesha was born, he died. His head was chopped off. That’s why he is the god of wisdom.

He is called the remover of obstacles, as only the one who dies truly lives.

Ganesha was created by his mother, Parvati, using earth, which she moulded into the shape of a boy. Ganesha was manifested through the body of Shakti (Parvati), this dynamic, creative, impulse of the universe.

At the moment Ganesha was born, there was a disconnect between Shiva and Shakti, between stillness and movement, between the world (Parvati, shape and form) and no world (Shiva, shapeless, formless), the manifest and the unmanifest. In that moment, Ganesha was created and so he was full of himself.

When the timebound gets disconnected from the timeless, there is ego, this sense of a separate self, this ‘what about me’. That’s the beginning of Ganesha. So, he really represented ego incarnate, this idea of ‘me against the world’, or ‘I have to save the people close to me’, this saviour complex. The ego is in a state of threat and so it is constantly looking for safety.

As Shiva was away on his meditative wanderings, Parvati set her new son as guard while she bathed. Shiva came back from the forest, longing to merge into Shakti. This is the eternal love affair between the form and the formless. But Shiva came back looking all wild. And, to the unawakened mind, the one who is awake seems crazy.

Ganesha saw Shiva as a madman and didn’t let him enter. That’s our conditioning. At that moment, Ganesha was the obstacle, guarding the gate.

This presence is longing to explode within us, but our conditioning makes us rigid.

Shiva chopped off Ganesha’s head. This is the death of the ego. The master’s grace killed the ego, in that very moment.

But then Parvati ran from her bath and admonished Shiva for killing their son. Shiva, realising what had happened, sought a new head for the boy. The first animal available was an elephant, so Ganesha gained an elephant head.

The elephant head has big ears. Instead of speaking, he is listening, an observer, not full of big ideas.This is the beginning of Ganesha. This whole story of ‘I am somehow special’ is gone.

What feels like death is actually birth; that moment of satori, of absolute surrender of our own ideologies, our false belief systems, our self-sabotaging patterns. That moment is the alchemy; from the ego-identified being to that deep wisdom.

As long as there is ego, there are only obstacles. Only when the ego is removed, is there no obstacle.

The material ego was overcome but later Ganesha’s spiritual ego reared its head. He went to visit his teacher, Vyasa, in Badrinath. He thought he knew everything but he couldn’t crystallize what he knew, as there was no awareness on the level of the soul.

He sat there for years until again satori dawned in him. Then he went back to his master and broke his right tusk off as an offering, representing his surrender to silence, to that inner voice of wisdom, to love, to that radical trust. That’s when he wrote the Vedas, with his broken tusk.

And so, Ganesha is often pictured with the right tusk broken, which represents the analytical aspect, the right side of the body, the left brain, the part of the brain which is constantly trying to figure things out. This shows that the desire to control is no more; transcendence of ego is there.

When we can transcend the ego, what arises in us is a spontaneous aliveness.

So, when you look at Ganesha, there is always a sense of joy there, a radical sense of positivity. Not a positivity which is a reaction to negativity, at war with negativity, but a positivity which really sees life in that way.

Ganesha is the remover of obstacles, through the wisdom realised in meditation. He acknowledges that obstacles are a part of the path, not obstacles on the path. Perceived obstacles are due to lack of creative intelligence. Ganesha has such creative intelligence that he destroys all obstacles.

He is the God of new beginnings and fresh starts. He looks for the best in everyone and everything, as he knows that there is always something to appreciate.  Enthusiasm, creativity, expansion and reasonless joy can all be yours. Invite them into your life with Ganesha. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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And now is a really good time to start, as it is Ganesh Chaturthi, a time that marks the birth of Ganesha. Jai Ganesha! ⠀⠀⠀

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