Varaha Avatar: New Explanation
Dr M Lakshmikumari is a scholar. She was the president of Vivekanada Kendra, Kanyakumari and edited its journals. I have already published one excerpt from her book: “Mother’s Love- Gandhari’s First Night”. I want to share one more page from her book; please note the headings are mine, not hers:
From the book SITA MUST LIVE: THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY written by Dr M Lakshmikumari:
“ One is reminded of the meaningful story full of highly relevant symbolism from our Puranas, centred round the incarnation of Lord Vishnu as the boar to restore Mother Earth that had tilted and slipped into the depths of Ocean. The moral is when human beings become oblivious of their responsibilities consequent on their interconnectedness and interdependence, God Almighty incarnates as Yagna Varaha—symbol of the principle of sacrifice. When our actions become self oriented and disjointed, breaking the natural interrelatedness, Truth gets devalued and there is a tilt. Yagnavaraha comes to remind man of the urgency of bringing the sense of sacrifice into his actions, of raising them into Yagnas, so that harmony and strength are restored as also the balance.
When the side of truth and related values including natural relationships become heavily outweighed on the other side with untruth and injustice, when our thoughts, words and deeds become shallow and superficial not expressive of deeper levels of our being, the individual, family and the society suffer. With each act of injustice we perpetrate, the scale is tilting further and further, distancing us from our roots in the earth, snapping one or more links in our connectedness with the rest of nature.
When humanity loses its balance, naturally the earth also loses its balance. With every generation the tilt becomes more and more conspicuous. The net result is a spiritual crisis, as is happening in our generation.
“Every day we reach deeper into the storehouse of earth’s resources, put more of these resources to use and generate more waste of every kind in the process. We are living on overdrafts and our children will have nothing to live on or live for. Frustration and anger will be their only inheritance.”
