The Tea Room

Wanted to create a thread on male devotion to Goddess worship. Please feel free to add your thoughts.

There are several male devotees of Goddess in Hindu traditions and Indian culture. Not without its own issues (caste being a big one). Looking back at my childhood, I think Ramakrishna was a prominent male devotee of Goddess in my life. So I wanted to start this thread with Ramakrishna.

1) RAMAKRISHNA
I grew up in South India where Goddess worship is alive and prevalent. I first came across Ramakrishna when I was 10. By then, the Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi spiritual centers had become well established all over India through several public schools, hospitals, and charities. Sarada Devi (Ramakrishna's wife) led several socially reformative projects for women's well being. My mom studied in one of their schools and later went to their well reputed college for her degree.

One day, I was on my bicycle and stopped by at a beautiful park. It felt so serene. So I wandered in. It was a 'Ramakrishna park' that had a big beautiful garden with a small pond and a small dome like building in the center. The gardener told me that it was a silent meditation place open for everyone. I went in. It felt nice but I got bored and ran back into the garden. After that day, I came back to that garden several times to sit and watch the squirrels play. There are several books about Ramakrishna and his teachings. I have not read any of the books but what I know of Ramakrishna is by sitting in one of his gardens.

Ramakrishna worked as a priest at a Kali temple in Calcutta, India. Here he meditated upon Kali as his own mother and as the universal mother. As his devotion deepened, he saw and experienced Kali in and as everything.

Quote"...houses, doors, temples and everything else vanished altogether; as if there was nothing anywhere! And what I saw was an infinite shoreless sea of light; a sea that was consciousness. However far and in whatever direction I looked, I saw shining waves, one after another, coming towards me."

Ramakrishna was explicit about his 'left-handed' practice of Tantra. He was initiated into Tantra by 'Bhairavi Brahmani, an orange-robed, middle-aged female ascetic' and practiced Goddess worship till the day he died. Devotion (Bhakti), service (seva), and non-duality (advaita) were his core teachings.

Quote"When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive - neither creating nor preserving nor destroying - I call Him Brahman or Purusha, the Impersonal God. When I think of Him as active - creating, preserving and destroying - I call Him Sakti or Maya or Prakriti, the Personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The Personal and Impersonal are the same thing, like milk and its whiteness, the diamond and its lustre, the snake and its wriggling motion. It is impossible to conceive of the one without the other. The Divine Mother and Brahman are one."

Ramakrishna's teachings on social service:

Quote"Jive daya noy, Shiv gyane jiv seba"
(Not kindness to living beings, but serving the living being as Shiva Himself)

One of the patriarchal preoccupation with Ramakrishna's journey has been about his sexuality. He married his wife as a child and never consummated the marriage. Sarada Devi was regarded as Divine Mother in person by Ramakrishna and his disciples. As his spiritual journey progressed, Ramakrishna became more androgynous and lived as 'handmaid' of Goddess.

Quote“How can a man conquer passion? He should assume the attitude of a woman. I spent many days as the handmaid of God. I dressed myself in women's clothes, put on ornaments and covered the upper part of my body with a scarf, just like a woman. With the scarf on I used to perform the evening worship before the image. Otherwise how could I have kept my wife with me for eight months? Both of us behaved as if we were the handmaid of the Divine Mother.”
Source: Sharma, Arvind (1977). "Ramakrishna Paramahamsa: A Study in a Mystic's Attitudes towards Women". In Rita M. Gross. Beyond Androcentrism.

Adding to this thread after a long time.
Excerpts from the book 'Transgender Spirituality: Man into Goddess' by Sakhi Bhava.

"I am a male who is powerfully drawn to the sacred light of the Feminine that he must lose himself - and his male ego and pride - it its penetrating rays. This is an honorable and transformative path that leads to spiritual fulfillment.
...Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae says flatly that "a man putting on women's clothes is searching for God.""

"...The saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It is also the purest expression of love. The greatest devotion, the greatest sacrifice, is to surrender one's own identity to another, to view life from a perspective that is not inherently one's own, for the sake of love.
...In a culture that considers female traits to be inferior and unworthy of a man, it is seen as a humiliation for a man to assume a woman's nature. Male pride and sense of superiority are the obstacles to a man's development and expression of his anima. Therefore, he fantasizes about being humbled because he needs to be humbled if he is to fulfill his spiritual and emotional potential by coming to know his feminine nature.
The spiritual life always requires the humbling of one's ego before a higher power or state of being. A man must overcome his male pride and accept the woman within himself so that he can surrender himself before the Divine. The leather clad dominatrices of erotic literature are cartoon surrogates for the Goddess herself, who must remove the arrogance of her male worshiper so he can receive her grace and learn the secrets of the anima, the woman within."

"...For the overwhelming majority of men, the process of integrating their feminine sides into their conscious personalities will involve an increased sense of empathy with women, a greater spontaneity of feeling and expression, and a fuller awareness of intuitive processes. But for those males who feel a powerful need to go further, to "become" women, either occasionally or permanently, the anima is demanding a fuller expression in the form of a feminine personality that must be taken seriously as an integral, or even dominant, part of their natures.
...Such a person must strive to become the woman he respects most. He must choose female role models to pattern himself after. He must give serious thought to what makes a woman admirable and go beyond the adoloscent stage of preferring physical beauty and grace to character and depth. This is not game of play-acting - the man who would be a woman is pursuing his own spiritual enligtenment. He will become the sort of woman he contemplates according to how deeply and sincerely he contemplates her. And like the women that he admires and strives to imitate, he must remember not to lose touch with his male side, for neither is complete without the consciousness of both."

"...A preference for goddesses as personal deities stems in part from awe of woman's ability to bring life into the world and to sustain it. But there are other reasons why a lover of God may prefer to envision the Ultimate as a woman, and especially as a mother. Women have been almost universally perceived as kinder, less violent, more tender, compassionate, and forbearing than men. A mother may forgive and console more readily than a father. She is usually seen as being more approachable and empathetic. Even where a patriarchal god theoretically dominates a feminine intercessor often appears, a saint or consort or Virgin Mother, to whom the troubled devotee may appeal with less fear and trembling."

Adding to this thread after a long time.

Excerpts about 'Queer Spirituality'

Quote"How many genders are there? To a modern Anglo-American, nothing might seem more definite than the answer that there are two: men and women. But not all societies around the world agree with Western culture's view that all humans are either women or men. The commonly accepted notion of "the opposite sex," based on anatomy, is itself an artifact of our society's rigid sex roles.

Among many cultures, there have existed different alternatives to "man" or "woman." An alternative role in many American Indian societies is referred to by anthropologists as berdache. Briefly, a berdache can be defined as a morphological male who does not fill a society's standard man's role, who has a nonmasculine character. This type of person is often stereotyped as effeminate, but a more accurate characterization is androgyny. Such a person has a clearly recognized and accepted social status, often based on a secure place in the tribal mythology. Berdaches have special ceremonial roles in many Native American religions, and important economic roles in their families.

Berdaches gain social prestige by their spiritual, intellectual, or craftwork/artistic contributions, and by their reputation for hard work and generosity. They serve a mediating function between women and men, precisely because their character is seen as distinct from either sex. They are not seen as men, yet they are not seen as women either. They occupy an alternative gender role that is a mixture of diverse elements. Berdachism is a way for society to recognize and assimilate some atypical individuals without imposing a change on them or stigmatizing them as deviant. This cultural institution confirms their legitimacy for what they are.

That which is not understood is seen as a threat. But an alternative method of dealing with such things, or people, is to take them out of the realm of threat and to sanctify them. The berdaches' role as mediator is thus not just between women and men, but also between the physical and the spiritual. American Indian cultures have taken what Western culture calls negative, and made it a positive; they have successfully utilized the different skills and insights of a class of people that Western culture has stigmatized and whose spiritual powers have been wasted.

Native American religions offered an explanation for human diversity by their creation stories. In some tribal religions, the Great Spiritual Being is conceived as neither male nor female but as a combination of both... These stories portray that the berdache was created by the deities for a special purpose, and that this creation led to the improvement of society... These stories suggest that the very survival of humanity is dependent on the inventiveness of berdache. The high status accorded to gender variation was passed down from generation to generation. A spiritual explanation guaranteed a special place for a person who was considered different but not deviant... Becoming any kind of sacred person involves taking on various social responsibilities and burdens.

The Europeans were not only aghast, but amazed and dumbfounded as to why berdaches were considered sacred. The holiness of the berdache has to do with Indian views that everything that exists is a reflection of the spiritual. If a person is different from the average individual, this means that the spirits must have taken particular care in creating this person."

— Walter L. Williams (The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture, 1986)

More on Queer Spirituality:

Quote"The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.

For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.

The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. 

The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self- effacement, depression, self-denial."

— Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984)

More on 'Queer Spirituality'

Quote"...The immortal soul has no gender and no orientation. The psycho-sexual body is the seat of emotions, desires, propensities, orientations, and also of moral agency... the gods and goddesses in Hindu mythic stories exhibit gender fluidity and queer orientations... many stories emerged wherein gods transition into goddesses and vice versa. There are gods who are third-gendered and some that manifest all three genders. Some deities only cross-dress, without gender transition. Then there are male gods who exhibit female attributes and female gods with male attributes... Apparently, for the ancients, masculinity did not diminish when the feminine was amplified.

All of these descriptions of inherent fluidity and diversity in physical bodies demonstrate the remarkable comfort with the queer found among the Hindu gods and narrated in their mythologies... They must be seen as metaphorical vehicles employed by the ancients to communicate complex ideas of metaphysics, sexuality, diversity, and human nature in narrative and symbolic form... the very idea of 'homosexuality as sin' is absent from the Hindu corpus, as it does not conceptually fit within a metaphysic of karma and infinite rebirth.

Many of [the Hindu] temples openly celebrate erotic imagery and sexuality in their architecture, including many that depicted homosexuality. The temples of Khajuraho and Chapri are striking examples of this... These temples were seen as celebration of life, light, and kama (Eros), from which comes all of creation. A temple devoid of the depictions of sexuality and sensuality was considered inferior and tantamount to the 'lair of death' and darkness. These facts indicate at the very least that sexual diversity and gender-fluidity were recognised as an evident feature of the world and its discussion or depictions were not considered taboo... This view is further validated when placed within the larger metaphysical nature of Hinduism articulated in the Rig Veda: vikiriti evam prakriti, which means that what seems unnatural is also natural, or diversity is nature.

Dharma is to humans what natural behaviour is to a plant or animal. However, since human beings are entities with imagination, agency and intentionality, an individual's dharma (appropriate behaviour) becomes a matter of ethical choice, context, wisdom and purpose... And, since divinity is embedded in everything, wisdom lies in discovering the divinity in the other rather than engaging in judgement and condemnation.

Karma performed with detachment, says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, is karma yoga, the yoga of action. In practice, this means being assertive without being arrogant. It means being firm about oneself, without being offensive to others. It means standing up not only for one's own rights and dignity but also for others like oneself and perhaps others who are struggling to have a voice. Taking part in community events, sharing and caring within the community and a relentless battle against the adharma of discrimination is one way of affirming one's faith. Hinduism advocates active engagement in the fight against negative feelings, which in today's world are forms of adharma.

In this way, 'coming out' would be a way to fight the negativity outside. And rejecting fear and loneliness would be a fight against negativity within oneself."

— Jerry Johnson (I Am Divine So Are You: How Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Hinduism affirm the dignity of queer identities and sexualities, 2017)