Kamakhya

As I am writing this blog, I am sitting on the bus headed for the town pronounced Tez-por. Brian is taking me up there today to do a survey with a good friend of his at the hospital. However, it's seems that we have broken down or there is some problem with the bus. We have been sitting just north of the river on the side of very busy main road for about 30 minutes now. I'm talking serious traffic jam southbound, buses FULL of people and then as many as can fit on top. Brian said it is the lifeline to south of the river into the city. It's a very large river too, I would say close to as wide as the Mississippi or wider is some spots, so they don't have bridges everywhere. Next closest is about 3 hours upstream where we are headed. Maybe we were waiting on someone, we just got two new passengers from a car that pulled up. That's how they roll in 1nd1a! Oh well, we are moving again so it's all good. Wait, now we are off-roading IN THE BUS! Haha! I'm sure you can imagine what shape this bus is in and understand why I thought it had broken down, I mean they did have to push start it...

The bus ride is not what I wanted to blog about, I threw that in for free. : ) What I really wanted to talk about was our visit to Kamakhya temple last week. This is one of the oldest temples in this area; I think Konkon said it was 800-1000 years old. This was our day to learn about H1nduism. Brian, who is mostly H1ndu focus, told us to just go in there and explore, ask questions, and find out the story behind why they worship here at Kamakhya. So we split up into groups of 3 or 4, with a national in each, and set out to learn the story. As we walked around there were people everywhere, many of them worshipping the images of gods carved in stone on the outside of the temple, others reading the holy book, and some more lighting dias, small candle, incense type things. We also saw the alter where they make daily sacrifices of goats. The goats were roaming freely around the temple area, as well as some cows. Then there was this caged line, like something you would see at Disney World, where you had to pay to get into the inter part of the temple to get blessings. As we were taking in all the sights, we stepped into one of the outer chambers just for exploration's sake but there found a couple of priest who were willing to share the story with us and answer some questions. To make a long and kind of complicated story shorter, one of the main gs, shiva, got mad at his wife, if I remember correctly, and cut her up into pieces and Kamakhya happens to be where her female reproductive organs fell. That is why they built a temple and worship here. Bet you weren't expecting that huh? We asked the priest many questions about what he became a priest, why they sacrifice, among a few other things. The two priests we talked to were multigenerational priest. I don't know if I termed that correctly but meaning they are part of a line of priests in their family. There are so many other things; it was just like an information overload. Everything seemed so complex. Some worship many gs, some worship a main g for a certain reason. They have around 33,000 gs if I understood that right. One of the priests told us that he liked Kamakhya because she gave fast blessings, like a mother would a child. That priest was not from here, he had made the trip from another town somewhere far off. The 12th was the main pooja, worship for the year or this phase of the moon. He said he would be there and fast for 9 days and on the 12th many young girls would come to the temple and he would feed them and give them blessings. That would be the pooja and then he would return home. Pretty interesting. There is so much more and I wish I could recall all of it right now and help understand. One thing about it though, all these people here paying for blessings, sacrificing animals, paying respects to these gs, fasting, and worshipping are so far off from knowing the 1 TRUE G and the sav10r JC...that's the heartbreaking part. Many have never even heard the story of J. It's a different world folks. So please continue to lift up these people so that the HS will raise up seekers who know there is something missing in their lives and are searching for the Truth. Brian said that every 1.5 seconds someone dies in SE A, only a fraction know JC.