Some guru stuff (part 2)

 

Some entry level (?) stuff you should have learned from your guru. 

What would be the lowest form of tamasic worship?

If by “lowest” you mean the most deeply tāmasic form of worship in the guṇa framework, rather than simply “the most frightening ritual,” I would put the emphasis on ignorance, cruelty, and deliberate misuse of religion.

The Bhagavad Gītā gives us a useful starting point. It describes tāmasic sacrifice as something performed without proper understanding, faith, or regard for the proper purpose of sacrifice. It also describes austerities performed from delusion or to harm oneself or others as tāmasic.

From that perspective, a rough hierarchy would be:

1. Tāmasic through ignorance
   Worship performed mechanically, superstitiously, or compulsively, with no real understanding of what one is doing.
2. Tāmasic through fear and obsession
   “I must perform this or something terrible will happen,” combined with fixation, paranoia, or irrational dependence on the ritual.
3. Tāmasic through selfish destructive intent
   Seeking to use a deity or ritual primarily for revenge, domination, hatred, or harm.
4. Extremely tāmasic
   Deliberately cultivating cruelty, hatred, degradation, or violence while regarding these things as spiritually desirable.

So I would actually put malicious intention lower than merely practicing a frightening or impure-looking ritual.

This is important for Tantra

A cremation-ground practice involving Bhairava, skull symbolism, darkness and fear might look extraordinarily tāmasic from the outside, but it isn't necessarily "low" worship at all.

Suppose the practitioner enters the cremation ground to confront:

• fear of death
• attachment to the body
• disgust
• aversion
• ego
• unconsciousness

and ultimately seeks liberation.

The materials and environment may be associated with tamas, but the purpose can be profoundly spiritual.

By contrast, a perfectly respectable-looking temple ritual performed with:

“May this deity destroy my enemy because I hate him”

could be considerably more tāmasic in its inner motivation.

The real bottom is probably instrumentalizing the Divine for evil

At the extreme end, the problem isn't simply that someone wants something for themselves. Even ordinary worldly requests can be rājasic.

The deeper descent is something like:

ignorance → selfishness → hatred → deliberate harm → identification of that harm with the sacred.

That is quite different from simply saying:

“I am frightened and I need protection.”

The latter may be rājasic or even sāttvic depending on the person's relationship with the deity.

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There is also a subtle point relevant to your earlier question about seeking a compassionate deity for your own sake.

Self-interest by itself is not the bottom of the scale. A person praying, “Mother, please help me; I am suffering,” is not necessarily deeply tāmasic. That's much closer to the Gītā's category of the ārta, the distressed person who turns toward God.

The much darker case would be:

“I don't care about truth, dharma, or other beings; I want divine power precisely so that I can harm, dominate, or indulge destructive impulses.”

That is where “tāmasic worship” becomes a genuinely strong description.

And this helps explain why Tantric traditions can sometimes work deliberately with tamas without endorsing tāmasic consciousness: the darkness itself can be used as the material of transformation.