Why Worship God as Mother? Navaratri and the Limitless Self

Nine nights, then a tenth morning of victory. That is the rhythm of Navaratri, the Hindu festival in which the Divine is worshiped as the Mother, and in a satsang recorded at the Sivananda Ashram in the Bahamas, Swami Brahmananda opens the season not with ritual instructions but with a diagnosis. The problem, he says, is not that we lack information. It is that we are ignorant of our own ignorance. From there the talk moves through a passage from Swami Sivananda on the relativity of human perception, a claim about the limitless nature of consciousness, and a reading of the Devi Mahatmya, the scripture that the nightly pujas are built around. This is Part 1 of a longer teaching, and what follows draws on its opening portion to explain the ideas underneath the devotion: why the yogic tradition calls ignorance universal, why the mind is always reaching for an ideal, and why a mother is a useful picture of the Divine.

Why does a Navaratri teaching begin with ignorance?

The word is the first snag, and the speaker goes straight at it. "Ignorance in the yogic teaching is not an offensive word," he says at 1:58. It does not mean that you are foolish or should feel ashamed. It describes something every person shares, because everyone who is born arrives inside it. The sting is in the second layer. We are ignorant, and then we are ignorant of that fact. "We are ignorant that we are ignorant," he says. We take our limited view of things to be simply how things are, and so we never think to examine it.

From this he draws a conclusion that sounds almost too simple for a festival: the human life is a search for identity. He asks the audience to notice how often people say that someone is "looking for themselves," and then asks, half-playfully, whether it is not strange that a person should be looking for themselves when they are already right here. The point is that the search is not an accident. It is the visible form of a deeper question about what we actually are, and worship, in this framing, is a disciplined way of pursuing that question rather than a set of inherited gestures.

This matters for how the nine nights are understood. The speaker presents the festival as a progressive teaching in which we "gradually begin to understand the true nature of divinity or the self which makes us free." Devotion to the Mother is not a sentimental detour from the work of self-knowledge. It is the vehicle for it.

What does "relative" mean in Swami Sivananda's introduction?

The speaker's main source for the evening is the book God's Mother, an explanation of the Devi Mahatmya by Swami Chidananda. Chidananda was, in the speaker's words, one of the closest disciples of Master Sivananda and his successor as president of the Divine Life Society, and he gave lectures during Navaratri on the scripture. The book opens with an introduction by Swami Sivananda himself, and the speaker reads its core claim aloud:

"The concept of the human mind is based on relative experience. Subjective idealism therefore in its initial stages takes the aid of objective and relative analogies."

The speaker unpacks the phrase with a simple structure. Every experience involves a knower and a known. "You are the knower of your own world called your life," he says, and the world you live in, inner and outer, is known by you relative to your mind. He compares it to a film in which you are always the star, sometimes uncomfortably so, and he invokes the yogic idea of prarabdha karma, the unfolding of the karma that shows up as this particular life.

Then comes the line he clearly wants the audience to hold onto. "Everything known is relative to the one who is knowing," he says at 8:51. He is careful to say this is not Einstein's relativity, though he admits the two are related in a loose sense. The claim is epistemic before it is physical: what appears to you always appears in a particular frame, and the frame is you.

What is the light behind perception, and why can't science find it?

The speaker then pushes the argument toward consciousness. We all know what it is to be aware, he says, but we rarely ask what the awareness itself is. He uses the image of seeing a light without knowing its source. Something illuminates perception, and the mind, senses, and inner and outer worlds all show up within that illumination.

He is direct about where that light is not. Modern science, he notes, looks for it in the brain. The yogic view is that this search will never succeed, because "the brain itself is a known object. It's not a knower." He gives a homely example: when you have a migraine, the migraine is known to you. The brain, like the migraine, is something that appears in awareness. It cannot be the awareness that witnesses it.

This is the philosophical hinge of the talk. If the knower cannot be found among the known objects, then the true nature of the self is not a thing to be located. It is what makes all locating possible. The speaker states the consequence plainly: "our true nature is limitless. It's infinite."

Why does the mind keep seeking a limitless ideal?

If our nature is limitless, why do we feel so small? The speaker answers with a list of ordinary observations. Children eat little and never seem to tire. Adults, by contrast, eat mountains of food and need to rest after an hour of activity. We are limited physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, spiritually, financially, and politically. Yet the teaching holds that beneath these limits a truer capacity is always present.

The result, in his account, is a tension. Deep down we know we are unbounded, but consciously we experience ourselves as bounded. That tension shows up as seeking. "We ever seek it," he says, and the seeking takes the form of what Swami Sivananda calls an ideal: something we perceive as supreme and expect will relieve our most urgent limitations. The speaker frames this as subjective idealism. Our ideals are shaped by who we currently think we are.

He illustrates with a child asked what is supreme. The child imagines a chocolate factory with swimming pools of melted chocolate. The answer is comic, but the logic is the point. The ideal we reach for is always relative to our identity and our current needs. A spiritual person, by contrast, wants to be freed from the limitations in the first place, which means the mind must be trained in what it chooses to aim at. The speaker's phrase for this is that the mind has to learn to go in the right direction. Ideals that merely bind us to our current limits keep us circling. Ideals that point toward the limitless loosen the circle.

Why picture the Divine as Mother?

This is where the Navaratri framing does its work. The Divine Mother is not offered as a sentimental image pasted onto an abstract truth. It is an instrument for the mind. The speaker's larger argument is that concepts, whether abstract or concrete, must be taken in relationship, because the mind learns through relationship. He returns repeatedly to the idea of establishing a relationship with the object of worship, and he links that to the nurturing quality of the Divine. The closing line of this section, which the speaker delivers with evident warmth, is that "the divine nurturer God is mother."

Part of why this works is that it answers the problem the speaker has just described. A mind that imagines the Absolute as a remote abstraction tends to keep the Absolute outside itself, as one more object. A mind that approaches the Divine as a mother, as a source of care that is also the ground of one's own being, is invited into a closeness that the abstract concept does not easily provide. The imagery is not meant to limit the limitless. It is meant to give an overly limited mind a way in.

How does the Devi Mahatmya fit into the nine nights?

Each night of the pujas includes readings from the Devi Mahatmya, a scripture the speaker describes as a narrative that carries deep teaching under its story. The story is not the teaching, he says; the teaching lies beneath it and concerns the spiritual quest. The tenth morning, the day of victory, is when the divine forces are said to completely abolish the forces of ignorance. The sequence is deliberate. Nine nights of worship, reading, and contemplation lead to a morning in which the ignorance the festival began by naming is overcome.

For a reader who has not attended the Bahamas retreat, the practical lesson is less about the festival calendar than about attention. The talk is a sustained exercise in noticing how perception is framed, what the mind aims at, and what is doing the noticing. Whatever one thinks of the Mother imagery, the argument does not require belief in a particular theology to be examined. It asks a plain question that the speaker keeps returning to: who or what is the knower?

Where to go from here

To go further, start with the text the speaker builds on. Swami Chidananda's God's Mother is the book the lectures are drawn from, and its introduction by Swami Sivananda contains the relative-experience passage quoted above. Read that passage slowly and test it against an ordinary experience of the day: a conversation, a worry, a moment of boredom. Ask what the knower is in that moment and what has been known. The Devi Mahatmya is the scripture read each night of Navaratri, and reading even one section alongside a commentary gives the story the depth the speaker says it holds.

Part 1 ends before the talk reaches its full treatment of the Mother, so the picture here is partial by design. Watching the rest of the series, or the Part 2 that follows, will show how the teaching develops from identity and relativity toward devotion. The opening hour already makes one thing clear. Worshiping God as Mother, in this tradition, is not a retreat from the hard questions about ignorance and identity. It is one of the oldest ways of asking them.