At a time when the sacredness of festivals is being progressively eroded by materialistic lifestyles, perhaps it is time to reinvent them. Festivals change along with the times and the people observing them. Change is inevitable, though it might not always be beneficial or meaningful. Today, when every festival — religious or cultural, national or international — is becoming an excuse to promote consumerism, perhaps there could be a reinvention that is different than one that kowtows to market diktats. Since the festival of the day is Raksha Bandhan, we could possibly ask ourselves whether we really need another “shopping day”, this one riding on the shoulders, and wrists, of brothers being goaded to buy all manners of tchotchkes for their sisters?
Raksha Bandhan has had a somewhat fluid interpretation, and as a result has often been historically reinvented. The idea of a thread of cotton as a carrier and conveyor of sacredness is an ancient one. Thread, along with fire and the wheel, was possibly one of those amazing discoveries that altered the course of humanity forever. In some ancient creation myths, the Creator is described as a weaver who wove the universe into existence. This conveys some of the magic the thread must have held in early societies where cloth, and the amount and way it was worn, became symbolic of the social status of the wearer. Our enduring relationship with the sacred thread is thus perhaps a reverberation through time and history of that early human fascination with the miracle of weaving.
From the Upanayan samskara’s janeu to the ubiquitous thread present at every ritual, to the divinely empowered amulets that all shrines, Hindu and Muslim, dispense to devotees, strands of cotton thread came to stand for a threading together. Of the divine and the human, and perhaps of our everyday consciousness with a deeper level of consciousness accessible at the rarefied spiritual atmosphere of shrines or during rituals and festivals. In the Indian subcontinent, the very terms sutra, literally “thread”, and tantra, literally “to weave”, too came to encompass comprehensive knowledge systems.
The idea of threading comes coupled with that of bandhan, the tying of oneself to something — a person, a relationship, a path or a practice. It could be of guru with student, deity with worshipper, priest with patron, brother with sister, and so on. In a contemporary reinvention, and particularly of the festival of Raksha Bandhan, where the bond is defined as one of “protection”, why not use the opportunity to acknowledge our deep connection with the earth and its ecosystem? Why not meditate upon the millions of ways in which the earth goddess, Gaia, protects and nurtures us, holds and keeps us? And contemplate how we too can contribute something useful to this all-encompassing relationship? Let us thread ourselves to Gaia this Raksha Bandhan. It might make for the beginning of a new sutra of meaning and depth in our lives.
Swati Chopra writes on spirituality and mindfulness. Blog: swatichopra.com
