Dr Devdutt Pattanaik wrote a lovely book titled Myth=Mithya An anthology of Hindu mythology. It was a simple book that took the myth and peeled of layers below the story to share insight with the reader.

There were a couple of themes that ran through the book.

– Nature v/s culture
– Destiny v/s desire

The key forms of God – Brahma – the creator; Vishnu – the preserver; Shiva – the destroyer and the feminine form Shakti.

Shakti represents nature – raw, unbridled energy. The masculine forms represents external order imposed on nature – domesticating it.

In the beginning, Brahma emerged seated on a lotus from Vishnu’s navel and floated on the sea of consciousness. He opens his eyes – sees nature all around him, interacts with it and begins the creative process.
Thus we are the sum of our interactions with the world around us. We can either choose to effect some change in the world or react to the changes in the world around us. Thus either our desires effect change or we submit to what we could loosely call our destiny.

I also liked this book as it helped me understand my unhappiness with some aspects of my life. I was not fighting for what I desired and nor was I accepting what could be called my destiny and hence plagued by a simmering frustration with myself. Reading the book was partly therapeutic and brings me to a inflection point – what am I going to do?

I have not decided and hopefully when I do – I will blog about it.