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By Swami Veda Bharati

April 2011

The divine feminine expressed in the divine mantra streem can be used for creating more humane blueprints for living and doing business.

In the tradition of yoga meditation, the first initiation is with a personal mantra. The mantras are often accompanied by bija-mantras or seed words that carry great potency but cannot be translated. One of the most powerful seed words is streem. This seed word is formed by adding to the word ‘stri’, which is Sanskrit for woman, the third sound in Om, the sound ‘m’, which denotes the silence that is the nature of meditation.

Today, when humanity’s power structures have largely failed, it is the mantra streem that can show the way out. The values of the present social, political, economic structures are anti-feminine and anti-family. By their very nature and constitution, they oppose and annul the values and structures of a society built with the power of a feminine mantra as its basis.

Of course, merely electing woman prime ministers will not change the situation. There have been 66 woman prime ministers, presidents and heads of state in the last 50 years. Forget big issues like world peace, women of power have not succeeded in advancing the cause of woman’s rights. Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher could not avoid wars in the interest of their countries and Benazir Bhutto could hardly do anything to change the antiwoman laws of her country.

Similarly, women who hold high positions in the corporate world have to operate within the existing cut-throat competitive systems established by men by adopting aggressive tones of communication and by constantly shifting between the attack and defence modes. The maledominated system being what it is does not have any room for the pursuit of harmony.

A new world

For a clear shift in thinking to happen, a council of thinkers comprising women as well as streem-initiated men have to come together to work out new formulae for running a new world that discards values and structures perpetrated by men. These women thinkers can help us create a completely new society that is more respectful of family values and sensitive to world unity and global peace. The blueprint of such a world would have to be devised on their own reading of non-violent approaches that echo Gandhian/ Taoist/ Jaina teachings. Women have the deep hidden power to create such a world, says Vaak, the daughter of sage AmbhrNa of the Rg-veda who sang of the cosmic feminine power within her:

Initiating, creating all worlds and beings that are the effects (Of your nature), as their Cause and Source, I alone am and operate un-superceded by another, the way the wind blows not pushed by another but of its own will.

Beyond space, beyond this earth, beyond all effects therein, I, who by form and nature am unattached, untouched, neutral, absolute Consciousness that is Brahman by my glory and power, such is my expanse.

I am in union as the spirit of all and the entire universes.
– Rg-veda 10.125.8

I bow to the sage Vaak, and invoke the mantra streem for the benefit of all humanity