The warrior aspect of Ganesha has been downplayed for some reason.
I don’t want to go into that.
But it is a very important thing to understand the warrior concept of Ganesha, the warrior
against ignorance, against negativity, against lethargy, and against evil.
These are all very important characteristics associated with Ganesha.
He is essentially a warrior.
That’s why he is…
Siva appointed him as the head of his army, The Divine Army.
You know, if you go to the mythological stories of Ganesha, you have a lot of references where
he went and killed the demons, and very powerful demons whom nobody else could defeat, or kill.
Ganesha was able to do.
So one of his qualities, perhaps the most important quality of Ganesha, is to destroy
the evil forces, and in that respect he’s a warrior.
He’s a warrior who can destroy evil forces, or lethargy, or ignorant forces.
Now there is a specific way… before I go into that, let me talk about a few of the
demons that he killed.
Hum.
One is the demon called Analasura.
He’s a Fire Demon, and then the fire is symbolic here of lust, the lust for sexual
pleasures.
Yeah, uncontrollable lust, and that belonged to a particular demon, and nobody could defeat
him, and then Ganesha was created for that purpose.
Analasura means the Fire Demon, you know, who was born out of the lust of another God,
and then he became uncontrollable and was creating a lot of problems, and Ganesha finally
swallowed him.
Ok.
Elsewhere I may have talked about this story.
Also another demon that he killed was the demon who also looked like Ganesha, who also
had an elephant face, and he defeated him.
And the stories are very interesting because once you kill somebody, although the killing
was justified because it was a demon who killed and there is some kind of karma attached to
that.
And there are stories that Ganesha himself goes and then does penance in order to get
rid of the karma of killing somebody.
So killing, whether it is done for a good cause, or a bad cause it involves a certain
amount of karma.
That’s a great teaching, so I wanted to mention that so that you will know, you won’t
misunderstand the concept of warrior.
We have a need to kill, or destroy evil forces on a personal level, or also on a collective
level we have to do that.
Now, Ganesha can do that.
Let me talk, or focus attention more on a personal level.
Personally, lethargy, procrastination, and inbuilt ignorance, these are all demonic forces
within us, and that leads us, you know, to end up in failure, and being unable to do
things.
So Ganesha could help you with all… with the destruction… help you to destroy these
forces which are against your progress in life.