The Conundrum of an ancient relic—Sabarimala and its women visitors The issue of women’s entry into the shrine of Sabarimala in Kerala has been in the eye of a raging storm that refuses to die. The controversy has snowballed today, to say the least, into a never ending debate on gender discrimination and women’s rights issue.

As a nascent spiritualist with that sharp thirst of a seeker this debate has enthralled me to a great extent and has been accentuated by the fact that I owe my geographical origins to the coasts of Malabar and Konkan. I have closely followed the arguments made by the opposing sides in the debate which I feel are significantly influenced by base emotions and leans heavily on the new superficiality in the media.

Moreover as someone who rebels against the notion of ‘’faith’’ and a non-believer in temples as conventionally understood, I would cast some of my thoughts as follows.

To start with, it may be helpful to grasp the following pointers in tradition relating to the Sabarimala shrine: • There are hundreds of temples dedicated to Lord Ayyappa in India where the deity is present in many avatars —in the form a child, an old person etc. But, in the temple of Sabarimala the deity is found in the form of ‘naishtika brahmchari’- an eternal celibate.

• The temple sits on the crucible of the celibate energy which is manifested in the deity itself in the form of an idol where the devotees worship as a path of renunciation (Nivritti Marga) and which is not conducive to the path of the family (Pravritti Marga or Grihasta).

• Ancient sub-continental traditions have stipulated motherhood as both a privilege and a personal duty for women (Swadharma) and puts women at the center of family, center of ‘Pravritti Marga’.

• The restriction on entry of women of reproductive age into the Sabarimala temple it traditionally viewed in this context. The belief is that the prohibition is placed not because women are considered inferior, but because the energy in the temple may interfere with the Swadharma of women.

• The belief is that a woman’s entry into the temple carries the risk of causing disruption to her menstrual cycles which may cause an obstruction to her ability to conceive, which is her privilege and Swadharma.

• Also, the belief is that the restriction prevents any imbalance in the spiritual energy and atmosphere of the temple.

The question is how these traditions and beliefs should be received in our modern world where every aspect is expected to be viewed through the prisms of “reasonability” and “logic”.

Modern cutting edge science, of which Stephen Hawkins is a strong proponent, espouses the existence of a multiverse where an infinite number of universes coexist in infinite dimensions. The notion of such a multiverse is a construct of an intuitive thought process, i.e. a process where Hawkins seeks to perceive existence through a leap of imagination and then seeks to justify the same through a series of complex mathematical equations. In the ancient sub-continental traditions he could well be seen as a “seer” or a “rishi”. It there an issue with our acceptance of the hypothesis of a western “seer” as science, but debunking, without a second thought, articulations of the seers from the east as superstition. As such, is there a flaw in rejecting the above pointers in tradition without any serious contemplation as eastern superstition that deserves a quick end?

At the same time it must be pointed out that within the sub-continent there have existed people with highly perceptive powers, the seers or the rishis who have contemplated on the forces in our universe and sought to explain the multi-dimensional interplay of the different kinds of energies, much like Hawkins does today. Tradition has it that these seers or rishis created, over the centuries, 3-dimensional practices and systems that would have multi-dimensional effects. This combination of systems and practices, both the knowledge and the procedure systems, came to be generally described as “Hinduism”.

For the larger section of the people these practices came in the form of a series of physical instructions that inexplicably would get the practitioner to a specific identified outcome. Through the ages many ‘’non-seers’’ who led these practices lost out on the scientific aspects of these practices which manifested themselves as mindless rituals and superstition. As a consequence, and probably led by belief systems that arrived from the middle-east and the west, the notion of “faith” took hold in the sub-continent. For the common man, Hinduism too came to be a practice in faith.

And today what is left from the past, i.e. a system that reflected the multi-dimensional aspects of the universe and its co-relation with the three dimensional world, are the relics primarily in the form of ancient temples.

In conclusion, it is possible that the Sabarimala shrine is one such relic from the past where a series of instructions on engaging with a combination of multi-dimensional forces at play have been left behind. Disregarding these instructions or indeed asking the Indian courts to do so merely because some of us do not comprehend these instructions and practices fully would probably be a folly. We might hazard undesirable outcomes or in the least losing a bunch of intangible benefits that are difficult to comprehend or identify.

Net net, as they say in the sub-continent, the state and the courts might need to weigh these possibilities against what might appear on the face to be an ancient discriminatory practice. My view would be against tampering with these ancient traditions, at least until these practices are indeed found to be discriminatory after a serious analysis.