The Mother Who Comes as Hunger

Yā devī sarvabhūteṣu kṣudhārūpeṇa saṃsthitā, namastasyai namastasyai namastasyai namo namaḥ.

To the Devi who dwells in all beings in the form of hunger: salutations to her, again and again.

The previous verse bowed to the Mother as sleep. This one bows to her as hunger. Guruji calls it even more essential: if you are half hungry, you cannot sleep. And unlike sleep, hunger stays with us for a lifetime.

Hunger comes by itself

Hunger is not produced at will. It does not stay with you all day, and it does not arrive because the clock says nine or one or four. It appears on its own, at its time. It is svayambhu, self-born, and in that, Guruji says, it carries the stamp of the Adi Shakti.

So the verse is also practical. Eat when hunger asks. Food in front of you does not make you hungry, and everything the eye sees on the road is not meant to be eaten. When the body truly asks, eat.

He gives a homely picture of the same Shakti. You come home already fed, and your mother still says: you must eat a little, I made this for you. You agree and take a few bites. That, he says, is matru shakti, the power of the mother, and the Devi’s grace is in it too.

Four hungers

Guruji names several kinds of hunger. There is the hunger of the body, the hunger of the mind, and the hunger of the heart, the emotional life. And there is spiritual hunger. Within spiritual hunger is a particular one: the hunger for knowledge.

Knowledge, he says, is like a great river that never stops flowing. Anyone can draw from it. Some take a little at the start and stay there, satisfied. Others keep going. The river is available to everyone. What decides who goes further is grace, the grace that, as he puts it, keeps some people afloat and carries them on.

The hunger no one can plant

This is the centre of his teaching on this verse.

If someone has spiritual hunger, no one else can produce it in them. It cannot be installed, and it cannot be planted like a seed.

Methods of meditation can be taught, and Guruji teaches many. But the seed itself is not a technique. It is what he calls shaktipata: the grace of the Mother and of Shiva, filled into the seeker by a Siddha Guru. When that grace fills a person, the hunger reveals itself on its own.

Knowledge cannot be force-fed

The opposite does not work either. Knowledge cannot be pushed into someone the way an anxious parent pushes food into a child’s mouth. The child spits it out, cries, and finally rebels. Forced spiritual teaching produces the same resistance.

Without real hunger, Guruji observes, a person can attend satsangs, practise, and fill themselves with ideas, and still find no satisfaction. They want more and more, and nothing settles. With hunger and grace, the same practice nourishes.

Balance

His conclusion is balance. Honour the body’s hunger without excess. Notice the hungers of the mind and heart. And value the hunger for truth when it comes, because even the chance to sit before a Siddha Guru and hear these things, he says, is itself a sign of the Mother’s grace.

To experience this grace directly, Guruji’s teaching begins with Siddha Meditation 1 and the free Thursday satsang.

Guruji also wrote a fuller commentary on this verse. Read it, with the verse in Kannada and his original notes, in Sutra 5 of the Devi Stuti.