Samudra vasane devi,parvata sthana mandite/ Vishnupatni namas tubhyam, dehi male tu prartaye —‘Oh Mother Earth! You are holding the oceans and the mountains, you are the wife of Vishnu; today, as I begin my day, please forgive me for putting my feet upon you.’
Today, Sita, in the form of Mother Earth, is being plundered by the 10- headed Ravana. With his 10 heads, he conjures up denials to dismiss, deceive and delude our world into a state of dangerous slumber — like the captive, sleeping beauties in his harem.
Ravana lives in the external world around us today. He also lives within us when we step out of the Lakshman Rekha, the circle of divine protection and connectedness.
Sita is the divine goddess, the origin of Mother Earth, she is god in the feminine aspect. She will never submit. She is Rama’s other self.
She will never consent to join Ravana’s harem or be molested by him.
Earth and the powerful mountains and rivers are able to regenerate themselves when they are held sacred and allowed to flow freely. When they are not damned by being damned up or desecrated by man’s intervention. Earth is a sacred goddess, Bhumi Devi. Her gifts cannot be regarded as simply commodities, or even resources to be exploited by the human world.
We must work for environmental protection, both locally and globally. But like Ravana, we ourselves can easily fall into dangerous patterns of motivation by lust, anger, greed and envy. Unless we clear the contamination within the ecology of our own hearts, no matter how many rivers, mountains and oceans we clean up, the contamination will just revert ,because its root cause is the untamed desire for over-accumulation and greed within our own hearts
We must reject the anthropocentric world view where human beings claim false proprietorship over all the world. We must create new networks of understanding the divine inter-connectivity of all that exists.
We must invert the ecological pyramid, and in humility, place the sanctity of the earth, oceans, mountains, animals, trees, and grass, as the ideal, and submit ourselves to the lowest place, where we, as humans, are meant to serve all others.
Sita, in her form as Bhumi Devi, Mother Earth, is sacred prakriti, or the divine shakti energy of Rama — the purusha, the holder of divine energy, the shaktiman.
The wisdom books of bhakti teach that just as sun and sunshine are never separated — there is no meaning to one without the other — in the same way, Sita, the energy, the divine shakti, and Rama, the energetic source, the shaktiman, can never be separated.
We ourselves as unlimited jiva, souls, in the form of humans, animals, aquatics, trees, grass, and all that is alive in nature have expanded from Sita, from her divine energy. Sita is Rama’s pleasure potency, and we belong to her. Like Bhakta Hanuman, we are also meant to serve, to give pleasure to Sita and Rama — in gratitude to them as our original and divine Source.
When we, like Ravana, try to usurp Sita for our own selfish purposes, when we try to dominate the earth, we ourselves, like Ravana, will be destroyed
The path of Bhakti is meant to assist the devotee, Hanuman, in returning Sita to her beloved Rama. The treasures of the earth are meant to be offered up in devotion to Rama, their original Source, in a consciousness of eco-bhakti.