One man killed himself in a ritual to appease a goddess. Kindly give Your opinion on such extreme steps.

Shri Anil asked: Padanamaskaram Swami, A 30-year-old man killed himself by slitting his throat in Jharkhand in a ritual to appease a goddess depicted in Hindu scriptures as having severed her own head with a scimitar. Kindly give Your opinion on such extreme steps.

Swami Replied: All such deeds indicate the climax of ignorance and foolishness resulting due to lack of proper spiritual knowledge. The action is called as Karma, the emotional force to implement the action is called as Bhakti and the fundamental decision coming from proper analysis of scriptures is called as Jnana. Jnana should generate Bhakti and Bhakti should generate Karma. If the fundamental Jnana is missing, the emotion and action go in wrong direction. One should give lot of importance and spend lot of time on the first step, which alone gives the right direction.

There is a deity called Chinnamastaa without head wearing curved knife in her hand by which her head was cut by herself. The inner sense of this deity is that the wrong knowledge represented by head was cut by herself with the help of her own analytical spiritual knowledge represented as knife. Lord says the end of the Gita that Arjuna should analyze what all preached by even the Lord. Cutting head is not in physical sense because the deity remains alive even after the head is cut. If it is physical sense, this is impossible. Hence, the inner meaning of this should be understood as cutting the wrong decision taken by intelligence represented by the head. Lack of true spiritual knowledge is the present situation and true spiritual knowledge is the urgent need of the present hour in this world.