06/17/2025
Dear Friends,
Despair is a blessing that collapses the illusionary self and its seeking. Personal and public despair prevails, but truth cannot be defeated, and always is the victory in the eternal unfolding of the cosmos.
Dhūmāvatī Devi is the ancient Goddess of illness and despair. She is a grey cloud of smokey despair. Scrawny and old with a grimace on her face telling of the human situation. She is the wisdom of despair.
Have you felt her Presence? If not, you’re not paying attention. You cannot avoid her, although the entire framework of the world is trying to, which is paradoxically causing the despair. She will reframe your despair as her blessing and visitation. You are eternally held and loved. She is the grandmother of all the Goddesses. She is therefore known as the first Mother. Among the ten Yogini Mahāvidyas, she is the power that destroys belief in thought and false ideas of what we are not. She is the wisdom we turn to in darkness that brings us home to What we are. Despair returns us to Reality, the one life that lives all.
Her mantra:
Om Dhum Dhum Dhumavati Swaha
The question is no longer “who am I”? with all its struggle and confusion. Stop asking that question. The question is “What am I”? And you are already What you are, so you can stop asking that question too.
Trying to answer the questions that culture has put in us, or trying to reach the goals that culture has put us, such as enlightenment or God, causes despair because you can never get there. It only creates the thought mechanism of the separate self. When that fabric that causes despair collapses, when you stop asking the questions, what is left is What you are. You are What the Buddha or Christ were there to indicate to us… that is What we are. This is always already the fact of you. It’s the only thing to commit to in the midst of non-elegant, vulgar, violent patterning of this dangerous world mind. Buddha and Christ and all the other “indicators” never wanted you to become seekers, or duplicates, but simply realize your natural state already Here.
The body is the cosmos in a unitary movement with the Total cosmos.
— Mark Whitwell
