Jai Gurudev!
Welcome to this Simple Pūjā course!
Pūjā is the basic ritual of Hinduism. For the worshipper, God is visible in the form, and God sees the person who worships.
Performing pūjā is to serve one’s deity and to build and strengthen one’s personal relationship with the divine. It is one of the best tools for calming and focusing the mind, as it involves all of our senses.
By practicing pūjā with love, we can learn to forget ourselves, our limitations, and to let go and surrender to God.
A mūrti is the manifestation of a deity in this world. The deity takes the form of a statue so that we can comprehend the form of the deity with our limited mind and thereby find it easier to connect with the Divine. If you place a mūrti/deity on your altar, you have to be aware that this is not just a statue but something much, much more – especially after it has been blessed.
This way to connect and build up a steady relationship to the Divine in the form of the deity is very powerful and important on the spiritual path. By worshipping the deity in such a form through pūjā – worshipping the Divine in the outside through various offerings and the chanting of mantras (arcana-bhakti) – it becomes much easier for us to concentrate and to go beyond the limitations of our mind. It also helps to cleanse our negativity so that we may be able to receive and handle more LOVE which our gurudeva/iṣṭadeva is constantly giving us. They are always willing to give even more through the grace of the satguru but we must do our part to prepare ourselves for that.