Ganesha Symbolism

Ganesha is one of the deities best-known and most widely worshipped in the Hindu pantheon. His image is found throughout India and Nepal. Devotion to Ganesha is widely diffused and extends to Jains, Buddhists, and beyond India. 

Although he is known by many other attributes, Ganesha's elephant head makes him particularly easy to identify. Ganesha is widely revered as the Remover of Obstacles.

Symbols can help us understand the path to Yoga or Union if they are based in spiritual values. Ganesha is a very popular symbol in India, but the fat man with the elephant head has gracefully made its way to the West as well.

The main use of Ganesha as a learning tool is to understand how we create obstacles for ourselves and consequently with his help, learn how to dissolve them.

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Elephants Emotions

Elephants have been known to die of broken hearts if a mate dies. They refuse to eat and will lay down, shedding tears until they starve to death. They refuse all human help. Scientists are beginning to believe that animals do have emotions and that their feelings may be more intense and unfiltered than our own. Emotion rises from the old brain, the limbic system, which birds and reptiles as well as dogs, humans, and other mammals share. Humans have additional brain structures and symbolic language to process our feelings and a complex array of psychological defense mechanisms that allay or soften the impact of our emotions. We repress, deny, subjugate, dissociate, and use all kinds of conscious and unconscious machinations to separate ourselves from our feelings, but animals have no such recourse, so their emotions are likely to be raw and strong. In fact, this may be one of the reasons we find them so attractive: they wear their hearts on their sleeves, so to speak. People seem to deny the existence of animal emotions so that they can continue to justify inhumane treatment and exploitation and avoid the fact that our actions have a deep emotional impact on our fellow beings.

EleFact #6

Elephants don't drink with their trunks, but use them as "tools" to drink with. This is accomplished by filling the trunk with water and then using it as a hose to pour it into the elephant's mouth.

                                            

EleFact #5

                               Elephants have greeting ceremonies when a friend that has been away for some time returns to the group.

EleFact #4

They have offspring up until they are around fifty years old

Kamahl - The Elephant Song

EleFact #3

Elephants typically reach puberty at thirteen or fourteen years of age

EleFact #2

Interestingly, the Asian elephant is more closely related to the extinct mammoth than to the African elephant.

EleFact #1

An elephant´s trunk, a union of the nose and upper lip, is a highly sensitive organ with over 100,000 muscle units.