Dates:
- Ghatasthapana (Day 1): Monday, September 22, 2025
- Fulpati (Day 7): Sunday, September 28, 2025
- Maha Ashtami (Day 8): Tuesday, September 30, 2025
- Maha Navami (Day 9): Wednesday, October 1, 2025
- Bijaya Dashami (Day 10): Thursday, October 2, 2025
Cultural & Mythic Frame
Dashain, Nepal’s longest and most widely celebrated festival, honors Durga’s victory over Mahishasura. It is both a cosmic drama and a family ritual: goddess and demon, light and inertia, blessing and renewal. Homes are purified, jamara (sacred barley shoots) are grown as symbols of fertility and life, and elders place tika and blessings upon the younger. The whole nation becomes, for fifteen days, a living temple.
Ephemeris Highlights (2025)
- Ghatasthapana (Sept 22, sunrise): Kalasha sthapana when the pot of Durga is installed. Astrologically aligned with Pratipada Tithi.
- Maha Ashtami (Sept 30): Ashtami Tithi (up to ~6:06 PM CST), Nakṣatra: Mūla → Pūrvāṣāḍhā, Yoga: Śobhāna → Atiganda. Fierce worship, animal sacrifice or symbolic substitutes.
- Maha Navami (Oct 1): Navami Tithi until ~7:26 PM, Nakṣatra: Pūrvāṣāḍhā → Uttarāṣāḍhā, Yoga: Atiganda → Sukarmā. Ayudha Puja, consecration of tools.
- Bijaya Dashami (Oct 2): Dashami Tithi (to ~9:03 PM), Nakṣatra: Uttarāṣāḍhā, Yoga: Sukarmā. Victory rituals, tika, blessings, journeys to kin.
The Fourth Way Reading
From a Fourth Way perspective, Dashain dramatizes the inner battle between centers:
- Mahishasura is inertia, the shape-shifting tendency of our machine — excuses, moods, automaticity.
- Durga’s ten weapons = ten conscious functions. Sword = discrimination, Bow = directed effort, Mace = endurance, Conch = awakening vibration, Shield = vigilance, Lotus = essence. When scattered, these weapons are useless; when gathered under one aim, they cut through resistance.
- Ashtami = the crisis point: resistance peaks. Inner Work demands intentional suffering, refusing mechanical indulgence.
- Navami = stabilization: consecrating instruments means bringing every function of life (tools, habits, even environment) under the Work.
- Dashami = victory day: the Master within places the tika of memory — “Remember yourself.” The Work is not just inner struggle but the transmission of consciousness through relationship.
Thus Dashain in Fourth Way terms is a school of remembrance, enacted yearly on the stage of family and society.
The Integral Yoga Reading
From Integral Yoga, Dashain shows the descent of Shakti not only into the soul but into the environment and instruments of life:
- Ghatasthapana: the pot (kalasha) is the vessel — symbol of the body. To establish it is to invite the Mother to dwell in our material being.
- Ashtami: the inner struggle with lower nature. Transformation demands Shakti’s weapons, but each is also an inner discipline: clarity of mind, courage of heart, endurance of body.
- Navami: the consecration of tools (Ayudha Puja). Here the environment itself — pen, plough, book, hammer, keyboard — is recognized as divine talisman. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother emphasized: no act too small to be spiritualized.
- Dashami: the descent of blessing. Tika and jamara are not mere tokens; they are the psychic remembrance that all life is yoga, all family is divine family, all victory is the Mother’s victory.
Integral Yoga transforms Dashain into a reminder that victory is not escape from the world but the divinization of the world itself.
Closing Reflection
Dashain is not just a festival of the Goddess. It is a pedagogy of transformation:
- In the Fourth Way, it trains us to struggle consciously, to marshal our functions, to resist sleep.
- In Integral Yoga, it reveals that the Divine does not ask us to flee life but to spiritualize it, to see every object, every relationship, every act as a talisman.
To celebrate Dashain in 2025 is to step into this dual inheritance: struggle and grace, discipline and blessing, battle and consecration.