Written Messages

Maha Shivaratri - Alfaz Albir, Spain

March 12, 2002

OM Namah Shivaya

What is Shiva?

Shiva is Nataraj – the dance in emptiness and aloneness – the Lahiri, the love, the laya in Kriya Yoga. It is the truth (swadhya), toil (tapas) and transcendance (Ishwara Pranidhan) of Kriya Yoga. He (Aloneness) is the father to our wisdom and wonders. He is a tranquil counsellor and mentor chasing away with his radiant smile all our clouds of gloom and depression, pointing to the eternal fire (Kundalini), quiet and preserving, leading us towards the integrality of the natural state of human life. In Shivahood, there is no ‘me’ experiencing and enhancing expectations of the dualistic brain-cortex. Water does not experience water. Fire does not experience fire. All determination is distortion and decoration and therefore negation of Reality. All propositions about Shivahood (No-mind) are only pervertions and paradoxes of the mind. The vital energy (Shiva) is perceived when the screen provided by cultural inputs and conditioned reflexes is shattered, when the mental devices created by our upbringing and untertakings are destroyed, when the fabrications generated by our fear and greed are finished. That radical mutation is Shivahood which cannot be brought about by the inherent mischief and utter shallowness of the mind indulging in all kinds of belief-systems and their psychic, neurotic and occult dimensions. Shivahood is the new man who is not a follower or a ‘believer’, but beyond all beliefs and disbeliefs, all ‘good’ or ‘evil’, all ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, all ‘allies’ or ‘enemies’, all ‘bliss’ or ‘blows’, ‘God’ or ‘Nothingness’. The new man is the door through which he himself goes without any dependence, attachment or cravings. Shivahood is regeneration of mankind and if the current closed-loop identifications continue in our daily lives, then the future of humanity is further degeneration and destruction. Shivahood is sanity, subtelity, patience, persistence, integral and flawless. It is not carelessness, negligence and indolence. It is the right instrument, right condition, right process.

To be in Shivahood is to be alone, which is not a philosophy of loneliness. It is a state of rebelliousness which is not to be available to so-called ‘revolutionary’ ideas to organize mafias and gangsters to usurp power, position, prominence and possessions. Shiva (Aloneness) is a rebel against the whole setup of the society which promotes envy as competition, encourages greed as consumerism, perpetuates fear as prayer and propagates belief-systems for organized bigotry and brutality. Society employs astonishing power not only at the government level, but also at monastic level. And all search for power is the vulgar activity of the mind. Mind is always in vested interests and vane assumptions and thus power corrupts and destroys. And it is only the mind which does not belong that can find aloneness (Shivahood). Aloneness is not something to be cultivated.You are just out, and no governor or president is going to invite you to dinner. Aloneness is no ambition.The ambitious man, religious or ordinary, can never know love. Aloneness is humility. Aloneness is affection –not agression. Aloneness has the quality of total living and therefore total action. Aloneness is the ending of the fiction called EGO.

JAI SHIVA SHANKARA, BOM BOM HARA HARA