Ever since I started practicing yoga I’ve had a Dancing Shiva in my house. In India, spiritual wisdom is given protection from time in the statues of the gods, who in the shape of their bodies and what they are holding teach the wisdom of the ages to new generations. An Indian statue of a god is not an idol or something to believe in, but a pointer to the universal truths that speak to all mankin. Of course, people do bow and worship these statues in India, but that is just their way of incorporating the spiritual truth into their lives.
The Dancing Shiva is such a statue. This fierce figure has four arms, wild long hair, a huge snake, and it dances in a cosmic ring of fire with one leg on a gnome and one leg moving free. This is the dance of creation with forms coming and going, where nothing is permanent, where everything dies. Imagine a dream where one’s eye opens up on this cosmic fire where everyone we know, and ourselves are being consumed by death. What a frightening vision. Is their any escape? Do we live just to die? What meaning is there in this?
Shiva’s four arms each have an answer. Two extended arms hold cymbals and fire, time and death, but the middle arms hold up it palm in the sign of “fear not,” and the third arm, almost unnoticed in the fiery dance, points to the liberated foot swinging above the gnome upon which the other foot holds to the ground. This gnome is the mind’s ignorance or the illusion of a separate ego identity or “little me.” It is the “little me” that fears its death. Shiva, who in India is the lord of yoga, puts his foot on the ego and liberates the yogi from the fear of death.
But the most significant part of the statue is the unmoving face of Shiva. In the middle of this cosmic dance the center is unmoved and free of time. Like the eye of the hurricane, Shiva’s face embodies absolute consciousness before it takes a form in time. Out of stillness come noise, out of space come objects, out of God comes us. Forms come and go, so don’t identify with form, with your body, with your mind’s little me…keep to the center, says Shiva.
Shiva is also saying that our true face, our original consciousness before it became our “little me,” is God, or absolute Consciousness. There are so many religious names for this absolute, and none have any meaning in themselves. To believe that the mental concept of God is God is worshiping an idol.
The face of Shiva cannot be seen or thought about or even known by the mind. Little Me must die in order to see Shiva, so Little Me fears God as death. But, here is the message of the lifted leg: to see the face of Shiva is to see our true Self. When we are our true original Self, we just are..just here…in this present moment. And we are happy..for no reason. The mind is still and we feel…that we a part of this ocean of being..we are life aware of itself!
Shiva tells us that true life is being in balance with creation and death by staying centered in God, the unmoved mover within. When we are centered in this way, we can let go of fear and just dance with life, and let the music swing our arms and our hair as our heel keeps its beat on our ego pinned to the ground.
Shiva is inviting us to be Him. “Dance as I do,” he says, “and you will be free.” In the dance of Shiva, we are just the dance.
Posted under General Observations
This post was written by ed on October 19, 2006
