Shaivism
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
Contents |
Core principles
Pasu, pathi, paasa
Sarala Rajagopalan, October 24, 2017: The Hindu
There are three core principles in Saiva Siddhanta. They are pasu, pathi and paasa. Pathi refers to God; pasu is the individual jivatma; and paasa refers to ego, illusion and karma.
Ego, illusion and karma are hurdles that stand in the way of our liberation. Those who cannot free themselves from the three hurdles exhibit certain undesirable traits, elaborated Sarala Rajagopalan in a discourse. They are avaricious and can never have enough of anything.
When we have a long list of desires and seek to fulfil all of them, it is inevitable that we are going to be disappointed. And when we are so particular about attaining something, even a minor setback seems unbearable to us. The result is that we become miserable.
And having spent our entire lives in the pursuit of wealth, we are too worn out to even think of God, when we are no longer able to earn.
But the man who loves God intensely will realise that love is God. The ignorant think that love and God are different. But the realised soul knows that love is God, and God is love. This is pointed out by Saint Thirumoolar. He says love and God are indistinguishable. They are one and the same.
God is the embodiment of love. We have to make ourselves worthy to receive His grace, and when we prepare ourselves for a life of devotion, God Himself comes to us. Manickavachagar, because of his love for Lord Siva, was in a state of wonder, not knowing how to reach Him. But the Lord steadied and calmed him, and gave Manickavachagar the rare boon of seeing His feet.
Manickavachagar celebrated this kindness of the Lord through his Thiruvachagam. Manickavachagar had no thoughts or time to spare for anything or anyone but Lord Siva.
And the Lord reciprocated the saint’s love for Him.
Kashmir Shaivism
Shivoham
Anup Taneja, March 10, 2021: The Times of India
Experience The Sublime State Of Shivoham
The three main cosmic functions of the Supreme Being, which are accepted by all systems of Indic philosophy, are ‘srishti’, creation; ‘sthiti’, preservation; and ‘samhriti’, dissolution. Kashmir Shaivism, however, accepts two additional functions, ‘nigraha’, concealment, and ‘anugraha’, grace. These are briefly explained below.
The Absolute Lord, called Paramashiva in Kashmir Shaivism, is the selfluminous, eternal Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, endowed with perfect I-Consciousness. He abides in pure awareness to the total absence of duality and desire of any kind. In the transcendental state, He holds within himself the unmanifest universe. In the light of the pure, undifferentiated I-Consciousness, all objects of the world stand revealed as identical with the subject. However, under the influence of ‘spanda shakti’, the divine creative pulsation, Paramashiva begins to feel incomplete. This limitation of Absolute Consciousness gives rise to the first tendency towards self-forgetfulness and, in the process, the bliss of pure I-Consciousness gets obscured. This state is also termed as the state of ‘vacuity’ or ‘indeterminateness’ and is the initial stage of consciousness before it crystallises into the reasoning process.
When this happens, the difference between cosmic I-Consciousness in pure creation and the individualised consciousness in pure-impure creation becomes conspicuously evident. Maya-Shakti, the gross power of consciousness, imposes a limit on Paramashiva’s powers of omniscience, omnipotence, and creates a sense of differentiation by polarising Pure Consciousness or Paramashiva into subject and object, mind and matter.
The Supreme Shiva, in the process of enacting His drama of manifestation as the wondrous universe with myriad names and forms, sheds, of His own volition, His undifferentiated state, conceals His true nature – which is pure awareness and pure bliss – becomes ‘pasu’, the individual soul and operates in the phenomenal world at three levels of consciousness, waking, dreaming and sleeping. Shiva also has the power to liberate the souls by eradicating the obstruction and removing the veil; he actually creates the opportunity for souls to work out their salvation. This is called grace.
According to Kashmir Shaivism, Paramashiva is spontaneously realised by the individual soul on whom the grace of God or sadhguru has descended. This grace occurs in the form of ‘shaktipat’ – awakening of the dormant Kundalini within the seeker. In fact, the intense desire to attain Selfrealisation implies that divine grace is already present in the seeker.
By the grace of the master, the awakened Kundalini begins to rise in the ‘sushumna’, the central nerve of the seeker, towards ‘sahasrara’, the highest spiritual centre in the cranium, bringing about his spiritual evolution at a rapid pace.
In the final stages of meditation, the seeker, in deep meditation, experiences the entire universe being permeated by the dazzling blue rays of consciousness. This is referred to as the process of assimilation, which is the reverse of the process of manifestation. When this happens, the seeker’s individuality gets completely dissolved in Pure Consciousness and he experiences the sublime state of ‘Shivoham’ – I-am-Shiva.
