Shiva - the personal Lord of Lords
Shiva is a personal God to me who bestows on his devotees compassion and dispenses both spritual and material blessings.
Shiva is Yoganat - lord of Yoga
Shiva is Bolenath - kind and easy to please
Shiva is Mahesh
Shiva is Neelakanth
Shiva is Shambhu Kailasheswar
Shiva is Umanath
Shiva is Nataraj
Shiva is the Jagad Guru
Shiva is the Eternal Time - as manifested in the form of Lingum
Shiva is 'That'
I bow to shiva forever and ever for eternity...
Shivom Shivom Shivom
satay
Shiva Theosophical Society
Shiva
[Reprinted from THE THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT, February 1962]
Who is Shiva, the destroyer-god, who with Brahma, the creator, and Vishnu, the preserver, forms the Hindu Trimurti? What relationship exists between this god and humanity? Is he to be prayed to, to be worshipped, to be feared, to be appeased? He is said to be Rudra, the terrible, the destroyer, the regenerator, the frequenter of the burning-ground, the Cosmic dancer, the eternal Contemplator, the Mahayogi, the patron of all the yogis. Is he entirely a Hindu concept? Or do we find him as Phtah, Typhon and Set in the Egyptian, as Saturn-Kronos in the Greek, as Jehovah in the Jewish, as Baal in the Chaldean teachings? Does not his vehicle, Nandi, the Bull, have its counterpart in Apis, the Egyptian sacred bull? And is not his symbol, the lingam, that of every creative god in every nation? The fundamental idea needs to be grasped that Shiva is a great god in Nature, a power in the Cosmos, the Sound, the Word, or Vach, that stirs all into activity. It is his drum that is the origin of Sanskrit, the language of the gods, Panini says. It is Nature's call, the rhythm of the Universe, the Song of Life, the sound of the waves, the rumbling of the thunderclap, the vast sounds emitted by every aspect of Nature, from the bursting of the bud to the earthquake, the "silvery buzzing of the golden fire-fly" to the trumpeting of the elephant. Shiva is Motion, which is positive and negative, present eternally in every atom during this Manvantara. He is within every atom; every atom is part of him; he is within every man and every man is part of him. There is that aspect of Shiva which we do not yet perceive, for it is without the sphere of our consciousness, and that aspect which is in us and which we are dimly beginning to recognize as the perceiver through sorrow and joy. Evolution is the process of becoming one with the eternal perceiver-contemplator. Briefly put, Shiva is the All. He is the universal spiritual essence of Nature. We degrade him by our anthropomorphic conceptions of him. Nature alone can incarnate the delusions which the illusions of Nature produce in us. It is because destruction is necessary for all changed and progress that man fears him and he has become the dreaded god of the burning-ground. Unfortunately for us, his regenerative aspect has been lost sight of. But, when this is seen, then destruction is welcomed, for it is only through destruction resulting in regeneration that we progress. This recognition marks a stage in human awakening and brings to mind H.P.B.'s statement: "Woe to those who live without suffering."