Shiva and Shakti – Awareness and Aliveness…

Source : clipartsmania

“Utterly fearless and uninhibited it is this consciousness that brings into manifestation and sustains the infinite variety of beings, from the creator to the blade of grass. It is ever dynamic and active, yet it is more inactive than a rock and is more unaffected by such activity than space.” ~ Yoga Vashishtha

Shiva is often called the awareness and Shakti is the aliveness. Shiva represents the unmanifest and Shakti the manifest; Shiva the formless and Shakti the formed; Shiva consciousness and Shakti energy, not only in the cosmos as a whole but in each and every individual. Shiva is the sacred ground on which Shakti creates. The roots of Shakti is in Shiva. Without the stillness and groundness of Shiva, the creative potential of Shakti becomes unmanageable. Without the creative potency of Shakti, Shiva becomes an observer lacking the ability to create or manifest. Shiva and Shakti merge to create Oneness and dissolve into this oneness where the masculine and feminine cease to exist and the pure consciousness of creation manifests in its place.

Shiva and Shakti symbolize an intrinsic duality, balance, and the freedom to embody and dance with our devotion and prayer in any form. Though one is manifested and the other unmanifested, they are in the ultimate sense one and the same One is the principle of changelessness and the other, the principle of change – Shakti is change within changelessness while Shiva is changelessness as the root of change. The experience of perfect unity of the changeless and the changeable, the dissolution of duality, is the aim of Tantra, and thus of Yoga.

Everything you see around you, whether physical, psychic, mental or whatever, is Shakti, both individually and collectively. This includes everything from a pebble to the sun. All manifestations of Shakti come from the underlying substratum, Shiva. Shiva and Shakti continue to unite and separate for eternity, just like we, in our humanness, oscillate between wholeness or oneness and separateness.

One energy with many names and forms. There is one energy that keeps taking on new shapes and forms. In Tantra the name of that energy is Shakti, which is the manifesting, or feminine force that is actually one and the same with its only apparent companion Shiva, the latent, or masculine. Each time the energy takes on a new form, we give it a new name. Shakti becomes Kundalini Shakti, or simply Kundalini. Kundalini becomes the energy of Prana, which flows in patterns or channels called Nadis, and concentrates itself by forming intersections known as Chakras. The subtle energies condense and become known as earth, water, fire, air, and space, forming our experience of the gross world. With Kundalini awakening, the primal energy of Shakti awakens in its true form.

Seek to experience that one energy. To know, in direct experience, that unchanging truth, the one energy that is the substratum of all of the names and forms, is one of the ways of describing the universal goal of spiritual life. It is the experience of the union of Shakti and Shiva, creation and its ground, feminine and masculine, even though they were never actually divided in the first place. It is like wetness that is never separate from water, sweetness that is never separate from sugar, and warmth that is never separate from sunlight.