April 27, 2024 - Lesson 15
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Sloka 15 from Dancing with Siva
What Is the Symbolism of Siva's Dance?
The symbolism of Siva Nataraja is religion, art and science merged as one. In God's endless dance of creation, preservation, destruction and paired graces is hidden a deep understanding of our universe. Aum Namah Sivaya.
Bhashya
Nataraja, the King of Dance, has four arms. The upper right hand holds the drum from which creation issues forth. The lower right hand is raised in blessing, betokening preservation. The upper left hand holds a flame, which is destruction, the dissolution of form. The right leg, representing obscuring grace, stands upon Apasmarapurusha, a soul temporarily earth-bound by its own sloth, confusion and forgetfulness. The uplifted left leg is revealing grace, which releases the mature soul from bondage. The lower left hand gestures toward that holy foot in assurance that Siva's grace is the refuge for everyone, the way to liberation. The circle of fire represents the cosmos and especially consciousness. The all-devouring form looming above is Mahakala, "Great Time." The cobra around Nataraja's waist is kundalini shakti, the soul-impelling cosmic power resident within all. Nataraja's dance is not just a symbol. It is taking place within each of us, at the atomic level, this very moment. The Agamas proclaim, "The birth of the world, its maintenance, its destruction, the soul's obscuration and liberation are the five acts of His dance." Aum Namah Sivaya.
Lesson 15 from Living with Siva
Asteya: Nonstealing
The third yama is asteya, neither stealing, nor coveting nor entering into debt. We all know what stealing is. But now let's define covetousness. It could well be defined as owning something mentally and emotionally but not actually owning it physically. This is not good. It puts a hidden psychological strain on all parties concerned and brings up the lower emotions from the tala chakras. It must be avoided at all cost. Coveting is desiring things that are not your own. Coveting leads to jealousy, and it leads to stealing. The first impulse toward stealing is coveting, wanting. If you can control the impulse to covet, then you will not steal. Coveting is mental stealing.
Of course, stealing must never ever happen. Even a penny, a peso, a rupee, a lira or a yen should not be misappropriated or stolen. Defaulting on debts is also a form of stealing. But avoiding debt in principle does not mean that one cannot buy things on credit or through other contractual arrangements. It does mean that payments must be made at the expected time, that credit be given in trust and be eliminated when the time has expired, that contracts be honored to the satisfaction of all parties concerned. Running one's affairs on other peoples' money must be restrained. To control this is the sadhana of asteya. Brahmacharis and sannyasins, of course, must scrupulously obey these restraints relating to debt, stealing and covetousness. These are certainly not in their code of living.
To perfect asteya, we must practice dana, charity, the third niyama; we must take the dashama bhaga vrata, promising to tithe, pay dashamamsha, to our favorite religious organization and, on top of that, give creatively, without thought of reward. Stealing is selfishness. Giving is unselfishness. Any lapse of asteya is corrected by dana.
It is important to realize that one cannot simply obey the yamas without actively practicing the niyamas. To restrain one's current tendencies successfully, each must be replaced by a positive observance. For each of the yamas, there is a positive replacement of doing something else. The niyamas must totally overshadow the qualities controlled by the yamas for the perfect person to emerge. It is also important to remember that doing what should not be done--and not doing what should be done--does have its consequences. These can be many, depending upon the evolution of the soul of each individual; but all such acts bring about the lowering of consciousness into the instinctive nature, and inevitable suffering is the result. Each Hindu guru has his own ways of mitigating the negative karmas that result as a consequence of not living up to the high ideals of these precepts. But the world is also a guru, in a sense, and its devotees learn by their own mistakes, often repeating the same lessons many, many times.
Sutra 15 of the Nandinatha Sutras
Zero Tolerance For Discord
Those who live with Siva have zero tolerance for disharmonious conditions. In the home and beyond, they settle differences when others can only disagree. Jai, they are all instruments of peace. Aum Namah Sivaya.
Lesson 15 from Merging with Siva
Find the Core Of Your Being
The superconscious mind and the body of the soul have been around a long time. This immortal body of yours has been around a long time, and it's seen many lives come and go, many experiences pass by the windows of its eyes. Some need no explanation, because they are the playing out of vibrations. Others do need an explanation, the explanation that would come and impress you intellectually from your superconscious, would give you power maybe to face an experience that was yet to come. So, don't analyze every nuance of a reaction or try to anticipate the next series of experiential patterns, for life is a series of experiences. They are all great experiences.
Hold your center. Find the place within you that has never ever changed, that's been the same for many lives, that feeling that has been the same within you since you were a little child up to this very time. Find that! Catch that vibration, and you've caught the vibration of the soul and identified it to your intellectual mind and your instinctive area of the mind. Then build on that. Work with that. Say to yourself, "There's something within me that never changes, no matter what happens."
Work on the analogy that if your foot hurts, your head doesn't hurt. If you have a pain in your stomach, it doesn't mean that you have a pain in your hand. In the very same way, if your emotions are upset and you're suffering, there's an area within you that's calm, peaceful, dynamic, vibrant, watching. That's the body of the soul. Work with that. Find that within you that has never changed, never will change, cannot change. All it can do is become more than what it is. This will give you understanding. This will allow you to innersearch, because you have an inner anchor which you're always trying to get into. You have identified the core of yourself very, very thoroughly. And each time you have unwound the emotional patterns and the intellectual patterns of an experience, you've graduated out of that classroom and you're on to greater and fuller experiences in this lifetime. If you would like to live a lifetime where you have no experiences at all, because you don't like experiences--you've had a lot of experiences that have been distasteful to you--you cannot do it on this planet. Lifetimes don't come about that way on this planet. But the core of you is the observer of all experience of the emotional, the instinctive, the intellectual areas of the mind.