Rita & Shiva... the destroyer....

shiva yantra
Originally uploaded by alxindia.

Shiva, in the Vedic pantheon, is the member of the divine triad, the G-O-D (Generator, Operator, Destroyer) who is responsible for destruction. destruction of what, one might ask, since Shiva is depicted as a pleasant guy if somewhat bizarre (sitting covered in cremation ground ash, wearing an animal skin around his mid-section and covered in live cobras) mostly meditating.

St. Julian of Norwich, a Medieval British mystic nun, referred to this quality of god not as the destroyer but as the Lover.

aha, the plot thickens.

my observation, rightly or wrongly, is that every person in America -- especially the 'spiritual' people, whatever that really means, -- is feeling the disturbances that are going on in Nature right now.

(if Nature is simply a mirror of us, or a macrocosmic response to our microcosmic actions, then those disturbances ARE, in a sense, going on inside us as well.)

I can't tell you how many, many people I'm in contact with lately who are 'sensitive' to energy and to finely tuned subtler forces, who are baffled by their own emotional overload lately.

I'm thinking: of course you're overloaded. thousands of people in your own country, on this land, our own Gulf Coast, were suffering a few weeks ago and continue to suffer in fear, searching for lost family members, for food and shelter, in loss of loved ones who'll never come back, or who did actually die under dreadful circumstances like drowning or starvation.

all of that sadness, shock, horror, suffering, pain and attachment -- a collective mass of fear and frustration, anger and loss -- it's with us all. those vibrations were released into Nature when this all happened -- and are still vibrating.

and now -- Rita is coming hard on Katrina's heels.

I think many many many of us are responding to and taking care of other souls on the subtle level, with or (largely) without our conscious notice -- and we're all feeling the weight of that energy, of those vibrations.

based on what people are sharing with me, and my own experiences, I suspect that many many many healers, right now, esp in America, are helping process the grief and pain and suffering energy of our brothers and sisters along the Gulf Coast.

so, yes, many healers are themselves suffering and registering a lot of painful emotions they might not usually notice or succumb to.

it's a trite-ism but also a truism -- we're all connected.

it's one of those cusp times of human evolution and development -- there's this internal knowing that the world will never be the same in the wake of all these natural disasters over the last few years (remember the tsuami waves that leveled Banda Aceh and Thai beaches was only last year)...

it's a huge illusion, I think, for all of us in this affluent American society (talk about an embarassment of riches!) to think that anything ever is or will be 'the same'.

yet it's an unspoken ideal that we've all grown up with, or clung to, somehow hoping or believing or being conditioned to aspire to a comforting degree of stasis.

but stasis isn't a principle of Nature.

decay is.

things are born, or sprout, they grow to a certain point, and then they begin to wither and die.

it is natural.

it is Nature.

the change, the transforming, on the material level, is all about LOSS.

we lose our bodies.

plants lose their flowers, then their fruit, then the seeds.

animals lose their bodies.

we grow old.

in a sense, you might consider that once we're born into this world, we're dying. we're on the track of -- what? work, marriage, making children, living... and then what?

the illusion is that the body matters or that life in this world is permanent.

we're so attached to this material illusion that we think it's unspeakably tragic that we die. that others die.

but... what is the real illusion?

and what is really being altered or destroyed when things are changing and not being allowed to 'stay the same'?

what are we being asked to aspire to, really, in all this tumult and change, challenge and transformation -- in all this loss?

Shiva is really destroying Illusion.

Illusion is really synonymous with Creation -- ie, the attachment to and investment in the reality of this creation as something permanent.

when this illusion is broken, and with it all the material attachments and dependencies, what's left is the soul.

which brings me back to the idea of the Destroyer as the Lover -- if the soul's awareness and emergence is the result of destruction... isn't that an expression of the high divine love?

I mean, we lose the material to gain the spiritual.

which one is going to last longer?