The night of Shiva

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Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev [1]

When we say Shiva, most people look at him as some kind of a god who is beyond everything. But if you look at the Shiva Purana, his life was such that he went through everything any human being would go through. He is many things at the same time — he is the most beautiful and also the ugliest; he is a great ascetic but also a family person; he is the most disciplined and also the most drunk. Be it gods or demons, all kinds of creatures in the world worship him.
If you can accept Shiva, who is a complex formation of every quality that you can find in the universe, you have crossed life itself. Lord Shiva is a combination of everything put together.
The word “Shivaratri” means Shiva’s night. Shivaratri is the day before the amavasya or the no-moon day. There are 12 Shivaratris in a year. Of these, the Shivaratri that falls in the month of February-March, known as Magha in the lunar calendar, is known as the Maha Shivaratri. On this day, in the northern hemisphere of our planet, there is a particular pull upward so that every human being experiences a certain upsurge of energies within oneself. This upsurge of energies can be truly made use of only by those who have their spine erect. Our good fortune of being human is that we are the only species that have graduated to that level of an erect spine. So we are supposed to spend this night awake, aware and with our spines erect because there is a great assistance from nature for whatever sadhana we are doing.
All evolution in a human being is fundamentally an upward movement of energy. Every practice, every sadhana that a spiritual person does is to move his energies upward. To graduate from being just a biological entity to a spiritual seeker, what is needed is an upward movement of energy. When we exist here catering only to a certain aspect of nature, which is our body — the physical body is just one aspect of nature — our lives will be just about survival and procreation. The physical dimension of the existence really has no other purpose than this.
If you look at every creation on this planet, you will see everything is constantly aspiring to survive and to procreate so that life goes on. If you were any other creature, living life merely on the physical plane would have been sufficient. But once you have taken birth as a human, a life that just goes on is not enough. Maha Shivaratri is an opportunity to go beyond the physical dimensions of life and experience the Divine within you.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org