Ardhanaarishwara: the divine expression of non-duality

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

Ancient contemplative traditions have at their core the revelation of non-duality. This is presence that is completely at one with reality—there is no separation between the self and the event that the self is living. This state is full of the silence and wildness of eternity. There is no language or story.

How is it possible to invite people into this state of being? This is where ancient contemplative traditions have gifted us rituals, deities and practices that hold such spaces, if we are ready and willing to be present. These traditions came from experiences of intimate ‘knowing’, which is knowledge that is not separate to the experience itself. Therefore they are passed down only as embodied transmission, through practice lineages.

Ardhanaarishwara, the union of Purusha(Siva) and Prakrithi (Shakthi) in the same physical body, is an embodied practice of contemplating non-duality. In our times, this has been narrowed to a male-female paradigm. However, the invitation of the practice here is to consider the most material (and therefore for us the most tangible and “real”) bases of our identity merely as a story, usually given to us. In the same moment, in an expansive approach, it is an invitation to consider even our paradigms of the divine and the not-divine, the earthly and the heavenly, and the sky and the earth as illusory dualities.

Purusha is the domain of the non-manifest, which is full of the emptiness of all paradigms, philosophies, stories, thoughts and forms. However Purusha is seen only through Prakriti, which is the body and its universe that includes earth, the senses, desire and the mind. It is said that Prakriti is always gazing upon the face of Purusha and thus Purusha is “seen”.

For us in these times, Ardhanaarishwara is a powerful symbol. In our times, we have come to the most fundamental of all dualities where we have pitted our life against that which sustains all life—the earth. The Purusha-Prakriti practice proposes that we cannot “see” Purusha without a complete immersion in Prakriti, for only in her beauteous adoring glance is Purusha reflected. So, there is no experience of divinity without the complete grace of all of Prakriti, which is the fullness of life of which we are a small part. To hold our self as a vessel of life and feeling separate from the life and feelings that pulsate through this earth is to live in an illusion of duality.

The first practice of non-duality is in the most intimate aspect of our self—our body. Ardhanaarishwara is the contemplative movement that offers our sacred attention to the realms of our own minds, bodies and feelings. This powerful and ritual dance held what only dance can hold—that which is not possible for language and thought. Through dance we feel the sacredness of freedom from separatedness and division. When this is revealed to us, we taste freedom that is unconditional.