Shiva's dance: The missing link in the return to Earth Consciousness
Photo: Rudra by Barbie Robinson
“Not seeing you
in the hill, in the forest,
from tree to tree
I roamed,
searching, gasping…”
Saivaite mystic Mahadeviyakka (12 AD) translated by A K Ramanujan, “Speaking of Siva”
Many of us are increasingly attentive to the separation that abounds in these times and its multi-layered manifestation. This separation is between people, between humans and other life, and most fundamentally, between humans and Earth. The last separation has been flourishing for many centuries now and has exacerbated over time with the hubris of human “progress” and superiority over all other forms of intelligence. Earth has become inert, simply material without any consciousness, and all other life less intelligent and less conscious, so that humans are justified in instrumentalising them for our own self-interest.
For some time now we have tried to turn the tide back by narratives of our impacts on Earth, positioning us as saviours of the planet and all of Her life. However this continues the separation paradigm- humans as the superior force and intelligence rescuing a poor and less capable Earth. While it is infinitely better than models of exploitation, it bypasses the challenge of a non-hierarchical relationship with Earth as Earth Consciousness and the consequences of such an experience which places us within an intelligent and self-determining Earth.
Ancient wisdom traditions all over the world recognised the vital need for humans to experience unity of consciousness with Earth because they acknowledged the inherent friction that exists between our mental consciousness and embodied or Earth consciousness. Many of these traditions were Goddess-led (usually Earth Goddesses who were supreme and the source of all divinity). Indian Earth Goddess tradition is one of the oldest in the world and the source of many ancient Goddess traditions in the west. Dancing Shiva in the Indian tradition is an astounding and sophisticated practice of establishing a flow between human mental consciousness and Earth consciousness. And its sophistication is that it recognises the friction inherent in this flow.
The friction relates to the mind’s nature to separate, which is very useful in functional life where we label and categorise to create day to day movement. This is the mind’s greatest strength but also its greatest barrier when it comes to experiences of unity of any kind. Language, the mind’s characteristic modality, is itself founded on duality. Shiva is the movement of the mind that recognises this separation from its own source, which is Nature or Earth. Our bodies are not created by the mind, even though we live as if, like Earth, our own body is circumscribed by our mental understanding of it. The body is the source of the mind and the body is of Earth. The separation we create between us and Earth is echoed in an intimate way as separation from our own bodies.
Shiva’s ancestors such as Rudra and even earlier as Pasupathi, were wild, itinerant nomads. Rudra’s howl echoes in the verses of the 4000 year old Rig Veda, poignantly resonating with our own separation from our Nature. There is anguish, loneliness and grief in this “searching and gasping” as Mahadeviyakka cries in her words to Shiva. Shiva acknowledges that it is no easy flow to simply return to unity with Earth- there is deep friction that is inevitable because the human mind’s nature is that of external projection and separation.
The Shiva consciousness is when we remember the ancient love for the Goddess not as a story but as a stirring deep within us, as a yearning which has no words or reason. For Mahadeviyakka and other women mystics, this was often expressed as the yearning for Shiva Himself. Because there is no duality in Shiva’s movement. He is both mind and body, Shiva and Earth/Goddess. The most ancient forms of Shiva carried a pot, the iconic signal of Earth/Goddess, always reminding us of the presence of Earth within us eternally.
When Shiva returns energy and consciousness towards its source within the body and away from its splintering through the mind, there is incredible force. He has to contend with the power of the friction of His mind that reaches outwards and the passion of His turning towards His yearning in His depths. It is like the confluence of many streams of water coming together to form one powerful river and then reversing the flow of this mighty water body towards its source! This is the great passion and intensity that Shiva holds, the paradox of the sensuous-ascetic, the movement from the world into the cosmos of the body. However, when we experience Shiva in His most ancient manifestation as the dancer, the movement is a flow rather than a withdrawal.
Shiva’s dance is the flow of consciousness from its dissipated fragmentation through the mind towards its fullness in its connection to body/Earth consciousness and its manifestation of this wholeness in the world as His dance. So the flow is not just in one direction. Manifestation/action is necessary so long as we are embodied- this is also the message of the seminal Bhagavad Gita in the words of another deity, Krishna.
Shiva’s dance is important because the friction between our longing for wholeness and our desire to be separate is ancient and real. A narrative that sits only on one side of this seesaw will not bring radical change- and we can see this in the times we live in. When the ancients proposed dance as a lens of Reality, they were not simply being poetic and imaginative. They knew something essential and vital about the nature of consciousness and how to transform this so we can live within Earth Consciousness and not separate from Her.
And dance, poetry and myth are necessary in this radical transformation.