WHAT IS HINDUISM?
comprehended, experienced and brought to presence in
awareness. The work of bringing to presence in awareness
belongs to those few human beings whose awareness has
already been expanded enough to receive currents of
knowing that flow towards us from the future – and that
also come down to us directly from the multidimensional
universe of awareness surrounding us and the trans-human
beings or ‘gods’ that dwell therein.
For the religious practitioner of Hindu Tantrism, to
‘worship’ a god is to become that god. This means to
experience it directly - through our body and as our most
essential self. This is not a self that ‘has’ or ‘possesses’
awareness but that Self which – like God – is awareness –
an awareness infinite and unbounded, pervading not only
our bodies but all bodies, and all of space and time. Shiva is
‘Lord’ because he is ‘Lord of Yoga’ – of meditation. The
human image of Shiva presents him as meditating both
himself and all things as an expression of the Divine - and
therefore knowing himself as identical with the Divine. That
is why the activity of meditating Lord Shiva meditating his
Divine nature turns his Mantra and Murti into both a
personification of our own Divine nature and a living
personification of the Divine.
Knowing himself as the Divine through meditating his
Divine Nature in human form, the image of Shiva reveals
him to us not just as a ‘symbol’ of the divine but as a living