WHAT IS HINDUISM?
Hinduism has no religious prophets, popes or
‘saviours’. Yet Shiva is that most primordial ‘god’ who alone
can “save us now” – saving us as individuals from
descending with the world into violence and barbarism,
offering us the freedom from bondage to the world that
only a higher and deeper awareness can bring, and providing
us with a gateway to the Great Goddess and to ‘God’ as
such, experienced and understood not just as Shiva but as
Shiva-Shakti.
Along with pre-historic mother goddesses or Mahadevis,
Mahadeva Shiva is one of the oldest and most primordial of
human god images. Yet the earliest and most primordial of
gods are not merely those furthest behind us – and thus
long since ‘past’ or ‘transcended’ by later, more historically
recent gods. On the contrary, as Heidegger recognized, the
earliest and most primordial god is the one who, having set
out longest ago, is also latest to arrive – the last to fully realise
itself and be recognized and understood as a god.
What Heidegger called “The Last God” – that god who
will be last to arrive and is therefore still to come – that god is
Shiva. Shiva is a god of the future and not merely the past, a
god still to be fully born – not as a supreme God-Being nor
as a supreme human Guru, Saviour or Avatar – but as a
higher Awareness. To take Shiva into our hearts as our
personal God or Divinity is to take the Awareness that he is
as Supreme or Divine Guru – and as our personal mediator