Evening Boss!
Want to make sure we don’t lead anons to believe the very ancient and powerful symbols of Shiva are inherently evil; that ok?
Like all ancient/powerful symbols, they are prone to hijacking by nefarious groups that misuse the power of symbols;
The most famous examples of this: the Swastika, which you can find in Swami Vivekananda’s COMPLETE WORKS Vol.1' (&who Trump mentioned in his amazing speech at huge Namaste Trump event in India) being discussed as one of the most ancient and universal of all symbols on earth, a symbol representing the meeting of cosmic forces and the the vortex of their movements in duality…
I am not sure of all the reasons why the Nazis liked that particular symbol,tbh,
but what is clear, is that it was severely perverted by dark forces…
Now, if we look closely at the purest forms of Shaivism, though perhaps very strange to our Western sensibilities in various ways, we will see that the core principles are:
the worship of beauty, consciousness, harmony and divinity of Nature and Being;
in fact, it is one of the supremely rare ‘nondual’ philosophies on earth;
not that Good and Evil do not exist as concepts therein- Shiva’s mythology is btw filled with trials between good and evil, and destinies of the Gods and Worlds are often decided by these [indeed, many of Eastern Mythology’s most Righteous Heros worship and seek great boons from Shiva, precisely that they may conquer Evil, from Arjuna (hero of Mahabharata/Bhagavad Gita) to Rama (hero of ancient Ramayana)… but rather, as in the sense of Theoretical Physics, they labor to achieve an understanding that: while reality may manifest in all sorts of various forms, good, evil, fat skinny, hot, cold, these are all nonetheless ultimately made up of the same stuff, a oneness that is all creation, like how everything is made of quarks to the Quantum dude, or for the Christian, a visceral understanding that All is indeed HIM, GOD Almighty- either in its self-aware form(righteous,noble) or in a deluded,prodigal form (fallen from grace, spiritually ‘cast out of Eden’,& thereby capable of evil)…
The understanding of this underlying ‘oneness’ of All things is, for the devotee of Shaivism, a kind of spiritual sanctuary; a source of awakening, inner peace, bliss and fearlessness- regardless of what is happening in the material world.
If we truly meditate upon it, we see that, logically, if Almighty God is Creator and is thereby ALL- then…we too can be nothing but that, a tiny piece of God’s light, seeking to know itself, experiencing itself subjective, in reflection of the Glory of the Greatness we find ourselves in, if we will but pause and look at the miraculousness of everything, from the flower to the flying eagle;
…in their faith, a certain enlightenment (kinda like Sainthood) entails “the wave realizing it is indeed one with the Ocean,”, as Paramahansa Yogananda so often said.. who btw, was said to have had the “special dispensation”, to unite the long broken branches of East and West to show how Christ and Krishna both taught from a shockingly similar Spiritual ethos, tho separated by millennia… in spite of all the apparent differences, Krsna & Christ both taught same core principles: courage, nobility, love, righteousness, and most importantly:
Good over Evil- sometimes at all costs…
…but lets get back to Shaivites real quick: in fact, the ‘truest’ of Shiva’s faithful, the Kashmir Shaivites, occupying Kashmir Valley several centuries ago, because of their obsession with enjoying life, seeing God in everything (I am reminded of St Francis), worshiping the beauty of the Divine(God), which they saw in Nature, animals, each other, art, music, family, and rather simple, devotional living… were utterly crushed when invading Muslim forces (obsessed with warfare, control and proliferation of their ideology) came into the once peaceful, Kashmir Valley (which looks kinda like parts of Switzerland);