Shiva in felt, by Mars Parker

In the past, I have associated Shiva much more with autumn than spring, focusing more on his destructive aspect than his creative aspect. Of course, the dance of Shiva involves both of these things and much more. This spring I’ve been strongly feeling the coexistence of destruction and creation, and it has me a bit conflicted and confused. Spring is supposed to be all about renewal, right?

I can, however, succinctly feel the unity of destruction and creation when I remember spring in Minnesota. The snow melts, and the first bulbs emerge. The snow and ice melt, and the trash, debris, dead fish and animals that were trapped within it emerge. It is almost as though the winter suspends what was broken down in the autumn, so that it can float to the surface and be dealt with in the spring.

I’m trying to get a handle on Shiva in the spring. He’s here, there’s no doubt about it.

A few days ago, I stumbled upon an article in the New York Times entitled Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory. I was, naturally, instantly horrified. One particular point peaked my attention, however: erasing memory can be a means to deal with behavior change — by erasing the memory of trauma or experiences leading to addiction, one can erase the pattern which causes behaviors with which it is associated. “Hmph!”, I thought. This sounds like a quick-fix for samskaras.

Samskaras are behavioral patterns that reinforce themselves. They were described to me once thusly: It’s like making a groove in a surface. Every time you repeat a particular behavior, you are cutting into a groove made by that behavior. Every time you repeat the behavior, you make the groove deeper, easier to fall into and harder to escape from. In my opinion, dealing with samskara is one of the foremost aspects of yoga. Through daily practice, tapas, and even the use of sankalpa, we can clear away the old energetic patterns and create new behaviors. The catch? You can’t take it in a pill form (until now!) … you have to work for it.

Back to Shiva. In my despair over the nature of the season and the undeniable force of Shiva’s dance, I started doing a little bit of reading on the subject of his dance, Tandava. According to my internet sources, it has 5 aspects: creation, preservation, destruction, illusion, and grace. It was “illusion” that got me. Illusion, a necessary aspect to the cycle of existence?

Illusion here is translated from the sanskrit word “Tirobhava”, or “Tirodhana”. Illusion is a fairly shallow translation of the word, and in the bigger picture it is not as negative as it might seem. Tirobhava is what obscures our divine nature, tying us to the cycle of karma, maya, birth and death. It is what allows us to experience life as we know it. It is represented in Shiva’s dance by Apasmara, the figure upon which Shiva dances.

This page put it very nicely: “His PLANTED FOOT stands for the syllable MA and symbolizes His concealing grace, tirodhana shakti, which limits consciousness, allowing souls to mature through experience. Siva dances upon the figure known as APASMARA, “forgetful or heedless,” who represents the soul bound by anava mala, the individuating veil of duality, source of separation from God.”

This also brings to mind something that I don’t necessarily want to bring up, but I feel obliged to do so. In the Abraham books by Jerry and Esther Hicks, they mention a theory of birth and rebirth. I’m heavily paraphrasing here because it’s been a while, but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark. They describe that our souls exist in some infinite place, whole and aware of their divine nature. They choose to be born into a particular place and time, even choosing their parents, to have an experience of life. Presumably, they choose to enter the physical world in order to learn something.

This all comes together for me. There’s the big dance of Shiva that is my life — birth, life, and death. And then there are all the little dances that happen within each other, the smaller births and life experiencces and deaths. The things is, I don’t particularly want to deal with the dredges of things I’ve attempted to destroy in my past. If the samskaras have been transformed, leave them be. I just want them gone, to have never existed. But this isn’t how things work. It’s about growth, about “maturing through experience”. One of these days I will simply have to accept the fact that things I would like to forget are actually contributing to the evolution of myself.