A NEW BEGINNING

Our parents play a great role in shaping our early lives, besides bringing us into being. The dream begins. We begin by being told, shown, and taught survival skills. A part of living is the many moments we connect with God. We are told that there is a God. We are given daily routine practices to follow and adhere to. Although these are initially mechanical in nature, growing up, we start to believe in them. The experiences that come our way build our faith in God. 

My friend and reader Siva Thondan writes,

It begins with faith and belief — Shraddha — not certainty, but the willingness to keep showing up before the altar even when the heart feels dry. 

If we figure and think that we are in charge of our lives, there come moments when we realize that we are not in control and cannot dictate the manner in which we wish things to turn out. We become helpless. We begin to turn to and look out for assistance, guidance, and solutions. Faith and believe begins to erode fast. We head to the temple and surrender all our troubles and problems to the divine, whom we have come to believe resides in these statues and temples. This is the moment God comes in a physical form, taking one of his numerous creations. We must be vigilant in his presence and heed the signs. For instance, a guru might come by taking the burden off our shoulders. We surrender unto him or her, laying all the baggage at his feet and return relieved of the weight that we had shouldered earlier. 

Siva Thondan writes,

The Guru in the Saiva Siddhanta tradition is not merely a teacher — he is the very form through which Pati, the Lord, extends His grace downward toward the bound soul. And yet even the Guru does not walk for us. 

In surrendering to a higher force, we begin to see changes take place. These changes could be as in things beginning to work in our favor. Or the change takes place within us, where we begin to accept it as the will of God and live with it. We could remain as pampered children wanting everything in life, or change and accept the will of God as ours. In the latter instance, in surrendering to God, he then begins his work on us, having given the clearance to do so. A new beginning takes place. We go with the flow. God then becomes personal. The path too becomes personal. The journey, too, is redefined to fulfill the desires, needs, and purpose of the soul in coming here. 

Siva Thondan writes,

Saiva Siddhantam reminds us that the soul — the Pasu — is not uniform in its bondage or its readiness. Each soul carries its own weight of Anava — that primal sense of smallness and separateness — wound tightly around it across countless lifetimes. The loosening of that knot is not a single event. It is a long, patient unraveling, unique to each soul, overseen by Shiva alone in His infinite compassion.

My unraveling is taking crores of human years, says Agathiyar, for he tells me that we have known each other for that number of years. And I am still not there yet. He is still working on me to reach the state of "Suddha Avastha — the state of purified soul-consciousness."

We are all on our way — the layman, the seeker, the guru — each carrying our particular weight of Malam, each receiving our particular measure of grace, each being worked upon by the same silent, tireless, infinitely patient Pati.

Saiva Siddhantam speaks of the soul moving through Kevala Avastha — bound and unaware, shrouded in Anava Malam — into Sakala Avastha, where the soul engages with the world and its experiences become the very classroom of liberation. Most of us live here, in the Sakala — and that is not a failure. It is where the work happens. It is where Charya, Kriya, Yoga, and Jnana — the four-fold path — slowly, faithfully, do their purifying work upon us.

.......practice prepares the vessel. It thins the walls. It makes us more permeable to what is always already pouring toward us.

Meykandar in the Sivagnana Botham reminds us that the soul cannot know itself or Shiva through intellect alone — it must be touched, turned, and transformed from within.

The soul that persists will find, one day, that the silence it once found empty has become full. That the God it once sought outside has been recognized within. That which began as effort has become effortless love — Anbu — which Thirumoolar in the Tirumantiram calls the very substance of the path.