I want to learnmore about God Siva

[Spiritualseeker]

Namaste,

I want to learn more about Lord Siva so that I can draw close to him. Can someone please help me out.

-juan

[Spiritualseeker]

http://allsaivism.tripod.com/snakes.html

The Symbolism of Snakes in Saivism

Lord Siva is depicted in many images like the one above as wearing a garland of snakes around his neck. There is a deep symbolism hidden behind this. Lord Siva is know as Pasupathinath, the lord of all creatures. Being a lord of the animals he has complete control on their behavior. Since a snake is one of the most feared and dangerous animals in the world, the garland of snakes around the neck firmly establishes this fact even the snakes fear Him and remain under his control.
The snake stands for all the evil and demonical nature in the world. By wearing the snake around his neck, Lord Siva gives us the assurance that no evil can touch us or destroy us once we surrender to him, seek his protection and worship him with deep devotion.
The snake also stands for the power of kundalini, which is described as a coiled serpent lying dormant in the muladhara chakra of all human beings and descends upwards when one starts ones spiritual journey and becomes increasingly divine oriented. The snake around the neck of Siva conveys the meaning that in him the kundalini not only has arisen fully but is also actively involved in the divine activity by keeping an eye on all the devotees who approach Siva with their individual problems.
The snake also stands for all passions and desires. By wearing the snakes around his neck, Lord Siva conveys the message to all his devotees that He has overcome all desires and is in full control of Prakriti, or maya and its various machinations.

[Spiritualseeker]

http://allsaivism.tripod.com/sivaandtantra.html

Siva and Tantra


Lord Siva is Pasupathinath, the Lord of animals. He is also the Lord of all animal passions that lay hidden in us. The belief is that if you pray to Lord Siva with complete devotion he will rid you of all your animal passions and change your consciousness into divine. Tantra also aims to achieve the same end, not through the control of animal passions but through their controlled expression. In Tantricism the Siddha identifies himself with Lord Siva and indulges in various acts of self purification in order to merge with Siva, so that he becomes Siva in reality. He accepts Siva as the means and Shakti as the end.
Long before the emergence of Tantricism as a major cult in India, Siva was already identified as a fertility Go. His worship in the form of Sivaling was popular in various parts of India and also beyond. The Indus valley people must have followed some vague form of rituals involving the Mother Goddess and her male counterpart, probably a prototype of Siva, whose seals were found in the ruins of Mohenjodaro and Harappa.
The Sivaling symbolized all that Tantricism stood for. Tantricism merely provided the philosophical justification for the worship of Siva as a God of love and liberator of mankind through the worship of Shakti in union with Siva. Tantricism suggested a new way to approach the subject, but was not in conflict with the fundamentals of Saivism.
Quite harmoniously, it blended the agnostic and atheistic philosophies of the sixth century B.C. with the theistic school of Saivism, accepting Siva as the Purusha, the eternal and indivisible principle which the Sankhya Vadins and the Charvakas vehemently denied to acknowledge.

[Spiritualseeker]

The Trident


The trident is the weapon of Siva with which he destroys evils and restores order. The trident stands for the triple qualities of nature, namely, sattva, rajas and tamas. Siva is the master of maya and thereby master of these three qualities with which he controls the worlds.

The trident symbolically represents the fact that Siva is the controller of the worlds and controller of all illusion. The trident also represents the three aspects of time, the past, the present and the future.
Siva is mater of Time, Kal Bhairav, who determines the progress of the worlds according to his will.

The trident represents the three paths to self-realization, namely the path of knowledge, the path of action and the path of devotion.


With these three paths, Siva transforms his devotees and destroys the evil in them. The trident stands for the three primary evils which need to destroyed in order to make progress towards the divine. They are the evil of anger, the evil of lust and the evil of pride.

[Spiritualseeker]

The Nature of Lord Siva



http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules...hp?itemid=3113

"He extends His grace to all and gives creatures experience and liberation"

Ajita Agama, or Ajita Tantra, is the fifth of the 28 Saiva Agamas. This excerpt is from section 2, "The Nature of Siva." It is in the form of a conversation between Lord Siva as Mahadeva and Lord Vishnu as Achyuta.



He is the gross, the subtle and the supreme; the manifested, the unmanifested and that which is both; the external, the internal and that which is external-internal; the eternal, the non-eternal and that which is eternal and non-eternal; the male, the female and the third entity which is non-male [and non-female]; wakefulness, dream and deep sleep; the past, the present and the future; the invisible, the visible and that which is visible and non-visible; the spoken, the mental and the act; the instrument of knowledge, the knower and the known; the atma-tattva, the vidya-tattva and the Siva-tattva; the experiencer, the experienced and cause of the experienced; [the impurity] born of maya, that innate in the soul and that from karma; the knowledge and the ignorance; the light and the darkness; the gross and the subtle, the near and the remote; that which is to be left and that which is to be taken; the permanent and the occasional; the superior and the inferior; that which is brought together and that which is scattered; the true and the untrue, the existent and the non-existent.

This Lord [Siva] is all that. There is nothing different from Him. He is the material cause, the mahat and the ahamkara, the tanmatras of sound, touch, color, taste and odor, the [sense-organs] ear, skin, eye, tongue and nose, the organ of speech, hand, the foot, organs of excretion and generation, with the mind, the five [elements] earth, etc., [and the various tattvas]. Only He can be the Lord. He is I and you. He is the God, i. e., Brahman etc., the Creators, Kasyapa, etc. He is the seven sages, Moon and Sun, lords of planets. He is the king of Gods. Siva is said to be the universe.

The four Vedas, with their secret [section, i. e., Upanishads], speak of Him. In the Siddhanta, the Bhuta Tantra, the left and right current of tantras, in the Bhairava Tantra and other tantras (those of pashus and Pashupata, etc.), in the Tantra of Vishnu, in the tantras of bauddhas and in the science on the lords of directions, in the eighteen Puranas, in the six ancillaries [of Veda] and in others, in the treatises of yoga, in all [sciences], Nyaya, Vaisesika, etc., whatever any of those sages, after examination, has said to be the true reality, this same eternal Lord of Gods, named Siva, is that.

In the Saiva tradition, Siva is known as free from beginning, middle and end, free by nature from the stain-entity, powerful, omniscient, endowed with plenitude, non-limited by directions of space, times, etc., beyond the range of speech and mind, free of manifestation, without action, all-pervading, always seeing everything.


The worship of Him can be the inner worship, which is especially for yogins. Men who take pleasure in the practice of yoga, whose mind is purified by the eight components of yoga, yama, etc., worship Him in the middle of the lotus of their heart, no others. The action of worshiping Him is superior. Without His worship, with any other [rite] there is no benefit for embodied souls.


Someone sometimes is entitled to perform the inner worship; those who have a little knowledge are entitled to perform the outer worship. Being aware of that, this Lord of Gods, Siva, who stands inside everything, who [desires] to extend His grace to all and gives creatures experience and liberation, this Siva became Sadasiva, whose body is manifested as the five brahma [mantras].


The whole universe entirely is created by Brahman, protected by you and destroyed by me. Thus a relation of material cause and effect is established in us. The nature of body of Siva is told to be in Sadasiva, etc. The nature of material cause is unique and established only in Him. This undecaying Sadasiva is worshiped in the Linga, by us, led by Maheshvara and by all creatures in the world. Such is the second chapter, entitled "Narration of the Nature of Siva," in the great Tantra called Ajita.

[Sherab]

And here is a yogi with a live snake wound in is hair....

[Sudarshan]

http://allsaivism.tripod.com/snakes.html

The Symbolism of Snakes in Saivism

Lord Siva is depicted in many images like the one above as wearing a garland of snakes around his neck. There is a deep symbolism hidden behind this. Lord Siva is know as Pasupathinath, the lord of all creatures. Being a lord of the animals he has complete control on their behavior. Since a snake is one of the most feared and dangerous animals in the world, the garland of snakes around the neck firmly establishes this fact even the snakes fear Him and remain under his control.
The snake stands for all the evil and demonical nature in the world. By wearing the snake around his neck, Lord Siva gives us the assurance that no evil can touch us or destroy us once we surrender to him, seek his protection and worship him with deep devotion.
The snake also stands for the power of kundalini, which is described as a coiled serpent lying dormant in the muladhara chakra of all human beings and descends upwards when one starts ones spiritual journey and becomes increasingly divine oriented. The snake around the neck of Siva conveys the meaning that in him the kundalini not only has arisen fully but is also actively involved in the divine activity by keeping an eye on all the devotees who approach Siva with their individual problems.
The snake also stands for all passions and desires. By wearing the snakes around his neck, Lord Siva conveys the message to all his devotees that He has overcome all desires and is in full control of Prakriti, or maya and its various machinations.

Snakes( both nAga-s and sarpa-s) technically denote entire system of nADi-s in the subtle body with nAga-s being a higher class. Lord Shiva and Lord garuDa have unusually similar qualities in that both symbolically wear eight major snakes. The wearer of the snakes must be a person who has complete domination of the snakes isnt it?

garuDa's story on his enimity with snakes and its association with the fetching of amrita is an important story in Mahabharata. It is in the Astika parva. Reading those sections very carefully will lead to the understanding of the snakes in the body. ( bhAratavarsha is the microcosm - the human body)

[Spiritualseeker]

Namaste,

My wife and I are going to offer puja for Lord Ganesha tonight. At our home we are going to use jasmine incense

[Spiritualseeker]

okay so we did it. What we did is i lit the incent stick and she offered it with her right hand and she said we offer this to you Lord Ganesha and I said please accept. She waved the smoke around the image. Then we placed the incent on the holder and we sat before the image and visualized Lord Ganesha and prayed to him.

Now i have question in the morning when we wake up do we have to get a complete bath before puja or can we just wash up a bit?

[dhruva023]

I recommend getting a complete bath, It doesn't matter if you spend only 5 minutes in bathroom, but please take a bath. A bath will physically and mentally prepare you for puja. It will also change you whole day. A bath will also make you wake up early, which is good, because we get more good and positive thought in the morning then any other time. I think bath is necessary for morning puja. but it might be just me. I would even say that we should take a bath everyday.