The word Shiva literally means “nothingness”. It becomes imperative to understand “nothingness” before we move any further. Nothingness is vast, has no boundaries and can be imagined as dark. Today, modern science informs us that everything comes from nothing and goes back to nothing, the very basis of the existence and the fundamental quality of the cosmos is the vast nothingness. The planets, stars, galaxies and the yet to be discovered celestial bodies are all a small sprinkling in the cosmos, the rest of it is all vast empty space, which is referred to as Shiva. That is the womb from which everything is born, and that is the oblivion into which everything is sucked back. Everything comes from Shiva and goes back to Shiva. Anything that reflected the above said phenomenon was referred to as Shiva.

So Shiva is described as a non-being and not as a being. No one knows his actual name, where was he born, who are his parents, what was his childhood like, where did he vanish, all of these and much more questions leads to one answer that Shiva is “ Self-Created” a Swayambhu.

On the other hand, Shiva is referred to as a certain yogi, in fact, the Adiyogi or the first yogi. He is the basis of the most profound inner technology ever manifested by anyone, which is known to us today as Yogic sciences. Yoga does not mean standing head side down or twisted bodies or holding your breath deep, Yoga is the science and technology to know the essential nature of how this life is created and how it can be taken to its ultimate possibility.

“Shiva” is referred to as both nothingness & yogi, because in many ways they are synonymous. This being, who is a yogi, and that non-being, which is the basis of the existence, are the same because to call someone a yogi means he has experienced the existence as himself. If you have to contain the existence within you even for a moment as an experience, you have to be that nothingness. Only nothingness can hold everything, something can never hold everything. The word “yoga” means “union.” A yogi is one who has experienced the union. That means, at least for one moment, he has been absolute nothingness.

All through these ages since the inception of Shiva we have talked about him as the ultimate, in the yogic culture, Shiva is not seen as a God. He was a being who walked this land and lived in the Himalayan region and is considered as the one who gave us the process of yoga. As the very source of the yogic traditions, his contribution in the making of human consciousness is too phenomenal to be ignored. This predates all religion, much before people devised divisive ways of fracturing humanity to a point where it seems almost impossible to fix now, the most powerful tool necessary to raise human consciousness were realized and propagated by him. Every possible way in which you could approach and transform the human mechanism into an ultimate possibility was explored thousands of years ago.

A sophistication of this scale is incredible. The question of whether people were so sophisticated at that time is irrelevant because this did not derive from a certain social order, this came from an inner realization. Shiva in great detail gave a meaning and a possibility of what you could do with every point in the human mechanism. You cannot hope to build on this even today because he said everything that could be said in beautiful and intelligent ways. You can only spend your lifetime trying to decipher it.

The above article is inspired by multiple sources like books on Shivapuranam, Jaggi Vasudev’s debriefing about Shiva & various folklore about Shiva.