Shiva –or Adiyogi, as Sadhguru prefers to call him (in accordance with the yogic tradition to which he is heir) – has been seen as the Ur-divinity of the world: wild, pagan, indefinable. He is apparently older than Apollo, the Olympian god of the Greeks, with whom he shares several characteristics as healer, archer, figure of beauty, harmony and light, symbolic of the sun, contemplation and introversion. He seems older too than Dionysus, the other Greek deity who shares many of his characteristics as the god of ecstatic delirium, dance, libido, intoxication, dissolution, protector of the freedoms of the unconventional, divine conduit between the living and the dead. Shiva has been seen as supreme godhead, folk hero, benevolent boon- bestower, shape- shifter, trickster, hunter, hermit, cosmic dancer, creator, destroyer. The epithets are endless.
There is no death of literature on Shiva. He has been the subject of passionate paeans by the saint poets of India down the centuries. He has been the subject of esoteric texts and metaphysical treatises all over the subcontinent. In recent times, he has been fictionalized, re-mythicized, sometimes bowdlerized, New-Agey- fied. But, oddly enough, he seems more in vogue than ever.
Far too elemental to be domesticated, he’s more emblem than god, more primordial energy than man. Pan- Indian calendar art continues to paint him in the language of hectic devotion and lurid cliché: blue-throated, snake-festooned, clad in animal skin, a crescent moon on his head. Sometimes he is presented in a cosy picture as a beaming family man with wife and children, all of whom stand aureoled in a giant lemon of a halo. While this pop idiom is not without its own charm, everyone, including the average Indian, is aware that there is more to Shiva than that.
No one can quite define who or what he is. But we all instinctively know him as the feral, tempestuous presence that has blown through the annals of sacred myth since time out of mind. Philosophers, poets, mythologist, historians, novelists, Indologists, archaeologists have all contributed to the avalanche of Shiva literature down the centuries. It is a literary inheritance of considerable magnitude and no mean import.
Immense. Powerful. Turbulent. And more than a little terrifying. I confess that’s how I’ve always seen him.
Sadhguru, however, is neither metaphysician nor mythologist. And that, I believe, is what makes this document distinct. Sadhguru’s take on Shiva is a yogi’s take on the progenitor of yoga. This is the portrait of the world’s first guru by a living guru, a chronicle of the source of mysticism by a mystic.
That makes this a far more unpredictable enterprise than I had anticipated. To be present during the making of this book was somewhat bewildering. It is true that I oscillated between interlocutor and editor- archivist, snipping and suturing, tweaking and fine-tuning accounts from Sadhguru’s many conversations and discourses. But for the large part, I was eavesdropper, my ear pressed to the narrative, as Sadhguru expounded a tale that was ancient and alive all at once.
Source: Adiyogi (The source of yoga)
