Creation is sound. The Creator is stillness.

Sound is of the surface, silence is of the core. The core is a total absence of sound. Absence of sound means absence of reverberation, life, death, creation; absence of creation in one’s experience leads to an enormous presence of the source of creation.

The word “Shiva” means literally, “that which is not.” Today, modern science is proving to us that everything comes from nothing and goes back to nothing. The basis of existence and the fundamental quality of the cosmos is vast nothingness.

Shiva is not described as light, but as darkness. Humanity has gone about eulogizing light only because of the nature of the visual apparatus that they carry. Otherwise, the only thing that is always, is darkness. Light is a limited happening in the sense that any source of light – whether a light bulb or the sun – will eventually lose its ability to give out light. Light is not eternal. It is always a limited possibility because it happens and it ends. Darkness is a much bigger possibility than light. Nothing needs to burn, it is always – it is eternal. Darkness is everywhere. It is the only thing that is all pervading...But if I say “divine darkness,” people think I am a devil worshiper or something. In fact, in some places in the West it is being propagated that Shiva is a demon! But if you look at it as a concept, there isn’t a more intelligent concept on the planet about the whole process of creation and how it has happened.

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. As the very source of the yogic traditions, his contribution in the making of human consciousness is too phenomenal to be ignored.

When you realize what sound is attached to a particular form, you give this sound as the name for that form – now the sound and the form are connected. If you utter the sound, you are relating to the form – not just psychologically, but existentially, you are connecting with the form. If you have mastery over the sound, you also have mastery over the form. Sanskrit is like a blueprint of the existence. What is in form, we converted into sound.

Once you are identified with something that is not you, anything you put your hand on gets stuck to you. Because of this experience, there is fear of involvement, and because of this, people are talking “detachment.” But if you avoid involvement, you will avoid life itself.

It is a medical fact that even when a physical leg is amputated, the sensory leg is still intact. The sensory body has its own presence beyond the physical body. There is a way to enlarge your sensory body. If you make your life energies very exuberant and ecstatic, your sensory body becomes as large as you want it. Yoga is to expand the boundary of your sensation in such a way that you experience the whole universe as a part of yourself. Everything becomes one. That is union.

Yoga is not about bending and twisting your body or holding your breath. It is a mechanism and a technology to get you to that state of experience where you see reality just the way it is.

Yoga always tries to transform the body, because if the body transforms, the mind will mature by itself.