As we celebrate Mahashivaratri tonight … here’s an excerpt from Osho’s discourse on Vedanta – Seven Steps to Samadhi. He speaks about what the Shiva Linga really is.
To read the full text click here – Only Knowing Remains.
“….. The Upanishads say that the divine can be defined only by negatives, so they go on negating.
They say, “This is not Brahman, that is not Brahman.” And they never say directly, they never assert directly. You cannot point to the Brahman with a finger because your finger will become a limitation.
Then Brahman will be where your finger is pointing and nowhere else. You can point to the Brahman only with a closed fist so you are not pointing anywhere – or, everywhere.
This negativity created many confusions, particularly in the West, because when for the first time the West came upon the Upanishads in the last century and they were translated – first in German, then in English, and then French and other languages – it was a very baffling thought, because The Bible defines God positively. Jews, Christians, Mohammedans define God very positively, they say what he is. Hinduism defines God totally negatively, they say what he is not.
In the West this looked not very religious, because you cannot worship a negativity. You can worship only something positive, you can love only something positive, you can devote yourself only to something positive. How can you devote yourself to something which is simply a denial, a negativity, a neti neti, neither this nor that? You cannot make an idol of a negative Brahman. How can you make an idol of a negative Brahman?
That’s why Hindus conceived their highest conception of Brahman as shiva-linga. And people go on thinking that Shivalinga is just a phallic symbol. It is not just a phallic symbol, that is just one of its implications. Shivalinga is a symbol of zero, shunya, the negative. Shivalinga doesn’t define any image. There is no image on it – no face, no eyes, nothing; just a zero, not even one. And the zero can be infinite. Zero has no boundaries; it begins nowhere, it ends nowhere.”
As the upward surge of energy continues tonight, meditate on the infinite !
Additionally do read – Shiva: The God of Meditation. The featured image is a screenshot taken from this article.
Thank You Master 🙏🏿