“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it Fate” – Carl Jung. Mahashivratri is considered one of the most important festivals towards this effort. “The Great Night of Shiva” is the most significant among twelve Shivratris, the fourteenth day of every lunar month or the day before the new moon. Who am I, What is my source, and Where am I, are the three most important and fundamental questions, any thinking human mind seeks answers to. Trinity of Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh is at the core of understanding one’s surroundings in Hinduism. Mahesh or Shiva is the Lord of destruction or evolution. Change is the very nature of nature, and this understanding is perhaps most vital aspect of a person’s intelligence.
Fritjof Capra, one of the foremost proponents of the link between ‘Eastern philosophy’ and science, says “Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics.”
One of the fundamental issues of our scientific understanding of the physical world is the attempt to superimpose the principles of macro-physics onto the micro-world of atoms, subatomic particles and energy, where they fail spectacularly. Quantum mechanics is a hugely successful theory in modern physics and has led to far-reaching practical applications in our lives today. We still don’t know the basic explanation for some of its foundational predictions.
Fritjof Capra explained in The ‘Tao of Physics’, “The Dance of Shiva symbolises the basis of all existence. At the same time, Shiva reminds us that the manifold forms in the world are not fundamental, but illusory and ever-changing. Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. “According to quantum field theory, the dance of creation and destruction is the basis of the very existence of matter. Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. For the modern physicists then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter, the basis of all existence and of all-natural phenomena.”
The night of celebrating the changing apparent reality by fasting, singing, dancing and meditating, so that one comes closer to directly experiencing the changeless reality, Mahashivaratri, is celebrated across India and is a Gazetted Holiday.
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