tattva-s continued

Shrinivas Gadkari sgadkari2001 at YAHOO.COM
Wed Feb 26 13:51:54 CST 2003


Namaste,

In earlier posts the following tattva-s were discussed:
shiva, shakti, iccha shakti, jnAna shakti, kriyA shakti,
rajoguNa, sattvaguNa, tamoguNa.

Here I will try to summarize tattva-s beyond shiva and shakti
tattva-s. (As usual, corrections, comments are welcome.)

shiva tattva is the cit shakti of the supreme being and
shakti tattva is it's (His) Ananda shakti. Just this
statement indicates that cit and Ananda are two aspects of
the supreme Being's supreme shakti. Since we have already
termed the Ananda shakti as shakti tattva, we will have
to use another term to denote the supreme shakti. We
refer to the supreme shakti by the term parA shakti.
All other shakti-s: cit, Ananda, iccha, jnAna, kriyA, mAyA ...
are aspects of parA shakti (tattva).

That state of Being which witnesses (or experiences) parA shakti
is (sometimes) referred to as mahA shambhu.

So we have two coupled tattva-s:
shiva - shakti, and mahA shambhu - parA shakti.

Between these is another pair of tattva-s: when parA shakti
manifests as cit-Ananda, this tattva is known as lalitA.
That state of Being which witnesses (experiences) lalitA
tattva is kAmeshvara. This is the third pair: kAmeshvara - lalitA.

There is one more state of Being. When the supreme Being has
absorbed even parA shakti in it (Him), what remains ? Just the
Being, just sat. We however encounter a problem in denoting
this state of Being as sat. Without consciousness (cit) to
ascertain existence, the Being is not able to know that it
is sat. So this state of Being is sometimes referred to as
"that which is neither sat nor asat". Probably, a valid
description of this state is shUnya (nothing) of Buddhists.
This is the state of paramshiva.

Best regards
Shrinivas Gadkari



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