Four aspects of Shiva.

It is a common place. We have seen it in temples, on calendars, on matchbox labels: the blue body smeared with ash, the third eye, the tiger-skin. Locked in the lotus posture he mediates in the mist and snow of Kailash; the moon rests on his hair and the Ganga spills from his tangled locks. Shiva is the ascetic whose meditation sustains the universe. He reposes at the centre and contemplates the world, concentrating its …

…All the other opposites that we believe we see, such as good and evil, birth and death, and perhaps reality. It is this which is expressed in the melding of god and goddess. Devi is Shiva?a shakti, the truth of his self of which she is half and he is half, yet each is whole. So as the Isha Upanisad begins: That is whole. This is whole. Wholeness comes from Wholeness, Wholeness still remains.