Is There Anything Above Shiva and Shakti?
For a long time I thought Shiva and Shakti were the end of the journey. He was consciousness, she was energy. He was stillness, she was movement. Together, they were everything.
And in a way, they are. Creation does not happen without both. But one day a quieter question came: if they are two, who is watching the two?
That question does not insult Shiva or Shakti. It completes them.
Shiva Is Stillness, Shakti Is Movement
Shiva is often described as pure awareness. The witness who never changes, never moves, never ages.
Shakti is described as power. The world appearing, the breath moving, the thought rising, the heart breaking open.
The old saying goes: Shiva without Shakti is shava, a corpse. Awareness with nothing to be aware of. Shakti without Shiva is energy with no one to hold it, lightning with no sky.
So we worship them together. And rightly so. Most of our spiritual life is spent learning that they are not separate.
But togetherness still implies two. And anything that is two can still dissolve into One.
The One Above The Two
Different traditions give this One different names, but they are pointing to the same silence.
In Kashmir Shaivism, it is called Paramashiva. Not Shiva plus Shakti, but Shiva and Shakti in perfect equilibrium, before the first vibration, before the universe begins to stir. Paramashiva is not a bigger god. He is the source from which even the idea of Shiva and Shakti arises.
In Advaita Vedanta, it is called Nirguna Brahman. Brahman without qualities, without form, without duality. Shiva and Shakti belong to Saguna Brahman, Brahman with attributes, Brahman as we can pray to, love, and imagine. Nirguna is prior to all imagining.
In the Upanishads, it is summed up in four words: Prajnanam Brahma. Consciousness is Brahman. Not consciousness of something. Just consciousness itself, self luminous, needing nothing else to shine.
Above here does not mean higher in the sky, or more powerful in a hierarchy. It means prior. More fundamental. Like the ocean is prior to the wave, even though the wave is made of nothing but ocean.
When The Person Disappears
This is where the teaching stops being philosophy and becomes dangerous to the ego.
As long as there is a worshipper and a worshipped, duality remains. Even the most beautiful devotion still has two: I am here, God is there. I am loving, God is being loved.
Ramakrishna lived this. For his whole life he worshipped Ma Kali. He loved her with a sweetness most of us will never know. And yet, at the end, he felt anguish. He said, two still remains two. The experience of oneness has still not happened.
His teacher Totapuri told him, you believe there are two, so there are two. Drop the belief. When Kali appears before you, raise a sword and cut her in two.
Ramakrishna could not do it. How do you cut the Beloved you have loved your whole life?
Finally Totapuri pressed a piece of glass to his forehead, at the point between the eyebrows, and said, now. Ramakrishna gathered his courage, raised the sword, and cut Kali in two.
Kali fell apart. And he became nondual. The wave dissolved in the ocean. The river fell into the ocean. He stayed immersed for six days in ultimate silence. When he opened his eyes, his first words were, the last barrier has fallen.
He did not kill the Goddess. He killed the separation between himself and the Goddess.
You Do Not Become, You Remember
That is why I no longer say, the person becomes one consciousness.
Becoming implies you were something else before, and now you have upgraded. But in that final seeing, there is no person left to become anything.
The person was a thought, a wave thinking it was separate from the ocean. When duality ends, you do not gain oneness. You remember you never lost it.
That is what Shivoham means. Not, I am like Shiva. But, I am Shiva. That is what Aham Brahmasmi means. I am Brahman.
When the seer, the seeing, and the seen merge, there is no one left to say, I have arrived. There is just consciousness knowing itself, without a second.
So yes. There is something above Shiva and Shakti.
It is the One from which Shiva and Shakti arise, the One into which they return, the One you already are when you stop dividing yourself from yourself.