What is the significance of Shiva-linga?

Transcript

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Question What is the significance of the Shiva Linga? Answer There are two kinds of representations of the divine.
Iconic and uniconic. Iconic means those forms that are based on the original eternal form of the absolute. That means Krishna’s deity form.
Krishna is playing a flute and wearing a peacock feather in the deity form and that is how he is in the spiritual world. And uniconic are those which do not have an original template in the spiritual world. So for example, we have a Shaligram Sheela.
So there is no spiritual world with a Shaligram Sheela as the predominating deity of the spiritual world. There is a particular Lila by which that form came. Now both forms are considered potent.
Both forms can lead to spiritual advancement. And so the Shiva Linga is an uniconic form of Lord Shiva. Uniconic means again it is not, Lord Shiva has his original form but this is a different form.
Now why are there, what is the significance of this form? Now yes, it does represent the union of Purusha and Prakriti which leads to the creation of everything material. However, this is not just a rural sexual representation. In general, when the Europeans came to India they often had a colonial and a Christian bias with which they saw everything in the country.
And they rabidly criticized the tradition that they said led to the worship of, that involved the worship of the phallus and the genitals. And as a response to that many, some Indian thinkers started saying that actually this doesn’t represent that. It is just, then they started giving various kinds of interpretations to the whole thing.
So the point is not that, if we look at the broad Vedic culture, it is not that sexuality per se is worshiped. It’s not the sexual organs are worshiped. But there is an understanding that beyond this arbitrary change that we see in the world, sometimes some things grow, sometimes deteriorate, some various things happen in this world.
There is a pattern and that pattern is that matter and spirit are interacting with each other. So Krishna talks about it in Bhagavad Gita. Purusha prakriti sthohi bhumte prakriti jan gunan karanam guna sangosya sada sadyo yajmasu.
So when the purusha gets situated in prakriti, at that time that’s formed by the desire of bhumte, for the sake of enjoyment, then sada asati gets good and bad in this world. So this is something which is sankhya is one of the six systems of philosophy. And many of the principles of sankhya are valid principles which are talked about in Vedanta also.
So sankhya visualizes the world as an interaction of purusha and prakriti. So purusha is represented by Shiva and prakriti is represented by Shakti or Durga. So it is their union that leads to the creation of everything.
So the Shiva linga represents their union and then it is a, in various sense, worship of the Shiva linga is not just the worship of the sexual organ or anything like that. It is a recognition that there are deeper principles that lead to the creation of the world. So it is acknowledgement that both material and spiritual things originate from a deeper source and by recognizing that as also fertility and creativity we sort of acknowledge that we are not the supreme creators or producers of anything.
So it is definitely not the highest form of worship because the highest form of worship is not just the lord as a creator but it is the lord as a supreme lover and as a lover he is not just, there is no mundane sexuality which leads to production of material things in him but there is a spiritual loving relationship between him and his consort and that’s why the representation, the worship of Krishna and his deities, Krishna or Vishnu, that is considered in the world of goodness and further beyond in transcendence. So the worship of Shiva linga is a graphic visual representation for people to redirect their carnal or sexual creative instincts to something higher. So it is not necessarily, as I said, lordship the worship of Shiva is generally done by those people who are influenced by the mode of ignorance and those, so lord Shiva has various symbolisms associated with him that can seem quite provocative he has a snake around him, he puts ash around his body he lives in crematoriums all this is done to attract tamasic people and similarly the worship of the Shiva linga is also one way by which the people in tamoguna become attracted towards some form of worship that helps them to acknowledge the higher reality underlying the things that attract them in this world.