"The Biodance, the constant renewal of the body from the world outside, stands in playful contrast to our ordinary idea of death. We do not wait on death, for we are constantly returning to the earth while alive. Every living moment a portion of the billions of atoms in our body return to the world outside." Recent radioisotope studies have demonstrated that 98 percent of the human body is replaced at least once a year, leading to conclude that every time one flies to Los Angeles, he brings pretty much the same suitcase but a different Person. In a similar fashion, during the past eighteen months since enrolling at Pacifica, I have become a totally different person—both metaphorically and physically—than I was before I began my monthly flights to Los Angeles. In short, I am as much engaged in Shiva’s cosmic dance as Shiva himself and in that way we are one.

In the image of Shiva Nataraja, I find a deeply moving symbol of the ultimately mysterious and paradoxical nature of the divine. Creation and destruction, order and chaos, asceticism and sensuality, immanence and transcendence, life and death, being and non-being all coexist, balance, and, indeed, dance with each other in Shiva’s divine choreography. Most wonderful of all, Nataraja shows us that these eternal oppositions and dualities can never be reconciled into some neutral third or middle position. Perhaps as we meditate on the image of Shiva as Lord of the Dance, we may finally come to understand that the essential power of the divine mystery, the very nature of our experience of the numinous, resides precisely in the inherently irresolvable, irreducible nature of all the eternal paradoxes so magnificently manifested and celebrated in Nataraja’s cosmic ballet.

Richard Stromer, Ph.D.

"O you the creator, you the destroyer, you who sustain and make an end,
Who in sunlight dance among the birds and the children at play,
Who at midnight dance among the corpses in the burning grounds,
You, Shiva, you dark and terrible Bhairava,
You Suchness and Illusion, the Void and All Things,
You are the lord of life, and therefore I have brought you flowers;
You are the lord of death, and therefore I have brought you my heart—
This heart that is now your burning ground.
Ignorance there and self shall be consumed with fire.
That you may dance, Bhairava, among the ashes.
That you may dance, Lord Shiva, in a place of flowers,
And I dance with you."
(Huxley, 167)