The Inspiring Story of the First Yogi – Sadhguru Explains the Spanda Hall Murals

Sadhguru: The side wall depicts Patanjali Maharishi. The artists who worked on this mural belong to a certain tradition and were not used to doing anything other than their traditional style. I visualized how Patanjali should be and told them what was on my mind. They did a very good job.

In Indian temples, Yoga, and tantra, snakes are a fundamental symbol for an upward movement of energies. How far you raise the energies is how your life is. Shiva has a snake sitting on top of his head to indicate that this is a being whose energies have reached its ultimate peak.

Patanjali was such a tremendous human being that he became a shower of divinity for people around him. To honor him, I decided to have snakes coming down from his head rather than going up. I think he turned out beautiful. This mural is done with natural dyes. If people take care of it well, it should stay for 5,000 years. No chemical paints have been used.

From here on, this wall is a depiction of Shiva’s life. In the Yogic culture, we do not see Shiva as a god but as Adiyogi or the first Yogi and as Adi Guru or the first Guru. He was the first one to teach Yoga.

Here, Shiva is shown sitting in a cremation ground, forlorn and lost.

True spirituality begins only when you confront death. Talking about God is not spirituality because generally, you are talking about God to live better. That is just survival. Only when you become fully aware of your own mortality, do you want to know what your existence is all about.

Shiva spent a long time in the cremation grounds looking at death. Somehow this invariably happens to almost everyone who seriously seeks spiritual process. I spent a lot of time in the cremation grounds in my early years, just looking at death. I did not know anything about spirituality; it just drew me there, and I wanted to know what happens.

“These people who were alive and suddenly fell dead, where did they go? What happens after death?” It is the intrigue of that which sets you forth on the journey. Shiva is in that state in the first picture. He looks pretty ugly and lost. That is how he is.

Then Shiva finds his path and starts Yoga. The most fundamental form of Yoga is known as Bhuta Shuddhi, which means becoming free from the pancha bhutas or the five elements of nature. The five elements limit you to the physical. As you become free from them, you become free from the physical, and are delivered to the spiritual dimension of existence.

Shiva went through all his sadhana and attained to a Samadhi state where the two intertwining snakes have met, which means his energies have touched their peak. He has transcended the dualities of life. He is free from the process of life but is still within life. It is such a rare event that all the celestial beings are celebrating.

After his attainment, the simplest thing for him would have been to shed the body and dissolve. For ninety percent of the realized beings, their moment of realization and their moment of leaving the body are the same. Here, he is in a predicament whether to hold on to the body and do something with the world, or leave his body and become part of the cosmic presence.

There is a whole story between the previous part and this one, which cannot be depicted in the painting, so we skipped it and went on. It is a story about how the gods conspired to get Shiva to stay on and teach the world. They crafted an elaborate conspiracy to get him married to Sati. He took her as his wife and got involved with it. In this mural, he is sitting with Sati.

Due to some extraneous reasons, Sati died a tragic death. When she died, Shiva became forlorn and taken over by grief. He carried her body and walked across the subcontinent. Her body started rotting and different parts of it fell down in different places. They became the shakti sthals or temples for each part of the body that fell. Then he withdrew into asceticism again and did not open his eyes for many millennia.

The gods conspired again and got Sati reincarnated as Parvati to put them together again. This time, Shiva remained a long-distance husband. He was with her off and on; the rest of the time, he withdrew into the mountains as an acetic. He did not want to get involved again, but he made use of her presence to be useful to the world in some way. These two aspects are depicted here. In one, he is with Parvati, but there is a distance between them. In the next one, he is withdrawn, happy with his bull.

The final depiction is the dance of dissolution – tandava – where Shiva danced himself into ecstasy and dissolution.

Actually, this is the journey of every human being. But since Shiva was the first one who walked the path, it is depicted as his life.