Vira Chandra: In the landscape of contemporary spirituality, certain patterns repeat themselves with striking clarity. Ancient names—Shiva, Shakti, Bhairava—are carried into a new context, no longer through the quiet transmission of practice or the austerity of long sādhanā, but through the channels of social media and lifestyle culture.
Here we encounter modern yogis and yoginis who travel between France, Italy, Greece, and other curated locations, sharing images of themselves against mountains, seas, and sunsets. The language of devotion is present, but it is woven into the fabric of privilege and leisure. Posts speak of “Bhairava and Kali” while depicting themselves and their partners on holiday. Altars are decorated with skulls, not as living reminders of death but as aesthetic objects. Tantra becomes a word for sensuality workshops, retreats, and poetic expressions of freedom.
What is being offered is not without beauty, but its register is different from the older currents it claims to represent. The wild jungles, the cremation grounds, the Bhairava who strips away all certainty—these appear as images, metaphors, and symbols, but rarely as lived realities. The skull becomes a symbol detached from death. The cremation ground is evoked without corpses. Bhairava is named, but softened into a “challenge” compatible with comfort and personal preference.
This creates a peculiar situation. On the one hand, the same sacred words are spoken. On the other, the meaning behind them shifts. Those who hear these words in their original depth—as names of surrender, death, transformation, and loss—find themselves looking at a different universe when the same words appear as captions for a curated life. The distance is not just cultural, but existential.
Two short quotes, taken from such expressions, illustrate this dynamic with clarity. At first sight they appear devotional, but when placed beside the realities they invoke, the distance between symbol and substance becomes visible.
First Quote
“My soul belongs to the wild jungles, the snowy isolated mountain peaks, the hot cremation grounds and anywhere else I manage to find you, Beloved Shiva 🔥🤍🔱🔥”
At first sight, the words suggest devotion. They name landscapes that, in spiritual memory, are charged with power: jungles where sages wandered, mountains where austerities were performed, cremation grounds where fear was dissolved. These are not ordinary places. They carry resonance because they have long been thresholds, spaces where the ordinary world thins and the presence of the divine feels closer.
And yet, there is something telling in how the quote arranges them. Shiva is imagined only in remote or dramatic settings—the wild, the isolated, the fiery. He is not encountered in the unremarkable. He is not named in the hospital ward, at the office desk, in the broken street. The Beloved here is confined to scenery that inspires awe and beauty, a Shiva who appears only where one chooses to “find” Him.
But the essence of Shiva cannot be contained in such selection. If He is the Beloved, then He comes as much in the places one would rather avoid as in the ones one seeks. He comes as the sound of coughing in the night, as the ash of ruined houses, as the unanswered prayer. The jungle and the cremation ground are not metaphors for aesthetic intensity; they are reminders that Shiva is inseparable from dissolution itself.
The key phrase is “anywhere else I manage to find you.” It quietly reveals the orientation: Shiva is located where He can be sought on one’s terms, where His presence can fit within the rhythm of personal desire and curated life. But devotion, in its true form, reverses this. It is not that the aspirant manages to find Shiva—it is that Shiva finds the aspirant, often where they would never have chosen to look.
A cremation ground is not sacred because it looks dramatic, but because it strips every covering of self. To say “my soul belongs to the cremation ground” is not to gesture at a fiery backdrop but to accept the fire itself—the fire that consumes everything that can be claimed as “mine.”
So the words are close to the truth, but they stop at the surface. They touch the symbol, but not yet its substance. They love the idea of Shiva in landscapes of grandeur, but not yet Shiva as the unchosen, the unbearable, the ordinary turned holy by surrender.
Only when “Beloved Shiva” is recognized equally in jungles and in ruins, on snowy peaks and on hospital floors, in poetic silence and in the silence that wounds—only then does the phrase become real.
Second Quote
“When you are a fiery Shiva Bhairava adorer ❤️🔥🖤 (the transcendent Shiva who destroys fear and challenges an aspirant to give up all limitations, abiding in nondual state) but are also a sensitive human being scared of change.”
On the surface, this sounds self-aware: to love Bhairava, yet admit to human sensitivity and fear. But the deeper you look, the more dissonance it reveals.
Bhairava is not a poetic archetype or a mood to balance with everyday feelings. Bhairava is the place where fear itself is broken open. He does not merely “challenge an aspirant to give up limitations” — He tears them away, mercilessly, in ways the aspirant never imagined. There is no polite process of negotiation. Bhairava is the rupture.
To say one “adores Bhairava” while confessing fear of change is like standing in front of a dragon, admiring its majesty, but hoping it never awakens. Sleeping, it is beautiful, even glamorous. But when it opens its eyes, fire fills the sky, and there is no safety left.
This is why the quote feels contradictory. It invokes Bhairava as if He were an energy that can be admired without consequence, a force one can reference but still keep at a distance. In truth, when Bhairava is awakened, there is no “distance.” It is like having your skin peeled off while still alive. Every covering of self is burned. The process is brutal beyond imagination — not something that can be displayed on Instagram, not something that makes a person look radiant or empowered, but something that strips away everything that could be displayed at all.
This is not to dismiss fear. Fear of change is profoundly human. But it is misleading to place it next to Bhairava’s name, because Bhairava is not about gradual adjustments or lifestyle shifts. He is the point where the fear of change itself is shattered — by a fire so relentless that nothing of the old self survives.
So the sentence tries to hold two truths, but they cannot coexist. You can be a sensitive human being afraid of change, or you can be an adorer of Bhairava — but if Bhairava truly enters, the fear of change will not remain. It will be devoured.
Conclusion
Bhairava nowadays widely has become glamorous because He sits so close to the flame of genius mystics like Abhinavagupta. People feel the prestige: ancient Sanskrit words, Kashmiri Shaiva subtlety, concepts like vimarśa (self-reflexive awareness) or saṃkoca (contraction), and suddenly it’s fashionable to “play” with them. It looks edgy: you’re invoking the God of cremation grounds while sipping espresso in Tuscany, quoting Tantra Sūtras on your Instagram reel.
But that glamour is precisely what makes it comical. Because the actual energy of Bhairava is the antithesis of glamour. There is no room for posing when the skin of your identity is torn away. Abhinavagupta could write of vimarśa only after burning through fear, not before. Those words arose from the cremation ground of his own Self, not from aesthetic positioning.
For the ancient yogis and yoginīs, to invoke Bhairava and Kali was not a poetic gesture. It was a vow to let everything be stripped away. The cremation ground was chosen not because it looked dramatic, but because it erased every marker of safety and identity. There, caste dissolved, family ties dissolved, even the name by which one was known ceased to matter. To sit in the śmaśān was to declare: I am ready to lose all persona, all coverings, for the sake of Divinity.
This is why they worshipped Bhairava and Kali — not as symbols of intensity to decorate a life, but as living forces of destruction that clear the way for truth. Their sādhanā was not curated; it was endured. It was the undoing of every preference.
When their names are spoken today, it is worth remembering what those names truly mean. A skull is not décor; it is death. A cremation ground is not a metaphor; it is loss. Bhairava is not a fiery mood; He is the end of what can be kept. Kali is not empowerment alone; She is the merciless blade that severs illusion.
And precisely there, in that unbearable place, the grace they carried shines. Because once all else is gone, what remains is not curated, not performed, not fragile. What remains is the Divine itself — vast, terrible, tender.
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