Bholenath's Rock

The time had finally come.Truth had to be realised and lived so as to understand the self's pristine nature. Bholenath stared intently at the fort on the seashore. His boat was somehow still in the sea a few miles away from the shore. The evening sun gave the water a shade of orange and the warmth embraced the sacred situation. Bholenath stood up and walked to the end of the boat; he cried looking at the sky " O Lord Shiva ,the eternal voice of subtle reality, liberate me from all the worldly desires, from all the attachments and expectations! Show me your feet and I shall surrender" The moment he completed the sentence,clouds surrounded the sky and it started raining heavily. Thunder roared in fierce anger it seemed and all of a sudden a bolt of lightning struck the wall of the fort making a hole into it.

What followed next was unimaginable. Thousands of sparrows flew out from the hole on the fort's wall and made their way to the top of the fort. Mystically they made a formation, an arrangement of their positions that formed the shape of Lord Shiva's face and chest. Bholenath's eyes were moist, he could not control his emotions, he jumped into the sea and swam till the shore. Astonishingly on reaching the shore what he had seen moments before had turned more enthralling and magical, the birds were flapping their wings with a much greater intensity and the drops of rainwater sliding from the feathers of their wings produced the effect as if Lord Shiva was sitting under a waterfall immersed in deep thought. Bholenath rushed towards the fort's entrance and then climbed to reach the top of the fort.

There he was, silently watching the birds above him, the birds that had made the formation of Lord Shiva. He closed his eyes now. All events of Bholenath's life,all chaos, emotional battles,anxiety,fears, worries began disappearing and his concentration was guided to just one place, it was Lord Shiva's aura. He steadily opened his eyes to find that the birds which were earlier at a height from the fort had come down and surrounded him without breaking the formation. He was so immersed in the thoughts of Shiva that he could no more feel his own body, it felt like a piece of rock to him & gradually his body turned into a rock part by part. The thousands of birds around one by one turned into rocks, thousands of birds shaped rocks arranged in a manner to produce the shape of Lord Shiva's idol with a human shaped rock at Lord Shiva's chest.

'Bholenath' means the god of simplicity and innocence. We humans have this element of Bholenath within all of us. Once we begin making efforts to realise it a journey begins that makes us reach closer to the doors of liberation. We will end up understanding that the body and world are mere pieces of rocks but the true soul within.....the true soul within is in a state of transcendence, in a state of Shiva!