Why must we anthropomorphise (longest word I've used in my life) things to understand them? Does visualising things and entities as ourselves make for easier understanding? Perhaps. Maybe that is the reason we call Companies legal persons and when teaching a fresh bunch of bright eyed kids, assign it a brain, hands and a heart, perhaps not the truest form of turning an enetity into ourselves, but there are other examples where we extend this thought to various creatures, entities and abstract concepts.

Starting with Mickey Mouse and all forms of singing dancing bi-ped creatures that have spawned since then, why? Does having an animal behave like us provide us with an inner sense of relatibility, one without which we see them only as vermin, that deserve little else, let alone gigantic theme parks.

The other extreme is religion, we anthromorphise god, arms (sometimes more than the pair), legs, feet, flowing beards et al. As a first step of understanding this isn't really a problem, but the issue I have is that somewhere in the melee of imagining our gods and goddesses as images of ourselves we forget and misplace certain "greater" truths that lie behind these images. Gods and goddesses were conceived as a manifestation of energy, the male and the female, each possessing its own qualities, qualities we should aspire to and strive to incorporate into our own lives, and how we fail. The purpose of religion has become that of a ostritch like act of burying ones head in the sand, eyes closed in blind "devotion" and hope that singing in front of an idol or facing a certain direction will cause all of the worlds ills to vanish as a consequence, without for one moment stopping to appreciate and truly understand the purspose for which religion was manufactured.  In our "religion" with little care for what the religion actually asks of you, of what a religion truly stands for, the philosophical and karmic depth of the morphoses of what a deity actually stands for.

Shiv and Parvati are husband and wife, yes, in a simple world, as an advertisement it works well, a person understands the concept of husband and wife and can identify with it. What we are failing to do is to take the role of religion in our lives beyond this advertisement, we do not wish to see that the philosophical thought which created Shiv and Parvati was thought that found its bedrock in oppossing energies, energies that exist in each of us, thoughts that exist in each of us, the neccessity to have a balance in life of such thoughts and energies, fables were told for the purpose of understanding, Shiva the destroyer was tempered by the calming influence of his wife, Parvati, oppossites that we must construct within our own selves to remain balanced.

Looking beyond the superficial has always led me to the example of the Aghori's. "holy men" who live their lives entirely on the premise that the Shiva is perfect and the world and everything that exists in it, is his creation and embodies his characteristics. The premise for their philosophy now takes them over a hard to live up to hump i.e., if Shiva embodies all things then all things must be perfect as well, therefore as an extension they embrace what we consider unworthy and defiled. Dead bodies, feces, carcasses, life in cremation grounds..its the ultimate philosophical commitment.. and is the other extreme of where some in our world stand.

I am not sure if I have drawn any conclusions from these couple of paras, maybe I didn't need to.