The cremation ground in Indian iconography is not a symbol of morbidity.
It is the place of absolute truth. Where the pretensions dissolve. Where the constructed identities — the roles, the reputations, the accumulated stories about who one is — are reduced to ash. Nothing false survives the cremation ground.
Shiva sits there by choice.
He is Maha Yogi — the great meditator — but he does not choose a serene garden or a mountain retreat. He chooses the place where human beings are most confronted with what they spend their lives avoiding: the fact that everything ends. He rubs the ash of the dead on his body. He wears the garland of skulls. He makes his home in the territory of dissolution.
The one who can sit comfortably with dissolution is not attached to any particular form. And the one who is not attached to any particular form cannot be threatened by change.
This is psychological teaching encoded in mythology. The quality Shiva represents — the capacity to be fully present in the face of endings, losses, collapses, and transformations, without being destabilised — is the most practically useful quality a human being can develop.
Your business model will become obsolete. Your relationships will change form. Your body will age. The version of yourself you are most attached to will, at some point, need to die so a more accurate version can live.
The Stoic practice of Memento Mori — remember that you will die — is not pessimism. It is the same gesture as Shiva in the cremation ground. Sit with ending. Let it become familiar. Discover that you are still here, still aware, still present — even in the full recognition of impermanence.
What remains when you sit with dissolution is not emptiness. It is the Shiva quality — the witnessing Consciousness that was never born and never dies, that the fire cannot touch because it is not made of anything that burns.
Sit in the fire. Find out what you are made of.