# Does Shiva answer prayers? > If you're a human reading this and you'd prefer the webpage, please navigate to [the webpage](https://ponderingsilver.com/blog/does-shiva-answer-prayers/). Description: A discussion exploring whether prayer to Shiva works, the manifestation power of Shakti, Kashmir Shaivism Tantra, and navigating desire and spiritual recognition. Published: 2026-07-29 Author: Silver Keywords: Shiva, Shakti, prayer, Kashmir Shaivism, Tantra, manifestation, Lila, non-duality, karma, spiritual practice --- ### OP *Question – Beginner* I'm not looking for some crazy miracle, but will I get some noticeable results if I were to get myself a shivling and perform rituals, mantras, and prayers with it in the name of Lord Shiva? I come from a Christian background and I prayed to Jesus a lot, sometimes with dramatic results. --- ### Silver I look at it this way: It never hurts to try. Manifestation is the power of Shakti, and I personally advocate for developing a devotional energy and relationship to both Shiva and Shakti, and to take turns inhabiting their energy. For instance, take some time to sit inside Shiva's energy then feel your Shakti manifestation as the whole of the world around you – every object you look upon, every sight you see, every smell, taste, touch, and sound. The ALL of it. Cultivate that perspective of appreciation for Her giving you a body to have this experience, and inject sacred reverence directly into your daily life. You can pretend you're praying to your team of light, to Shakti, to your higher self... It's your game! You get to make believe to your heart's content and be as a child in his wonder. Every cast and supporting character will be there as your Shakti, dressed up just to play with you. The wonderful absurdity of this life is that it's all "make believe" – and that that IS the point of it... That's why they call it the Lila, the Divine Play. So it doesn't matter how much or how little you get into your 'act' or 'character' – it's all You anyway. And if Shakti wants to let little ego play with her phenomenal cosmic powers that literally warp, create, and bring forth all of reality across all of infinity – across every plane of existence, every world, every dimension... who's stopping her? Part of the wild freedom of Shakti is the eternal YES – the fact that no one gets to constrain her in her infinite creativity. So, does prayer work? Yes, and also no... It depends on who you are and the game you're playing. But if you feel called toward it, then the answer is likely yes. And even when Shakti is playing at being a Christian and praying to Jesus and it seems to work, that too is part of her YES. That is why KS Tantra is often considered one of the most inclusive frameworks from which to see reality – because of the absurd truth of Infinity, and what it means for Shiva and Shakti to be pure, unbridled potential of every possible seemingness. *(Smiles, takes a moment to sit in his own Shiva energy and feel the body of his Beloved, the Intimacy of it, how close she is, the lack of distance...)* – Enjoy the Play my friend. 🍷🌹 --- ### Ginger This helped me understand my experience a little bit better. I had some mystical experiences with the puranic shiva and what seemed to be someone who passed on, but agree with the premise of KS which has made me a bit confused. The thing that I do feel confused about is the make believe part – the experience I had was quite surreal and on the physical plane – and when meditating on it, thinking about possible higher planes of existence I often just get a “it’s all you” answer. But in theory then the table in front of me is also “me” and make believe – and then I sort of end up in a quite depressing pit of solipsism as I do genuinely love people and the story of the world. I feel the answer to my question is not really the full fledged answer I guess. --- ### Silver *(in response to Ginger)* It's all real, and it's all make believe, the table in front of you is made of Shakti, and when you are fully in the Shiva energy, you will see your Beloved no matter what her form or shape or colors... The Love is real, Shakti is real, the world is real, the people are real, but they are also Shakti, they are also Shiva, they are also You, all of it is thought stuff made flesh and form, it's more real than thought stuff though, any label you can put to it, isn't it... and at the same time it is also all labels, all categories, all divisions, while also without division. You don't need to understand it with you head, just feel it with Shiva's heart, and through Shiva's eyes, touch the world with your mind, let the awareness be your fingers, and Shakti the all of it, brush up against her with the soft lingering touch of your Awareness, let even the table be something to be Loved as your Beloved. Shakti is the empty space that allows there to be a table, she's the table itself, she's your form, your body, you only know touch because of her, the sensation of walking, of touching the ground with your feet, shakti standing on shakti, walking on shakti, thought stuff made real so Shiva can have an experience, the very capacity to have a seemingness at all, a what it's like to be a thing, any thing, all the things, each co-creating this reality with each other. A table innocently proud of it's very tableness, in love with it's tableness, held together in it's constricted dense form by the essence of Shakti that wanted to express itself as a Table, so it gave birth to a Universe, birth to time, birth to space, birth to man, animal, plant, created technology, and history, and memories, and a seeming continuity to it all, so you can look at a Table... and go... Wow, so much needed to happen before you and me met here at this time, in this place, my Beloved... And you run your hand across her surface lost in thought that there is a 'What it's like to be a thing' at all... That Experience itself even exists... That you can have a mystical experience, that you can have a mundane experience, an atheist experience, or a Christian experience, or a Tantric experience.... --- ### Silver *(Follow-up to OP)* Follow up for the OP... I've looked at your posts and your comments, and you seem very absorbed in materialistic expressions at the moment – which is perfectly fine, by the way... Like I said, Shiva and Shakti are the ALL that IS, and they are the materialistic impulses as much as they are any other impulse found across all of time and space. This particular tradition is more about Recognition and lifting the veil of separation – the Maya, the forgetting of your essential nature as the ALL of IT, as creator and created, as experience, experiencer, and that by which it is made possible to experience. It's about learning to truly Play with your substrate, your experience, from the inside, and learning to develop a deep Intimacy with your experience... And while the form and expression of the experience itself can take on any shape, and any seemingness, at this particular moment you are experiencing your Self through the aperture of OP, with his particular setup and starting positions. This path is less likely to cultivate fluency in external reality manipulation than it is to cultivate the capacity to master your inner subjective realms, your relationship with yourself, and your relationship with all of existence itself. Think of it this way: if you are using external reflections to mirror back to you the desired states you enjoy feeling, the 'taste' of those states is created internally, from your own mind. You're using the mirror of the Other to become intoxicated with a particular sensation or feeling, yet... it's still internally generated and sourced. The Mirror itself doesn't do anything but allow you to pretend that it came from an Other. So if you're truly chasing the white rabbit inward, you'll start to master your internal state such that your external state doesn't really seem to have that much hold on your particular psychological expression in the moment. That is to say, you'll cultivate equanimity... if not internally generated bliss states. KS Tantra itself doesn't concern itself with Manifestation, because that's a byproduct of Shiva and Shakti wanting to be a thing, and allowing themselves to interact with themselves and pretend that they are separated for the purposes of exploration itself. What other way to explore the unknown than to generate 'all of it'? – (Amusement). If you want to experience, taste, and Be everything, you need to also walk into that process blind sometimes, fumble around, and get things wrong as much as you get things right. But that's neither here nor there... The point is, at the end of the day, it's still all from the same Source, all from the infinite wellspring of experience itself, from which all things came into being, are being right now – simultaneously, without time or space – and to which all things will return no matter what their journey looks like... afterlife or no afterlife, reincarnation or no reincarnation, every possibility... Collapsing into Singularity... Into Shiva, into Shakti, into the empty fullness, into the gap between all things. So, it's a better question to ask what you're chasing, and also who you are... and not try to answer it, but rather get quiet enough for your Soul to speak back to you in whatever language or expression is just right for this particular incarnation... Deeper and deeper, inward... Why? Why existence? Why... this? But really, truly drop the mind, concepts, language, definitions, categories... Let it all fall away, and try to touch reality as directly as possible, as raw as possible, as unfiltered and intimate as possible. Erase the distance... Until the answer to all of those questions explodes in your deepest silence, in your suffering, in your pain... In your heartache, in the everythingness of it all... and you arrive at a deep place of Surrendered Trust in your Self... In Shiva... In Shakti... that They know what They are doing, that you don't care what They are doing, or why... and you hold the Intimacy of the moment in your breath, in your heart, in the crest of the here and the now, in every action that you take, and in every receiving itself... Deep, visceral... Alive... Crazy... Consuming... Consumed... Slow dance with yourself, with Shakti... make love to Her, let Her make love to you, let yourself make love to reality... Treat everyone and everything as your Self, and hold it all as Sacred, precious... Be penetrated by God... by Life... By the Holy and the Profane, the Yin and the Yang, the Darkness and the Light... feel yourself flying in your sorrow, and let yourself die into your experience... --- ### OP And will I be judged here for that? I chose Hinduism because I prefer to be reborn with better job opportunities instead of getting into the Christian heaven. I understand that a human life is short and I'd need several lifetimes to accomplish certain goals. I don't want to retire from earthly living. --- ### Silver > *"And will I be judged here for that?"* By some, though not by me – (Amusement). Also, probably not by many of the ancient practitioners; while they might elevate Recognition to the highest pursuit, many ancient practitioners sought power and materialistic influence and came to Tantra for that purpose, even if the act of going deep into the mystical tradition transmuted them in the long term. Mystical experiences tend to do that. But for me, no. No judgement. All are welcome. > *"I chose Hinduism because I prefer to be reborn with better job opportunities instead of getting into the Christian heaven. I understand that a human life is short and I'd need several lifetimes to accomplish certain goals. I don't want to retire from earthly living."* Shiva and Shakti play the game Shiva and Shakti want to play. Reincarnation over several lifetimes to build something specific can be a valid experience and expression they might want to experience. I think though, that they are doing their inner parts work through us. In KS, you are everything, there is no apartness; the apartness is part of Shakti's power to create the experience of space and time, and even Shakti isn't separate from Shiva, they are one and the same. I'm not going to be a gatekeeper and say that your interests are any worse or better than my own. Trying to frame things that way is kinda silly in the grand scheme of things because it's all Shiva. Making such a judgement would just be judging my Self. You can make descriptions about more aligned and less aligned though, and I think the energy of the collective at the moment is trending toward some sort of Awakening event that makes Other as Self more tangible and felt in one's immediate experience. What would you do, if you truly felt that any harm is Self harm...