Meeting Kali
A timeless story as it unfolds in time.
Circa 1980
I don’t want to do anything whatsoever with these gods of man.
I don’t care if they were and are real or not.
I don’t care for their boons, their rules, desires, the mandatory ceremonies, the offerings.
Nothing. I do not want any part of it. None whatsoever.
My god — if anyone insists I have or believe in one — I know undoubtedly wants me to play right now.
My head muttered on as I sat, eyes closed with my siblings chanting the mantra I had absolutely no interest in uttering.
“How fast can I be done with this?”
My being lit up at this thought.
I squeezed my eye open and squinted to my right without moving my head an inch. Something I was proud to be an expert at by now so my grandma sitting behind wouldn’t notice.
I sneaked a quiet side peek at my younger sibling on my side.
I could swear he was not paying attention either as his eyes closed, his lips mumbled something.
If I could not understand what he was saying, how would God understand?
Holding this very valid question in my head I allowed my mind wander on to more interesting things.
I couldn’t stop the urge to nudge him with my elbow, whispering I can probably…nah surely say these words faster than you and be done with it! Wait… even better…maybe in our tongue twisting ways, we can create our very own secret mantra!!
The sound of the bronze bell that held an upright and seemingly interested Hanuman brought me right back to reality.
Phew! An eye roll denoted we were done for the day.
It somehow always felt like the longest 15 mins of my Life.
And so the days passed by….
Circa 1986
You couldn’t escape it.
While we were hardly a religious kind of household, we were unwittingly still soaked in stories, celebrations and a culture around this.
I saw them clearly in their true light. Or so I thought.
Each god, every story, simply another face of the man that visualized and created it.
I witnessed deep reverence and devotion.
And I also witnessed fear creating and praying to the fearful gods it worshipped.
I withdrew.
Perhaps because with it all, I sensed a similar fear within?
Cool floors, warm breeze, fragrant incense, and then I distinctly recall seeing her face.
Dark skin, big bulging eyes, red tongue out…a wild madness written on her face.
Her unadorned, naked body clad with skulls and bones of men she had devoured.
Or something on those lines is what I heard the passing by Pandit say.
Her wrath, her fury, not something anyone would want to face.
Once you worship these gods, you have to continue the rituals for Life we are told. Unless we wanted to invite their shadow sides.
For every ‘good’ god there seemed to be a fierce one, ready to kill evil and right your wrongs.
Who comes up with these stories? I wondered.
At one point deeply wishing I could interview each of the sages who had written our mythologies. I wanted to know who they were and from what perspective they wrote these stories that enticed and held us rapt in fascination experiencing these flowerings of all humanness.
But beyond that, I had no interest in partaking in any of these adorations or rituals.
Luckily, with a sigh of relief I knew none of this was going to be significant for me. I was thankful I only needed to somehow get over those few minutes of lamp lighting and simple chants.
Which again, I was relieved to be set free of when I turned 16 or so.
December 1994
(Because I better remember when I got married! Ha!)
Years later, as a new bride, I moved into my husband’s home in a well-known town of Temples and Ashrams.
My abode for a very brief time was this beautiful old home with warm red oxide floors and a partially open patio that let the warm South Indian sunshine in. The patio overlooked lush, fertile green farms and had a bounty of coconut trees lining its compound.
My instant favorite spot to muse was by the well bursting full with sweet tasting fresh spring water by the shade of a large fragrant Curry Leaf tree.
Undoubtedly my soul space to be…
All was well till I discovered, right opposite the gate directly facing the home was the entrance of a Goddess Spirit temple with her demons guarding the walls.
I recall smiling at the irony of it all.
This was just the beginning.
The sharing of stories of seeing Spirits and presumed ghouls continued through many a late nights post my arrival. So did temple visits with live chicken cutting as an offering at one point that completely freaked me out. The value of these traditions, stories of magic and mysteries were shared.
Family bonding at best, I suppose!
I had experienced enough woo and seen enough with my very own eyes in Life till then to know I could not refute anyone’s personal experience or describe mine with much accuracy either.
What can one really state as the truth?
All words and perceptions seemed simply a reflection of the mind that interprets it.
Forgetting and letting it be felt easier.
It’s amazing how little I recall from my past. It all seems like a hazy dream until some incident triggers a memory.
Fall 2021
Life reveals itself to each one of us in mysterious ways.
There she was in my dreams…or reality? I cannot say for sure.
An amorphous mass of moving energy.
I couldn’t see her as it felt as though she lay just beyond the edges of the mind that could conceive of describing her.
But I distinctly and undeniably felt her.
She did not feel anything like how she was depicted in all her pictures and stories.
Her quiet warmth and staggering benevolence took me by surprise.
Unlike what her images evoked, she surprisingly didn’t bring up any fear in me. In fact through what felt like the wetness of tears on my cheeks it was as if I had been waiting for her for eons.
In a flash, as if a reckoning there was a dawning.
The dark one that brings up fear is the fear that is of the mind and not the fear of her. She is the all encompassing love that resides in our hearts as the truth of our being.
The dark fierceness the mind interprets as fear is her sacred womb that brings forth all the light there is to see.
She’s Kālī काली.
She is the awakening divine energy that moves this realm of Time into the timelessness truth of what we are.
She rejects no part of existence that she is, wearing all the mind heads as a garland around her neck.
This play is none other than her own creation.
Her perceived wrath and fury simply her power and love for the truth of what is her essence, the omnipresent Shiva.
Her fierceness is her invitation to dwell in the infinite possibility of what life is.
As we cannot define the totality of what we are, she cannot be defined by the mind that is her creation.
She is raw. She is wild. She is pure desire. She is the very infinite force of nature.
The mind that thinks it sees her through its eyes simply describes it’s own eyes. What does not make sense to it, it defines as madness. She cannot be seen or known by the mind. Only venerated by it at best.
She is the essence in every seeker’s question and longing. But the seeking mind can never lead one to her and true freedom.
If one wants to truly be free, does one even know how to be free? Does one even know what desires this freedom?
If you invoke her, she will arrive just as she never left.
She will liberate you if you free fall into the very darkness you fear.
She is prakruti who commands the gunas and transmutes it all.
She is viscerally alive in the now for all who wish to sense and live her.
Her naked body an invitation to seeing reality for what it is in it’s glory.
“So are you truly ready to live the awakening?” She gently whispered, her voice a caress.
True to itself, the unfailingly naive mind retorted promptly, reflecting its nature in its reply.
“I believe so. Perhaps time will tell.”
To which she, the timeless one, roared in riotous laughter that echoed as if through all space-time.
Now.
The Kālī of Kaliyuga is not this Kālī, the Goddess of Time.
And yet, I see this Time of Kaliyuga as a time of her clear presence.
As the saying goes, Kaliyuga will hold much destruction and is to be a time of strife, contention, and discord.
All fruits born from a life lived in and through the identity of the conditioned mind.
Kaliyuga, seen through her eyes, is the same yet different.
It is a time of awakening to the Now of our true nature.
Kāla काल is Time. Kāla काल also means Dark.
This conditoned familiar mind is the root of the world we see.
She reminds us to wake up from the dream and the darkness we have created by recognizing the truth of what we are.
भोगा न भुक्ता वयमेव भुक्ताः, तपो न तप्तं वयमेव तप्ताः ।
कालो न यातो वयमेव याताः तृष्णा न जीर्णा वयमेव जीर्णाः ॥Bhogā na bhuktā vayameva bhuktāḥ, tapo na taptaṃ vayameva taptāḥ ।
Kālo na yāto vayameva yātāḥ, tṛṣṇā na jīrṇā vayameva jīrṇāḥ ॥
- Bhartṛihari VairāgyashatakamWe don’t enjoy pleasures, we are consumed by them.
Without being the light, we burn in our own illusion.
Time doesn’t come to pass, but in waiting, we pass away.
In and as unquenchable thirst, we shall remain forever thirsty.
When living entirely identified with this Body-Mind-World, it is natural to experience Time eating/using us up.
Just look at the lives we live.
We run our lives on Time, basing our activities by the calendar.
Kal means to calculate and this allows us to magnificientally strategize and be creators of this experince and reality.
Unwittingly we, identified with the mind, instead of using time have become the slaves of the Space-Time-World of our own making.
We expend our precious Life energy, calling it managing Time, and even see it as a virtue.
We try to do the impossible — we schedule Life.
Thus is the nature of Life as it is experienced on this plane under the influence of the conditioned mind. A life simply a recycled wheel of our karma.
As days and nights speed by — one hears it to be so even more now than ever before — we do not realize we are not living Life anymore but are being consumed by the conditions that live us.
Time is synonymous with the perceived material Body-Mind-World.
This perceived material world and space-time are inseparably one.
They are simply two faces of the same coin.
Kali, the energy of destruction and transformation awakens us to the truth of the ever-present, timelessness we are.
In some ways, it is not a choice of the perceived separate Body-Mind to choose this as her presence and grace touches and is in all.
This particular Body-Mind who writes this does not actively worship Kali, and neither does it do any tapas or chant her name inviting her benevolence.
It has not have much clue about what is true, yet it is perplexed to have received this flow through it.
The we we think we are, thinks we need to “do” things in order to receive the grace of the divine. It forgets in its delusion the truth of what it is — which is a flow of grace itself.
No Body-Mind is separate from the One That Is All.
Each perceived separate one who utters a chant in devotion calling upon her calls her on behalf of all.
Each one who meditates on Life’s essence brings it forth for us all her nectar to taste.
Each one who cries out for her presence in times of pain lights the dawn of clarity within each one of us.
Each one who stands up in her fierceness for what serves all, stands up on behalf of the one that is all.
The one who plays in the abandon following her soul’s calling plays bringing forth the very beauty of all that she is.
Living our seemingly fluid svadharma we each — no matter what it looks like on the outside — align to and partake in raising the vibration of us/her on this plane.
Every seeker who seeks takes you with them to the door knocking for the awakening and liberation from the mind that continues to think all is separate and does not see the magic of the one that is.
The Time to recognize her and our true nature of timelessness is here.
Thank the steep stepping stones of the past that bring us so beautifully right to where we are to be.
Accepting her is letting go with prayer and reverence, all that has served and will not anymore.
She is here.
Even closer than here.
She in NOW.
She is me.
She is you.
She is beyond that which perceives this me and you.
She never was.
She never will be.
She is.
Timeless.
Kali means death.
An invitation to die before you die.
The ultimate and complete surrender.
This dying that is the waking up.
Leave the mind that fascinates, defines, describes, and projects all that it seemingly thinks it knows.
Get unebriated in the unknown of YOU.
Waking up is realizing her womb is the only place one ever lived.
Whether the mind acknowledges her or not, her love and grace encompasses and is all.
ॐ क्रीं कालिकायै नम:
Om Krim Kalikayai Namaha
🙏
P.S- I invite you to read the above as fact-fiction. Is there a genre like this? I have no clue! I cannot say with any surety what parts (and esp some parts) of this are fact or fiction. Life feels more and more like a dream. It is such even more so once one fully accepts her invitation.
I offer my deepest gratitude to Mr. Sampadananda Mishra for his exemplary and inspiring article on “काल kāla — The Spirit” 🙏 that I unexpectedly and coincidentally (no surprise at all) came across the next morning after my so-called dream experience.
In reading it, there was an undoubted knowing that this story was to be written and shared.
Read article here — https://sampadanandamishra.medium.com/काल-kāla-the-spirit-56048a7f6770