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Divine Mother Kali
She is my mother
She is my Father
She is my Brother
She is my Lover
She is my Sun
She is my Moon
She is my Child
She is the Grass
She is the Dew
Look at how much she can teach her tongue dripping in blood
A circle of skulls around her neck
A dagger in one hand
Giving birth in the other
The whole process of nature
How exquisitely subtle
Remember Sidhartha his journey, and the amount of time he spent in the garden of pleasure who had much to teach? She always had a new thing to teach.. she will always have a new thing to teach.. always
Can anyone imagine the a would as full and seductive as that is not going to teach something? Is not going to continue to teach something?
Commentary
“How exquisitely subtle” 😂
Kali’s lack of subtlety is what unlocked my understanding of Hindu gods. On the surface, the plethora of gods seems at odds with Hinduism’s nondualistic point of view. However, these gods are to be seen/used as personifications of parts of the world to give our logical minds something to understand/ remember rather than trying to grasp as wordless concepts. When learning about Hindu gods, you witness the deity’s form and their contribution to the story, then peel back the personification and ask what this says about the world. What’s nice about Kali is that the depiction gives us plenty to work with without even getting into all the legends.
Here are just some of what Kali has going on:
- Kali is definitively female, different from many other gods, who may be more androgynous.Â
- Kali is actively giving birth
- Kali is scary as all heck has a knife, and can be shown killingÂ
- Kali has a neckless of severed heads
Kali is positioned as the “mother” of all form. Everything we see, feel, and experience is form (form exists in contrast to the void. Learn about the void in Series 1 | Book 1 | 18). Form is made (birth) and form is destroyed (death). Form is everything we know, can touch or speak of. It is everything beautiful, but form also contains every evil we have ever known. Form is often positioned as an inherently evil thing. It comes down to: “Wouldn’t life be easier/ more comfortable/ have less suffering if the form didn’t exist?” Perhaps, but when we consider the evil that exists in the world through the lens of mutual arising, If that evil didn’t exist, the good couldn’t exist either. They depend on each other.
In Hindu philosophy, life is considered a curriculum, something to be used as a vehicle to learn/mature the spirit. The form our awareness exists in is what we have to use to grow. Kali’s knife represents wisdom. Kali will kill you, but she is not going to kill your spirit; she is going to kill your form-based ego with wisdom.Â
Shedding one’s ego is the goal of life. We are born, seduced by all the amazing things around us, see beauty, see evil, and then are yanked away out of form. Hopefully, in the time we have in form, we have learned more about the world.