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Dakshineswar

Yielding to the Storm of Kali 

Yielding to the Storm of Kali


This article, written in 1992, first appeared in Tattva-Sangarba, the journal  of the Sringiri Shankaracharia Math, India. A portion was also published in
Tantra Magazine and Light of Consciousness. There’s a sacred wind blowing,  heralding the dawn of mysticism. I feel it, my friends feel it, and the news
media has started writing about it. We are waiting with bated breath for the day  to come when mystics will inhabit the world, when Christians, Muslims, Jews and  Hindus get so intoxicated with love for the God of their heart that their  differences melt into a giant pot of divine love. When I close my eyes and think
about it, I can almost taste what a world consummated by collective mystical  union could be like.
 


Ma Bhavatarini KaliA mystic in my dictionary is someone who, over and  above his or her spiritual and/or intellectual disciplines, is in perfect tune
with the consciousness underlying all-the very thing we all have in common and  that which differentiates a live person from a dead body. Everybody is hooked  into this life-giving consciousness, but only few enjoy its divine bliss and splendor. A mystic enjoys the glamour of God because he or she has managed to  shake off the ego, which is the only thing that separates us and prevents  lasting happiness.


We’re living in a time when things are getting ready for change. As we  approach the millennium, suddenly old beliefs we’ve lain in comfortably for so
many years don’t hold any longer, baring the field of doctrine to a tempest  which may reshape Western religious and intellectual thought.


On the spiritual side, there is turmoil. Organized religions have trouble  keeping their formalities flexible enough to accommodate people’s desire for a
more personalized religion. I believe that people want to practice yoga whether  they call it by this name or not. They want to have their own personal
connection with God and put sacredness back into every aspect of their daily  lives. People are reaching out to spirituality, something that can be
substantiated by the fact that Pope John Paul II’s new book, Crossing the  Threshold of Hope topped the best-seller list, bypassing Faye Resnick’s raunchy
tell-all book about Nicole Brown Simpson.On the scholarly side, there is  turmoil. Faith in secular, rationalist humanism-with progress as the promise and
reason as the tool-is eroding for the first time since this philosophy  germinated in the Renaissance. Rationalist humanism made us believe we could
discover the “laws of nature” through reason and, applying this knowledge,  things would get better and better.


And since we’ve failed to harness nature over all these years, the voices of  advocates of the chaos theory are now getting louder, undermining the
conventional theories of rationalist humanism. According to the chaos theory,  we’re living in a universe of chaos where change is the norm, and where change  without end does not necessarily mean we are progressing toward anything  better.



As a lover of the Hindu Goddess Kali, I have no problem with chaos. I see  it as Ma Kali’s divinely intoxicated dance. As the destroyer, Kali clears the
path for new creation. Shouting, “Off with the ego!” the great Queen of the  Universe clothes Herself in chaos so awesome that our arrogance automatically
falls off, giving way to unconditional surrender.
 


Ma Dakshineswari Kali of Laguna Beach: This black goddess Kali is mysticism  personified. As such, She has a tremendous unifying power. She intoxicates us,  fermenting us into the same wine. I’ve been privy to gain first-hand knowledge  of this. Over the past couple of years, I have sponsored public Kali pujas held  in Laguna Beach, California, performed by Sri Haradhan Chakraborti, the main  pujari (priest) of the Dakshineswar Kali Temple. So many blissful faces, so many  diverse people worshipping side by side-Westerners and Indian, people from the  Vedanta Society, SRF, Yoga Center, ISKCON and followers of a veritable rainbow  of yogis and yoginis too numerous to list.The first time I felt like  abandoning myself to the divine will was when I first saw Ma Kali’s face in the  inner sanctum of the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, Calcutta, India. I was so awed  that I forgot to ask Her for anything, not even to straighten out any of my  problems. All I wanted was to let go of myself just like a child lets go of the  string, releasing the balloon to ascend toward the vast blue sky.


Perhaps this feeling of wild abandonment was caused by the inexplicable  ecstatic joy I fest at the time, or perhaps it was just the noise of my rapidly
beating heart that drove away my thoughts. Whatever the reason, this feeling  came to me quite naturally and was not something I deliberately
manufactured.


Yet, what seemed so easy a thing to accomplish at first has turned into the  hardest task I have ever attempted. Years have passed, and I still don’t know
how to completely surrender at Ma Kali’s feet. It’s a vicious cycle. The more I  long to surrender, the deeper my understanding gets of what it means to
surrender to the Divine. One moment I feel I have done it; the next, I realize  how much farther I need to go.


I found Kali-or She found me-in 1986 while I was traveling in India on  assignment for a magazine. I was immediately overwhelmed by the very tangible
power one feels in Her presence, and I got frustrated when I could not find  enough information on this mystical black goddess. I had so many questions and
could find no books written about Her in a language my heart could understand.  So, I began research and wrote one myself.


The fuel for my passion that drives me to do all kinds of things-such as  writing a book on Kali-is love. Life is boring without love. I think that
perhaps I need more love than other people do, because I don’t want to live  without it. I remember my teenage years, which I spent mostly depressed. Though  I got plenty of love, it was never enough to satisfy my hungry heart. I was a  beggar for love, begging with outstretched hands: “Oh please, give me love, give  me love, give me more love.”


Today, I am a lot wealthier. Ma Kali’s presence in my heart reversed, as it  were, the current of love within me. Previously, this current flowed from the
outside in and made me depend on favorable external influences. Now, it flows  from the inside out. When I stopped depending on people to love me and started  listening to and feeling the love in my own exciting heart, the current of love  reversed.


If only people would become lovers rather than wanting to be beloveds, there would be a lot less hurt and hatred in the world. It’s much easier to be a lover
because the ego gets less in the way. As a lover, I am more prone to love  unconditionally, without expectations. As a lover, I seek happiness more for my
beloved than for myself. It encourages me to be unselfish. In my case,  unselfishness did not come over night. I’m still working on it and have a long
way to go.
 
My ideal is Sri Ramakrishna, the Godman who lived at the  Dakshineswar Kali Temple for 30 years. His passionate love and total surrender  to Kali united his being with Hers, making Her will and his  inseparable.“Surrender seems like such a passive act,” remarked my friend  Tray during a recent discussion. “Yet, it’s really a lot of work.”


But it’s certainly worth it. The more I go about loving unselfishly, the  deeper the feeling of satisfaction. It is my sincere belief that as long as I am  unselfish and live in tune with God, my love will always be replenished. I’ll  never run our of love, even if the people I love hurt me. I may not be immune to
getting hurt, but when I do, underneath the tears continues to flow a sweet  current of bliss.


To me, surrender to God means to live constantly in tune with God. This is,  indeed, a very hard thing to do. The belief that I am not the doer and Ma Kali
is doing something through me comes with practice. It shouldn’t be wishful  thinking or come from an emotional sentiment that may land me in a mental
institution. When it is real and true, it is a tangible feeling beyond  doubt.


I have met many people who I thought had attained great spiritual heights.  But, after spending time with them, I discovered that their talk and behavior
was based on past spiritual experiences and learned behavior-which is certainly  not bad. But, God cannot be realized in the past or future. God can only be
realized in the present.It is truly rare and great good fortune to meet  someone who lives in the present moment and whose spirituality bubbles
spontaneously from the heart. When one lives constantly in tune with God, every  word, every action is spontaneous. Even when one repeats God’s name a thousand  times, each repetition is fresh and completely spontaneous.


Though surrendering to Kali means giving up the ego, depending on which Kali  worshipper one talks to, one gets a slightly different point of view. I may long
to annihilate my ego but my friend Gita may not think this is the goal: “I  believe the purpose of creation is to love God-realize one’s identity with Kali
but retain the semblance of separation so She can be loved,” said Gita. “It is  Mother who gave us this ego and these desires in the first place. It’s up to Her
to take them away or fulfill them. She gives so much, even the things that lead  to pain. We asked for them and She gives them to let us grow. When you realize  that everything is Kali, the desires drop away and you just love Her.” My friend  Jose does not worry about the ego. “I never made a conscious effort to bring God  into my life,” said Jose. “God is doing everything. I am a Krishna devotee and  had no intention of worshipping Kali. It’s Sri Ramakrishna’s trick. Somebody  brought me an image of Kali, and I now worship Her every day.”


One thing all Kali worshippers I met have in common is a sense of  fearlessness. I don’t have to be afraid of anything for I worship the Mother who
gives birth and destroys all things created. So, whom or what to fear? Ma  Jaya Sati Bhagavati, one of the most vivacious American spiritual teachers I
know, has turned Kali worship into a most practical application. Ma Jaya gives  Kali to people afflicted with AIDS. She tells them, “I can’t cure you, but I can
teach you how to die fearlessly in the Mother’s arms.” Ma Jaya, who is also an  artist, activist and humanitarian, is the founder of the Kashi Foundation in
Sebastian, Florida.


One can read a lot about spirituality and surrender, but one doesn’t get the  taste for it until one experiences it. It helps to spend time in the company of
the holy, people who have dedicated their lives to realize God. Their company  stimulates sacred emotion, which, in turn, overpowers mere analytical
thought.


I owe India a lot. I have learned so much by just being there. In my book  Kali, the Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, published by Nicolas-Hays, I tried to
convey to the reader what it feels like to stand in the courtyard in front of  the temple. The following is an excerpt:


 The closer one gets to the inner shrine, the louder one hears throaty  shouts that echo from within the temple. “Ma, oh Ma, Ma go Ma! Jai Kali! Jai
Kali Ma! Jai Ma Bhavatarini ji ki jai!” One also hears the loud clanking of a  bell that rings in spurts. Yet, one still cant see anything in front besides
heads and raised arms. The front entrance to the Kali shrine has three arched  passageways. Because the middle one is blocked, worshippers enter and exit at  both sides. Today, it is very crowded, and one is shoved through. Cold sweat  stands on the forehead as one suddenly finds oneself inside a cool covered  veranda. It is quite cool although there in no visible air-conditioning system.  Toward the left, suspended from the ceiling, hangs a big brass bell. Every other  pilgrim who is pushed past, reaches up and clanks it as loudly as possible at  least a couple of times. Parents hold up their children to give them also a  chance to clank the bell, thereby proclaiming to Ma Kali that they have arrived,  that they exist. Countless bare feet shuffle over the cool, smooth marble tiles.  Occasionally one steps on something slippery and wonders what it is. Perhaps  it’s a flower, spilled water, something indefinable that is better not to know.  Whatever it is, one will never know because there is no chance to see the  ground. There are too many bodies, pushing, pressing and crowding like moths in  the night toward a light that is still a little farther off.Everyone’s focus  is on the lighted entrance in the middle of the covered veranda. A cast-iron  gate prevents people from entering, so they crowd before it, half hanging over  it, trying to get a little closer inside. Some people kneel, reach through the  gate and touch the ground within the sanctum. Immediately behind the gate stand  two priests keeping watch. There white dhotis bear the marks of their  profession-red sandalwood paste, vermilion and flower stains. Their foreheads  are marked with large vertical lives of vermilion, the signs of a male Shakti  worshipper-women wear large vermilion dots. Pilgrims hand their baskets of  offerings to attending priests, who take the hibiscus garlands and expertly  fling them into the lighted inner sanctum at Mother Kali’s feet. Basket in hand, each priest disappears inside, utters some mantras over the basket and offers it  to Mother Kali with reverence. A few sweets from each basket stay with Ma Kali  in a box next to the altar. The rest of the offerings, together with flowers  taken from the altar, are returned to the pilgrim. These returned offerings are  called prasad and considered a great blessing. God has taken the first  bite-eaten the subtle essence of the food-and the devotee, swallowing the gross  elements of the food, takes the second. Anxiety has reached a fever pitch, and  the short distance walk from the arched passageway to the lighted inner sanctum  seems to take forever. But, when one finally stands before Kali, time seems to stand still. Everything stops. The people, the noise-all is mysteriously gone.  One stares with wide eyes, forgetting even to blink. All one sees is Kali and  nothing else.
Nobody can define Kali, the mystical black goddess. My book is   just a blueprint, an attempt to take people a little closer to the realm of  Kali. After a talk in a Berkeley bookshop, one person came to me and said, “When  you talk about Kali, you talk about love, whereas I and my group look at Her as  a militant, liberated woman. She kills all the demons single-handedly. How do  you reconcile the two views?” Pointing to the garland of skulls Mother Kali is
wearing, I used an observation Betty Lundsted, my publisher, made some time ago.  When you look closely at the severed heads, you see that they are all smiling.  They are smiling because Ma Kali killed their egos. After they were liberated,  only love remained.


The heart is such a small place. God and the ego cannot coexist there. If one  is there, the other has no room. 




 

Kali Ma - A Global Perspective

Kali Ma, called the "Dark Mother," is the Hindugoddess of creation,  preservation, and destruction. She is especially known in her Destroyer aspect,
squatting over her dead consort, Shiva, devouring his  entrails while her yoni sexually devours his lingam, penis. Kali, in this aspect  is said to be "The hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on  their corpses…" In India the  experience of the Terrible Mother has been given its most grandiose form of  Kali, which just is not  simple imagery; it is the image of the Feminine, particularly the Maternal, for  in a profound way life and birth are integrally connected to death and  destruction.

Kali serves as the archetypal image of the birth-and-death  Mother, simultaneously the womb and tomb, giver of life as well as the devourer  of her children: the identical image was portrayed in a thousand ancient  religions. Current psychologists face this image with an uneasy acknowledgement  of its power. Apparently the image of the angry, punishing, castrating Father  seems less threatening than the destructive Mother--perhaps because she  symbolized the inexorable reality of death, whereas he only postulated a  problematic post-mortem judgment. Perhaps this is one reason the Roman Catholics  maintain the teaching of purgatory, to divert the final end.


The full importance of the profound meaning of the functions of  Kali as the live-giver, preserver, and destroyer have been dismissed or  destroyed over the centuries, as have been the aspects of other manifestations  of the goddess. Many western interpretations of Kali in art and literature just  depict the destructive aspect of this goddess, which tend to portray her as  fearsome and evil. In the LondonMuseum is an image of her which is labeled  "Kali-Destroying Demon." The Encyclopedia Britannica devotes five columns to the  Christian interpretation of the Logos and dismisses Kali's part in the creation
of the world. This deity is mentioned in a brief paragraph as the consort of  Shiva, and "a goddess of disease."


In Hinduism Kali's three functions are assigned to the gods:  Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; and  Shiva, the destroyer. It is noted that Vishnu, who is thought to have brought  the world out of the primal abyss, wrote the following about Kali: "Maternal  cause of all change, manifestation, and destruction…the whole Universe rests  upon Her, rises out of Her and melts into Her. From Her crystallized the  original elements and qualities which construct the apparent world. She is both mother and grave… The gods themselves are merely constructs out of Her maternal  substance, which is both consciousness and potential  joy."


As a Mother, Kali was called Treasure-House of Compassion (karuna), Giver of Life to the World,  the Life of all lives. Despite the popular western belief that she is just a  Goddess of destruction, she is the fount of every kind of love, which flows into  the world through women, her agents on earth. Thus, it is said of a male  worshipper of Kali, "bows down at the feet of women," regarding them as his  rightful teachers.

Some say the name Eve perhaps originated from Kali's leva or  Jiva, the primordial female principle of manifestation; she gave birth to her  "first manifested form" and called him Idam (Adam). She also bore the same title  given to Eve in the Old Testament: Mother of All Living  (Jaganmata).


Although referred to as "the One," Kali was always a trinity  Goddess: Virgin,Mother, and Crone. This triad formed  perhaps nine or ten millennia ago has been manifested in many cultures: the  Celts with their triple Morrigan, the Greeks with their triple Moerae, the  Norsemen with their Norms, the Romans with their Fates and triadic Uni  (Juno), the Egyptians with  their triple Mut, and the Arabian  Moon-goddess. Kali can be identified everywhere. Her trinity is recognized in  the Christian triple Godhead; some conclude this Godhead is all male, not  nothing that in the Hebrew Old Testament the word for Spirit, ruwach,  was of feminine gender.


Blood sacrifice was important in the worship of Kali as they  were in the worship of the early Biblical God, the commanded that the blood must  be poured on his alters (Exodus 29:16) for the remission of sins (Numbers 18:9),  but there were differences. Jewish priests ate the sacrificial meat themselves
whereas the devotees of Kali were permitted to eat their own offerings as in  Calcutta. Kali  demanded only male animals be sacrificed; a custom dating back to the primitive  belief that the male had no part in the cycle of generation. The god Shiva,  Kali's sacrificial spouse, commanded that female animals must not be slain on  the altar.


Kali was the Ocean of Blood at the beginning of the world; she  might be said to be the primordial mass from which all life arouse; and her  ultimate destruction of the universe is prefigured by the destruction of each  individual, though her karmic wheel always brought reincarnation. After death
  came nothing-at-all, which Tantricsages called the  third of three states of being; to experience it was like the experience of  Dreamless Sleep. This state was also called "the Generative Womb of All, the  Beginning and End of Beings." Kali devoured Time, she resumed her "dark  formlessness," which appeared in all myths of before-creation and after-doomsday  as elemental Chaos.


The Tantric worshippers of Kali readily acknowledged and  accepted her Curse; they willing accepted her terror of death as well as they  accepted her beautiful, nurturing, maternal aspect. They knew the coin of life  has two sides, life and death; one cannot exist without the other. Kali's sages
communed with her in the grisly atmosphere of the cremation ground, to become  familiar with the images of death. Her devotee would say, "His Goddess, his  loving Mother, in time who gives him birth and loves him in the flesh, she also  destroys him in the flesh. His image of Her is incomplete if he does not know  her as his tearer and devourer."


The name Kali Ma comes from Kalma, a hunter of tombs and eater  of the dead, as she was called in Finland,  also called the Black Goddess. European "witches" worshipped her in funeral  places, for the same reasons, that the Tantric yogis and dakinis worshipped her  in cremation grounds, as Smashana-Kali, Lady of the Dead. Former pagans adored  her in cemeteries as the Black Mother Earth, where the Roman tombstones invoked  her with the phrase Mater genuit, Mother receipt-the Mother  bore me, the Mother took me back.


Sometimes Kali, the Destroyer, wore red symbolizing the blood of  the life that that she gave and took back: "as She devours all existence, as She
chews all things existing with Her fierce teeth, therefore a mass of blood is  imagined to be the apparel of the Queen of the Gods at the final dissolution."
The gypsies in their worship of Kali, the Goddess of disease, clothed her in  red, the proper color of gypsy funerals. 


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