Hindu Goddess Kali
Horrors at the end of our newspaper spoon
I'm horrified by what I woke up to this morning, or, more accurately, parts of it. I came downstairs to the beginnings of sunrise, with birdsong accompaniment, in the spring-green scene outside the terrace door.
Then, I opened my laptop to The New York Times and saw "the other side of that" ... the horrors of the world as it’s unfolding day by day in our time ... murder by atrocity in Syria, chaos let loose and a man in the U.S. White House who knows only two things: power and blame.
I tried to write a poem about this, but it was too much! I couldn’t find a way to accept it all. Yes, I believe "it's all Illusion," but it's also my—our—life! Has the Compassionate Father I’m devoted to fallen asleep at the switch? I don't think so.
The hard part is the meditative thought: "What’s happening to anyone, anywhere, is happening, by extension, to me." The One Self lives in the forms of children who were gassed, as much as in the "me" who sits here quietly.
Yes, I believe that "the Law of Karma is absolute," meaning that there are no exceptions to perfect karmic justice; there’s a reason for everything, no matter how it looks. But emotionally, it’s very difficult to accept the horrors we’re privy to, in William Burroughs' words, "at the end of our long newspaper spoon."
Mother Kali
The only image I could think of to describe the world—as it always is, but as it appears in very obvious and dramatic ways, these days—is the image of Mother Kali, the Goddess who is pictured with a severed head in one of her many hands, a sword in another and giving birth with yet another.
Symbolically, this image is the only one that fully expresses for me, at least today, the reality of life on Earth: Birth and Death, the entire drama of life. "The One who slays me is the One who gave me birth!"
I experienced some satisfaction in finding an image to at least contain all that I'd found so troubling, as well as the aspects of Nature that I'd found so inspiring just a moment before. Symbols are containers of life-energy, repositories of archetypal experience, that take us beyond the limited ego.
Sri Ramakrishna
It is "I"—the Universal "I"—whom Kali pulls from her womb in every new form, and "I" whom she slays in every death, to reappear in another incarnation until that soul becomes Self-Realized someday, after learning, enduring and balancing all there is to know or be.
It’s said that Kali also embodies Vishnu, the Preserver, so that there can be something we regard as "Life." Ramakrishna, the great mystic of late 19th-century India, worshipped Kali as boundless Love and often sang hymns to her. He saw a Divine Mother who was totally different from the terrible surface appearance. He alluded to this Reality in his ecstatic songs, and exhorted his disciples to persist in their spiritual efforts, so that they'd someday be able to see her as she really is, as well.
It is for the questing soul to expand his or her awareness, until it can accept life on Earth in its sometimes glorious, sometimes "ordinary" and sometimes horrific fullness.
The Kali Yuga, which is said to have begun in 3102 BC, is believed by some to have recently ended, or to be in the process of ending. Perhaps a less brutal image of life will be of primary relevance in the dawning age. We will continue to take the symbols we need from the repository of all human experience, and if what is needed does not exist, to create it.
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image 1: Piyal Kundu via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons BY-SA / Cropped from original); image 2: Franz Dvorak via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
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