Mother Kali is most frightening and is equally, stunningly beautiful. If one doesn't perceive her power as an initiatory process and a direct reflection of our own mental readiness, and in so doing surrender to the force of her teaching... she can eat one alive. But that's kinda her job, anyway.
I wholly agree with Albert, she is an archetypal symbol. A symbol and a bonafide goddess. A mask the Omniself wears for specific lessons. Her manifestation is that of the living, dancing Shakti, the
"cosmic current" which creates, maintains and destroys all of our existential dreamscapes. Behind her terrifying appearance, is a well of love so pure and embracing... it draws our attention from that of an observers and witness, into that of the the Sacred Void and insubstantiality of Eternal Being...
The Unified Field.
I suppose on some levels, she scares us so much, that we release our individuality and ego centrism, just to escape the intensity of her commanding presence? And within such vital perceptual transformation, we eventually see her as void of all form and empty of any aspects. Like ourselves, she is a dream. Like ourselves, she is that seed of Divine immortality, indwelling within all being. Her destructive symbolism is mirrored & balanced by her well of compassion and her intense motherly love.
AlbertKLloyd wrote:It is important to keep in mind that the meanings of the symbols must be appreciated by the individual, in this way the insight into them should arise from the individual.
Life itself, the life experience, layers...
the story, the moral, and the nature of it.
thoughts arise, feelings arise, what is self/mind?
one might as well laugh at everything.
Agreed. And I also feel that all of the aspects of symbol or archetype, are truly parts of our own interior landscape. Our deeper thoughts, patterns of cognition and subjective interpretations... all stem from our central core, our mind. Not our thinking, analyzing mentality, our truest reality as Divine thought. Plato had much to say along these lines.
Likewise, we give birth to the earth beneath our feet, the stars overhead and the space which seemingly separates one form from another form, one atom from another, etc. We are active participants in the reality of this existential paradigm. Co-creators, co-sustainers, co-destroyers... essentially, we are each co-authors with the unfolding story of the ever-changing Tao.
But there is also the realm of the interconnection of all human dreams, all thought-forms and myriad manifestations of the greater, un-individuated mind. What Dr. Carl Jung intelligently called the "collective unconscious". We are both, the source of the Grid of Omniversal Being and merely another thread within it's fabric of universal reality. Our challenge is to see the unseen, to touch the untouchable, to feel
Kali within ourselves and feel ourselves within others. To embrace ego-death and in so doing, bloom effulgently and exponentially.
Perhaps this is why we meet so many gods, goddesses, angels, elves and other inter-dimensional beings, when we travel through Hyperspace? They are imprinted upon the Akashic template of all humankind. Regardless if we believe in re-incarnation or not, we all more or less agree that our thoughts become interwoven with all other thoughts. Our ideas are echoes and reflections of all the thoughts which emerge our of mind, as ideas move through one consciousness to another. Right? When we pool into these higher realms of idea, spell bound by the force of a psychedelic experience, we encounter many of these aspects of the Sacred current. We give them reality by observing and perceiving them through our own inner and outer vision. They are powerful teachers, these gods and goddesses.
Kali was worshiped fervently by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa. 35 years ago,when I first studied his teachings, this really blew my mind. How could he love a goddess so seemingly horrible looking and wholly terrifying? But he saw her true form, her hidden formlessness. He obsessed over his longing for her love, her manifestation of God as the Holy Mother of everything... and conversely, her aspect of transience of material life. She pulls each ego-soul back into non-existence of oneself, an empty vacuum of no-thingness.
For Sri Ramakrishna, Kali's destructive aspect was the embodiment of the purest Divine love. His own immersion to this limitless love, burned his own identity and personal Egoself into ashes. So much so, that the fulcrum of his devotion shattered his very definition of his own self into so much cosmic dust. The concentration he cultivated shifted his attention from his personal mirages and concepts. He merged with the object of his love, the chosen form of his living Goddess, so much so, that he was absorbed into the Void itslef.
His radical practice of unswerving Bhakti morphed his inner vision into that of Jnani. It awakened within him an understanding of the immanence of the Divine within all material expression of life. He began to see God inherently existent within all archetypes, symbols and thought-forms. And even further... into the void of the unformed, unborn Omniself.
He was henceforth, an inspired advocate of Vedanta Advaita. He released any form or association he had held of Kali. He surrendered any an all self membranes, those thoughts separating himself from the Supreme Being. He had died and been reborn, yet, knew of his own illusory dreamscape. His profound lucidity was so powerful, he was often entranced to such a degree that he was oblivious to the world around himself. Gone...
I chuckle to myself as I type in these speculative words. I am reminded of the old psychedelic colloquialism from the late 1960's and early 1970's,
"I am totally gone, man".
It could be viewed as Mother Kali destroying Sri Ramakrishna, and Sri Ramakrishna in turn, destroying Mother Kali. When his conscious-awareness had ripened enough, her archetypal form was essentially, unnecessary. That's why I strongly implied that there was an initiatory element to one's visions of Kali. She is sometimes recognized when we are shifted into higher states of mind. Yet... she is also a guardian Spirit Helper of sorts. An angel and a goddess, both, but not something other than ourselves nor we something other than her.
As a symbolic representation of the Divine cause, She births us as individuals and conversely, kills us when this paradigm is superseded by the next paradigm. Kali stands at the gate beyond Egoself, testing our readiness to merge consciously, into the Sacred Light. To surrender to the current of sonic vibration, which initiates all universal being into manifestation. To attune ourselves to that which we have always been. To fuse our focus within the Indivisible. Quintessentially, to see through the illusion of our cyclical mirage of self sustenance and our affirmation of an isolated point of individual awareness.
In short, Kali is that Sacred part within ourselves, which takes the false sense of I am-ness, our Egoself, and tears it all up into so much cosmic confetti. We are not only the dreamscape of our perception, we are the dreamer behind the phenomenon. Dreamer and the dream are one. Yet, when the dreamer awakens, all dreamscapes becomes so much smoke in the breeze. No mind.
This allows for a remembrance of what we were before we began to think and label our mortal experiences as this or that. In our awakening, she is likewise awakened. In our becoming, encounter with the Oneness of unified reality, our un-becoming facilitates a lovely state of freedom. She too, is then returned into the Clear Light of the Void... our eternal nature, ineffably being what it is and will always be.
No words can go further nor rightly capture the infinite character of the Tao.
There is no self to which I cling, for I am one with everything.