January 25, 2021

The one Goddess who has pervaded Western imagination is Kālī, defined here as the Black One or the Supreme Goddess of Time. The Kālī we have come to know here in the West is a version of the goddess connected to the Bengal region of India. While this rendering is included in the non-dual Tantric understanding of Kālī, the understanding in this tradition is broader and deeper.

Mythically, Kālī emerges from Durga’s third eye to successfully slay the demons threatening the land of the gods. Her depth of passion fuels ferocity in battle and eventually Shiva lays down at her feet to ground her fury. Kālī here is the ultimate force of desire, passion and intensity that drives our behaviours. She represents the destructive aspect of the cycle of birth, life and death and as such is to be respected if not feared.

For some of us, connecting to the fierce aspect of our being carries us to anger, activism and extreme action. While this may (and may not) be Kālī in action, we also find the dissolutive element of Her in much more subtle ways. She is the force that releases a train of thought; She is the aspect that destroys countless small beings each time we take a step; She is the relief and satisfaction that comes with slaying a mosquito. She drives our passions and fuels our desires - especially the ultimate desire to know.

Defined here as the Black One, Kālī in this non-dual tradition represents the all- consuming void. She is the black hole which devours everything and from which nothing can escape. She is the point of singularity into which everything dissolves and from which everything emerges. Described as the radiant darkness, She consumes all the sense of difference, blanketing the world in comfort and scariness of nothingness. This emptiness is not without energy but it does dissolve all the ways that we define ourselves based on perceived difference. How scary! It seems frightening until we realize that all we thought we were (roles, characteristics based on likes and dislikes, physical make-up, etc) is nothing and we realize that all we are (divinity made into a unique presentation) is everything.

Kālī’s fierceness then is completely necessary. What strength it takes to destroy our firmly planted illusions of what is real and unreal and who we are and are not. Her passion fuels her desire to free us from the bonds of limitation that we wrap around ourselves as identity without realizing, often until the moment of death, how flimsy these ideas are until we are about to step out of this body.

Our second translation defines Kālī as the Supreme Goddess of Time and we will speak more of this aspect of Her in the following attribute. Ultimately, we are asked here to recognize linear time as a man-made concept. Natural time has no real beginning or end but cycles around in an endless spiral of birth, life and death. Kālī asks us here to step out of our mental idea of time and into the limitlessness where time and space dissolve. The concepts, roles and identities we assume in our lifetime

are defined by time. We become a parent only after the time that we have children; we are a student only when in a formal process of study, and so on. The fierceness of this Goddess shows us that all of this is temporal and when we come face to face with Kālī, She destroys all of this, leaving us empty of that which we thought we were. What is left is eternal - that what we are, essentially, is unborn and undying, the One incarnate.