ABOUT KALI
This year the theme of the festival is Divine Essence Nature and Goddess Kali will be our inspiration and festival guide. Like Ganesh was in the last edition and the Green Tara before.
In nondual Shaiva Tantra, deities are not entities outside of us, deities are just different features of consciousness, different aspects of our essence-nature. So when we worship a deity in nondual Shaiva Tantra, we are making space in our life for the energy that this deity represents, it helps us remember that this energy is already part of our nature.
Kali means the Dark One or the Black One. It also means Time, or she who is related to Time. She has quite a fierce form. Kali is for sure not a randomly destructive force. Traditionally she removes what needs to be removed for our awakening. So she is only beneficially destructive that is why she is a goddess and not a demon. We encountered Kali in India as a loving energy, so emphatic, so forgiving, so supporting for all on the path.
She wears a necklace of skulls and sticks out her tongue. She has four arms, in one arm she is holding a trident, in another one a chopper, in another arm a cut of head, and in the last a bowl. She stands on the body of Shiva.
The trident represents the three gunas (qualities) which make up all of cosmos: Sat (Truth, Knowledge), Rajas (Action, Movement) and Tamas (Presence, Substance, Form). At the same time it refers to the Trika lineage.
Kali uses the chopper to cut off the head of ego- the false sense of separateness that prevents an individual soul from experiencing their one-ness with the divine. In the third hand she holds the chopped head of a demon. Here this demon is the ego. In the fourth hand she usually holds a cup which gathers the blood dripping from the chopped head.
Why is she standing on Shiva? In nondual Shaiva Tantra, Kali standing on Shiva is not a sign of domination or conflict, but a precise metaphysical symbol. The core idea of nonduality is that there is only one reality: Shiva-Shakti. They are never separate, only distinguishable for teaching. The image encodes a crucial tantric instruction: Do not transcend experience, let experience stand on awareness.
In practice it means: You do not leave the world to find stillness, to realize consciousness. Let stillness, consciousness be discovered within movement and in daily life. Every sensation is allowed to Rise, Peak, Dissolve without being grasped or rejected.
It is through Shakti that Shiva is realized, and for one whose awareness has expanded to embrace the true nature of the play of the Universal Mother, the daily routine of everyday life becomes the real means of worship.
We wish Kali’s energy to help us all to recognize our Divine Essence Nature, to bring some light in our ego structures. We wish her guidance will provide compassion and clarity in our actions and thoughts.
Sources:
www.tantrailluminated.com
www.kalimandir.org/post/kali-in-kashmir-shaivism