She who lives in the cremation grounds and frees us from darkness and death,
Who bears the skulls of impurity,
Who's the great secret of time,
And who confronts the forces of duality.
Think now of Kali.
Her skin is pitch black because she is the dark womb of unbound reality.
She is that from which all of creation arises.
She's black because all other colors dissolve in black.
Everything in creation dissolves in this great mother.
She has a garland of human heads.
She wears a skirt of human arms,
Always showing us her intention,
Which is to free us from identifying with the I self and with its self-serving actions.
She has four arms.
She holds a sword in one and a freshly severed human head in one.
This is your I self.
Ideally you want her to chop this off.
And as if she wants to soften her fierceness,
In one of her four hands she shows this gesture,
A mudra,
Which says,
Don't fear me.
And with another she forms another mudra,
Which says,
Ask me anything and I'll grant it to you.
Meditate now on her face.
She has two bloodshot eyes and a third one,
Which is a vertical third eye in her forehead,
Which is wide open because she is always awake.
She is the eternal reality.
Her tongue hangs from her mouth,
Dripping blood,
Because she consumes everything as time.
Her tongue is also a symbol of how she touches all of creation,
Which arises from her mouth and ends in it.
Meditate now on where she is.
She's in a cemetery.
All around her are these corpses,
Reminding us that death is inevitable.
As time she is dancing in this vast cemetery of creation.
With every step of her dance,
A new universe is born.
With every step,
Another is dying.
Everything evolves,
Grows old and dies in Kali's rhythm.
And look where she's dancing.
Under her is Shiva.
Shiva is this infinite,
Vast awareness.
He is that into which all time-related phenomena arise from and fall back into.
See how still he is,
Because he's forgotten under the enchantment of Kali's dance.
She's so dramatic in her appearance as time that we have forgotten Shiva,
The ground of our true nature.
Kali's dance is like time itself.
Although we talk about the past and the present and the future,
Everybody is talking about be here now.
See how ironic it is that you don't really know now.
You can't know it.
As soon as you think you're in the present moment,
It's gone.
Kali's dance shows us how everything is relative.
The past was once the present and the future will be the present.
She's unpredictable.
Just when you get comfortable with your situation,
She'll change the pace of her dance and suddenly our life will be out of control,
Because that's how Kali manifests.
Now take a deep breath.
Bow to the image of Kali in your mind.
If anything,
If there's anything you can ask of her,
It is the courage to face her.
And if you feel like it,
You can open your eyes.
Or not,
You can keep them closed.
As we talk about Kali,
Who we have now invoked into our presence.
