Building an America Kali - Towards an Intelligent Culture of Death
By Shivanath
You are going to die. Admit it.
Rumi talks of life as jostling in the line in front of a door through
which people are passing, one at a time, never to return. Why do people
contest and shove for position in the queue rather than being focussed
on the mystery which comes after all the waiting?
Rumi, of course, was a mad man, but you get the point. Death is
certain, life is uncertain. Death will come, but life can almost
entirely elude us.
Be on good terms with Death, the general concept, and death - your
death - the personal experience.
To help us with this task, we're going to talk with Kali, the Dark
Goddess of Death and Destruction, who carried with her the head of
Brama, the Lord of the Creation of the Universe.
Shivanath: Kali, dear goddess, what's with all the killing?
Kali: [Hacks shivanath's head off with an axe]
Kali: Now, did that change anything?
Shivanath (from Astral Plane): I don't really suppose so. But those
library books are going to take me a while to get back now.
A Kapala is a skull cup. Ideally it should be made from the skull of
your previous incarnation but that can be hard to arrange. Any human
skull will do. You don't eat or drink anything that isn't served in
that skull because, after all, you don't want to get the foolish idea
that you're immortal-in-this-body, even if you might be
Immortal-in-the-soul.
Might.
I have a skull. Two, actually. One contains my brain. The other is
polystyrene and was bought at Big Lots before Burning Man last year.
It's good to have a skull.
It's better to have two, so you won't forget that you die.
If you think this culture has sex taboos, you ain't seen nothing. Death
is THE GREAT TABOO in American culture. Hospitals and Morgues exist to
make death as invisible and as sanitary as possible, the dying hidden
from the living, and the dead - as far as possible - hidden from
everybody. We live in the same world as "Logan's Run" depicted, with an
eternity of Truth and Beauty suddenly interrupted when people go
missing sometime around 50 and stop appearing on TV, in Movies, in the
News Papers and so on. All we ever really have thrown at our awareness
is Youth, young faces and bodies in a never ending media parade while
the old and the sick and the dying wither invisibly in nursing homes
without a sound.
You think about this unless you were planning on being young and living
forever.
To cushion the shock of thinking about death, have a revealed truth:
A birth at any point in the universe represents either the entry of a
new soul-being into the Game of Life, or the death of a being at some
other point of the Universe.
Read that again.
A birth at any point in the universe represents either the entry of a
new soul-being into the Game of Life, or the death of a being at some
other point of the Universe.
(Assuming reincarnation) You - yes YOU used to live somewhere else. And
then you died, and you came here. Death-and-life, the severing of the
old in the name of the creation of the New. Hitler (we'll talk about
him more in another essay) destroyed the world trying to create his
vision of newness, so this process isn't always good, but it is a
fundamental process: one thing dies, even one self, so that another may
live. Even in a peaceful time, unless all beings incarnating are new,
fresh souls, somebody is dying to keep the Wheel of Time (Kalachakra)
appearing to turn.
Kali is not the Grim Reaper, by the way. Kali is your mom: in one form
(Parvati) she creates, and in another form (Kali) she continues to
create. Just by, you know, hacking your head off.
Kali: So you'll be wanting a new physical body then, Shivanath?
Shivanath: Well... not having any hands other than the ones I imagine
into reality myself is a bit of an inconvenience. I can't pick anything
solid up and I'm getting hungry.
Kali: Hungry? You habit-addicted fool, you don't even have a stomach to
fill. Jesus! Here, eat this (throws Fat Astral Shivanath a donut).
Shivanath: (as donut passes clean through him) Bitch!
Kali and Shivanath: (cackle like mad witches)
Shivanath: Ok, ok, where do you want me to go next?
Kali: Well, how's about earth?
Death is not a major deal from the perspective of the dead, who know
that, paradoxically , they are still alive. For the living, death
represents the theft of a familiar object, say "Fred," rather than a
metaphysical event. Death is like losing your wallet for the living,
and like an unexpected trip to a far away place (next door) for the
dying.
I think this sounds more blaze and casual than I really feel about
dying, but I've gotta say, this is exactly how I saw it before I came
here. The attachment to life thing is basically bred into the bodies,
and is not a function of the soul.
You are going to die. And it's going to be fine, except for the people
who miss you. Some of them will see you again in future lives, though.
So, let's meet this Dark Goddess with whom we are so familiar in the
tens of thousands of years, but ignorant of in the decades.
Here she is:
This is the evolution of an Archetype - literally the entry of a new
Goddess-form into the World Mind. The American Kali is white-skinned
with black clothes, has two arms, and guns and knives. She is a little
colder than the Indian Kali, may be single rather than paired with
Neo/Christ/Shiva and, in general has a lot more of the killing, and a
lot less of the regeneration, as befits a more violent culture and
society.
But she's still the killer we all know and love opening the doorway
from one lifetime to the next, the mother-before-the-mother, charon of
the more ancient world, ferrying us around and around on a mill pond
universe.
