I will describe things in a way that some traditionalist may object to. I don’t mean to offend anyone by it. I’m just drawing from my general sense of the cross cultural meaning of these things.

How do you feel about time?

About time in general? Yes. It moves too fast, and moved too slow when I was a child.

It’s too vague for my liking.

In Hindu cosmology, the universe is pretty much animistic. Some of the spirits and lesser divinities live closer to the world as they say, and others exist in a state further removed from the earthly order we understand. Indra is their god of rain, not because he created rain. Indra is rain among other things. The same with Agni. He didn’t create fire, he is fire.

They are elemental beings? Elemental and beyond. They each exist and interact with each other as a part of a vast interplay of forces. Together, they don’t create the balance of the universe so much as embody it. So when Kali dances, change seems to happen quickly. When Shiva dances, innovation speeds up, but tonight we are talking about Kali.

Kali is she who is time and change, and in essence energy, where her consort is matter. Shiva is her consort. It’s hard to talk about the Hindu gods in a simple cut and dried way. In part, because the original thinking sort of defies that, but also because their mystics and holy men tend to subscribe to different theologies about the gods in general. What they don’t do is change the basic essence of a deity. Why the thinking varies so widely is their mystics observe different relationships between the deities, and different behaviours of the deity in the world.

To Hindu thinking, things happen because the gods move. Prosperity is possible due to the efforts of Ganesha along side other beings. Change is possible due to the interaction between Shiva and Kali. Kali is time, the great mother. She is universally depicted as being very dark, like a deep clouded night sky or deep oblivious sleep. She came into being before Shiva, before matter. Without Kali, Shiva lies dead, matter loses life and meaning. Without Shiva, Kali’s potential remains empty, vast but without substance to manifest awareness in.

Some say that consciousness is an emergent quality of matter. With enough matter and sufficiently complicated matter, you have the potential for the behaviour we call consciousness, or so it goes. To the followers of Kali, time is the origin and source of consciousness, change, and was present before matter was a concern, and will extend beyond the limits of matter.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~