THE DOMINO EFFECT‘The Domino Effect is a chain reaction that occurs when a small change causes a similar change nearby, which then causes another similar change, and so on in linear sequence. The term is best known as a mechanical effect, and is used as an analogy to a falling row of dominoes. It typically refers to a linked sequence of events where the time between successive events is relatively small. It can be used literally (an observed series of actual collisions) or metaphorically (causal linkages within systems such as global finance or politics).’
Wikipedia |
Every kingdom built eventually falls,
Every form dies. I come to destroy the walls of your fortresses, To desecrate your bodies. For when all is gone, You are liberated. -Kali Mata |
NOTHING IS AT IT SEEMS
This section of Kali’s Teachings is an introduction to Kali's Domino
Effect, providing Kali’s perspective of life in order that the Effect is more
easily grasped by the human mind. Kali's Domino Effect will be explained in detail
following this section of the teaching.
An Organized System
The Domino Effect is a mirror of life’s process; from the beginning of time as we personally experience it, until this moment and beyond, all that occurs does so in a synchronistic knock-on effect that is a means to an end.
This means that Life as we experience it in this dimension is purposeful. It is a dynamic, organized system in which all its parts are inter-related. While at ground level not everything appears to be connected, a few steps up the shakti ladder and one will see that everything is inter-linked. While at ground level it appears that we have separate thinking minds, a higher view will acknowledge a unified mindset.
Nothing New
Nobody is experiencing anything new. We are not living in a universe in which new ideas are being birthed. Every idea that appears to be new is actually re-cycled.
Because we look ‘back’ on days when we wandered around in animal skins, and compare it to how we live today, we live with the illusion that we have developed, that we are more intelligent, that we are more creative. Because we wore different clothes and lived in caves, we imagine that we were different people, that we are more civilized today. We convince ourselves that we are more evolved; we think that our brains are bigger, more discerning. The mind plays tricks on us. It tells stories about our history. It makes false links between material things and human intelligence. It weaves lies that we believe because we no longer know how else to think.
Do not be fooled by the world’s ‘advanced’ technologies. They are old, they are limited. They have been around for aeons because Kali has suspended our powers of creativity. Today is a repeat of a long-forgotten yesterday, and today will come around again in Kali’s ever-turning, ever-repeating Wheel of Life. ‘New’ songs are old songs. ’New’ books are old books. A ‘new’ era is an old era. ‘New’ teachings are old teachings. The human condition is akin to an old archaeological dig, and the ‘creative’ ideas that we have are nothing more than ancient artefacts. The mind has the ability to forage into ancient memory and remember creativities of ancient experiences. What we are dazzled by in today’s age of technology is in actual fact old, stale, decrepit.
We are unable to think new thoughts. We recycle old ideas that were born in long ago times, times before this epoch. With our recycled thoughts come recycled lives. We are caught on a wheel that without God’s intervention, we would not be able to get off. Humankind is a special kind. It is a lost kind. It is lost in its ideas; it is drowned by them, choked by them, imprisoned by them. Human beings are not an intelligent species. Human beings are unable to think beyond the thoughts that clutter the mind. Human beings can change the melody, but we sing the same song over and over. We are lost. We are yearning for a home that we don’t recognize as our own.
The Human Stupor
Under the influence of a vast web of beliefs, we stagger around in a stupor, living through our ideas as if they were Truth itself. We worship our ideas, keeping them alive through repetition; we pass down stories through the generations, giving immense importance to our cultural heritage, our history. The more we tell these stories, the longer we stay locked in a bubble of reality that we cannot escape. We identify with the body, with the family, with our culture, with our nationality. We make the routine, mundane way of human life vastly important, as if it were the be-all and end-all, as if humanity was the shining light of the universe. We forget our True Heritage; we forget that we are not human at all, that we are God, the One True Self. We are blind and deaf to the fact that our deepest misery - that sensation of pointlessness, Band-Aided by materialism - arises out of a subconscious recognition that this is not real.
The Masks We Wear
We wear masks to hide our misery from ourselves and from others. We don’t know who we are any more, so we create personas for ourselves. We are pompous characters, braying to the world about our great talents, our great minds, our great this, our great that. We wear trendy clothes and consort with other ‘special’ people, ‘on the same level’ as we are. Or we project an air of great ‘humility’; we save people, trees, whales, animals and we let everyone know all about it. We wear loincloths, braided hair and rings through our noses and we talk loud militant talk about saving the planet, and protecting human beings from themselves. Or we are religious or spiritual people. We wear an air of piousness, and a ‘better-than-you’ attitude. We are clothed to reflect this; we want people to recognize us; we crave attention - we must be distinguished amongst the ‘ordinary flock’.
And yet there is nothing grandiose about any one of us. We are all sick to our souls of who we have become. Not knowing how to shake off our beliefs, we adopt those that belong to others, pushing our ‘old-fashioned’ ones deeper and deeper down into the mind where we imagine they’ll be lost forever. The mind becomes an entanglement of ideas, a storehouse of thoughts that cluster to form the ideas that shape us.
No-one is special. Kings and queens posture because they are as pathetic as the next human being; they are lost and empty and shaped by ugly ideas. Celebrities posture because they are subconsciously afraid of the spotlight and they go to great lengths to hide their ugly ideas. As religious people, we are drawn to religion by God because we are shaped by ugly ideas. As spiritual people, we are drawn to certain circles because we are governed by ugly ideas. Every last one of us feels ugly. We are filled with self-loathing, because deep in our long-ignored centres, we know that we are not this.
No-one understands life. Nobody, not scientists, politicians, or anyone else who is ‘educated’, knows what they are doing. All are stumbling in the dark. The human mind is sick; it is wanting, it is grasping, it is desperate and pathetic. The human mind, when left to its own devices creates greater mayhem that leads us further and further into the mire.
Taken in Hand
Who are we as human beings? We are nothing more than a story and we are aspects of God, living out that story. Every thought, every idea, belongs to God. God is it all. We are God. And Kali is God and Kali is here, assisting aspects of Herself to be free.
Freedom comes when we stop telling the story, when we arrive at the moment when we are willing to give up the story altogether. Freedom does not come when we tell different versions of the story. There are many stories in the universe. There are beings from many alternate universes that we rarely encounter. There are different beings in this universe that we do encounter – animal life, plant life, mineral life etc. Whatever the species, it is a story of life. ‘Home’ is not another planet. ‘Home’ is not a species, ‘Home’ is not out in nature. Home is God; Home is to be the True Self. To be free, we have to give up the story of everything.
What compels us to keep telling our story? Why do we keep repeating it, why are we threatened by the idea of not telling the story? Because beyond the story (so we tell ourselves) lies ‘death’. The concept of death has no tangible story attached to it; no-one in our circle of relationships who experiences death comes back to tell the tale. We imagine that when the body is gone, the mind dies with it, because we do not understand what the mind actually is. We therefore refuse to acknowledge an existence that is without a physical form. To the human mind, form is life, and formlessness is death. With this story so imprinted on our minds, our attention is kept from any reference to existence without form. When we arrive at the moment when we are willing to surrender the human story, we begin to realize the True Self. We begin to live out of That, and by living through That, we know that death refers only to illusions of self, and to nothing else.
And so we are here, in Kali’s world. Taken in hand, we have been plucked from the netherworlds of our story existence and brought to the Wheel of Fate, which will turn until we are clean of our ideas, and the story unravels all by itself. Kali works with the mind; She works with that mass of ideas so densely packed and so protected against destruction that it takes the force of impactful events to clear up the mess.
The World: A Perfect Place to Be
This world is the perfect place for the heavy task of the unravelling of the many different stories; human, animal, mineral, plant, insect and more. It is where all of us come to confront our ideas, to challenge the mind and to break it down. This world is full of cruelty, death and destruction. It is Kali’s workplace; together, Kali and Shiva set great forces in motion, energy that shatters and destroys the old, leaving us empty and ready to re-acknowledge who we are.
Nothing in this world happens by chance. There is no devil. The ‘devil’ is in our painful ideas; the ‘devil’ is the mind’s voice that fights against what is happening. God is all-powerful. To suggest that God would allow ‘random’ acts of evil to occur is to declare God impotent. To suggest that God would allow natural disasters to take ‘innocent’ people; to imagine that God has no power over ‘the devil’s work’ is to suggest that there is no God at all. It is only the mind that can suggest God to be an imposter, for to do so is to protect our ideas from destruction.
The mind worships an omnipotent God and yet speaks of random events and a chaotic universe. This mental behaviour points to insanity. God is love, and God brings us back to ourselves by dragging us through the fires of our own internal hells. God, through Kali’s hand, creates every event in the world as a means to bring us home.
Kali and Shiva bring together ‘victim’ and ‘aggressor’ in a confrontation of ideas that only through pain will be released. Nothing in this world occurs through good or bad luck, through personal effort or by coincidence. Nobody is a victim, no matter how the mind chooses to interpret events. Wars, genocide, domestic abuse, rape, murder, torture, child-trafficking; it all serves a purpose and is brought about by the hand of Kali and Shiva.
We are all always posturing, pretending we are what we are not. We hide from ourselves, adopting ‘special’ masks to play a role of somebody that we think we’d like to be. When tragedy strikes, when the walls of our familiar world crumbles about our feet, our ugly ideas are revealed, and it is only then that we confront them. Kali knows how to get to the truth. She knows our lies, our self-deceptions, our beautiful masks. She brings calamity to us all in different ways. Some difficulties test us gently. Others destroy us. Kali knows the strength of the walls of our fortresses. She knows just how much force to apply, and she creates the circumstances that will do it. All of us (except the living manifestations of God) are here because we are imprisoned by ideas that create a false sense of separation from who we truly are. Kali is here to destroy that wall for us, because She is the part of us that is in full recognition of the True Self.
Events reveal Who We Are
When we experience hardship, the ugly ideas that we hide from ourselves are revealed. Situations do not change us; they do not create us; instead, they reveal us. This is the work of Kali at hand. She knows our deception; She knows the mind’s devious ability to bury the ugliness of our ideas deep in the recesses of our minds. We can pretend and pretend, until the day hardship strikes, and the reality of who we are is brought to the surface.
We do not kill for money, we do not burgle houses, we do not steal and manipulate because we live in poverty. We do these things because we believe in concepts of loneliness, in concepts of powerlessness, in concepts of chaos. The poverty-stricken person is the same as the rich person with the same ideas. The rich person gives to charity, is an up-standing community member. She goes to church, she is educated and speaks beautifully. All her ideas are shoved deep in some corner of her mind, pretending not to exist until Kali arrives with Her sword. When she is struck down by Kali’s calamities, the no-longer-rich woman is grasping, she steals, she prostitutes herself, she’ll kill to get back what she once owned.
The poverty-stricken person has no place to hide, no money to cover his ugly thoughts. The situation of having none of the glamours of life reveals him. He steals, rapes, kills, because he believes in these ugly concepts; the place in which he lives is a mirror of those beliefs that are at the surface to be released. He may go to prison; he sees more of himself there. Kali’s work is in action.
However ‘changed’ the people in our lives seem to be when tragedy comes upon them, this ‘change’ is all an illusion. They were always this way, and if we look closely we will find evidence of this fact. In the same manner, through difficult circumstances, we are also revealed to be generous, giving, kind. Kali’s sword cuts through to the Truth of who we are, letting us see everything that we need to see.
Victim and Aggressor: Two Sides of the Same Coin
In Kali’s world, there is no victim or aggressor, no matter what the surface picture appears to be. If we are passive, we are also aggressive. If we are abused, we are also the abuser. We are both sides of the same coin, and Kali brings both sides into play in the world. She sets up one against the other so that we can see the whole picture that is us. In one person Kali provokes the Bully, in another, She provokes the Mouse. And She watches as the drama between them unfolds, and She waits, as the ideas that the two individuals share are surrendered through their misery.
We each have a designated journey, along which we meet all the right people at exactly the right time, and everyone we meet is a perfect mirror for some aspect of ourselves.
The victim is the aggressor. The policeman is the criminal. The judge is the judged. The carer is the one cared for. The peace warrior is the war-monger. We are mirrors of each other. Whatever cause we are involved in, be it for peace, for love, for amnesty, for animal rights, for children’s, rights, for human rights...we are involved because we are addressing the negative reflection in ourselves. We are not the saviour for these causes; we are only the saviour for ourselves. What is ‘wrong’ in the world is what is ‘wrong’ within us. Not one of us can face another without seeing the mirror of what lies within.
You Are What You Think
Everything that we think describes us. Our assessment of the world, our assessment of another person, our assessment of our situation, our assessment of anything; it all describes our own personality. We have been born into a mirror world in which everything that we encounter is a direct reflection of our inner world. It is designed this way, so that we can finally confront the ideas that imprison us.
When we look around ourselves and examine our physical environment, we will find the ideas that we are currently governed by are reflected there. Whether we live in a graffiti-painted hovel; whether we are in prison, or we inhabit a cave – all of it speaks of the ideas that exist at the surface of the mind, and those that we are here to release.
Be careful not to be fooled by an individual’s journey and the outer material reflections. All of us have many facets to us; we are heavy with intricate belief structures that we barely recognize. We can only deal with them one moment at a time, one life-time at a time. What we see in any ‘different’ individual is just a facet of ourselves. It might be that a ‘bad guy’ lives in a fabulous house, and that the ‘good guy’ lives in a hovel. The ‘bad’ guy might be creating murderous havoc, while living it up materially, his true character cloaked in his own illusions of grandeur. The ‘good’ guy is confronting his own ideas of self-loathing, and his surroundings reflect that. The ‘bad guy’, however ‘evil’, has a beautiful side too, one that is shoved deep into the recesses of the mind. We are all journeying, and all of us are used for and against each other in a purposeful dance that takes us to our ultimate destination.
Doubt is a Trick of the Mind
Everyone doubts. It is human to doubt, because doubting thoughts are a trick of the mind. They protect the mind from having to surrender its false sense of power. Doubt is a powerful tool, yet it is as illusory as any other idea. When we are seized by doubt, it is the mind creating a barrier, a roadblock to the process of letting go. When we know something is right, and yet we find ourselves exploring all the reasons not to do something, we are often unaware that the mind has all its defences up, and will fight to preserve itself. Doubt has kept human beings imprisoned for a long time. Doubt is linked to the concept of ‘logic’, which in itself is a ghostly apparition that has no substance.
You Have No Authority
Kali has brought us to Her world and while here, we have no authority whatsoever in the process of undoing our beliefs. We cannot appeal Kali’s processes; if we find her methods harsh and cruel, these judgments come from a mind that is unaware of its terrible predicament, and knows not how to free itself.
Kali will not be ‘appeased’, because She has no agenda except to free us. She will not be manipulated, for She knows the wiles of the tricky mind. When we cry out in pain, and we call for Her to stop our hurting, She tunes her heart to the call that is louder, the call of the soul that begs Her to end our suffering.
There is nothing that we can ‘do right’ to get what we want. No ‘right actions’, no abstinence, no prayer, no fasting. All of these activities come from disciplines that that have helped us to get to this point in our liberation process, but which have no meaning from this moment forward. To employ them is an attempt at manipulation, an attempt to be in control. We have no authority. Kali has taken charge of us. We are Hers. We have been taken in hand and there is nothing we can do.
You Do Not Think ‘For Yourself’; Your Thoughts Arise
Just as Kali controls our breath, our heartbeat, our digestion, and other involuntary body functions, so is She responsible for our thoughts. We do not choose our thoughts, no matter how it feels otherwise. Our thoughts arise through the prompts of the Divine Play of Life. as orchestrated by Kali.
Our thoughts belong to us, but their rising and ebbing respond to the forces of Kali’s energy currents. As we live out our ideas, so Kali takes us into situations where these ideas are challenged. Sometimes the challenges are subtle, sometime they are obvious. Some of us move in slow motion through life, unravelling at a snail’s-pace, while others of us hurtle at top speed through tumultuous situations that alter us significantly. The reasons for all of this belong to Kali, and everything that occurs conforms to Her Divine Play of Life.
The Domino Effect is a mirror of life’s process; from the beginning of time as we personally experience it, until this moment and beyond, all that occurs does so in a synchronistic knock-on effect that is a means to an end.
This means that Life as we experience it in this dimension is purposeful. It is a dynamic, organized system in which all its parts are inter-related. While at ground level not everything appears to be connected, a few steps up the shakti ladder and one will see that everything is inter-linked. While at ground level it appears that we have separate thinking minds, a higher view will acknowledge a unified mindset.
Nothing New
Nobody is experiencing anything new. We are not living in a universe in which new ideas are being birthed. Every idea that appears to be new is actually re-cycled.
Because we look ‘back’ on days when we wandered around in animal skins, and compare it to how we live today, we live with the illusion that we have developed, that we are more intelligent, that we are more creative. Because we wore different clothes and lived in caves, we imagine that we were different people, that we are more civilized today. We convince ourselves that we are more evolved; we think that our brains are bigger, more discerning. The mind plays tricks on us. It tells stories about our history. It makes false links between material things and human intelligence. It weaves lies that we believe because we no longer know how else to think.
Do not be fooled by the world’s ‘advanced’ technologies. They are old, they are limited. They have been around for aeons because Kali has suspended our powers of creativity. Today is a repeat of a long-forgotten yesterday, and today will come around again in Kali’s ever-turning, ever-repeating Wheel of Life. ‘New’ songs are old songs. ’New’ books are old books. A ‘new’ era is an old era. ‘New’ teachings are old teachings. The human condition is akin to an old archaeological dig, and the ‘creative’ ideas that we have are nothing more than ancient artefacts. The mind has the ability to forage into ancient memory and remember creativities of ancient experiences. What we are dazzled by in today’s age of technology is in actual fact old, stale, decrepit.
We are unable to think new thoughts. We recycle old ideas that were born in long ago times, times before this epoch. With our recycled thoughts come recycled lives. We are caught on a wheel that without God’s intervention, we would not be able to get off. Humankind is a special kind. It is a lost kind. It is lost in its ideas; it is drowned by them, choked by them, imprisoned by them. Human beings are not an intelligent species. Human beings are unable to think beyond the thoughts that clutter the mind. Human beings can change the melody, but we sing the same song over and over. We are lost. We are yearning for a home that we don’t recognize as our own.
The Human Stupor
Under the influence of a vast web of beliefs, we stagger around in a stupor, living through our ideas as if they were Truth itself. We worship our ideas, keeping them alive through repetition; we pass down stories through the generations, giving immense importance to our cultural heritage, our history. The more we tell these stories, the longer we stay locked in a bubble of reality that we cannot escape. We identify with the body, with the family, with our culture, with our nationality. We make the routine, mundane way of human life vastly important, as if it were the be-all and end-all, as if humanity was the shining light of the universe. We forget our True Heritage; we forget that we are not human at all, that we are God, the One True Self. We are blind and deaf to the fact that our deepest misery - that sensation of pointlessness, Band-Aided by materialism - arises out of a subconscious recognition that this is not real.
The Masks We Wear
We wear masks to hide our misery from ourselves and from others. We don’t know who we are any more, so we create personas for ourselves. We are pompous characters, braying to the world about our great talents, our great minds, our great this, our great that. We wear trendy clothes and consort with other ‘special’ people, ‘on the same level’ as we are. Or we project an air of great ‘humility’; we save people, trees, whales, animals and we let everyone know all about it. We wear loincloths, braided hair and rings through our noses and we talk loud militant talk about saving the planet, and protecting human beings from themselves. Or we are religious or spiritual people. We wear an air of piousness, and a ‘better-than-you’ attitude. We are clothed to reflect this; we want people to recognize us; we crave attention - we must be distinguished amongst the ‘ordinary flock’.
And yet there is nothing grandiose about any one of us. We are all sick to our souls of who we have become. Not knowing how to shake off our beliefs, we adopt those that belong to others, pushing our ‘old-fashioned’ ones deeper and deeper down into the mind where we imagine they’ll be lost forever. The mind becomes an entanglement of ideas, a storehouse of thoughts that cluster to form the ideas that shape us.
No-one is special. Kings and queens posture because they are as pathetic as the next human being; they are lost and empty and shaped by ugly ideas. Celebrities posture because they are subconsciously afraid of the spotlight and they go to great lengths to hide their ugly ideas. As religious people, we are drawn to religion by God because we are shaped by ugly ideas. As spiritual people, we are drawn to certain circles because we are governed by ugly ideas. Every last one of us feels ugly. We are filled with self-loathing, because deep in our long-ignored centres, we know that we are not this.
No-one understands life. Nobody, not scientists, politicians, or anyone else who is ‘educated’, knows what they are doing. All are stumbling in the dark. The human mind is sick; it is wanting, it is grasping, it is desperate and pathetic. The human mind, when left to its own devices creates greater mayhem that leads us further and further into the mire.
Taken in Hand
Who are we as human beings? We are nothing more than a story and we are aspects of God, living out that story. Every thought, every idea, belongs to God. God is it all. We are God. And Kali is God and Kali is here, assisting aspects of Herself to be free.
Freedom comes when we stop telling the story, when we arrive at the moment when we are willing to give up the story altogether. Freedom does not come when we tell different versions of the story. There are many stories in the universe. There are beings from many alternate universes that we rarely encounter. There are different beings in this universe that we do encounter – animal life, plant life, mineral life etc. Whatever the species, it is a story of life. ‘Home’ is not another planet. ‘Home’ is not a species, ‘Home’ is not out in nature. Home is God; Home is to be the True Self. To be free, we have to give up the story of everything.
What compels us to keep telling our story? Why do we keep repeating it, why are we threatened by the idea of not telling the story? Because beyond the story (so we tell ourselves) lies ‘death’. The concept of death has no tangible story attached to it; no-one in our circle of relationships who experiences death comes back to tell the tale. We imagine that when the body is gone, the mind dies with it, because we do not understand what the mind actually is. We therefore refuse to acknowledge an existence that is without a physical form. To the human mind, form is life, and formlessness is death. With this story so imprinted on our minds, our attention is kept from any reference to existence without form. When we arrive at the moment when we are willing to surrender the human story, we begin to realize the True Self. We begin to live out of That, and by living through That, we know that death refers only to illusions of self, and to nothing else.
And so we are here, in Kali’s world. Taken in hand, we have been plucked from the netherworlds of our story existence and brought to the Wheel of Fate, which will turn until we are clean of our ideas, and the story unravels all by itself. Kali works with the mind; She works with that mass of ideas so densely packed and so protected against destruction that it takes the force of impactful events to clear up the mess.
The World: A Perfect Place to Be
This world is the perfect place for the heavy task of the unravelling of the many different stories; human, animal, mineral, plant, insect and more. It is where all of us come to confront our ideas, to challenge the mind and to break it down. This world is full of cruelty, death and destruction. It is Kali’s workplace; together, Kali and Shiva set great forces in motion, energy that shatters and destroys the old, leaving us empty and ready to re-acknowledge who we are.
Nothing in this world happens by chance. There is no devil. The ‘devil’ is in our painful ideas; the ‘devil’ is the mind’s voice that fights against what is happening. God is all-powerful. To suggest that God would allow ‘random’ acts of evil to occur is to declare God impotent. To suggest that God would allow natural disasters to take ‘innocent’ people; to imagine that God has no power over ‘the devil’s work’ is to suggest that there is no God at all. It is only the mind that can suggest God to be an imposter, for to do so is to protect our ideas from destruction.
The mind worships an omnipotent God and yet speaks of random events and a chaotic universe. This mental behaviour points to insanity. God is love, and God brings us back to ourselves by dragging us through the fires of our own internal hells. God, through Kali’s hand, creates every event in the world as a means to bring us home.
Kali and Shiva bring together ‘victim’ and ‘aggressor’ in a confrontation of ideas that only through pain will be released. Nothing in this world occurs through good or bad luck, through personal effort or by coincidence. Nobody is a victim, no matter how the mind chooses to interpret events. Wars, genocide, domestic abuse, rape, murder, torture, child-trafficking; it all serves a purpose and is brought about by the hand of Kali and Shiva.
We are all always posturing, pretending we are what we are not. We hide from ourselves, adopting ‘special’ masks to play a role of somebody that we think we’d like to be. When tragedy strikes, when the walls of our familiar world crumbles about our feet, our ugly ideas are revealed, and it is only then that we confront them. Kali knows how to get to the truth. She knows our lies, our self-deceptions, our beautiful masks. She brings calamity to us all in different ways. Some difficulties test us gently. Others destroy us. Kali knows the strength of the walls of our fortresses. She knows just how much force to apply, and she creates the circumstances that will do it. All of us (except the living manifestations of God) are here because we are imprisoned by ideas that create a false sense of separation from who we truly are. Kali is here to destroy that wall for us, because She is the part of us that is in full recognition of the True Self.
Events reveal Who We Are
When we experience hardship, the ugly ideas that we hide from ourselves are revealed. Situations do not change us; they do not create us; instead, they reveal us. This is the work of Kali at hand. She knows our deception; She knows the mind’s devious ability to bury the ugliness of our ideas deep in the recesses of our minds. We can pretend and pretend, until the day hardship strikes, and the reality of who we are is brought to the surface.
We do not kill for money, we do not burgle houses, we do not steal and manipulate because we live in poverty. We do these things because we believe in concepts of loneliness, in concepts of powerlessness, in concepts of chaos. The poverty-stricken person is the same as the rich person with the same ideas. The rich person gives to charity, is an up-standing community member. She goes to church, she is educated and speaks beautifully. All her ideas are shoved deep in some corner of her mind, pretending not to exist until Kali arrives with Her sword. When she is struck down by Kali’s calamities, the no-longer-rich woman is grasping, she steals, she prostitutes herself, she’ll kill to get back what she once owned.
The poverty-stricken person has no place to hide, no money to cover his ugly thoughts. The situation of having none of the glamours of life reveals him. He steals, rapes, kills, because he believes in these ugly concepts; the place in which he lives is a mirror of those beliefs that are at the surface to be released. He may go to prison; he sees more of himself there. Kali’s work is in action.
However ‘changed’ the people in our lives seem to be when tragedy comes upon them, this ‘change’ is all an illusion. They were always this way, and if we look closely we will find evidence of this fact. In the same manner, through difficult circumstances, we are also revealed to be generous, giving, kind. Kali’s sword cuts through to the Truth of who we are, letting us see everything that we need to see.
Victim and Aggressor: Two Sides of the Same Coin
In Kali’s world, there is no victim or aggressor, no matter what the surface picture appears to be. If we are passive, we are also aggressive. If we are abused, we are also the abuser. We are both sides of the same coin, and Kali brings both sides into play in the world. She sets up one against the other so that we can see the whole picture that is us. In one person Kali provokes the Bully, in another, She provokes the Mouse. And She watches as the drama between them unfolds, and She waits, as the ideas that the two individuals share are surrendered through their misery.
We each have a designated journey, along which we meet all the right people at exactly the right time, and everyone we meet is a perfect mirror for some aspect of ourselves.
The victim is the aggressor. The policeman is the criminal. The judge is the judged. The carer is the one cared for. The peace warrior is the war-monger. We are mirrors of each other. Whatever cause we are involved in, be it for peace, for love, for amnesty, for animal rights, for children’s, rights, for human rights...we are involved because we are addressing the negative reflection in ourselves. We are not the saviour for these causes; we are only the saviour for ourselves. What is ‘wrong’ in the world is what is ‘wrong’ within us. Not one of us can face another without seeing the mirror of what lies within.
You Are What You Think
Everything that we think describes us. Our assessment of the world, our assessment of another person, our assessment of our situation, our assessment of anything; it all describes our own personality. We have been born into a mirror world in which everything that we encounter is a direct reflection of our inner world. It is designed this way, so that we can finally confront the ideas that imprison us.
When we look around ourselves and examine our physical environment, we will find the ideas that we are currently governed by are reflected there. Whether we live in a graffiti-painted hovel; whether we are in prison, or we inhabit a cave – all of it speaks of the ideas that exist at the surface of the mind, and those that we are here to release.
Be careful not to be fooled by an individual’s journey and the outer material reflections. All of us have many facets to us; we are heavy with intricate belief structures that we barely recognize. We can only deal with them one moment at a time, one life-time at a time. What we see in any ‘different’ individual is just a facet of ourselves. It might be that a ‘bad guy’ lives in a fabulous house, and that the ‘good guy’ lives in a hovel. The ‘bad’ guy might be creating murderous havoc, while living it up materially, his true character cloaked in his own illusions of grandeur. The ‘good’ guy is confronting his own ideas of self-loathing, and his surroundings reflect that. The ‘bad guy’, however ‘evil’, has a beautiful side too, one that is shoved deep into the recesses of the mind. We are all journeying, and all of us are used for and against each other in a purposeful dance that takes us to our ultimate destination.
Doubt is a Trick of the Mind
Everyone doubts. It is human to doubt, because doubting thoughts are a trick of the mind. They protect the mind from having to surrender its false sense of power. Doubt is a powerful tool, yet it is as illusory as any other idea. When we are seized by doubt, it is the mind creating a barrier, a roadblock to the process of letting go. When we know something is right, and yet we find ourselves exploring all the reasons not to do something, we are often unaware that the mind has all its defences up, and will fight to preserve itself. Doubt has kept human beings imprisoned for a long time. Doubt is linked to the concept of ‘logic’, which in itself is a ghostly apparition that has no substance.
You Have No Authority
Kali has brought us to Her world and while here, we have no authority whatsoever in the process of undoing our beliefs. We cannot appeal Kali’s processes; if we find her methods harsh and cruel, these judgments come from a mind that is unaware of its terrible predicament, and knows not how to free itself.
Kali will not be ‘appeased’, because She has no agenda except to free us. She will not be manipulated, for She knows the wiles of the tricky mind. When we cry out in pain, and we call for Her to stop our hurting, She tunes her heart to the call that is louder, the call of the soul that begs Her to end our suffering.
There is nothing that we can ‘do right’ to get what we want. No ‘right actions’, no abstinence, no prayer, no fasting. All of these activities come from disciplines that that have helped us to get to this point in our liberation process, but which have no meaning from this moment forward. To employ them is an attempt at manipulation, an attempt to be in control. We have no authority. Kali has taken charge of us. We are Hers. We have been taken in hand and there is nothing we can do.
You Do Not Think ‘For Yourself’; Your Thoughts Arise
Just as Kali controls our breath, our heartbeat, our digestion, and other involuntary body functions, so is She responsible for our thoughts. We do not choose our thoughts, no matter how it feels otherwise. Our thoughts arise through the prompts of the Divine Play of Life. as orchestrated by Kali.
Our thoughts belong to us, but their rising and ebbing respond to the forces of Kali’s energy currents. As we live out our ideas, so Kali takes us into situations where these ideas are challenged. Sometimes the challenges are subtle, sometime they are obvious. Some of us move in slow motion through life, unravelling at a snail’s-pace, while others of us hurtle at top speed through tumultuous situations that alter us significantly. The reasons for all of this belong to Kali, and everything that occurs conforms to Her Divine Play of Life.