Brahma Vidhya - Kali, the First of the Dasa Mahavidyas.

I have been asked whether I have achieved mental peace with all my study and understanding of the faith. I probably have crossed that bridge and though I have not attained any greater spiritual height I have a very strong belief there is more to this path than just mental peace. In fact, the outside world doesn't really bother me as such... they are fine, ignorant and hopeless and cribbing about it is really no great help. Lets look at more interesting concepts. 

Lets assume we started out on the faith on the grounds of getting petty wishes fulfilled. Well, I have been there like everyone else but along the way I realized how inadequate my mind was to take on such a responsibility of wishing. I even got what I didn't want, things that I dreaded but thought of them unexpectantly not realizing it may just be granted. The Goddess fulfills every wish :) and therefore the bond with Her grows, not to receive boons which I have been careless about, but to understand Her build, Her make...respect Her, for She is the giver. 

Constant prayer [not like a parrot, or a mechanical habit but serious prayer] begins to make the mind think. Leaving aside all desires, all problems and all that potentially upsets my peace, I sat to wonder about who I really am and who She really is and what is this relationship really about. I came to realize that I had already defined my existance, within a limit of time, from when I started to get conscious about my surroundings to realizing the abstraction of the limitation of my life and the endless to do list I had created for myself. Now scrapping all that aside, I came to realize that fundamentally I am born, I will die and there is no changing that, it is inevitable. It made me wonder whether I had a greater purpose beyond this life, where this life was just a chapter and these people around me were just illusions tuning me towards a greater good by being themselves and providing related experiences. 

One truth is evident, "I" am the same mind with the same thought over so many years, but the body keeps changing and therefore I age creating an illusion of time. I, the abstract thinker is maturing with thought but that is not in sync with the abused body within which I live. And hence with the evolution of contemplation, with the discarding of unnecessary thoughts I come to realize that giving up this body and this existance in this apparent period in time will help me move to a higher realm of consciousness with greater realization towards my core purpose. I begin to agree with and accept death, I begin to realize what a fool I was sitting there and asking for petty things in my life, that just fed an illusionistic ego. I turned to prefer death for it just looked more challenging, more fun and more unknown. 

Death is not a denial of life, its a need to leave this one and proceed to the next. And as law of life would have it, experiences get enriched when I am reborn in another form, and not the same self that I am in currently. This weird cycle of discarding the body and constantly reappearing gives an illusion of endlessness of time, of the repeated devouring of the flesh which makes it appear terrible, painful and fearful. And this fear, that seems to follow us like a shadow makes us reduce to mere mortals. At some point we need to realize that death and fear should not go hand in hand in our realization, for thats what makes us mortal. When we accept death, fear dies, we have actually discarded the cycle of death itself.  

In Tantra, this earth with all its life and all its death, is the Maha Shamshan, the Great Cremation ground, where every living thing has to go through death. Hence, to realize the workings of this phenomenon is to embrace the form of Kali, the Goddess of change and time. With every death and every birth, Ma Kali dances, reverberating the time and change concept, drilling it into our ignorant heads. She is the one, who takes away that life ruthlessly [it appears] and presents us another one. She chops our lives, She grants us boons, She gives what ever we want, but She takes just our life... and we don't seem to realize that asking for boons is no big deal, but getting out of this noise of life and death, this tireless journey is what the soul purpose of our existance is. Every life of ours echoes that question back to us, "Did I achieve getting out of the cycle in this life or not"? The answer, inevitably is No, for I never asked for the boon to get out of this cycle in the first place. I feared even asking that boon for every boon has a repercussion and I was never sure what this one would be.  

She is not just called Ma Kali, She is also called Dakshina Kalika, for she is so skillful in not just devouring this life of mine, she grants me the next based on her judgment of what works for me keeping my current state of evolution and realization in mind. She transforms me into another being, full and ready to evolve again, better and more beautiful this time. She is that which stays with me always, the pranic force, the breath which is always granted to me every time I am born and leaves every time I die only to come back after I am transformed, promising a better quality of existance, every time.   

Reference: The Ten Great Cosmic Powers - Shankaranarayanan

The Ten Sacred Brahma Vidhyas

Hinduism believes in a world of devatas who live in various strata of the visible atmosphere, the lower Kshudra devatas who reside closer to earth to the Uccha Devatas who live in higher planes. The vedas tell us how to live right and well so that we can ascend this ladder and move to higher levels in our own spirital progress post death if we are lucky. 

While leading our earthly existance these lower deities bless us with cheap wishes and so called benefits that we may look for but then we miss the real matter, the cardinal deities who are of higher spiritual discipline who actually help us in our progress and are not just mere wish fulfilling lower deities. 

In order to get the right direction, move towards the supreme higher deities and achieve Brahman as described in the Upanishads one must take the help of the Brahma Vidhyas, a spiritual discipline that leads up to this superior existance. Brahma Vidhyas are better known as Siddha vidhyas or Dasamahavidhyas are ten great disciplines that enable a person to progress spiritually. They are represented pictorially as ten great Goddesses/mothers whose worship and realization takes the aspirant to the next level. 

As an introduction, they are ten outstanding personalities of the divine mother and are represented in the following forms:

Kali
Tara
Tripurasundari
Bhuvaneshwari
Tripura Bhairavi
Chinnamasta
Dhumavati
Bagalamukhi
Matangi
Kamalatmika

Each of these Goddess describes a principle of life that we need to know, digest, accept, realize and fulfill in order to move on in our spiritual progress. 

Now the big question maybe what do each of these great mothers represent. This moved into the sphere of abstraction where we define a few things for our own understanding. The supreme energy is all enveloping, all encompassing and stitched into the process of creation. With this is born the idea of time and space. Space is vast and can be understood by bringing in divisions. 

Hence as an entity, as a sadhaka we need to understand and realize that the space is defined by the 8 directions that surround us - North, North East, East, South East, South, South West, West, North West, above and below. Time is defined by every breath we take during our life time. In order to understand and realize this knowledge we have been given ten senses to realize the true potential with our consciousness - Skin, eyes, ears, tongue, nose, mouth, foot, hands, anus and genitals. 

Its this combination of time, space, sense that we attribute to the dasa mahavidhyas at the beginning of our spiritual progress. All of these attributes that we are familiar with bring us closer to our own consciousness and sharpen it ten fold to reach a higher realm. 

While our initial journey may not be in the direction of attain supreme salvation and our sadhana may be tuned towards just one of the ten mahavidhyas, as we progress in this path, it opens our mind to the other great Vidhyas in this path. As the sadhaka keeps worshipping the great Mother and leaves all his worldly problems in her hands, this relationship between the aspirant and the divine mother grows, so much so that the aspirant depends and believes in the Divine Mother for solutions to every one of their problems, even the trivial ones. This leads to an intimate relationship between the seeker and the Goddess so much so that they forget the goal they originally started off with.  

The seeker realizes the presence of the Goddess, their attitude changes and its visible to everyone around them. This journey leads us to higher realms that the mind understands and digests. And the real truth lies in the fact that it cannot be explained to anyone, it can only be realized by one self. This is the fun in spiritualism, the real intoxication that keeps us going disconnecting us from our present birth and all its attractions. All the mind starts working on is how to go from one strata to the next and progress to reach the supreme with the blessings of the divine mother and not about how to get petty wishes coming true during our earthly life. 

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