Kali And Her Sword – Lessons for Men

Kali is closely connected to Tantric meditation and one of the aspects that has had a powerful effect on me has been its special relationship between men and women.

It treats men and women as gods and goddesses to be revered and worshipped. This is a powerful starting point from which to understand yourself as a man.

If you can see yourself as worthy of worship by women then you have come a long way to re-awakening your true core as a man.

When you look deeper you find that there are powerful forces at work in Tantric meditation. This came home to me after I took part in a meditation based on Kali and her relationship with Shiva. This essential Kali relationship, the Shiva-Shakti, goes to the core of male and female energy. It teaches a man to be strong and powerful and to remain detached from what is happening in the woman.

A man’s presence and power has an amazing effect on women only if he remains like a rock and confident in his own certainty and strength.

To understand this better I will explain more about Kali and then come back to draw out the lessons for men.

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The Story of Kali

Kali is the Hindu goddess of eternal energy, of time and change. She is the consort of the god Shiva, on whose body she is often seen standing.

Kali conveys death, destruction, and the consuming aspects of reality. She is more than a vicious, slayer of demons who serves Shiva. Kali is also the supreme mistress of the universe. In union with Shiva she creates and destroys worlds. She is also described as young and beautiful, with a gentle smile, and makes gestures with her right hands to dispel fear. These more positive features turn her divine wrath into a goddess of salvation, who dispelling fear.

In Kali’s most famous story, the gods try to destroy the demon Raktabija. They have worsened the situation, for every drop of blood that is spilt from Raktabija the demon reproduces himself. The battlefield is filled with his duplicates. In need of help, they summons Kali to combat the demon.

She engages the demon in battle. Her eyes are red, her complexion dark, her features gaunt, her hair unbound, and her teeth sharp like fangs. As the eight-armed Goddess rides into battle on her lion, Raktabija experiences fear in his demonic heart. Kali orders the gods to attack him. She spreads her tongue to cover the battlefield preventing a single drop of Raktabija’s blood from falling on the ground. Thus, she prevents him from reproducing himself and the gods are able to slay the demon.

Intoxicated with Raktabija’s blood, Kali runs amuck across the universes, destroying everything and everyone in her sight. To restrain her, Shiva takes the form of a corpse and blocks her path. As the goddess trips on his lifeless body, she is jolted out of her frenzy . She wonders if she has killed her own husband. She places a foot on Shiva’s chest and brings him back to life. Shiva takes the form of a child and begins to cry, stirring maternal love in the heart of Kali who sheds her fierce form becoming a radiant mother, bestower of life.

Kali in Tantra

Goddesses play an important role in Tantra and are central to the nature of reality. They are revered by men who see all women as goddesses. It is this aspect that is most crucial in understanding the Tantric approach to Kali. The Tantric interpretation of Kali standing on top of her husband is:

Shiva (Divine Consciousness) is inactive, while Shakti (Divine Energy as Kali) is active. Shiva represents pure consciousness which is beyond all names, forms and activities. Kali represents the potential energy responsible for all names, forms and activities. She is his Shakti, or creative power, and is seen as the substance behind all consciousness. She can never exist apart from Shiva or act independently of him. Shakti, all the matter/energy of the universe, is not distinct from Shiva, but is rather his dynamic power.

From a Tantric perspective, when one meditates on reality as pure consciousness one refers to this as Shiva. When one meditates on reality as dynamic and creative, with the activities of creation, preservation or dissolution, one refers to it as Kali or Shakti. In either case it is  the same reality other than in name and appearance.

With Shiva as male and Kali as female it is only by their union that creation may transpire.

Shiva’s involvement with Tantra and Kali’s dark nature have led to her becoming an important Tantric figure. To devotees, it was essential to face her Curse, the terror of death, as willingly as they accepted Blessings from her beautiful, nurturing, maternal aspect. For them, wisdom meant learning that no coin has only one side: as death cannot exist without life, so life cannot exist without death.

Kali’s role sometimes grew beyond that of chaos — which could be confronted — to that of one who could bring wisdom.

The Lessons for Men

There are two major lessons for men that come out of the story of Kali. The first concerns a man’s strength and the second informs the powerful relationship between men and women.

If you go back to the story of Kali for the first lesson, you will remember that after succeeding with her task Kali was drunk on the blood of the demon and ran amok in the Universe killing and causing chaos. Women have a tendency to chaos in their nature, they whirl and dance and get caught up in the excitement or fear of the moment. The gods did not know how to deal with this, as is the case frequently with men. Shiva sees what is happening and decides to take control by lying down and doing nothing! He lets Kali trample on him and trusts what the result will be. He does not get involved but shows Kali the power of his trust in her. At the last minute she sees it is her man, stops and calms down. His immovable strength enabled her to let go of the chaos and come back to her normality.

When a man stands like a rock in the midst of female chaos she can lock on to him and let it all go.

For the second lesson look at the Tantric interpretation of Kali standing on Shiva,

“Shiva without Shakti is Shava (without the female power of action the male power of consciousness is dead).”

Without the women, the man is powerless, without the man the woman cannot exist. It is the power of their combination that is responsible for the creation of the world. The essence of the dynamic and creative forces of creation comes from the inter-twining of the two forms of energy.

So as men we need to understand that alone we create death but with the female we, together, become a great creative force in the world.

This takes us men way beyond the childishness of ‘the game’ played by ‘Alpha Males’. It takes us into the vortex of the creative energy that created the world, what I call Kali Sword. This energy has the potential to fly off into uncontrolled chaos but through its combination with the strength and power of men it grows and becomes even more powerful.

—Photo‌ billydl/Flickr‌