Thread by @Satyamshakti9

DAŚA MAHĀ-VIDYĀS

The Ten Great Cosmic Wisdom Goddesses
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KĀLĪ
Of all the Hindu icons, Kālī is the most discomforting for most westerners! It must also be mentioned in all fairness that many Indians also find her iconography disconcerting.
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Ma kali is usually depicted dancing on the prostrate figure of Lord Śiva. She is black in colour with four arms. Her hair is disheveled and her tongue lolls out of her mouth.
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She has four hands — holding a decapitated head, a sword, a bowl of blood which she drinks and the lower right hand displays the gesture of fearlessness. She wears a garland of human heads and her skirt is comprised of severed arms.
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Bearing in mind that Kālī is the embodiment of Time, and that impermanence and change are the 2 underpinning realities of the universe and our existence in it -
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the image of the Goddess attempts to portray the force of disintegration and confronts us with the reality of our own mortality.
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Accoutrements

The kapāla— head she holds represents our ahaṅkāra concept-of-self— the ego.
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It is the concept of ourselves as separate and unique individuals which is the foundation upon which the edifice of misunderstanding (avidyā) and delusion (moha) is constructed. It is the pivot of our assumptive personal universes.
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The khaḍga— sword represents discrimination & wisdom.

Through discriminating between real and & unreal, the truth and the untruth we gradually progress towards insight and wisdom which culminates in the elimination of the ego.
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Our spiritual practice does not consist of achieving anything but rather removing those conditioning factors which obscure the vision of the Divine which is our essential, natural state.
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The muṇḍa-mālā— garland of human heads represents all the false personas that we embody and the masks that we wear — all of which hinder and obscure insight into our true natures.
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The severed hands represent our actions - Karma we engage in to support our assumed identities & to fulfil our desires — all in search of actualisation of "happiness projects" which never really bring the ultimate happiness expected.
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The demon who was Kālī’s nemesis on the field of battle was Rakta-bīja — the “blood-seed demon”, whose every drop of spilt blood generated another demon like him — representing our desires.
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Each fulfilled desire begets another just as strong. Only way to terminate this cycle is to decapitate the demon & to drink his blood which symbolizes quaffing of all desires which are the basis for our suffering.
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The hand bestowing fearlessness indicates the need to overcome the greatest of all fears which is the fear of personal annihilation.
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By facing our fears and confronting the ultimate time-bound experience — death, we can achieve liberation from our spatio-temporal limitations and the cycle of rebirth and achieve Nirvāna — the Supreme Bliss of "non-existence".
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Mahā-Kālī is the personification of the universal power of transformation, the transcendent power of Time, the Great Goddess who rules unchallenged over the universe and all that is in it.
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All processes in universe are cyclic, can be divided in 10 phases connected with the symbolism attached to the mystical number 5 — the five aspects of Śiva and the five aspects of Śakti operate as day and night — the markers of Time.
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Mahā-Kālī sub-divides herself into the 10 goddesses known as the Mahā-vidyās (ten objects of transcendent wisdom) which are the 10 aspects of the cycle of time
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— they’re representative of the entire processes of projection and withdrawal of the universe. They are the underlying subtle energies of which the gross universe is the outer expression.
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Impermanence and change are the 2 underpinning realities of the universe and our existence in it, hence the Goddesses of Transcendental Wisdom are ultimately the powers of disintegration,
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but it is through the disintegration of all of our assumptive universes and everything that “appears” desirable and by facing what appears to us most fearful, (mahā-bhaya) the ultimate time-bound experience
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— death, that we can be liberated from bondage to the cycle of becoming and attain the ultimate goal of life, the limitless supreme bliss (parama-ānanda) of “non-existence” (existence is being conditioned by time and space.)
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