Art and Technology of the Kali Yantra

I have always loved working with imagery, especially as the colors fade from the landscape. I became very interested in yantra a few months ago when I was studying about ancient yogini temples. A yantra is an arrangement of symbols that draws your eye to the center, possibly stimulating the pineal gland. Yantra is an ancient visual tool for meditation. This was the technology of these times.

Meditation has been a challenge throughout the ages!

Yantra utilizes the principal of symbols and colors, that every shape and every color emits a very specific frequency and energy pattern. The longer one spends meditating with the mind focused inside the yantra, wandering as if in a labyrinth, the sense of repeating energy patterns on many levels becomes illuminated. Patterns become reflected the microcosm and in the macrocosm. The image on the right is the Kali yantra, or a depiction of the goddess Kali.

Kali can be a scary looking goddess, a collective of specific energy signatures, with blood, fangs, and severed heads, if you look at some anthropomorphic images of her such as the one here. The style of imagery she encompasses is pervasive during the Halloween or Samhain time of year, when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thinnest.

Kali carries a deep wisdom for the living. Invoking her and her sword of discernment can bring fierce liberation from the ego (note the head necklace), or destruction of constructs, and sharp insights. Although to some she is the mother, Kali is also the force that dissolves time, and dissolves form.

To see Kali as an artist's interpretation can be helpful if a person wants to connect personally with her form, or cultivate some of the qualities she represents, but the symbolic information of the yantra, free of time, gender, and all of the other filters, can penetrate the mind beyond form, and beyond ordinary reality. Mind bending!

In this reality, in this autumnal phase of the wheel of the year, many of us are turning back to indoor pursuits of arts and crafts, sorting through all that we have harvested and stored over the past few months, or longer! Some of it many longer speak to or inspire us, and it may be an optimal time to liberate oneself from clutter. As you dig out your art supplies, music, writing, half finished projects and the like, what is moving into your awareness? Let your inspiration be sourced from these deeper recesses of consciousness. Art can be a very cleansing experience of release. Honor your creativity as the sacred inner power liberating stagnation and bringing the formless into form!