Kali Takes New York: Sign of the Times

In a breathtaking heart-to-heart, Ma Kali took New York.

Just as this Venus Retrograde began to take us all deeper into the darkness of the underworld, the Divine Feminine Maha Shakti, goddess of spiritual death, destruction and resurrection, rode the zeitgeist straight onto the face of the Empire State Building and into the heart of collective consciousness.

This Kali apparition over Manhattan may be our last warning. Fierce protectress of truth, she tells it like it is, she beckons us to dive into the dark, to face the stark reality of the global ecological crisis upon us, and to let heartbreak be the ground from which we awaken and serve.

Perhaps it is even too late now, perhaps only calamity can make us silence the ego and hear the cries of the World Soul, perhaps destruction must be our baptism into change, but this is the time and we are the ones summoned to be the shamans of the Shift.

Never underestimate the power of holy darkness to reveal the Soul of all matters. The dark is where illusions are shattered, where false certainties are broken; the dark is where the mind is cut off so that only the heart can see… It is time to let holy darkness be our medicine. The world as we know it must change or perish.

In an unprecedented and awe-inspiring public display of art by filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and his team, Projecting Change, projected onto the NYC skyline by Obscura Digital, was meant to spark awareness of massive wildlife extinction, and be a chilling call to conservation turning the Empire State Building, New York’s brightest and most recognizable symbol and capitalism’s earliest totem, into the worlds greatest canvas, as well as its most epic tombstone and oracle of the Dark Feminine.

From the colossal projection of Cecil the Lion, whose recent tragic death provoked a mass outpouring of love and outrage, to the images of hundreds of nameless endangered animals, finned ones and scaled ones, horned ones and winged ones, two-legged and four, creeping and crawling and running for their lives across the Empire State Building, this revolutionary and heart-rending project, will not soon be forgotten.

“If you are not heartbroken, you are not paying attention!” this project seems to scream from its illustrious rooftop. For as the parade of near-extinct animals appear on the screen, it is impossible not to face the crushing realization that it is not a question of if hundreds of species will continue to go extinct, but when… Our shiny unsustainable systems based on glamour and greed have taken us to a world on the edge of collapse — only holy darkness can save us now.

And it was Kali, the dark mother, the destroyer of illusions and the personification of time, death and holy change, by Android Jones, that stole the show in New York, as the final, spectacular image of the installation, leaving her fierce gaze to peer into our souls.

If there was ever a sign of the times, this is it. In our bones we all recognize, we are in the death pangs of the old world, and that we make it through is anything but certain.

It is time to get our Kali on inside and out; to cut off the head and commit to the heart on all levels. So many of us are shedding our false selves, empty certainties and small lives, and no matter how much we wish for the safety of the old, the more desperately we hold on, the hotter the fires of the Real.

The quickening of the New Earth is upon us and what is needed now is the fierceness of Ma Kali. A holy oracle of change, her medicine is darkness, her initiation is by fire — she calls upon us to rise from our own ashes, to speak truth to power, take on all our shadows and take up the arms that we have, our own, to hold, serve and protect all life as we would our own child.

The Divine Feminine energy is pulsing through every pore of the planet right now, every whisper of the world soul is one intimately connected to our ecology. The ecological consciousness is feminine consciousness, systemic, interconnected, relational and embodied; nature and psyche, body and soul, the spiritual and the political can no longer remain apart.

May we burn up the convoluted narratives of separation, deprivation and control, cut off the dead promises of capitalism, step fully into our dharma, and let the Mother guide us through the fires of transfiguration. May all beings be happy. One Body. One Heart. Jai Ma!

“In preparation for the birth of the Divine, the entire human race is now going through a global dark night, which will result in a new humanity that has been humbled and chastened by tragedy, so that it may open completely to the mystery of divine grace. This dark night cannot be bargained with, explained away, leapt over or mitigated. It is the destined crucifixion of a communal human ego now clearly revealed to be suicidal, matricidal, dangerous to itself and to the whole of creation. No one and nothing will stop Kali dancing Her terrible dance of destruction and re-creation. There will be no resurrection of an embodied divine humanity without a systematic, perfectly organized, brutally complete crucifixion of everything in us that keeps us addicted to the systems of illusion that are now rapidly destroying everything.”

~ Andrew Harvey