MRTYU KALI : “Convergence” – This Kali is a moment of convergence that stops time. Like when some fool posts on Facebook an embarrasing old photo of you from 1987 with braces and glasses and weird hair. You step out of time for a second, recognize yourself, say “that’s me” and then you’re done. (Sometimes the act of REMOVE TAG completes the circuit.)
When an OBJECT merges into a SUBJECT time stops, dies, then flows again. This is an ordinary experience of, say, reading a novel. And these kinds of experiences of convergence tend to also evoke feelings of peace and ease. That’s why many people find reading to be relaxing before bed. And surely this is why, despite the madding crowds, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a wondrous sigh of relief – objects of beauty and fascination merge with subjects who see something of themselves IN those objects. All under one big glorious roof.
Deity meditation with mantra (subjects focused on objects) can also create access to time in ways that seem out of the ordinary. My own morning meditation was about 20 minutes, but I experienced it like hours. Wallace Stevens describes Mrytu Kali like this:
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Eric Stoneberg 