Kāla cloaks Joy
This fall we’ve been learning about Tantra’s view of our innate powers. In these final weeks of the year we’re studying why we don’t experience those powers in everyday life.
I have just gotten up from a particularly arduous meditation session. My mind was busy. Any effort to turn away from its content only stirred up more. 25 minutes felt like an eternity today.
But this is not always so. Some days I sit for meditation and my mind is busy. But as I rest in the rhythm of my breath I am not labored. The timer sounding at 25 minutes is a shock. Surely, the time couldn’t have passed already.
This is the indicator that this thing we call ‘Time’ is not as fixed as we would like to believe. If it were, wouldn’t we always experience it the same way? Like gravity - unchanging except when we leave Earth’s atmosphere. The simple shift in how we perceive time during meditation sessions is our clue that time is not as foundational as our minds would like us to believe. This is a peek under the cloak of kāla.
The Cloak of Time
Kāla is time. Time that is perceived as passing from one moment into the next. It gives us the experience of past, present, and future. Time moves sequentially from one thing to the next in a continuous unfolding. This is how we experience it, isn’t it? This must be how it is.
But as you may have guessed, kāla is a kanchuka that veils something much bigger. Time veils joy, ananda. Which is to say, when we experience time we lose touch with the ever-present timelessness of Chiti. In timeless simultaneity, Chiti experiences the power of absolute joy or bliss (ananda śhakti). As soon as one contracts into embodiment, the cloak of time appears and with it, great limitations.
Have you noticed this? Have you ever been so drawn into your creative process that you lost all track of time? Do you remember the powerful joy of no-time? Perhaps a moment of deep love or grief took you there. The boundaries that usually drive you slipped away and you simply existed. Even in grief there is a subtle pulsation of bliss under everything. Timeless. Eternal. Ever new. Have you had this experience?
Shadow Time
In my twenties I was invested in time. I paid the price and drowned in the separation it created. My school life, then work life, then parenting life was by the clock. Measured. Pressured. Some days I would cut my life into 15-minute increments then push to meet unrealistic deadlines. I was exhausted, frustrated, and definitely not present to my life. This was not joy..I didn’t have time for joy. This was shadow kāla. I was so invested in time that it was running everything. I couldn’t relax.
Shadow time is extremely limiting. The more strongly one measures time, the less spontaneity one can experience. One usually believes there’s not enough time. Or one becomes over-busy, trying to fill every minute without awareness of what’s actually possible. Impatience arrives. Demands that things change at an unreasonable or unsafe pace arise. Depression may arise when one lives only in the past. Anxiety when one projects fears into the future. The more one becomes dominated by time the further one moves from bliss.
Golden Time
But there’s a lighter side too. Because we are embodied we DO experience time, it’s not unreal to us. There are gifts in it if we look closely. For one, it creates boundaries that we agree upon. Those boundaries can be quite useful. They allow me to get my kids to school when their teachers and classmates are there. Time makes it possible for the yoga students to be in the studio when I’m there. We agree to abide by time so that we can share experiences with each other. Sometimes those experiences tip us into timelessness. But we wouldn’t get there without coming together at an agreed upon time.
More importantly, wearing the gold side out with kāla is holding the paradox of human life. We are timeless, eternal, never beginning/never ending and yet we experience our bodies, our forms as finite. Each of us breathed a first breath and will breath a last. To wear the gold side out is to remember this. Then to use the time you have in ways that serve the highest good. To do what you can to uplift yourself and others and to remember that part which is unchanging, Chiti.
Practice & Guidance
For many of us, this is easier said than done with the ease of scrolling, binge watching, and myriad other distraction stealing attention away from the Heart. That’s why we have practices - periods where we intentionally step away from devices, out of responsibility into remembering the Heart. Practice could be anything that puts you into timelessness: music, art, cooking, firemaking, knitting, āsana, meditation, good conversation, truly anything. It matters less the vehicle and more that you give yourself this gift. Every time you remove the shadow cloak of time you realign with Chiti. In this you receive more peace and ease. And, because kāla is so strong, any movement towards timelessness is experienced as blissful.
The guidance with kāla, like the other kanchukas is to wake up to your relationship with it. Notice your relationship to time, especially to that favorite phrase “I don’t have enough time”. And also notice your relationship to joy. If there isn’t enough joy right now, look at your time. Maybe you could shift something to be in a gentler relationship with it.
We’ll never be out from under the cloak of kāla for long, these are the terms of embodiment. But we can be in right relationship with it. We can consciously meet each moment as it arises. Not pushing ahead, not lagging behind. But bringing our full selves, full presence to what is here right here right now. This is how we develop presence. This is how we taste moments of bliss.
{{ Did you notice something strange about this kanchuka? Kāla is about time. But it’s also the same letters for kalā - limited action. If you were to pronounce these in Sanskrit, they would sound different - hence the line over the A. I think this is pretty interesting, though I understand it can be confusing. Just stick with it. }}