Reflections on “Aghora”

Contributed by Dharmavrat

“The basis of all fears is the fear of death”

I arrived at the path of Tantra as a response to the death of my Mother. Witnessing her death was an enormous gift to me. It stripped me of everything I believed myself to be. It terrified me. It took me three years to understand all that I had learned, and most of it did not penetrate until I read the book Aghora by Robert Svoboda.

As many times as I have heard Kali described and sat in Kali puja, I don’t think I ever felt fear or terror. There was something familiar and alluring about Kali. I would contemplate her murti, as we made the offerings and wonder why she was described as “terrible,” why her tongue dripped blood and why she was “chaotic” and “fierce.” I would recite her mantra when I found myself clinging to a person, an experience or a situation. I would pray for her knife to come down and free me from my current attachment. Always I would be comforted and released.

It was not until I read the description of the garland of severed human heads around her neck, that I began to re-arrange my relationship to her, and realize that she had visited me as my Mother was dying. It is said that the heads around Kali’s neck represent lust, anger, greed, delusion, envy, shame, fear and disgust. I remembered the disgust my mother had at her inability to control her bowels and I remember trying to comfort and reassure her. I remember crying about my Mother’s difficulty accepting her old age.

I moved quickly from that memory to the realization of the fear that had haunted me for three years before my Mother died, and three years since. I watched my mother being stripped away of everything. Surgery after surgery I prayed for her recovery. I clung to her. But I did not cling to her as she was, frail, and in great pain, her face and body marked by her 80 years. I clung instead to my earliest memory of her and I wanted that memory of my burying my head in her skirt and inhaling her smell and feeling her arms embrace me to become real again. I wanted my mother to be strong and powerful and immortal as I believed she was when I was a child. I wanted her to be elegant and bright, active and implacable. Weren’t those attributes to be preserved? I loved my mother as she was in the past. But I now realize that I was unable to love her as I needed to when she was dying.

In fact, her existence, became intolerable to me because I would cry and fall apart when I saw her as she was. I told myself I was preparing for her death. I told myself that my tears were mourning her passing. Perhaps, that was true to some degree. But many of my tears were about myself and my own journey towards my old age, my own mortality. I remember once, her caregiver shocked me by asking me why I didn’t go and see her, why I didn’t call her once a week at least. Wasn’t I spending half my income to keep her in her home? I had to work to support her, right? The money I would have spent on airplanes was better spent on adult diapers, and blood pressure medication, and home repairs. How dare a stranger judge me. I was certain I had no other choice. I was righteous in my certainty. I brushed away the thought that it was too difficult to understand her on the phone, and that I could not find the time in my life to be with her. I brushed away the fear that gripped me when I saw her in her wheelchair.

The last week before her death my mother became delirious. She raged at her grandchildren, at me, at my siblings. The catheter hung from her bed dangling with urine. I wept as I turned her over to help remove the feces from her back. I was numbed by the fierce cruelty I was witnessing. I grimaced at her pain. She stopped eating, then drinking water, then speaking, then moving. I remember her last look at me with distant red-rimmed vacant eyes. I remember her last breath.

In addition to the grief, there was anger now. Why had she suffered so much as she was dying? It was unjust, she had worked so hard, sacrificed so much for her children. She deserved a “good death”, and she always was very clear that she was ready to die. I realize now that the real question is why had I suffered so much as she was dying?

“You see Smashan Tara in Her terrifying form because you are possessed of the eight nooses, of eons of karmas, and all the rest of the filth of your false personality, and She wants to disconnect you in the fastest way possible…most humans are such idiots that they are terrified of Ma, because they are afraid to disengage themselves from their filth”

Sometimes I watch people and I get a flash of when I was 20, when my children were born, when I was 30, and rushing around “making a career”. It is a dream. At times it feels like a movie I watched long ago. At times I get a whiff of the intense physical sensations of that time. I am the same inside, I am curious, I hunger to learn. I still long to dance and run. But my body is no longer the same and I am learning the swift biting lessons of the march of time.

I will never know all that my Mother was carrying or coping with before her death. But I know that her letting go was fierce, cruel, abrupt and chaotic. I now see the delusions I hold about myself, about death, about pain, and about suffering. Above all I see the fear that kept me from a genuine relationship with my Mother in her old age and in her death. I see the fear that lives within me. I saw Kali back then and did not know her name or her essence. But I have found her again, and I am grateful for her teaching. I take my fear and leave it at her feet.

“All people, objects and situations are always dissolving though they may appear to be stable or growing/evolving. Our own death may be surprising if we forget that we die.” (Dharmanidhi Sarasvati)

Photo by: Albert Egazarov

Share