Thursday, November 20,2025

Thursday, November 20,2025

In one previous post the inspiration I shared was about the aesthetic experience—what happens to an onlooker when they confront a great work of art. In that case, it was Michelangelo’s David. Today, I would like to share with you one of my spiritual experiences. The structure of the experience is the same, but its content is very different. This time it took place at a Kali temple in the small town of Hatkoti in the lower Himalayan ranges.

First, I must introduce you to the goddess Kali. As a student of art history, I used to avoid studying her images. They depicted a gruesome and terrifying naked female adorned only with skulls and bones who dwelt in cremation grounds. But when I decided to write a book on Hindu and Buddhist goddesses—Indian Goddesses: Myths, Meanings and Models—I could not exclude her. She is one of India’s most beloved and complex goddesses.

As I probed deeper into her iconography and symbolism, something shifted. Slowly the veil of my ignorance lifted. I studied, researched, and analyzed Kali’s images. I learned that she is the fierce wrath of the auspicious goddess Durga. The personified wrath about discrimination, injustice, sexism and inequity in Hindu society against low caste people who exist on the margins of society, and women. Kali embodies the moment when righteous anger becomes a living force. Kali’s imagery also expresses the deep ambiguity of the human condition in which opposing extremes exist simultaneously—the sublime and the terrible; birth and death; beauty and ugliness.

Her bizarre imagery jolts the mindful onlooker awake. She reveals that the world is not neatly divided into clean and unclean, creative and destructive, purity and pollution. Instead, it is a unified totality. The terrible and the sublime are not opposites—they define one another. What society labels “unclean” such as female bodily processes, the “messiness” of birthing, the blend of erotic and maternal emotions—are simply natural, universal, human.

To understand opposites, to accept ambiguity, is to be fully human. One pole is meaningless without the other. This fierce divine affirmation becomes a profound directive. For lower-caste communities and for women, Kali serves as a powerful symbol urging them to claim their worth and to move beyond limiting social norms.

As my understanding of Kali deepened, I felt drawn not only to her images in books and museums, but to the living presence of the goddess herself—to the places where people worship her with devotion and awe. And so, a few years later, I found myself traveling with my husband into the lower Himalayan ranges, hoping to encounter Kali not as an idea, but as an experience.

While driving along the winding mountain roads, the River Beas appeared now and then—shimmering silver deep in the valley. My intention was to photograph the locally revered image of Kali enshrined in her temple’s sanctum sanctorum. Our bus wound through forested passes as river and rivulets played hide and seek below, stirring childlike delight and awakening a sense of carefree wonder.

Then there I was, standing before the image of Kali in the dark womb chamber, lit by a single lamp. There was no fierce iconographic form—only a serene face emerging from layers and layers of brocaded silk, heavy gold necklaces, and elaborate ornaments. Covered in finery from head to toe, I would not have recognized the image as Kali had her name not been displayed at the entrance.

The scent of incense and marigolds hung gently in the air. I rang the bell suspended in the doorway and immediately tears began streaming down my face. My body shook. I had to sit down. As I settled, I wondered what was happening. These were not tears of fear—they were tears of joyous pleasure, the culmination of an experience far deeper than simply viewing an image.

Like an aesthetic experience, a spiritual emotion can arrive all at once or unfold gradually. I had prepared myself for this sacred viewing—studying Kali’s historical development, understanding her symbols, absorbing her many meanings. That intellectual groundwork traveled with me from the city to the mountains. As we ascended through the cool air, with glimpses of the shimmering river and the gentle summer breeze brushing my face, a quiet contentment grew within me.

So by the time I entered the temple, I was already in an uplifted state. Saturated with knowledge yet softened by nature, the simple act of seeing her—even veiled by glitter and gold—stirred an artistic and spiritual sensitivity within me. It carried me to a higher plane of darshan, meaning the sacred “seeing” that is also believed to be a kind of being seen.

Ideally, the combination of intellect and emotion is what ignites both aesthetic delight and spiritual joy and triggers deep feeling. Sometimes the external object itself does not generate the deep emotion but acts as a catalyst—if the onlooker is ready.

When we expose ourselves repeatedly to creativity, to beauty, to spirituality, they become woven into our inner landscape. They prepare us, quietly and steadily, for moments of heightened perception. And when we finally encounter beauty—whether in art, in nature, or in the sacred—it awakens us instantly. It beguiles us. It reminds us that the boundaries between the aesthetic and the spiritual are far more porous than we imagine.