In the Universal Mother’s Divine Playground

Swami Vivekananda never taught the worship of Mother Kali. In a letter to Mary Hale he writes, “Kali worship is not a necessary step in any religion.

- SWAMI SATYAPRIYANANDA

The Upanishads teach us all there is of religion. Kali worship is my special fad; you never heard me preach it, or read of my preaching it in India. I only preach what is good for universal humanity. If there is any curious method which applies entirely to me, I keep it a secret and there it ends. I must not explain to you what Kali worship is, as I never taught it to anybody.”1 What is that curiosity in the method of worshipping Mother Kali? This article examines this as briefly as possible.

There are two main approaches: 1) the Upanishadic ideas with all its logic and reasoning, and 2) the concept of the worship of the Divine Mother.

One of the main axioms in reasoning is that every effect must have a cause. So, the ‘intelligent’ ones try to explain everything based on cause and effect relationship. This position is entirely scientific. This has led people to find out the secrets of nature and formulate the laws of science through the power of reasoning — asking the question “why” of every event. These laws are believed to be infallible though occasionally the laws, based on further experimentation, analysis and interpretation of data, have been superseded by ‘better’ laws. There is a famous quote attributed to Arthur Koestler: “The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.”