Under the Shadow of Kaali’s Clock

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Civilizations like to think of time as progress. Politicians speak of being on “the right side of history,” technologists sell futures measured in product cycles, and every wellness app tries to convince us that one more day of streaks is a step towards eternal glow. But if we look through the tantric lens, particularly the Kashmir Shaivite tradition that Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1020 CE) lived and breathed, time is not a gentle flow towards improvement. Time is Kaali herself—the devourer, the relentless countdown, the inexorable black tongue licking away at the illusions of permanence.

To call Kaali “time” is to admit something most of our rationalist society cannot: that every tick of the clock is not a march toward perfection, but a step toward doom. And yet, there is an honesty in this darkness. When physicists tell us we live under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, when climate models predict thresholds beyond which human life cracks, they are only repeating in secular language what tantrics knew: to live in time is to live inside a cataclysm waiting to happen. The modern myth of “progress” is just our attempt to decorate the noose.

Time Dilation and the Tantric Mirror

Albert Einstein’s Special Relativity (1905) showed us something astonishing: time is not absolute. It bends, stretches, dilates, depending on velocity and gravity. At near-light speeds, time slows down for the traveler while decades slip by for those left behind. In tantric thought, this isn’t surprising—it’s confirmation. Because time is never separate from space. Christopher Wallis, in his exegesis of Shaiva Tantra (Tantra Illuminated, 2012), reminds us that Shiva is Space—the container, the infinite ground. Kaali as time and Shiva as space are not lovers by accident but necessity; you cannot speak of time dilating without space flexing. They are a single continuum, whether we name it spacetime (Einstein) or the cosmic embrace of Shakti and Shiva (Tantra).

Physics says this through Lorentz transformations; tantra says it through mythic intimacy. Both are right. And both reveal that what we take as solid—seconds, hours, lifespans—are slippery. If a person can age five years while their friend back on Earth ages fifty, then whose “progress” are we celebrating? Whose doom are we counting?

Living in a Black Hole of Our Own

Neil deGrasse Tyson has mused that perhaps our universe itself is inside a massive black hole, nested within a larger cosmos (see Tyson, Death by Black Hole, 2007). This isn’t mysticism—it’s serious astrophysical speculation. And in tantric terms, it’s poetry hiding in equations. Because to live in a black hole is to admit that everything we measure—light, time, bodies, civilizations—occurs within a prison of collapse. Every orbit, every ritual, every scientific discovery happens against the backdrop of an ultimate swallowing.

And yet, we persist. Maybe even because of it. Civilizations always grow most flamboyant under a death shadow. Think of the Roman orgies before collapse, or our own hyper-consumption under climate dread. The tantric answer is not to run from this shadow, but to face Kaali head-on. If she is time, then the black hole is her womb, and everything we call “now” is just the stretch marks of eternity.

Ripley’s Daughter and the Horror of Relative Time

Sometimes the most brutal examples of time dilation don’t come from textbooks but from cinema. In Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley wakes after hypersleep to discover that her daughter, Amanda Ripley, left behind on Earth, has lived sixty-six years, aged, and died【alienanthology.fandom.com】. Ripley herself has only biologically aged about eight years since the events of Alien. This isn’t just science fiction melodrama. It’s an existential horror perfectly illustrating relativity’s consequence: time doesn’t care about fairness. It fractures human bonds, mocks parental love, and leaves us stranded in different temporal neighborhoods.

And of course, let’s clear up a common misconception: when you’re trapped in a conversation with a boring colleague who insists on narrating their commute in real time, that’s not Einsteinian time dilation, even if it feels like it. Physics does not bend because someone is explaining their old aunt’s diet or the finer points of office printer maintenance. That sensation of seconds dragging into eternities is not relativity—it’s just banality weaponized. Cruel, yes, but not cosmic.

From Minus 124 to Infinity

Modern physics also confronts us with numbers so obscene they border on mystical. Consider the vacuum energy density problem, where calculations overshoot reality by 10 to the power of -124 (minus 124)—Steven Weinberg called this “the worst theoretical prediction in physics”. This is not just a mistake—it is mathematics screaming into the abyss. Tantra has always dealt in such scales. Infinity isn’t abstract when you meditate on it; it is the very fabric of awareness. To speak of 10^-124 is to admit that our instruments, however precise, are only children’s toys scratching the surface of Shiva’s skin.

When physicists say, “We don’t know why the cosmological constant is so small,” the tantric smiles. Of course we don’t. Because space—Shiva—is not an object to be measured but an infinite, self-aware field. The math stutters where the myth already bowed.

Rudy Rucker (Infinity and the Mind), please help!

Progress or Decay?

Western modernity thrives on the idea that time equals advancement. Faster computers, higher GDPs, longer lifespans. But what if these are not signs of health but symptoms of decay? In the tantric reading, acceleration itself is a pathology. The more frantic the tick, the closer to collapse. Nuclear arsenals, climate acceleration, AI arms races—these are not progress. They are Kaali’s garlands, skulls of civilizations that thought themselves immortal.

The tantric doesn’t weep over this. Nor do they cheer it. They dance with it. Because to understand Kaali as time is not to reject doom, but to recognize that doom is the only guarantee. Civilizations end. Species die. Even universes might evaporate into heat death. What matters is not survival but lucidity: how we live under the shadow of annihilation.

Philosophers like Carl Jung argued that modern Christianity’s “loving God” had amputated half of the archetype, leaving us with a sentimental but incomplete image of the divine (Answer to Job, 1952). He suggested the darker, wrathful aspects had to be reintegrated for wholeness. Nietzsche also sneered at the softening of religion, preferring the raw vitality of pre-Christian values (The Antichrist, 1895).

Pleasure as Resistance to Doom

Here’s the heretical twist. If time is doom, then pleasure is rebellion. Not the Instagram pleasure of curated brunches, but the tantric pleasure of immersion—ecstasy in forests, the exhilaration of binge-watching Animal Kingdom at 3 a.m., the shock of a kiss that feels like it might break history in two. Pleasure refuses the utilitarian calculus of progress. It doesn’t ask, “Will this add years to my life?” It asks, “Will this moment be fully alive, even if it ends everything?”

This is where your body becomes a better philosopher than Immanuel Kant (see Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), your nervous system more eloquent than any TED Talk. Because Kaali is swallowing you anyway. Better to moan than to optimize. Better to write dangerously, love obscenely, and build rituals of joy than to die mid-PowerPoint convinced you were contributing to “progress.”

Why This Matters Now

We live in a culture that pretends doom is avoidable if we buy enough green tech, pray to the GDP, or upload ourselves into the cloud. But tantra whispers the opposite: doom is certain, therefore joy is urgent. Not joy as escape, but as participation in the great dissolution.

This is not nihilism. It’s clarity. A civilization that forgets its mortality produces cheap futures and shallow myths. A civilization that remembers Kaali might just produce art, science, and rituals that are worth something—if only as the last sparks before the blackout.

Closing Invocation

Time is slowing down, but not in the way the technocrats dream. It slows in black holes, in near-light travel, in gravitational wells. It slows in Ripley’s hypersleep and in the grief of her lost daughter. It slows in equations that stretch from 10^-124 to infinity. And always, it slows under Kaali’s gaze, because slowing is just another word for distancing yourself from dying.

So let us not call this “progress.” Let us call it what it is: decay made visible. And let us, in the tantric spirit, not despair but dance. Because if Kaali is time and Shiva is space, then every breath is both devouring and expanding, collapsing and flowering.

Write spells. Laugh heartily. Eat tamasic. And when the nuclear umbrella opens fully, remember: it was always Kaali holding it.

📚 Further Reading

• Abhinavagupta, Tantraloka (c. 1000 CE) — Kashmir Shaivism on time, space, and consciousness.

• Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916) — accessible intro to his ideas.

• Christopher Wallis, Tantra Illuminated (2012) — modern translation and commentary on tantric cosmology.

• Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole (2007) — essays on cosmic catastrophes and physics.

• Steven Weinberg, The Cosmological Constant Problem (1989) — on the 10^124 vacuum energy issue.

• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781) — for the limits of rational structures versus raw experience.

• Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind (1982) — a wild, mathematical–philosophical exploration of infinity, paradox, and consciousness.