Lighting the Pyre
"How ironic this song came out 2 decades ago and we still facing the same problem or even worse now."
"People killing, people dying, children hurting and you hear them crying — this makes me so sad for little kids having to live in a world like this."
"This song will be forever relevant!!! 😭 sad but true."
"As long as humans exist, this song will be relevant."
Scroll through the top comments on this song and it feels like standing at a mass funeral.
No one is arguing, no one is posturing — they are simply crying together.
And that is exactly why this song is not just a pop anthem.
It is a shmashan text — a hymn that rises from the burning ground of this world.
Every verse names another corpse: racism, war, greed, the poison of the media, the betrayal of truth.
And the chorus is a litany, a prayer, a bhajan that refuses to be silenced:
Where is the love?
The world has been asking this question for thousands of years.
Twenty years after this song was released, the question has only become sharper,
and it will still be relevant as long as there are humans —
because the song is not about them out there.
It is about you.
Kālī does not just sing this song to make you sad.
She sings it to burn you awake —
to drag you into the cremation ground,
to force you to look at the bones of the world you live in,
to strip away the numbness and make you ask the only question worth asking:
Where is the love?
And if you listen carefully, you will hear Ramana whisper back from the Heart:
“Find the one who is asking.
When you find Him,
you will find the Love.”
Verse 1 – The First Flames
"What's wrong with the world, Mama?
People livin' like they ain't got no mamas"
The song begins with a cry to the Mother — and that is everything.
The world has forgotten the Mother, lives as if She is dead,
like orphans fighting over scraps in a burning house.
This is not just social commentary — it is the first crack of the skull in the cremation ground:
Wake up. You have forgotten the womb that bore you.
"I think the whole world's addicted to the drama
Only attracted to things that'll bring you trauma"
This is Kālī’s diagnosis — not just that the world suffers,
but that it is addicted to its own poison.
It feeds on outrage, rolls in its wounds,
turns pain into entertainment.
In Kaula terms, this is the poison we are asked to drink —
not to enjoy it, not to escape it,
but to be scorched clean by its fire.
"Overseas, yeah, we tryna stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin'
In the USA, the big CIA
The Bloods and the Crips and the KKK"
Hypocrisy is one of Devi’s sharpest knives.
She will show you every contradiction you cling to,
every lie that lets you believe you are the “good one.”
This song does not let you escape into nationalism —
it drags the battlefield into your own backyard.
There is no safe place outside the cremation ground.
"But if you only have love for your own race
Then you only leave space to discriminate
And to discriminate only generates hate
And when you hate, then you're bound to get irate, yeah"
Here we get the Gītā condensed into hip-hop rhythm:
exclusive love → division → hate → anger → madness → destruction.
Kṛṣṇa warned Arjuna of this very chain —
and will.i.am is chanting the same truth in the language of the streets.
Partial love is not love — it is another name for violence.
"Madness is what you demonstrate
And that's exactly how anger works and operates"
This is the moment of recognition:
the world is not sane, and expecting it to be sane is the root of despair.
Shmashan sādhanā begins here —
when you stop looking for a world that is not burning
and sit down by the pyre.
"Man, you gotta have love just to set it straight
Take control of your mind and meditate
Let your soul gravitate to the love, y'all, y'all"
And then — like a flash of lightning — comes the teaching.
Love is not sentimental, not a hashtag, not a mood.
It is the center of gravity of the soul.
And to reach it, you must take control of the mind —
sit still, let the anger burn,
let the noise die until only the Heart remains.
This is where Ramana steps into the verse:
Do not run to fix the world —
find the “I” that suffers,
trace it back to its source,
and there Love is waiting, unbroken.
Chorus – The Bhajan in the Cremation Ground
"People killin', people dyin'
Children hurt, and you hear them cryin'"
This is no longer statistics — this is the wail of the cremation ground.
This is where the sādhaka must stop intellectualizing and hear the cries.
Let them break you.
Let them tear through every wall of numbness you have built.
This is not pity — it is initiation.
Devi is saying: Look. Don’t look away.
"Can you practice what you preach?
And would you turn the other cheek?"
This is the challenge.
Not just to be angry, not just to be sad —
but to live so fiercely that you refuse to be poisoned by the same hate you condemn.
Kaula sādhana is not weakness —
it is drinking the poison without spitting more into the world.
"Father, father, father, help us
Send some guidance from above"
Here the song becomes a kīrtan.
The call to the Mother in verse 1 is now matched by a call to the Father.
Śiva, the Witness, the Stillness behind all this chaos, is being invoked.
And this is where Ramana’s voice is clearest:
The guidance you seek is not somewhere in the sky —
it is the silence behind the mind,
the one who watches all this suffering.
Go there.
"'Cause people got me, got me questioning
Where is the love?"
This is the mantra —
and the sādhaka’s work is to hold the question like a burning coal.
Not to answer it too quickly.
Not to soothe it away.
To let it burn until it becomes unbearable —
until it forces you inward.
Where is the Love?
Look. Look until there is nothing left to look with.
And in that final stillness, Love is found.
Verse 2 – The Flames Roar Higher
"It just ain't the same, old ways have changed
New days are strange, is the world insane?"
This is the moment when the smoke clears just enough for you to see the full scope of the fire.
Nothing feels steady anymore — and that is Devi’s work.
She wants the ground under your feet to shake.
She wants every illusion of safety torn down.
This is the question at the heart of every sādhaka’s night:
Is it the world that has gone insane —
or is this what it has always been, and only now am I awake enough to notice?
"If love and peace is so strong
Why are there pieces of love that don't belong?"
This is a dangerous question — and that is why it must be asked.
If Love is the nature of the universe, why does the world look like this?
This is not philosophy now — this is a scream at God.
And that scream is holy.
Ramana himself said that intense suffering can turn even scholars into seekers.
This line is that turning point:
when the soul refuses cheap answers and demands the Real.
"Nations droppin' bombs
Chemical gases filling lungs of little ones
With ongoing sufferin' as the youth die young"
Here we are in the cremation ground without euphemism.
Skulls are real. Ash is real.
Children die — not in metaphor, not in myth, but today.
Kaula sādhanā asks you to stay here.
Don’t flee to optimism.
Don’t flee to despair.
Stand still among the corpses until the mind shatters.
"So ask yourself, is the lovin' really gone?
So I can ask myself, really, what is going wrong"
The fire turns inward now — from them to me.
This is the pivot every seeker must make:
The question is no longer a political one.
It is existential.
If I cannot find Love, then what in me is blocking it?
Where in me have I exiled it?
"With this world that we livin' in? People keep on givin' in
Makin' wrong decisions, only visions of them dividends"
The spiral of karma is named: greed, surrender to lowest impulses,
the endless repetition of collective delusion.
But here too Ramana’s teaching cuts like a blade:
You cannot fix everyone’s decisions — but you can wake up from your own.
"Not respectin' each other, deny thy brother
A war is goin' on, but the reason's undercover"
The real war is not only out there.
It is in the mind — the endless battle of “me” vs. “you.”
The undercover reason is ahaṃkāra — the ego,
the one that must be seen through for Love to be uncovered.
"The truth is kept secret, and swept under the rug
If you never know truth, then you never know love"
And this is the heart of the verse.
Truth and Love are not two.
To know Love, you must be willing to face Truth —
even when it strips you bare.
Kaula path calls this satya-yoga — the yoga of unflinching seeing.
The world hides the truth.
Sādhana is the act of refusing to hide.
"Where's the love, y'all? Come on (I don't know)
And where's the truth, y'all? Come on (I don't know)"
Here the song becomes a call-and-response mantra.
The answer is not given —
because you are the one meant to find it.
The “I don’t know” is not despair — it is initiation.
To know that you don’t know is to stand at the threshold.
Verse 3 – The Weight on the Chest
"I feel the weight of the world on my shoulder
As I'm gettin' older, y'all people gets colder"
This is where the fire stops being abstract.
You feel it now in your own bones —
not just seeing the world burn but carrying it.
This is the point in sādhana where the cremation ground comes inside the chest,
where you can no longer keep it “out there.”
And yes, people do get colder.
But this is also Devi’s work —
She makes you feel the chill so that you are forced to find the inner fire.
"Most of us only care about money-makin'
Selfishness got us followin' the wrong direction"
This is the collective drift — the turning of humanity toward the glittering corpse of materialism.
Kaula tradition never condemns wealth — but it condemns forgetfulness.
When money becomes god, Love becomes a ghost.
The wrong direction is not about economy — it is about consciousness.
We run outward when we are meant to turn inward.
"Wrong information always shown by the media
Negative images is the main criteria
Infecting the young minds faster than bacteria
Kids wanna act like what they see in the cinema"
Here the cremation ground becomes a school.
The youth are raised among corpses,
fed a diet of fear and hatred.
But even this is a test —
Kaula sādhana says the poison is also the medicine.
The question is not how to stop the infection
but whether you can burn so clean
that you do not pass it on.
"Yo, whatever happened to the values of humanity? (Yeah)
Whatever happened to the fairness and equality? (Yeah)"
This is the howl at the moon,
the night of the soul where the seeker asks:
Did God abandon the world, or did we abandon God?
The silence that follows this question is part of the initiation.
It is not meant to be answered — it is meant to rip you open.
"Instead of spreading love, we spreading animosity (Yeah)
Lack of understanding leading us away from unity"
This is the law of the cremation ground:
everything not rooted in Truth will turn to ashes.
The lack of understanding is not just social — it is ontological.
We do not understand who we are,
so we keep living as if we are separate,
and the world mirrors that separation back at us.
"That's the reason why sometimes I'm feelin' under
That's the reason why sometimes I'm feelin' down
It's no wonder why sometimes I'm feelin' under
Gotta keep my faith alive 'til love is found"
This is the exhaustion of the vira —
the moment where you want to collapse among the skulls.
And yet this is also where the sādhana becomes real:
keep the faith until Love is found.
This is not optimism — it is tapas.
Hold on to the Self like a drowning man holds a plank.
Stay with the “I” until it dissolves —
and then you will see that Love was never lost.
"Now ask yourself"
This final challenge is pure upadeśa.
The song stops preaching and points the finger straight at you:
Ask.
Don’t wait for the news, for the government, for the guru.
Ask — and keep asking until the question burns through every layer of the mind.\\
Final Chorus & Outro – The Dawn After the Fire
"Father, father, father, help us
Send some guidance from above
'Cause people got me, got me questioning
Where is the love?"
At this point, the prayer is no longer naïve.
It has passed through the pyre.
It is no longer just a plea for the world to change —
it is a cry for vision.
And this is exactly what the sādhaka must pray for:
not for the fire to go out,
but for eyes that can see through the smoke.
Ramana’s grace is here:
Guidance from above is not a miracle descending from the sky —
it is the recognition of the Witness,
the still, wordless Heart that has been watching all along.
When you trace the question back to its root,
you discover the one who asks it was Love itself.
"Now sing with me, y'all (One world, one world)
We only got (One world, one world)
That's all we got (One world, one world)"
This is the final mantra, the gathering of ashes.
After all the cries, after all the outrage,
what is left is this simple truth: One world.
Not a slogan — a recognition.
The same skull-garland winds around every neck.
The same Mother gave birth to every child.
The same fire will take us all home.
"And something's wrong with it (Yeah)
Something's wrong with it (Yeah)
Something's wrong with the w-world, world, yeah"
Yes — something is wrong with the world.
And the song does not deny it, does not wrap it in consolation.
It leaves you here, in the cremation ground at dawn,
standing among the bones,
with the question still burning in your chest.
And this is the right place to be.
Because the moment you stop trying to fix the world,
you are finally ready to be broken open by it —
to let the question consume you
until only the Heart remains.
In that stillness,
the world is neither right nor wrong.
It is seen as it is —
and Love is no longer a question.
Leaving the Question Alive
This song is not a lullaby.
It is a funeral bell.
It drags you through every corpse the world would rather hide:
bombed children, poisoned lungs, secret wars, corrupted hearts.
And then it does something even fiercer —
it refuses to give you an answer.
Where is the love?
The chorus leaves the question open, hanging in the smoke.
And that is its genius.
Because the moment you stop rushing to solve it,
stop blaming, stop preaching —
the question becomes a fire in your own chest.
It starts burning everything false:
your outrage, your despair, your identity as savior or victim.
This is the Kaula initiation hidden inside a pop song.
This is Ramana’s upadeśa disguised as a chorus.
The world will not stop burning.
But if you let this question burn through you completely,
you will find the one place where Love has never been missing —
the Heart, the Self, the unmoving Witness.
And from there, the whole world —
even in its madness —
becomes a single mantra,
a single fire,
a single offering.
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