Shakti – many meanings
Shakti – many meaningsAll great Goddesses and even all woman goddesses are manifestations of One Goddess. In tantra this One Mother of all Goddesses is Shakti. She has many kinds of meaning. The first meaning is that She is the Creator of all other goddesses and all of life. Nothing exists without having emerged from Her Creative Womb and also passing through Her Divine Yoni - the great Passage between the absolute Divine and this world of manifestation {or world of relativity}. And because everyone and everything has come from Her Womb, everyone carries in them some of her Juice Essence.
The other meaning of Shakti as Mother is that all goddesses, and all of life as well, are representative {and manifested} aspects of Her Divine Complexity. Each goddess and each living soul has some of Her Essence - but is also a unique representation of at least one of her aspects {or Qualities}. So in this second kind of meaning, all of the goddesses and all beings are various aspects of Shakti or different combinations of Her Qualities. Each is a reflection of Shakti, yet never a complete or absolute reflection, though we can all approach closer to this.
Note that a number of key words are used in this description, all of them intrinsically related. Moreover, none of these reflections take anything away from the One Herself. In other words, there is nothing in manifestation that depletes the Great Goddess, just as any reflected image of the Sun does not deplete the Sun, nor does a mirror image of a person take anything away from that person. Thus, She {in Herself} always remains infinitely energetic and generous.
The first meaning is most simple and true, which is that Shakti is Mother Creator of all goddesses and of everything existent, but the second meaning has more depth in it. Thus, to understand the different goddesses, we can see them as different mirror reflections of the One Goddess, though each mirror reflection of the Divine Complexity has some kind of perspective or angle to it, which is why relativity enters into existence. But also know that each goddess {and each person} has Her Divine Essence in them, so the very energy-substance of Shakti is in all of us. This Shakti energy is always moving through us, unless suppressed or blocked by something.
This brings us right into the next understanding about Shakti, that Shakti is an Energy. Well, not just an energy, but The Energy. She is the active, vibrating energy in life and through all the universe. Shakti is the fundamental Energy that is both creative and energizing to life. Shakti is the Force of Life – the vibrant life energy, the elan vital. This is also the same as prana, chi or ki. In tantra we speak about prana when wanting to be more scientific and impersonal, and without reference to the Goddess; but prana is Her Energy. This prana energy is vital to life, and it is vital to health and to healing. Free flowing Shakti through one's body is healthy and healing.
The other aspect of Shakti Energy, besides vitality or vital
energy, is enjoyment or pleasure. Actually, both vitality and
pleasure co-relate, since body pleasure depends on vitality. In
loving, both are desired. For example, the love ritual needs a lot of
vitality, which increases pleasure and enjoyment. A flowing,
energetic, vital energy creates enjoyment, and all physical
enjoyments have vitality in them. So, both vitality and pleasure are
aspects of Shakti Energy, and both are regarded as spiritual
qualities – as qualities of the Goddess.
Shakti in both man and woman
The quality of Shakti is sensual and sexual, and She has the dual will to both increase her enjoyment and embrace the man loving her with the greatest of pleasure and joy. The Shakti energy within a woman will be experienced either as her sexual desire, as her sexual pleasure, or as her sexual power.
Shakti is the primal, vital energy of life. She is the primal energy which moves through bodies with pleasurable flow and enjoyment. In her most pure and primal essence, Shakti is raw, pulsating, joyful energy, which is inherent in the body if there are no immediate problems or blockages of energy. So a woman's shakti is her raw, sensual, sexual energy.
This is usually kept in restraint or at times even suppressed, for social and practical reasons, and in psychology this self-control (or restraint or suppression) is managed by the personal ego. Otherwise, if a woman's Shakti energy is untamed and let loose, the woman can become a wild and almost crazy lover. In regular practical life and in casual social get togethers a woman would not want to be always letting her shakti energies loose on everyone, except maybe in a tamed or more subtle manner.
Yet, when the opportunity is appropriate, and the person she is with is desired, then this is a good time to actually let herself loose and thus enjoy the experience of allowing her goddess shakti energies to freely express. Shakti is unveiled and revealed through a woman, when her sexual essence is allowed to come out in a full flow and force of expression.
But as well, the power of Shakti is also in a man. So with a man as well, the shakti energy within him will be experienced as sexual desire, or as sexual pleasure, or as sexual power. This is the Goddess Shakti within him seeking pleasure, enjoyment and delight, through the experience of a man; just as She seeks to experience this in a woman.
We are the vehicles, or the bodies, for Her enjoyment, which is our own enjoyment as well. So, Shakti Herself is enjoying the whole sexual experience, enjoying the pleasures of Her sexual energies circulating throughout Her sensuous body of woman or man. If both the man and woman realize this – that their sexual energy and enjoyment is all the same Shakti experience – then this will be a secret pathway towards realized unity {or reunion} in the love ritual.
Sexual power can come forth either overtly and assertively, or more covertly and seductively. Both man and woman can be magnetically seductive, even though we normally only think this about women. Conversely, the sexual power of both man and woman can be overt and assertive, even though we might normally only think this about men. Generally though, a man tends to express his sexual power in a more assertive {electrical} way, which can sometimes even be aggressive. And generally, a woman tends to express her sexual power in a more seductive {magnetic} way, and women tend to have a greater ability to be sexually magnetic. However, these are merely generalizations about how people tend to be. What a man or woman can be is another matter. Both kinds of sexual power are within the self-potential of both man and woman. Thus, both can express their sexual power either magnetically {seductively} or electrically {assertively}; for these are both powers of Shakti, and Shakti is in both man and woman.
The Shakti sexual energy of one person, whether a man or woman, can also evoke and bring forth the sexual energy of another person. This is the power and magic of Shakti. She wishes to flow through and be experienced in oneself, but also She seeks to bring out the same kind of flow and experience in a potential sexual partner. She is seeking to bring forth Herself in the other, in hope for an ecstatic experience of reunion with Her Self.
Man's spiritual response to woman is to serve the empowerment and realization of the Shakti within and through her, which is also to serve her realization and actualization of her goddess powers. In tantra, the man serves the woman and the woman serves the man. Both give to and receive from the other, in the realization of their mutual need and spiritual value to each other. Each can understand themselves better from knowing and loving the other.
The potential powers or qualities of each lover, in both man and
woman, are brought forth and realized in the loving ritual and in the
ways that these various qualities blend and complement one another.
How this all occurs can only be suggested as possibilities, because
everyone is somewhat unique and thus each love relationship is
unique. Moreover, we each have to learn from actual personal
experience, with an attitude of exploration and discovery, and a
willingness to get fully into each experience, its energies and the
qualities.
Consumed
in the fire of KaliAn additional goddess of love to understand and a very important Goddess, who is also a form of Shakti (the Supreme Goddess), is the Goddess Kali. Kali is Shakti in her most powerfully untamed and unrestricted intensity. Her experienced presence in the love ritual only happens in the most intensity of heat and self-abandonment. Kali is rarely seen or experienced until these moments, which is why she is not one of the four love goddesses commonly expressed through love partners, and yet Kali is latent within each, latent like the fire of Kundalini coiled and awaiting in the unconscious core of each person.
If Kali were expressed through a woman in regular life, her energy and behavior would be far too wild and primal for others to handle. Perhaps in an unrestricted and unconstrained freedom of dance might a woman {or man} experience Kali dancing through her or him. So we only find Kali emerging in the love ritual, and not even there most of the time, but only if the lovers reach a necessary intensity and abandonment in order to invoke her. Kali can enter into one's meditation, but this very rare occurrence would be very intense, so there are few ready for it.
In the common religious understanding of Kali, She is the cosmic Destroyer, and many traditional tantric followers feel a religious connection to Kali and make acts of sacrifice for her, out of respect for her tremendous power. If we understand the Creative Mother as a primary aspect of Shakti, then its polar opposite would be the Disintegrating Destroyer. This cosmic aspect of the One Goddess is Kali. This destroying aspect of Divine-Cosmic Power is also known as death. So in pictures Kali is often seen with sculls wrapped around and she doesn't look very pleasant either. So, many people find it odd that anyone would want to have her as their Goddess. Yet in the Hindu and Tantra traditions, death and destruction are viewed equally spiritual as life and creative birth. Also when people talk about worship of Kali, they probably mean 'reverent respect', rather than admiration or adoration.
More esoterically, Kali is the Power that annihilates one's personal consciousness in the yogic meditation leading towards samadhi (meaning the void-bliss of self-annihilation). This is the meaning of death and destruction, in relation to our possible spiritual experience – to lose our personal self-consciousness, as our separate-personal selfness gets annihilated in an ecstatic experience of nirvanic bliss. So this spiritual-psychological understanding of Kali is of more practical use in tantra, for here there is something possible to actually experience while being alive. And of course this relates with the sexual love ritual, or it is at least possible in it. For it is possible to lose oneself and in fact lose all personal perspective, and to be self-annihilated in a bliss of love-unity.
Kali is the consuming Love-fire of Shakti, which annihilates the separate self. She even annihilates all goddess, or any sense of being one kind of goddess rather than another. For Kali brings one into experiencing the One Great Goddess Herself {Shakti Herself}. She brings one to Union with Oneness. Kali is the transformer of separation into unity, the transformer of a man or woman to being nothing but Ecstasy Itself.
Kali is not one of the four tantric love goddesses, because Kali is beyond any kind of personal perspective, attitude or approach. She is beyond type. She is more like an explosion of fire. Moreover, no one comes into the love ritual as Kali. But, it is possible for a woman to become Kali in the course of the love ritual, expressing the Kali power or allowing it to move through and come into the shared love experience. In a larger sense, it is possible for Kali to simply blow both lovers away, to annihilate both of them in ecstatic Bliss, ...if the two can progress into a deep meditative flow together combined with a raging fire, and also be open to losing themselves in one another or in the shared experience itself. So, Kali can enter into the love energy, but only if the heat is high enough and the lovers are in flow enough, (a mixture of watery-flowingness with fiery heat).
Instead of demanding the man's loving, as with Durga, Kali just consumes him in her fire of enjoyment and ecstasy. She powerfully draws her lover into her own excitement and sexual fire. Like Lakshmi, Kali's power is a drawing kind of power, rather than a doing kind of power. She draws him into her by the very power of her fiery presence. Lakshmi draws the man to her with her natural beauty and ready ripeness for the taking, while Kali draws the man into her by her power of sexual excitement and ecstatic bliss, a burning fire so powerful that the lover is consumed into it. Kali consumes the man with her intense fire of sexual bliss and absorbs his being within Herself, and all the man can do is to just willingly surrender or allow himself to be assimilated into Her. The man melts in Her fire, as She consumes all of him.
The power of Kali pleases and excites the man to such a frenzy that he cannot help but give all his body, heart and mind to Her, surrendering his whole being into Her magical Goddess Yoni, as he allows himself to be consumed within Her warm, loving embrace. Kali seeks to completely embrace the man with Her love, drawing him into Her body and into Her love, Her warmth and the fire of Her passion, and give him the greatest enjoyment imaginable, while he screams for Her and gives his full love to Her, as his Goddess, even sacrificing himself in worship to Her. She becomes for him the all-embracing Love Goddess, to Whom all love and worship is given.
The power of Kali is to drive the man to uncontrolled excitement and ecstasy, consuming him in her sexual fire of passion. With Kali the man is inwardly forced to surrender to Her. His passion is consumed by Her passion, Her fire. With Kali the man feels like he is being taken into her, eaten and swallowed up in the intensity of her sexual fire.
By being totally involved in Her ecstasy, the man is consumed by that ecstasy and taken away by it. Her very being is in such an ecstatic vibration that the man is consumed into this fire of ecstasy. Her ecstatic power swallows up the man into her, and the man willingly sacrifices himself into her, loosing himself, abandoning himself completely, and surrendering into her power. She is like a gravitational black hole which pulls and receives the man into her.
There is a point, though, just as Kali is emerging into the heat of love, whereby a man may have enough personal will and choice to back away enough in order to barely avoid being consumed into Kali, into the Goddess. The woman has already let herself surrender into this goddess fire, but the man now has a last moment choice to surrender or not. Yet if he does not back down, as it were, but instead lets himself surrender into this consuming fiery heat of Kali, then he will be no more as he was. He will first lose his mind and then lose all sense and feeling of being separate from the woman. In fact, even the woman will disappear - as she previously was - as a separate person. For all that will remain is just Her, just the Goddess, just this One Being.
At this point, ordinary man will lose all self-control and have an ejaculating orgasm. But if the man has acquired enough prana in earlier stages of the ritual and can maintain a continuous conscious breath, and also practice a few other principles, he may be able to pass through Kali to a total blissful love orgasm without any physical ejaculation. If he can do this, he gains special respect from Kali, and She will increase his own power of fire, as well as bring him to even greater love pleasure the next time.
So, both man and woman may experience Kali in the self-abandonment
of orgasm. When the build up to orgasm has brought into the lovers
enough intensity and fiery heat, there is possibility for a very high
bliss of orgasmic experience. But not all orgasms are equal. When
Kali is involved, this orgasm is beyond the ordinary in its intensity
and self-explosive bliss. For then, when one experiences a complete
letting go of personal conscious and perspective, and loses oneself
in the experience itself. The experience of oneself, as well as the
experience of two separate beings, all disappears in an uncontrolled
explosion. Even the room disappears. Everything and everyone
disappears. This is love's nirvanic bliss. Such is the
self-annihilating power of Kali.