A section from the journey

The Devi as Supreme

In many stories the Goddess stands beside a god as his power. But in the fullest Shakta vision she stands alone, as the supreme reality. She is the one from whom the gods themselves arise. She wears countless faces, gentle and fierce, gracious and terrible, yet behind them all she is one. To love her is to love the source of everything.

We have met the Goddess as Shakti, the living power beside the still divine. Now let us follow the Shakta vision all the way to its height, and see what it dares to say.

In many tales the Goddess stands beside a god, as his queen, his power, his helper. That is one way to see her. But in the fullest Shakta vision, she does not stand beside anyone. She stands alone, at the very top. She is the supreme reality itself, the one ground from which all else comes.

Think back to the deepest word of this whole journey: brahman, the one reality behind all things. The Upanishads taught it. The Shakta now says, with great boldness, that this highest reality is the Mother. The Goddess is brahman, worn as a face you can love. She is not under the gods. The gods are under her, receiving their power and their tasks from her hand.

Because she is the whole of reality, she wears countless faces. Her devotees do not find this strange. They see all her forms as the many faces of one Mother, the way a single person can be tender at home and fierce in defence of a child.

Some of her faces are gentle. She is the giver of grace, of beauty, of plenty, the warm one who feeds her children and asks nothing back. To these forms the devotee comes as a child to a mother's lap, simply to be held.

And some of her faces are fierce. She is also the dark one who stands on the battlefield, who is found at the edge of death and at the burning ground, garlanded and terrible. She is not evil. She is the one who destroys what is false, who cuts away fear and pride, who is not afraid of the dark because she is its mother too.

Here is the courage at the centre of this path. The Shakta holds that the gentle face and the fierce face are one and the same Mother. She is the whole of reality, its sweetness and its terror together, its births and its endings. The path looks straight at all of life, even its darkness, even its dyings, and still dares to call the whole of it Mother. Nothing is left outside her love.

So to love the Devi as supreme is to make peace with the whole world as her body, the kind days and the hard ones alike. It is to trust that even the fierce face is turned toward you in care. And it is to rest, at the last, in the one source of everything, the Mother who holds it all.

The Shakta dares to call even life's darkness and its endings Mother. Where in your own life have you found that a hard or frightening thing was, in time, also a kind of care? Could you hold the gentle and the fierce as one?