“Suddenly, in one dazzling moment, [Totapuri, saw] on all sides the presence of
the Divine Mother.

She is in everything.

She is everything.

She is in the water.

She is on land.

She is the body.

She is the mind.

She is pain.

She is comfort.

She is life.

She is death.

She is everything that one sees, hears, or imagines.

She turns ‘yea’ into ‘nay,’ and ‘nay’ into ‘yea.’

Without Her grace no embodied being can go beyond Her realm.

Man has no free will.

He is not even free to die.

Yet, again, beyond the body and mind … 

She resides in Her Transcendental, Absolute aspect.

She is the Brahman that Totapuri had been worshipping all his life.” 

She is the kundalini energy in the body and,

when that energy rises from the muladhara chakra to the sahasrara,

Shakti is said to merge with Shiva.

This is another way in which the Mother can lead the aspirant to the Father.

Swami Sivananda says:

Shakti “leads the individual from Chakra to Chakra,

from plane to plane and unifies him/her

with Lord Shiva in the Sahasrara.” 

Sri Ramakrishna and his disciples used to sing a song

whose aim was to invoke the kundalini to rise,

so that Shakti would meet Shiva at the Sahasrara.

“Awake, Mother! Awake!

How long Thou hast been asleep In the lotus of the Muladhara!

“Fulfil Thy secret function, Mother:

Rise to the thousand-petalled lotus within the head,

where mighty Shiva has His dwelling;

Swiftly pierce the six lotuses

And take away my grief, O Essence of Consciousness!” 

As each chakra awakens under the influence of our growing spirituality,

the Mother is heard to “knock at the door,” in

Paramahansa Yogananda’s words.

“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock (sound through Om vibration):

If any man hear my voice (listen to Om),

and open the door, I will come in to him. (Revelation 3:20).” 

Many aspirants, prominent among them

Franklin Merrell-Wolff and Da Free John,

were led to Brahmajnana (or God-realization attendant upon the spiritual energy

reaching the seventh chakra) by the kundalini.

Here is how Dr. Wolff described it:

“The Current is clearly a subtle, fluid-like substance

which brings the sense of well-being already described.

Along with It, a more than earthly Joy suffuses the whole nature.

To myself, I called It a Nectar.

Now, I recognize It under several names.

It is … the ‘Soma,’ the ‘Ambrosia of the Gods,’

the ‘Elixir of Life,’

the ‘Water of Life’ of Jesus,

and the ‘Baptism of the Spirit’ of St. Paul.

It is more than related to Immortality; in fact it is Identical with Immortality.” 

Da Free John called it this “current of immortal joy.”

His energetic experiences with the Divine Energy or the Shakti are unusual.

His process, which ended in God-realization, began one day when:

“I could feel and hear little clicking pulses in the base of my head and neck,

indicating the characteristic Presence of the Mother Shakti.” 

The Mother knocks at the door and

Da Free John hears Her and invites Her in.

Meditating in a Vedanta Society temple in Hollywood,

which he found to be a very powerful centre of Shakti:

“I felt the Shakti appear against my own form.

She embraced me, and we grasped one another in sexual union.

We clasped one another in a fire of cosmic desire,

as if to give birth to the universes.

Then I felt the oneness of the Divine Energy and my own Being.

There was no separation at all.

The one Being that was my own nature

included the reality that is all manifestation

as a single cosmic unity and eternal union.

“The sensations of the embrace were overwhelmingly blissful.

It exceeded any kind of pleasure that a man could acquire.

And soon I ceased to feel myself as a dependent child of the Shakti.

I accepted her as my consort, my loved-one,

and I held her forever to my heart.” 

This proved to be his penultimate experience before God-Realization,

the “harbinger” of the Father.

He returned to the temple the next day but nothing happened.

He simply sat in the temple.

In a moment, he became aware of his true nature.

“In an instant, I became profoundly and directly aware of what I am.

It was a tacit realization, a direct knowledge in consciousness itself.

It was consciousness itself without the addition of a communication

from any other source.

I simply sat there and knew what I am.

I was being what I am.

I am Reality, the Self, and Nature and Support of all things and all beings.

I am the One Being, known as God, Brahman, Atman, the One Mind.” 

Withdrawing Her veils,

moving us onward by her evolutionary coaxings,

teaching us in Her school of matter,

liberating us through the rising of the kundalini –

There are many ways that the Mother leads the

prodigal child to the Father.

No other spiritual agency has received the attention She has,

under such a variety of names, and yet has been so little understood

The Divine Mother has been known to sages throughout the centuries,

around the world, in religions from Advaita to Zarathustreanism.

But the myriad names She has been called and

the lack of integrated studies of Her have sometimes proved confusing …

The most known names:

“Holy Spirit,” “Divine Mother,” and “Shakti”

The Mother will always be incomprehensible and

Her significance will remain immeasurable.

One day we shall be able to say with Solomon:

“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom…

She is more precious than rubies;

and all things thou canst desire are not to be compared with her.”  

But though we merge with Her and reap all the rewards of doing so,

we can never know Her as long as we are human.

Only those who have achieved what Jesus called everlasting life,

the immortality that the experience of vijnana (wisdom),

or stable and permanent realization,

confers reach a high enough vantage point even to begin to inquire into,

let alone understand, Her mystery.

Even then, they can only marvel and say, with Shankara:

[The Mother] is neither being nor non-being, nor a mixture of both.

She is neither divided nor undivided, nor a mixture of both.

She is neither an indivisible whole,

nor composed of parts, nor a mixture of both.

She is most strange.

Her nature is inexplicable.

Now …