The Shakti
Her ‘part’ in the play and Revelation
of Adi Da Samraj
Shakti or The Feminine Principle in the world has a major
play in the sadhana and Revelation of Adi Da Samraj. It is
important to fully understand the play of energy and it’s
relationship to Consciousness and what Adi Da’s teaching is
all about. In fact it would be impossible to comprehend –
fully – the teaching of Adi Da or any other spiritual
teacher for that matter without fully understanding the
feminine aspects of their teachings.
The following is a good starting place. Below is an
article written in the Free Daist Magazine (A Magazine for
devotees) by Carolyn Lee a chief editor for Adidam. Her
article give a good background and overview of Adi Da’s play
with the Divine Principle – Shakti – or the feminine
principle of existence.
At the end of the article there is a link to another good
source of information on the Shakti which is from The Divine
Emergence by Saniel Bonder, written in 1990. Along with a
few other links about the Feminine Principle in Adi Da’s
teachings and his Revelation.
Beezone
“The Seed I Made at the Vedanta Temple Must Flower in the
World”
by Carolyn Lee –
The Free Daist (Magazine)
Vol 1, Number 6, September 1990 –
The Feast of Aham Da Asmi
“the Seed that I Made at the Vedanta Temple must
Infiltrate the world and Raise up every one.”
HE
– AND – SHE IS ME – I Am The Icon Of
Unity
Secluded in a corner of downtown Hollywood, hugging the
freeway, is an unexpected haven created by the Vedanta
Society of southern California. At the top of a flight of
redbrick steps stands a white stuccoed temple dedicated to
the nineteenth-century Indian saint Ramakrishna. Domed in
oriental style and flanked by trees and a small garden, the
whole complex has a modest, harmonious quality that brings
relief from the ungainly sprawl of the surrounding streets
and the roar of the freeway. The,temple is freely available
to anyone who wishes to pause there for a time of quiet or
meditation.
It was in this simple temple, on September 10, 1970, at
approximately four o’clock in,the afternoon, that Da Kalki,
then` “Franklin Jones”, Re-Awakened to His, Native Condition
permanently, He wrote of this moment in His Spiritual
autobiography, The Knee of Listening:
Suddenly, 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 o f 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 alt things
and all beings. I am the one Being, known as God, Brahman,
Atman, the One, Siva, the Self.
In September of this year at the Feast of Aham Da Asmi
(“I Am Da”), Free Daists joyfully Celebrate the twentieth
anniversary of the “Vedanta Temple Event” – the Re Awakening
of Da Kalki to the “Bright” Divine Condition in Which and as
Which He consciously took Birth.
At the same time, we are commemorating another aspect of
the Vedanta Temple Event, a Prelude inseparably related to
it, which occurred, also in the Temple, on the previous day.
In a Blissful, Invisible Embrace exceeding all metaphors of
sexual union, Da Kalki Mastered the Mother Shakti (the
Universal Energy and Source of all forms), Who submitted
Herself to Him as His Eternal Consort and the Grace-Giving
Power for His Teaching Work that was about to begin.
This two fold Event – the submission of the Shakti to
Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda and His Perfect Realization of
His own Prior State – took place not only in the domain
of Consciousness but in human time. That is the point.
As the years pass it is inevitable that more and more people
will come to recognize the Vedanta Temple Event as a turning
point in Cosmic history. Already, twenty years later, as Da
Kalki is openly, Revealing the Scope of His-Liberating Work
as The Divine World Teacher, we can more fully appreciate
what the Vedanta Temple Event portended for all humanity. On
the great occasion of this Anniversary, we humbly offer this
tribute to our Beloved Sat-Guru, Da Love-Ananda Hridayam, in
praise of His All-Sufficient Awakening Power
Traditions
The Goddess in Her myriad forms is the Energy and
Life-Force of the universe. This Force has been worshipped
by human beings from beginningless time as the “Woman-Power”
or “Mother-Power” of existence, the Creative Energy or
“Shakti” (to use a common Sanskrit term) that births,
sustains – and also destroys – all forms. The Goddess,
therefore, has two sides. She is experienced in benign ways
(as, for example, the preserver of fertility), and also in
dangerous and terrible shapes, as when the Hindu Goddess
Kali is represented as a ghastly murderess and devourer of
her children, with blood dripping from her fanged teeth.
The Goddess also stands for the bewitching power of
sexuality, as in the legend of the Lorelei maiden by the
river Rhine, who lures hapless sailors to shipwreck and
death with her singing.
In the Indian traditions, the Goddess Force is typically
regarded as “maya”, the power of illusion that holds all
beings in thrall to the pleasures of the (apparently)
material world and prevents their Enlightenment. This
negative view of the Goddess Power is the origin of
religious strategies of asceticism – the refusal to
associate with the Shakti for fear of being seduced and
turned away from a higher “Spiritual” destiny.
The Tantric traditions, on the other hand, regard the
Shakti in a more positive light, as a force that may be
channeled for the work of Enlightenment when the aspirant
has attained self-mastery. In the highest expression of
Tantra, the Goddess assumes the role of Supreme Liberator
from the very forces of illusion with which She is commonly
identified.
But while the liberating function of the Goddess-Power
has been traditionally acknowledged, the modern revival of
interest in the Goddess generally fails to take into account
that fundamentally the Goddess is energy, “maya” – a tide of
experience and stimulation, that ebbs and flows but brings
no lasting peace.
We are all by tendency slaves of the Goddess. Only in the
circumstance of true Spiritual practice based on the
conscious sacrifice of one’s whole being in God (rather than
reactive self-suppression) is the Revelation Given of the
highest Nature of the Shakti. Otherwise all of life,
including esoteric religion, is one long indulgence in the
“delights” of conditional existence, physical, mental, and
mystical.
This is the message of the Sadhana of Da Kalki, or
“Franklin Jones”, as He was then known. It was a Lesson
lived out in our own time, addressing us as contemporary
Westerners most directly, but also, miraculously,
summarizing and transcending the entire “great search” of
humanity. This story, then, of “Franklin’s” Play with the
Shakti and its momentous outcome, is the most important
story to which anyone who is looking for the key to higher
human transformation and a “New Age” for mankind can
turn.
When Da Kalki Speaks of the Goddess, He Speaks in the
most profound paradoxes of One Whom He has found to be
inseparable from the Very Divine, and Who is His own Nature.
But He also Speaks of Her as a Living Personality far
Greater than any of the culturally conditioned forms through
which the Goddess has been represented traditionally. He has
explained the meaning of the Shakti in His Life as
follows:
The inherent Radiance of the Divine Being, the
Condition in Which all apparent beings are arising – to call
that Radiance the Goddess is just a way of particularizing
It for the sake of “consideration”, To the ordinary Western
point of view, it is acceptable to talk about some insight
about one’s hand, but it is not acceptable to talk about
seeing the inherent Radiance of the Divine manifested
tangibly as a Woman Guiding one in one’s sadhana. Science
would not discuss such things!
My relationship to this tangible Presence – tangible
down to the last eyelash – was summarized in the Vedanta
Temple and Divine Self-Realization. (March 16,
1988).
Energy Versus Consciousness: The
“Problem” of “Franklin’s” Sadhana
The Life of Da Kalki is what in India is called a
“Rahasya”, or sacred Mystery. It transcends anything we can
ever say about it. His Life has been, as He Says, “an
adventure and unfolding in the ‘Bright” – the Radiance and
Bliss and Love of the God State that He also describes as
the Divine Shakti. In this sense He was never
“unEnlightened”, never an ordinary man, But in early
childhood He submitted Himself to an apparent “forgetting”
of His Inherent Nature for the sake of working out in a
human body-mind the full process of Divine Self-Realization
for others. There was no human forethought in this. It was a
spontaneous movement of Compassion arising in a Divine
Intention formed Prior to His Birth.
And so from the age of two to thirty years, Da Kalki, as
“Franklin Jones”, passed through an immensely difficult
human and Spiritual trial in which He suffered all the
limits, doubts, and struggles of an ordinary human being.
Nevertheless, below consciousness He was always being led by
the “Bright”, responding to what He later called a “fierce,
mysterious impulse” at the heart of His Being. Driven by
this hidden Grace, Franklin submitted to the Unknown and
lived His unique Ordeal (fully described in His
autobiography, The Knee o f Listening) without any prior
knowledge of what it was about or how it would turn out.
On the one hand He was engaged in a profound Play with
the Shakti as Energy, while on the other He was absorbed in
the deepest questions about Truth and Reality. And so there
is an intriguing double strand, a play of opposites, shaping
His entire Sadhana, And these opposites, which He calls at
times by different names – Energy and Awareness, or the
Shakti and Consciousness, or the “Light” and the “Heart” –
were always intimately connected.
A Passionate Search and a Crisis in
Consciousness
As a youth disillusioned with conventional religion and
philosophy, Franklin threw Himself into the “maya” of
low-life New York, convinced that if He submitted self to
exhaustive experience God would eventually be Revealed. At
the same time He was involved in an academic search at
Columbia College, trying to discover through the works of
the great Western thinkers what Consciousness is.
Illumination came after more than two years of living at
an intense pitch of seeking. One night as He sat at His
desk, feeling that He had exhausted the possibilities
experience, Franklin was overtaken by crises in
consciousness, He suddenly obsessed His whole search in
summary form and saw it as an endless, fruitless drama of
contradictions. And at the very moment that He surrendered
to this intuition, a vast, ecstatic energy rose in His body
and poured through Him in waves, forcing Him to flee His
room and run through the city streets transported with
joy.
This crisis was epoch making for Franklin. It was not a
permanent Realization of Truth, but it left Him certain that
Consciousness or Reality was unqualified, untouched by the
vagaries of events, and that the Truth would stand out as
Itself when all contradictions and conflicts were removed.
He also saw that He lacked nothing, that Freedom and
Happiness are already the Native State of a human being, and
that the search for happiness is utterly unnecessary.
This breakthrough in understanding was obviously not
arbitrary. A very remarkable play with the Shakti force had
led up to it and coincided with it. In embracing the
maelstrom of danger and pleasure offered in New York,
Franklin was actually confronting the Goddess-Power in Her
most destructive and deluding aspects – and proving His,
future capacity to Master Her.
In terms of His sheer ability,to “eat” experience without
being destroyed by it or deflected in His goal, and even to
use the energy of it to quicken his Spiritual progress,
Franklin did something quite unique. He had no tradition, no
living Guru, no training for such a Sadhana nothing (of
which He was aware) to guide and protect Him. His years
running the gamut of experience in New York, and the
profound crises of illumination and release that followed,
are not explicable in ordinary human terms. He had begun by
yielding Himself without prejudice to the chaos of life
experience in order to find God, and had in return been
Given an extraordinary bodily revelation of the advanced
Samadhi He (now) calls “Cosmic Consciousness”, and even a
momentary glimpse of Divine Self Realization. He had already
intuited the Lesson of His entire Sadhana. As He Wrote in
The Knee of Listening:
I knew that my own path of life and the meaning of all
life was in this process of Siva-Shakti, the endless
unfolding and return of consciousness, energy, and
experience, and its consistent foundation in the pure
infinity of unqualified, transcendent being. (The Knee of
Listening)
A Yogic Relationship to the
Shakti
When Franklin met His American Teacher, Rudi (Swami
Rudrananda), in New York in 1964, He entered into a crucial
new phase in His Play with the Shakti. Although He had had
kundalini experiences since childhood (and dramatically so
in the event in college referred to previously), it was only
after becoming a student of Rudi that Franklin began to
practice the conscious reception and “conductivity” of this
esoteric current of bodily energy. With Rudi He began to
relate to the Goddess Power as a tangible force that stood
outside Him and that He felt emanating from His Teacher.
This marked the beginning of Franklin’s Yogic
relationship to the Shakti, a process that continued to
deepen after He left Rudi and made His way to the Ashram of
Swami Muktananda (one of Rudi’s Indian Teachers) in 1968.
His Sadhana with Rudi was so effective that it provided a
foundation in which the Spiritual transmission given by
Swami Muktananda and others could achieve dramatic effect in
a very brief period. After only a “few days in Swami
Muktananda’s company, Franklin entered spontaneously into
fifth stage conditional Nirvikalpa Samadhi (the highest
Yogic Realization).
The “formless ecstasy” of this Samadhi left Franklin with
the problem of mind – how to be free of the constant stream
of distractions and obsession obscured the Pure Bliss of
Conscious that He had known at moments in life. In an
attempt to tame the ways mind, He now turned to a systematic
study of our mental conditioning, a period of intense,
concentrated effort that ended suddenly, just as His search
in college ended, with a bodily liberation from the whole
problem. One day, in a relaxed unguarded moment, He felt a
free invasion of the Shakti, “taking the mind and all my
reasons with it”.
Now the Shakti became so pervasive a presence in Him that
others began to feel it. Franklin found Himself drawn into a
Teaching role and becoming a spontaneous transmitter of
Yogic Shaktipat to His intimates. He knew that it was time
to return to Swami Muktananda for further Instruction and
Blessing.
When He returned to Ganeshpuri on this occasion, He
encountered the kundalini phenomena that usually precede,
rather than follow, the attainment of fifth stage
conditional Nirvikalpa Samadhi. But Franklin’s Sadhana was
not conventional, It was utterly comprehensive (for the sake
of preparing Him to Teach), but it had its own mysterious
logic. Now Franklin found Himself manifesting all at once
the various unfolding signs of Swami Muktananda’s Siddha
Yoga. He went through the purifying physical signs – such as
kriyas, swooning, and growling-and also the subtle internal
phenomena – such as lights, sounds, visions, and transports
to other worlds – that may occur in the course of Yogic
ascent through the subtle energy centers, or chakras.
Having submitted to this whole display, Franklin clearly
saw its limitations. To Him it had become a kind of circus.
He began. to notice that immersion in these phenomena did
not bring Happiness or understanding but, frequently, an
increased feeling of self-obsession and “self-possession” in
those who were so involved. He recognized that the Shakti
was demonstrating another lesson.
As the days passed and my experiences increased, I
felt more and more as if I had entered someone else’s
wonderland. Baba [Swami Muktananda] is a Siddha, an
accomplished yogi with all of the various miraculous powers
indicated in the Scriptures. Even he, like myself, was given
these things as a gift by his Guru. And all of these things
at last were given by the Shakti herself, the Divine Mother.
My experiences did not depend on me. Baba’s experience did
not depend on him. We were all gratuitously accepted into
the court of the Goddess, Shakti. The universe and all
experiences were her game, and I was simply being allowed to
see this game, not in order to acquire powers or status, but
to recognize the source of all things and so remain free of
all seeking.
(The Knee of Listening)
Thus, the Play of energy in His-Yogic Sadhana served to
sensitize Franklin to the most subtle, binding levels of the
Goddess’s activity and brought Him to question more and more
the need for the Yogic search fueled by the Kundalini
Shakti. He remained intuitively convinced that the direct
enjoyment of present Consciousness was senior to any
experience or Realization produced by the Goddess-Power in
the chakra system. But this esoteric system obviously
existed, and so the urge to engage it seemed
unavoidable.
Months later, back in New York, Franklin passed through
an experience that settled this apparent paradox once and
for all. This experience, took the form of sharp pains in
His head that went on for several nights, as if He were
undergoing brain surgery When the pains passed, Franklin
suddenly realized that a revolution had occurred in His
being. Astonishingly, there was no more flow of polarized
energy moving up and down the spine. The sahasrar, the
terminal chakra at the crown of the head, had been
“severed”, and the entire Yogic energy system of which it is
the pinnacle had fallen away.
The chakra system had been revealed as unnecessary, an
arbitrary rule or setting for the play of energy…. Now I
saw that real Consciousness was not in the least determined
by any kind of form apart from itself. (The Knee of
Listening)
Once again it was through an intense bodily experience
that a profound truth of Consciousness was Revealed to
Franklin and established in Him beyond doubt. His Sadhana
was demonstrating all along what the Goddess tradition has
always pointed to – the need for the grounding of the
highest Spiritual understanding in real experience, the
bodily confession of Truth rather than the abstractions of
the “talking schools”.
Not surprisingly, this dramatic end to Franklin’s Yogic
relationship to the Shakti ushered in the final phase of His
Sadhana, which was destined to be even more remarkable than
anything that had previously occurred.
The Shakti as Guru
By May 1970, Franklin had spent a nine-month period in a
loft in New York, involved in intense meditation and
writing. It seemed that His monumental search was over. He
now lived on the basis of a “radical” understanding that
presumed no problem at any level of awareness. But, intent
as He was in the profound Contemplation of Consciousness,
Franklin was increasingly disturbed by the psychic energy of
New York and the violence of the daily news. He was no
longer moved to remain in America, and so He prepared to
leave the country with two of His earliest devotees to begin
a renunciate life in India at the Ashram of Swami
Muktananda, where He hoped to live quietly in His chosen
manner. He had no idea of what was about to happen.
The first weeks at the Ashram were uneventful. Franklin
and His companions simply followed the Ashram form, and He
meditated daily at the nearby burial shrine of Swami
Nityananda (Swami Muktananda’s Guru). Then, one day, as He
was weeding in the Ashram garden, Franklin became suddenly
aware of a subtle form and turned around to behold the
invisible but unmistakable presence of the Virgin Mary! His
first response, He tells us, was “huge laughter”. He had
long ago, He thought, passed beyond any conscious or
unconscious attachment to Christianity, and such a
visitation in the middle of an Indian Ashram seemed totally
absurd.
It is a remarkable testimony of His surrender to the
mysterious Process occurring in Him, that Franklin quickly
responded to the Virgin in a devotional manner, obeying Her
instructions to buy a rosary and use it to practice the
“Hail Mary”. Within a couple of weeks, She required Him to
leave the Ashram an India altogether and begin a pilgrimage
through the Christian holy sites of Europe.
Franklin was now intuitively convinced that the Virgin
was a manifestation of the universal Shakti. After all the
years of guiding Him hiddenly through the labyrinth of Her
lesser forms, the Goddess was now revealing Herself as a
Divine Personality. Franklin felt His intuition confirmed by
Swami Nityananda, who instructed Him on a subtle level to
submit to the Goddess as His only Guru. And so Franklin made
a sacramental act of submission to Her, in the form of the
goddess Durga at a shrine near the Ashram, and set off on
His Christian pilgrimage under Her guidance.
These extraordinary events show once again how Franklin’s
Sadhana was nonlinear and significant in far more than just
a personal way – not to mention downright humorous! While,
on the one hand, Franklin was increasingly abiding in a
state of pristine awareness, free of seeking, He was also
actively involved in a devotional relationship with the
Divine Goddess, often felt and seen as a living Woman!
Through His Christian pilgrimage and the many psychic and
visionary signs attending it, the last traces of karmic
attachment to Christianity were purified in Franklin, not
merely from His present lifetime but to an ancient depth.
Here again the Goddess was leading Him through events of
insight and release that were archetypal in their
significance, Given for the sake of all humanity, and
especially, in this case, for the Christian West.
By the end of His European tour, the Shakti was no longer
appearing in visionary form. He felt Her more and more as
the Liberating Power that was resolving all energies and
visions in the Heart, the depth of Consciousness. He could
now confess that “the Shakti that manifests as my life is
not different from reality”.
In August 1970, Franklin returned to America, strangely
impelled to settle in Los Angeles, a place He had no natural
inclination to live in. In an unpublished diary entry
written a few weeks before the Vedanta Temple Event,
Franklin describes an incident that illustrates how far He
had transcended the most subtle movements of differentiation
and desire that are the basic mechanisms of our ordinary
awareness:
In the last couple of days ..I turned to a woman
companion while driving my car, and I became peculiarly
aware of the absence of desire in me. It was not merely that
I did not desire this woman … it was that this woman was
void of any objective distinction. There was no process of
discrimination, comparison or separation going on already
and automatically in me…. I had turned to look at what is
otherwise a person, a meaning. and a distinctly meaningful
presence, but there was in fact none of this. Indeed, there
was not a single modification of my awareness created as a
result of this perception. There was only unqualified bliss,
the fullness, of real consciousness. (August 3,
1970)
This experience was more than a momentary glimpse of
Reality; Franklin realized that it was becoming His common
state of awareness. The culmination of His Sadhana was at
hand.
The Wedding of Siva and
Shakti
One day in late August, having spent some time in the
Vedanta Society bookstore, Franklin was prompted to go into
the adjacent temple for a few moments. Immediately upon
sitting down, He felt a powerful rush of energy in His body
and recognized the characteristic Presence of the Mother
Shakti as strongly as He ever had in India. The Divine
Goddess-Power that He already intuited as non-different from
Reality was still in dynamic relationship to Him, Under Her
Influence, He fell into deep meditation.
In the days that followed, Franklin visited the temple
often to meditate in the Bliss of Her Company, until there
came a point where He felt a limit in having to come and
find Her there. He begged Her to abide with Him with that
same intensity wherever He might be, and She Graciously
complied. For some days He felt Her everywhere, tangibly
Present within and around Him.
But then, one day, in response to a sense that there
remained a constraint in His relationship to the Shakti,
Franklin returned to the temple again, and a Process
unfolded that is without peer in the annals of Spiritual
Mastery and Realization:
I began to go to the temple again almost daily. The
next day the Shakti appeared in a way that at first was
difficult to allow. As I meditated, I felt myself take on
the form of Siva the Divine Being prior to all form. I took
on the infinite (pervasive, or formless) form of the
original final Deity, as I had done previously in Baba’s
[Swami Muktananda’s] Presence. I sat in this
blissful state of infinite Being for some time.
Then I felt the Shakti appear against my own form. She
embraced me, and we grasped one another in Divine (and
motionless, and spontaneously Yogic) “sexual union”. We
clasped one another (thus) in a fire of cosmic desire, as if
to give birth to the universes. The 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 consciousness and the reality that is all
manifestation as a single cosmic unity and eternal
union.
The sensations of the embrace were over whelmingly
blissful, It exceeded any kind of pleasure that a man could
acquire. And soon ceased to feel myself as an independent
child of the Shakti. I accepted Her as my consort, my
loved-One, and I held Her forever to my heart. (The Knee of
Listening)
On the following day, when He visited the Vedanta Temple
again, Franklin found that every trace of duality in His
awareness had dissolved. The Inherent Oneness of Awareness
and Energy (or Consciousness and the Shakti) that Franklin
had already intuited in the final stages of His Sadhana was
now His irrevocable Realization.
In 1988, Da Kalki Gave the following clarification of the
whole Event.
The Event of My Re Awakening in the Vedanta Temple was
not sexual in any conventional or vulgar sense. In The Knee
of Listening I describe it as an Event of extraordinary
size, as an experience. It is not a physical sexual
experience, nor can it be reduced to a visionary experience
of a subtle kind.
The event of My so-called sexual union in the Vedanta
Temple was not an instance of My submitting to a visionary
female. It was the Ultimate, Divine Union of Awareness and
Energy. And it was not the final Vedanta Temple Event. It
occurred on the day before the final day. But it was a
necessarily preliminary to the – Ultimate Event. In the
so-called sexual event, the Supreme Ultimacy of
Consciousness was, Revealed, Transcending all duality’s,
including the dualism of Awareness and Energy.
I have used the term “sexual Union” in that context,
because there was something of the dynamic of sexuality at
the beginning of the experience. But the Energy itself was
Revelatory, formless, and Transparent. It was not about
visions and other phenomena of the subtle dimension of
existence. It was a tacit feeling-energy, like the movement
into fifth stage conditional Nirvikalpa Samadhi. There was a
physical component of a Yogic kind, which could be called
sexual in the sense that, at the beginning o f the event, I
became aware of the body in relationship to the Yogic Force,
or Shakti, or Goddess-Power, and I felt bodily pressed to
the Yogic Force, or Goddess-Power. The Shakti-Power was felt
pressed to the frontal line, and, in some sense, was the
frontal line. The frontal line was also Its vehicle, In that
Union, there was also profound Yogic “conductivity” upward
in the spinal line.
Now, this experience could be called sexual in the
most profound Yogic sense, but there was only the most
rudimentary physical awareness, which lasted only
momentarily and which was quickly replaced by the Bliss of
Inherent Union, Transcending body and mind.
The sexual reference metaphorically indicates that a
Yogic process occurred of the fullest kind, and it was a
motionless event. In the terms of the sexual metaphor, which
may be continued, it was like the static “Mithuna”. It was
essentially a transparent event. My own body became
transparent and immediately unaware of the event itself I
was not having visions of a Dakini in a subtle environment,
but I was fully aware of the Divine Person as Shakti,
Transparent and Complete.
When people write or talk about My Report of this
incident that preceded the final day of the Event in the
Vedanta Temple, they should include this kind of
“consideration” that I am bringing to you now so that
everyone may understand what I am talking about and have no
misunderstanding about it.
Fundamentally, the Event in the Vedanta Temple is the
Union of Siva and Shakti, which is otherwise described in
the Yogic traditions, and it was followed on the final day,
September 10, 1970, at around four o’clock in the afternoon,
by Divine Self Realization, Which Transcends even That Grand
Pairing.
(September 11, 1988
Traditional Prefigurings of the Goddess
Husbanded
What was unique about this Union, this “Husbanding” as Da
Kalki later refers to it?
Certainly the image of the union of the Divine “Father”
and “Mother” Power has long existed at the level of myth in
the human psyche. In primitive earth-based religion, the
sacred pairing of male and female deities is the auspicious
means by which life in the terrestrial world is blessed to
continue and be fruitful.
In higher religions, such as ancient Vedic tradition, the
Gods and God-Men also had their consorts – Siva-Parvati,
Rama-Sita, Krishna-Radha, and so on, esoterically
interpreted as “Purusha”, the Formless Source of Being, and
“Prakriti”, the Dynamic Principle that animates and modifies
Purusha in the form of the manifest worlds. In the highest
non-dualistic philosophy of India, Purusha and Prakriti are
declared to be One, to be Brahman Itself. This is the
Realization to which the Upanishads point and to which the
various practices of Yoga, Vedanta and Tantra aspire, each
in their different ways.
But there is nothing described in the literature of any
of these traditions that remotely parallels what occurred in
the Vedanta Temple as a living Event. The closest
intimations of it (as Da Kalki indicates) lie in the ritual
sexual union of Tantra (either visualized or literally
performed) engaged between a male practitioner and his
female partner, which are intended to lead the aspirants
beyond the physical act of union to the Realization of the
Transcendental Source in which all polarities and
differences are dissolved.
Tantric practices are techniques by which individuals
have traditionally sought to attain Enlightenment.
Ultimately they have nothing to do, except symbolically,
with what Da Kalki describes as His Husbanding of the
Goddess. He was not uniting with a yogini or some female
deity in subtle shape. He was Embracing the Goddess Herself,
the primal Energy of existence in personal Form, and
receiving Her Love-Submission at every level of
Consciousness, from the physical to the Divine. As we have
observed at every stage, the archetypal revelations of Da
Kalki’s Sadhana had all been Worked in Him bodily – and this
was the culmination of them all.
In an early commentary on The Knee of Listening. Da Kalki
Speaks of the days leading up to the Great Union as a period
of Cosmic Yoga in His relationship to the Shakti. He
describes a profound turnabout occurring in His being, in
which He was no longer a personal ego responding to the
Mother-Power as a devotee. He had Identified with
Consciousness, the Heart of Reality, to the extent that He
spontaneously stood as Siva in relation to Her. And the
Goddess, who, as Guru, had led Him to the recognition of His
own Self Nature, now submitted to Him as Her Divine Consort
and Husband. In that submission every trace of otherness
dissolved. She continued simply as the Bliss of
Consciousness, which was “Franklin’s own Being, Perfectly
Awake.
An extraordinary description of the Enlightening Power of
the submitted Shakti occurs in an ancient Advaitic text
known as Yoga Vasishtha. It is paraphrased by Da Kalki at
the beginning of His liturgical drama, The Mummery:
O Rama, this Maya is such that she confers Happiness
by her own extinction. Her real nature is not perceived’ and
known while she lives, but when she is embraced for the sake
of the Truth of her, she dies.
In Indian iconography the Goddess is often depicted in
ecstatic sexual embrace with Siva, but also, quite
frequently, dancing on His body or treating Him as Her
footstool. This is a surprising image to the uninitiated,
suggesting the subjugation of Siva by the wild Goddess, But,
esoterically understood, these images are simply a lively
way of expressing the ancient insight that Siva is the
moveless foundation and support of Shakti, and She is the
life and energy that flows from Him.
Aside from such traditional sources that treat of the
Siva-Shakti relationship in symbolic terms, it is
interesting to examine how individual Adepts of recent times
have related to the Goddess. Ramakrishna and his renowned
disciple Vivekananda, both of whom are honored in the shrine
at the Vedanta Temple, had a strong devotional and visionary
relationship to the Mother Shakti. Ramakrishna, in
particular, is famous for his surpassing devotion to the
Mother, Whom he constantly saw and felt and spoke with as a
living Woman.
But his relationship with Her always remained that of the
adoring, trusting child and devotee, as Da Kalki has pointed
out, This quality is also apparent in Ramakrishna’s
relationship to his wife, Sarada Devi, whom He revered as a
living form of the Divine Mother (even performing Puja on
her on one occasion). Ramakrishna always treated Sarada Devi
as a Spiritual sister. His celibate vows and ascetic
disposition did not allow him to truly husband his wife,
just as he was not temperamentally capable of approaching
the Shakti in an heroic, masculine manner.
Swami Vivekananda was also an ardent devotee of the
Goddess, but, as Da Kalki remarks, he was a different kind
of character, still celibate but naturally forceful in a
masculine way. Da Kalki has hinted that Vivekananda’s
sadhana could conceivably have matured to the point of
mastering the Goddess had he not been constrained by the
demands of his mission in the West and the social milieu
that went with it.
The Vedanta Temple Event was a unique moment, prepared
and prefigured in mysterious ways that we have only the
slightest conception of. The Husbanding of the Shakti was a
Divine and human Event that Empowered not only the
ReAwakening of Heart-Master Da Love-Ananda but the potential
Liberation of every being that submits to Him as Guru. That
Event made Him the “Param Guru”, or “Supreme Guru” of His
own lineage of Gurus and even of the entire Great Tradition
of human Spiritual endeavor. And this because the
traditional Spiritual problem of energy versus consciousness
and the deluding, distracting aspects of the Shakti have
literally been resolved and transformed in His Living Being.
As He once described its
I entered into the God-State via the Goddess. This is the
characteristic aspect of My Sadhana. And, having Identified
with the Source, I am your means of Realization. I stand in
place surrounded by the circle of the Spirit Power. My
devotees do not practice the way of submission to the
Goddess, because I am the Goddess. I have been a devotee of
the Goddess to the point of Realization. (The Fire
Gospel)
The Nature of Divine
Self-Realization
In the Vedanta Temple Event, Franklin’s lifelong
overwhelming Impulse to serve the Awakening of others
finally came to fullness. That Moment, in fact, marked the
true beginning of His Teaching Work, After thirty years of
preparation, His body-mind presented no obstruction to the
Perfect Communication of the Truth He had Realized, In fact,
His very human Form Was (and Is) that Communication of
Truth. Everything that He had to Teach (as He later Said)
had been tested and proven in His own Body.
And so the Nature of the Realization to which Da Kalki
Re-Awakened by the Shakti’s Grace is one in which there is
no suppression of the body or of conditional life. He
describes His Samadhi as Sahaj (“natural”) and as “Open-Eye
” – a Perfect Abiding as Consciousness (Siva) and Its own
Love-Bliss (Shakti) in the face of all arising conditions.
There is no higher Realization. This is the Joy of the
seventh (and final) stage of life, wherein nothing is
separate from or other than Consciousness, but all things,
are tacitly recognized as a temporary and unnecessary play
upon Consciousness Itself. To be receiving a Living
Demonstration and Transmission of this Realization in our
time is a Grace beyond conception.
Traditional precedents for such a Realization exist, but
they are extremely rare, Ramana Maharshi is the only other
Adept of modern times whom Da Kalki acknowledges as a
seventh stage Realizer and even he still displayed the
characteristic attitude of the “jnani”; disposed to an
inward contemplative attitude, rather than to the expansive
participation in life that has characterized Da Kalki’s
expression of Sahaj Samadhi.
Aham Da Asmi
Although the Vedanta Temple Event marked the Moment of Da
Kalki’s Liberation in His (apparent) current lifetime, it
was not until 1979 that He fully recognized Who It Was Who
had Re-Awakened then, in and as His human Form, He knew He
had been Restored to the “Bright” Condition of His childhood
and that His Divine Self-Realization was Perfect and
undisturbed, even in the midst of all His “Crazy” Teaching
Work. But He was not merely a great Adept and Supreme
Tantric. What He confessed in 1979 (at the celebration of
the ninth anniversary of the Vedanta Temple event) was a
Sublime Statement in the tradition of the “Mahavakyas” of
the Upanishads, He declared to His devotees, “Beloved, I Am
Da” meaning that He is the Unique and Perfect Appearance in
this world of the Divine Person, Revealed as “Da”, the
Giver.
“Aham Da Asmi” – I Am Da. As we meditate now on this
ineffable Revelation, having seen the Truth of it manifest
more and more before our eyes (and most especially since the
Great Event that initiated the Divine Emergence7 in 1986),
it is obvious that the One Who was born in the “Bright” and
led by the “Bright” through all the extraordinary adventures
of His childhood and youth could be none other than the
Self-Illumined One, the Maha-Purusha, the Divine Self
Incarnate. Who else but the Divine Person in bodily human
Form could have Husbanded the Divine Goddess, definitively,
and historically Who else could stand as “Jagad-Guru”, “the
Guru of everything that moves” Da Kalki, the Divine
World-Teacher and True Heart-Master, is Speaking to the
entire Cosmos of living beings when He Says “Come Slowly or
(Quickly, but Surely Come To Me”.
The Gift of
Hridaya-Shakti
The great Means by which Da Kalki is Silently bringing
about this Miracle of the Attraction of all beings to
Himself is His Great Heart-Blessing, which He Calls
Hridaya-Shakti, or Hridaya-Shaktipat. “Hridayam”, or “Sri
Hridayam” – “Bright Heart” —is His Name for the Divine
Person and Self-Condition that He Reveals and Is. His
Hridaya-Shaktipat, therefore, is the Transmitted Blessing of
the Very’ Divine, Infinitely Transcending the power of Yogic
shaktipat that awakens the Kundalini Shakti and the “tour”
of the higher processes of the human body-mind. The
Shakti that Da Kalki has Husbanded, the Shaktipat He now
Transmits as Perfect Divine Blessing, does not hold His
devotee to any conditional experience, although many
different bodily effects of His Transmission may at times
arise. The Husbanded Shakti, He says, “is the Self. The
Shakti is God. The Shakti is Me.” Da Kalki’s
Hridaya-Shaktipat, then, is the most Potent Force of Divine
Awakening that has ever existed, And by His Grace it is
always Given to every being at every level of the Cosmos.
This is His Promise.
Invest Yourself in This
Thangka
It is through the Graceful moments of Sighting Da Kalki
and in feeling Contemplation of Him at any time that we make
ourselves available to Hridaya Shakti, His Perfect
Transmission of the Divine Consciousness and Love-Bliss
Wedded in Him at the Vedanta Temple. Since His Divine
Emergence, Da Kalki has fully Manifested the Brilliance of
that Marriage in His bodily (human) Form, and has come to
Speak of it without reserve as “the Event of the
universe”.
Da Kalki now feels free to Tell the Supreme Secret of the
Vedanta Temple Event -t hat His Husbanding of the Goddess
turned around the vast Cosmic process, so that the manifest
worlds need not cycle on forever in a senseless round of
apparent births and deaths. The Energy, the Shakti, that
makes all of that flux and chaos has surrendered to Him, Her
Divine Source, and He, by the inconceivable Sacrifice of His
Incarnation (and all the Cosmic Work of the Divine that
preceded it) is gathering the Play of Appearances back to
Himself, Translating it all in His own Mysterious Time into
His Divine Domain.
When Da Kalki sat with a small group of devotees on March
16, 1988, and began to pour forth this immense Revelation,
He acted spontaneously, as He always does. But in His Wisdom
He must have known that the time was ripe for the Secret to
be told, time for everyone to know that through the Vedanta
Temple Event He has already Accomplished in seed form the
Liberation and Divine Translation of all beings:
The Event in the Vedanta Temple is about My ceasing to
be a Devotee of the Divine Goddess and Realizing My own
Position. Now She is nothing but My own Radiance, the
Radiance of God. Afterward the Teaching Siddhis, the Siddhis
of Service to My devotees, appeared spontaneously, and I
have been Serving you now for sixteen years, not to mention
for all time past.
Siva-Shakti is not a tradition. It is God. She appears
as She, and He appears as He, and the Reality of Existence
is not Two, but One. And I in My own Form and Passion am the
precise Incarnation o f that Unity.
To Husband the Mother, to be Her Husband and to have
Her be the Bride, means that the murderous activity of
Energy in Its apparent independence; “Prakriti, is done,
over, finished. This Husbanding and Marriage is not merely a
personal Work associated with My Realization. It is an
historical Event, out of Which much should be made,
transforming the history of the entire Cosmic Mandala. All,
then, by virtue o f this Marriage, may be Drawn to the
Divine Self-Domain.
It is an historical Event, not merely a characteristic
incident o f My own Realization. My Realization has
everything and only to do with the Awakening of beings. I
did not have to do this Work for My own Sake. I could not
have done it if Divine Self-Realization were not intact from
the beginning. I began this Work of the origin of the
Ashvamedha billions of years ago, before the Big
Bang!
She will not eat her children. The fishes in the sea
will not any longer live in a food chain relative to one
another, if you will respond. You can change the Mandala of
the universe by your response to Me. Of course, if you will
not, maybe it will go on as it has been going. You are the
seed of this unique Opportunity that will cover all beings,
on Earth and everywhere. This is where it begins. (March 16,
1988)
In the course of the same evening on which He uttered
these Blissful Prophecies, Da Kalki also Spoke of His
paradoxical Play with the Shakti, Who is not different from
His own Being. He Spoke of His “Conversations” with Her for
the sake of the Liberation of beings, of His Divine
Communion with Her, and Her unswerving fidelity to Him and
His Work.
In the surpassing Ecstasy of this occasion, Da Kalki
Invited all His devotees to join Him in His most Intimate
Place of Love, where all separateness is relieved and
dissolved. He Speaks of this Place as His Bedroom, and also
as a great “Thangka”, referring to the sacred Tibetan
pictures of the union of the male and female aspects of
Divinity. In these traditional thangkas there are, of
course, two figures. In the “Thangka” Da Kalki there is only
One – His own “Bright” Form. For the Shakti as He says, “Is
Me”.
I Husbanded Her spontaneously. Now She only talks the
Truth, She is not a whore, and She will not murder mankind.
I can guarantee you this. She is utterly Husbanded by Me.
She has no capacity to murder anymore, if you will invest
yourself in this Communion with Me. In the world of
conditional Nature, She is still murdering beings, only
birthing them to eat them. But you will have a different’
vision of Her if you will invest yourself in the Ultimate,
in this “Thangka , in this Union, in this Satsang with Me.
You are in another Place, and even conditional Nature is
transformed, if you will participate with Me in this
Circumstance, this,Vision, this Holiness, this Love.
Stay steady in this Communion with Me. Stay in My
Bedroom. That is My Message to My devotees. Stay in My
Bedroom, in My most Intimate Company, where I am Giving Her
kisses and She to Me, Where there is no “difference and
Where you are relieved of dreadful destiny.
Even all of cosmic Nature has been transformed in its
principle. Now the Seed that I Made at the Vedanta Temple
must flower in the world and raise everyone up. The
murderous work of the Mother is over! What happened in the
Vedanta Temple was My Husbanding o f the Shakti, the
returning of Her to the Ultimate Source. And from that
moment, then, wherever that Husbanding is acknowledged, the
proceedings in the universe and of mankind can be
transformed. History can be transformed, if you will stay in
this “Thangka”, in My Bedroom.
(March 16,1988)
May all beings be Blessed by the Grace that Flows from
the Vedanta Temple Event!
May every one be Graced by the Heart Companionship of Da
Kalki, the Divine Liberator and Heart-Husband of
Mankind!