I simply point to Shakti as being a wave of the Absolute Consciousness, a wave of the non-dual. It can take many different avenues in the body, or it can accost the body as a mass or wave of current. My style of awakening and transmission is more toward the latter viewpoint, that of an enormous indistinguishable wave of Consciousness amassing all around itself in all directions, arising, penetrating, permeating, saturating and then intoxicating a human being with a Divine fragrance. I use the word fragrance here metaphorically although some people actually do smell various fragrances as well.
The Consciousness that gives birth to the Shakti is a basin, a gorge of cosmic emptiness. The Shakti originates out of there and returns back to there. In that way it can help establish non-dual realization in any aspirant. It simply arises, it engulfs, and then it takes everything with it back into the void. In that way the Shakti is eternally manifesting and returning. When it manifests it’s Shakti. In the fullness of its return it’s Shiva, it’s the Absolute.
Shiva-Shakti therefore best describes this cosmic union of energy and silence. They are only two different elements in so far as human language analyses them. When experience questions and then supplies answers to itself about the nature of Shiva-Shakti, they come out as two different things. That’s just the nature of duality, the nature of human language creating duality, but the truth is that energy is not separate from silence.
Your human nervous system right now is animated with electrical impulses that keep its heart beating. What is that? Where does that come from? Who is doing it? Is your I doing it? Absolutely not, an eternal energy is in fact performing that function. That energy is also non-dual. It’s not just the silent aspect of the Absolute which is non-dual. Energy also is non-dual.
On the level of life, on the surface level, there are many interdependencies you see in nature, things feeding off each other, living off each other. All of that is inspired by the electrical current at the root of existence, the Bliss wave that gives rise to the kind of agitation necessary for a world to be created and maintained and finally destroyed.
The Shakti keeps this world active so that the play of nature can continue, but that energy is not somewhere else away from the cosmic transcendental Consciousness. It is a manifestation of that, it is a reverberation of that. This is another way to say that the masculine and feminine characteristics of existence are one. The male does not exist superior over the female. Shiva is not superior to Shakti. Shakti is not inferior to Shiva. They are different aspects of one unknowable whole.
There’s no way to understand or embrace the activity of the world unless you bring in the notion of energy. You need energy to bridge the invisible Absolute with the manifest play. If you don’t bring in energy you have two things. You have a dualistic universe, and the universe is not dual, it’s non-dual. It’s monistic. It is about Oneness. There’s only One, absolutely and irrevocably One.
As soon as you talk, two is created. If you remain silent there is only the One. But what is it that gives you the spur, that spurs you on to speak? That agitation is the Shakti, the Shakti expressing itself through your relative body-mind. The relative body-mind is rooted in the One through energy, through the manifestation of energy, which it is. Energy is not different than that which apparently creates it.
Nothing creates energy. Just as nothing preceded silence, preceded the silence of Shiva. Nothing precedes that. That is from the beginning. Energy also is from the beginning. The Universe has been going on like this eternally. Eternally means outside of time. Yet time is produced, the experience of time or progression is a necessary correlate to that timeless Being.