Śakti transmission is Consciousness looking back at Itself. Svātantrya Śakti is the autonomous power of Consciousness to forever manifest Its own fullness and perfection, expressing Itself as a matrix of energy called Kauliki Śakti.

Kauliki Śakti is Consciousness becoming the universe, individuating into kuṇḍalinī and into you and me. Because kuṇḍalinī śakti is everywhere, śakti transmission is not the movement of energy from one location to another. Instead, it is a contact between two points held within the dynamic infinite field of Oneness. That is where transmission takes place.

What is this energetic field of Consciousness? Max Planck, a German theoretical physicist, whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in 1918, said this:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only...

It is not by escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into the transcendent, but in finding that place where they come into union, the mystery that is inherently inside all of us is revealed.

Throughout the ages, people have asked these fundamental questions: “Why am I here? What is the relationship between me and the Divine?” It is our sādhana that brings us to the understanding that we were birthed out of the intimacy between Śiva and Śakti, Consciousness and energy. It is that dynamic interchange, that intimacy of love that creates and gives life.

When the eternal and the human meet, love is born; that is love doubling back on itself. By finding that place of union within us, we recognize that we, too, are birthed out of love.

Realization is living that union in our own lives, with heart wide open. It is the revelation of the mystery that is inherently inside all of us. How amazing that this could be true!

If we accept the premise that we were birthed out of the...

Kuṇḍalinī is the volcanic flow of śakti that burns away all obscurity as She erupts into the central channel and our awareness. 

I often say that devotion is the full measure of surrender and in the practice of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana, we discover that this means allowing the powerful force of śakti within us to do its work.

We can describe that energy in many ways, but in the context of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana we are talking about Śiva’s Śakti — about the energy through which Pure Consciousness expresses and manifests Its primal urge, which is the expansion of fullness, freedom, and joy. All form arises and subsides on the field Consciousness, and this happens without Śiva losing any sense of Oneness. Manifestation comes into existence through Kuṇḍalinī Śakti, and in the nondual Trika tradition She is known as the Goddess Parā. Her primary attributes are that She is the power of will, knowledge, and action, the energies that Śiva uses to express His innate joy into form, into...

The cathedral of doubt is made of sand. In stillness thoughts go no further and distinctions vanish, then doubt dissolves back into the ocean of consciousness.

My experience as a teacher is that doubt is a major reason why students lose sight of the ultimate intention of sādhana: to find that God dwells within them as their Self. In the classical nondual Tantrāloka there’s an extraordinary statement that says that doubt is the fundamental effect of misunderstanding, and that any attempt to discover the truth from a place of doubt is impossible. So let’s look at doubt: what it is, and why it gets in the way of spiritual practice.

One major form doubt takes is that we doubt God’s existence because we can’t see him — even though, in truth, we see him every moment of our lives. It’s so important for us to penetrate through that misunderstanding, to grasp that everything we see is God, and that it is only our dualistic perception that prevents us from...