note: I intentionally alternate between italicizing the names of Lalitā and Śiva and leaving them unitalicized. When italicized, the names refer to the underlying metaphysical principles or concepts they embody; when unitalicized, they refer to the deities themselves.

Nearly every day, when I chant the Lalitā Sahasranāma, or the thousand names of the Goddess Lalitā, I sing Her dhyāna śloka, the meditation verse that describes Her appearance.

Aruṇām karuṇā-taraṅgitākṣīm, I always sing before I start chanting Her thousand names.

Karuṇā-taraṅgitākṣīm translates to “eyes wet with compassion”. Her eyes are ever wet with karuṇā, or compassion, for Her devotees. The Lalitā Sahasranāma speaks again and again about Her wetness. She is also described as nityaklinnā, or as eternally wet with eros.

The Goddess Lalitā is the form Śakti takes when She expresses Her power as divine eros. And most of Lalitā’s iconography focuses on Her eroticism. Much of my book describes how this eroticism is directed towards liberation.

As I write my book, I remain in a prolonged dark night of the soul that has lasted over three years now, and my Lalitā sadhana continues to deepen during this time.

And these days, I find my eyes becoming more and more wet for reality.

The smallest interactions, and the every day, oftentimes move me to tears. I sit before random strangers, looking foolishly teary-eyed at the most mundane things. I’m aware of how silly it looks, and yet I know that I’d much rather be on this side of consciousness - where the world is now viewed through the eyes of love.

I happen to have pretty poor eyesight. I wear contact lenses most days to correct my vision, but have thought on and off about LASIK, where they shoot lasers into your eyeballs to correct your vision. My main worry is that the procedure oftentimes leaves the eyes chronically dry. I ask myself - is it worth it to view reality through dry eyes? What happens to the quality of seeing?

What happens if our vision is a bit blurred, but wet with love?

Some time during this dark night, I got short baby bangs, contrasting with my long, straight black hair. It’s a cute name for a straight fringe that hangs a few centimeters above the eyebrows. It manages to look simultaneously severe and cute. It was a small and playful change during a dark time.

And although I have been celibate for the majority of this dark night, I found myself innocently wondering about a lover from my past, years after I saw him last. The memory peered into my awareness seemingly out of nowhere, when I heard from him after years of silence and tapasya. I wondered innocently if he might find my new hair beautiful. I’d rocked a considerably more boring forehead when I said goodbye to him years prior.

Throughout my celibacy, I’ve spoken passionately about patriarchy and have successfully shunned all romantic and erotic relationships with men. I’ve mostly rejected the male gaze, determined to turn my eros upwards towards God. And yet, the Goddess Lalitā, my guru, at times purposefully wets my eyes, tilting them downwards again.

I found myself wondering about how Śakti adorns reality, so that Śiva’s eyes may gaze upon it, His eyes wet with love.

She sweetly paints consciousness with baby bangs, and looks back coyly, wondering if Śiva will enjoy the new image. And what else can Śiva do but stare helplessly, wide-eyed, completely taken by divine eros?

The mahāyoginī known as Lalitā lives to delight in Śiva’s gaze.

In the tale of Goddess Lalitā, Śiva has been seated in meditation for thousands of years, when suddenly he opens His eyes and sees the goddess Parvati before Him, and He feels a stir of passion. A celibate yogin whose sādhanā has been interrupted, he immediately becomes furious when He spots the god Kāmadeva, otherwise known as Cupid, hiding nearby and watching Him. Kāmadeva had promised to aid Parvati in Her quest to make Śiva Her husband.

Realizing He has been shot with Kāmadeva’s arrows, he wrathfully opens His third eye and incinerates Kāmadeva, turning him into a pile of ashes. Parvati weeps, realizing Her attempts to win Śiva over by passion alone have been futile. She leaves Śiva, and in the version of this story told in the Śiva Purana, she commits to a 3,000-year tapasya in order to win over the ascetic god as Her husband.

However, this is where the story of Lalitā diverges from the original tale.

The pile of ashes is shaped into a doll by Śiva’s attendant, and is then imbued with life. Brahma sees this grotesque new being and proclaims “Bhand, bhand!” (Shame, shame!), and so this new being became known as Bhaṇḍāsura. This being, Kāmadeva in a new form, propitiates Śiva with a terrible penance, and Śiva grants him immeasurable power in return.

Rati, Kāmadeva’s widowed wife and lover, watches from afar and weeps bitterly, now alone without her husband. She begs the Mother to restore her beloved to her, and the Mother promises that Kāmadeva and his passionate play will eventually be restored.

Bhaṇḍāsura, the demon king, now rules over the universe, and his rule continues for thousands of years. All play and desire has disappeared. Beings stop making love, as the demon king who propitiated the ascetic lord of the universe, Śiva, has sucked the universe dry. Backed by Śiva’s power, he becomes indestructible.

All of the gods, including Brahma, Vishnu, and Indra, lament the current state of the universe. Unable to bear this turn of events, and pulled away from their own lovemaking, they turn again to Śiva. “What do we do? We cannot go on like this anymore.”

Śiva comes out of his penance and tells them, “Construct a yajña (sacrificial fire) and offer your bodies. From this yajña, the Mother of the entire universe will arise in the form of Srī Lalitā Tripura Sundarī. Only She has the power to vanquish Bhaṇḍāsura.”

The gods faithfully construct the yajña, and one by one, jump in, offering themselves in an act of terrible flesh sacrifice. This is depicted in Lalitā’s iconography, where She is seated on the pañcapretāsana, or the throne of five corpses, constructed of the bodies of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Rudra, Indra, and finally, Her consort Śiva.

This fire, having eaten the flesh offering, crackles like a storm. Eventually, there arises the Mother of the universe, Her complexion completely red with passion. She is the embodiment of terrifying beauty, and is so sweet that when Bhaṇḍāsura sees Her and her army of yogini warriors, he laughs. “This army of women can never defeat me,” he proclaims.

I’ll spoil it for you. After a long battle, She defeats him. She defeats him by first pulling the ascetic lord, Śiva, out of His meditation and into marriage with Her. He is finally won over, not by earthly passion or Kāmadeva, but by Her primordial eros. The same Śakti that enables His asceticism, eventually brings Him back into worldly life and love.

Śiva, who takes the form of Kāmeśvara, or the lord of erotic desire, to marry Lalitā, gives Her the Kāmeśvarāstra, a weapon formed by the friction between the divine couple. It is with the Kāmeśvarāstra that She eventually destroys Bhaṇḍāsura.

As promised, She restores Kāmadeva, and returns him to Rati, whose joy knows no bounds. His play is alive in the universe again.

Before I sat down to write this essay, I messaged a friend to share my intention to write this essay, including my thoughts about love and men. I was met with “women experience love emotionally, men experience ‘performative lust’”. According to them, the research shows that “men are sexual animals”. I was taken aback by their words, mostly because it was full of beliefs that Lalitā had long ago had me discard, beliefs I had been raised with, beliefs that humans continue to hold on to in order to explain their grief about reality.

It’s not about humanizing the male portion of humanity, although I think that’s important too. But I want to ask - why do we reduce the experience of love to hormones, chemicals and maps from other -ologies?

I remember the aforementioned lover once told me, “Women have a nerve that runs from their yoni to their heart. Men don’t have that.” My Vedānta guru has echoed a similar sentiment.

Such dry eyes.

What lasers were shot into the heart after what heartbreak?

Humans, in their quest for truth, totally dry out reality, subsequently drying out their own hearts.

Through my own celibacy, I also adopted a hard-heartedness towards humanity. I never explained men and women using hormones and chemicals alone, but at a time in my life where wetness should flow freely, I found myself content to be solitary. Part of it is the time we live in. Ours is an increasingly loveless world that teaches us to move against our natural playfulness. My celibacy has not only been a promise to commune with God, but it has also been a joyous “fuck you” to a society that takes wetness and willingly dries it out.

When I was in high school, I was taught that love isn’t sex. I grew up believing so, and in this loveless world we live in, loveless sex has become an everyday reality. This is because the concept of love has been constrained within man-made structures and contracts that pull us further and further from God.

Lalitā teaches that kāma, the primordial desire that powers sex, is love. Without divine eros, found in the power of kundalini śakti, there is no samādhi. Without that same Śakti, there is no māyā, or a world to be experienced.

Austerity isn’t found in asceticism alone. It’s also found in arid theories about chemicals and the human mind. We are so willing to reduce the experience of bliss to the brain and nervous system. In doing so, we still enjoy, but mistake the enjoyment for something clinical. We believe deeply that our enjoyment depends on receptors that can easily burn out if they are overstimulated.

And the eyes continue to stare at reality, dehydrated, refusing to move, unable to tilt between māyā and formless God.

Bhaṇḍāsura in yet another form.

When our experiences of love are reduced to neat little maps, we forget that love is God to begin with.

Tantrik sādhanā is also ruthless in its quest for truth. It becomes ruthless when Lalitā goads the seeker back into māyā, when She becomes insistent that to achieve liberation, we must learn to play with wetness.

My experience of Lalitā as my guru is that She transmits Her movement in the universe, and watches to see if I understand. It’s not like having a human guru. I have to learn to track the movement of the Divine, which exceeds everything we know about normal human behavior. I, as a yoginī, become responsible for translating Her movement. It’s not as simple as Her whispering words in my ear, although sometimes She does. I must become fit to keep up as She plays. Occasionally, She turns back to see if I am following.

This is because, in this form, Śakti is essentially a performance artist. Liberation is the performance.

Her name, Lalitā, means She who plays.

And here’s what I’ve learned about Her play. Bliss, what we call ānanda in Sanskrit, is the nature of consciousness. God is naturally love and play. She playfully arranges each jīva, or individual being, in Her universe, writes the script and lets it all unfold. But the best part is that the jīva is the one who delights in the performance by the end. It is all love.

To make the experience of ānanda possible in human embodiment, Lalitā designs intricate systems - nerves, neurons, receptors, sensations, thoughts, words, all compounding into experience in material reality. This is how the Divine makes ānanda available in material existence.

Bliss did not emerge from the material. The material formed to reflect the glory of the Divine.

Moisture in the tissues of the eyeball is required for all of this to work.

Moisture is also required for the gaze to shift back and forth between form and formless. Without moisture, the instrument either stays stuck in samādhi or remains in saṃsāra. The two facets of reality never get to meet.

When I was young, I wondered about becoming a nun. I knew pretty early on that the dharma of my life would end in mukti. I spent years under the instruction of my beloved guru of Vedānta. Of course, his teaching and transmission was made possible only by Śakti Herself. He spoke of Her frequently.

Although many Tantriks have their qualms with Vedānta, I could not have approached my Lalitā sadhana without having the guru first point out the presence of the Divine behind the eyes.

The yogins work tirelessly to achieve samādhi, to know nondual reality. And that is no easy feat. There is no Lalitā without Śiva’s tapasya, and the subsequent creation of Bhaṇḍāsura. We cannot know this world, or the Divine, unless we know that all of it is held in the formless.

During the Lalitā sadhana, my promise to be celibate was taken at Her playful behest. Even my Vedānta guru never encouraged it. It was what Lalitā wanted, and it was also what I wanted.

With celibacy, we think we are eschewing the erotic and bodily pleasure. For me, it was a commitment to redirect the fire of life upwards towards God. The energy normally spent ruminating over a man was now spent turning the eyeballs back towards God instead. From that vantage point, I looked at other women, myself, my friends, and lamented how we all got so caught up in spinning over a man. It was such a relief to be free of that bondage.

And somehow in the middle of all of that, I wanted to get baby bangs. They are so like Lalitā, both cute and cutting in the same movement.

It’s not that I saw it elsewhere and thought it looked cool. One day, I put on a hat on a windy day in Iceland, and my hair was pushed up to my forehead to create the illusion of a fringe beneath my hat. I looked at myself and I thought, “Oh, that’s different…I like it.” The last time I’d had bangs, I must have been 6 or 7.

Nowhere in descriptions of Lalitā’s iconography is there any mention of a fringe. The concept of a fringe must have been totally foreign to the sages that transmitted Her mantra, as it didn’t exist in that era or that culture as a fashionable hairstyle for women.

The thing is, with this sadhana, you don’t truly know if the fringe was your idea, or if it was Lalitā’s. It’s hard to separate. But I imagine that in this iteration of māyā, She wanted to paint consciousness with baby bangs.

I’d have thought that completely throwing myself into my practice would have taken away my interest in these things. Instead, She dropped little ideas for beauty in the austere desolation that formed my inner world.

And along with this little change, the lover showed up again. My tapasya hadn’t erased this particular lover’s memory, and not for lack of trying. After he contacted me, I replayed moments we shared years later. I wondered what it would be like to see him again. The eyeballs became wet and slowly tilted forwards once more.

And this time it was different, because the forward tilt had, itself, become pleasurable.

It is the arc that matters. The eyes must be able to travel upwards and come back down. That play is Lalitā.

We think it is by our own power that we withdraw from the world, and while we’re at it, She may even let us think that we have done so successfully.

But She creates this play for Her own joy, and as She arises from the yajña of Tantrik sādhanā, She restores joy for the jīva, not through mindless pleasure, but through the restoration of kāma in the jīva. At this point, the jīva may play with kāma, as a means to attain liberation and to also play in the world - at Her command.

Sometimes that looks like getting baby bangs, and wondering if a former lover would enjoy them.

If She so desires bangs, then let there be bangs.

Śiva cannot do anything but enjoy the new adornment, and the jīva is caught in delight at this play. This is the icchā śakti, or creative power, of Lalitā.

She reminds Śiva that it is only by Her grace that He is able to sit in samādhi for thousands of years. The Śakti that travels into His crown is Her alone. And that same Śakti, by Her will, travels back downwards.

None of this is possible without the offering of flesh sacrifice into the fire of Lalitā sadhana. Ordinary enjoyment in the world is unsatisfactory without the yajña of samādhi.

Truly, kāma is love. What She restores is love between beings, and love for all of reality - hence She is the Goddess whose eyes are wet with compassion.

This is the real reason Lalitā is praised as the giver of both bhoga and mokṣa, material enjoyment and liberation. She guides the ascent, and then the descent again.

Beyond that, I’ll also tell you this.

In the end, in samādhi, Śakti wets the whole painting, and the whole thing blurs together anyway.

The entire canvas becomes soaked, and God is wet with love.

A heartfelt thank you to my dear friends Natasha Boye and Jory Pryor for reading early drafts with generosity and care. Their thoughtful questions and reflections helped sharpen many of the ideas in this essay.

Realistically speaking, I’m not really sure how much interest the rishis (sages) of old India would have had in conversing with modern day physicists. I don’t know how much they would have cared to bridge their own mysticism with a field that seeks to know reality through measurable and reproducible observation. The rishis’ emphasis was on direct experience of the ineffable. Quite honestly, the physicist would have to seek out the rishi, and from what I hear, the field doesn’t seem to express much interest in doing that either.

It’s likely that this conversation would never happen between either party.

We do know that the rishis recorded and disseminated their knowledge out of compassion for humanity. If they were asked a question about black holes and the nature of the universe, they most certainly would have smiled (or scowled) and told us to look inward at our Self-nature. They would have reminded us that all of the answers we were seeking could be found in the question, “Who am I?”

I have spent the past twelve years of my life steeped in the advaitic (nondual) contemplative traditions of India. My path has converged into a particular tradition known as Śrīvidyā Tantra. In this tradition, ultimate reality is worshipped in the form of the Goddess, Lalita Tripura Sundarī. Her names translate to “She who plays” and “She who is beautiful in the three worlds”.

To sum it up concisely, these traditions have posited, through direct experience, that consciousness is fundamental and is the “material” that forms the universe.

Essentially, the world exists through the act of seeing, and it is also created through that seeing. This is described more deeply in the texts Tripura Rahasya and Yoga Vasishtha.

Some people think that the famous “double-slit” experiment confirms the teachings found in these scriptures, particularly the insight around the behavior of an electron when its movement is “observed”. As far as I understand, this is not quite true, and I won’t be arguing that here.

In the mantras and scriptures surrounding the Śrīvidyā tradition, we hear again and again about the primacy of Brahman, or pure consciousness. Brahman is comprised of two inseparable primal aspects - Shiva and Shakti. These aspects of Brahman are found described in all of the mantras and iconography describing Lalita.

If I had to describe the interaction between Shiva and Shakti in more impersonal terms, I would describe the following. Shiva is the ground of pure consciousness. The 20th century Tamil sage Ramana Maharshi used to describe the world being projected onto God, like a movie screen.

Shakti is the aspect of Brahman that makes the projection possible. Shakti is frequently described as energy. Across Goddess-centered traditions, Shakti is certainly presented as such - a terrifying, uncontrollable force that wields the universe’s power to both create and destroy. There is no world appearance nor is there realization of the ground of consciousness, without Shakti’s activity.

The tradition has it down to a science, whether we’re comfortable calling it that or not.

And according to the tradition, both aspects are expressed within the human body. Shiva is recognized when the human being inquires into her Self-nature and meditates upon the aspect that radiates being-ness. This is made possible by the human being’s innate Shakti. That same Shakti, or energy, is the body’s creative capacity. Before that Shakti is turned inward in meditation and enquiry, it is constantly projecting more world onto the screen of consciousness - made possible by continuous experiences of “seeing” compounding into an apparently coherent world appearance.

This process is reversed when Shakti chooses to re-orient Its movement (I’m being quite careful with my language here, to indicate that this is a process that is enacted by Brahman, and Brahman alone). When this process is reversed, the human being is able to behold her true identity as Brahman. She beholds that, all along, the world has appeared within the act of seeing itself. She does not exist in the world. The world exists in her. And, by some strange miracle, this appearance is multiplied across several seemingly different beings.

This Shakti exists in the human body as the infamous kundalini shakti.

All I can say is if you know, you know.

Shakti frequently presents Itself as the Mother Goddess. It presents as Lalita, and also as Mahakali.

There is a form the Mother takes that is somehow both the irresistible beauty of Lalita and the terror of Mahakali. This form is known as Kaamakhya, and She is worshiped at a temple in eastern India in the form of the yoni. This yoni is represented as a vulva carved into stone, the passageway into the womb of the Mother.

The vulva and the womb have long had a gravitational pull. It is the entrance to the passageway of life. We try to explain this “gravity” using biology and anthropology. However we try to explain it, we cannot deny that wars have been fought, poetry has been written and minds have been lost over the gravity of the yoni.

The yoni is a map of the movement of Shakti. Shakti creates from the inconceivable to make It conceivable. She quite literally conceives reality.

It is also said that Shakti in Her form as Mahakali exists in the mahasmashan, or the great cremation ground.

In India, people bring their dead to the cemetery where the body is transformed by fire from corpse into ash. It is in this place that Tantriks go to meditate, in order to harness the Shakti present in the process of cremation in the hope that She bestows upon them a vision of their Self-nature.

Both the womb and the cremation ground provide the ground where Shakti does Its work - it transforms reality, whether that is into form or into formless consciousness. The window at death, when the body has been ground to ash, is said to be an opportunity for the mind to understand Its origin as pure consciousness.

Reality is always moving between these two modes. One where the screen is blank, and consciousness remembers Itself, and the other where the movie is screened, and consciousness temporarily forgets Itself. This is Its play.

When I first read that the abode of both Shiva and Mahakali is in the Mahasmashan, my mind immediately went to celestial objects. It felt as though this was less a statement about the physical location of these deities (although I do believe these deities reside in actual cremation grounds), and more about a universal process.

My mind immediately jumped to the miracle that we know today as the black hole.

It is said that no human can see inside a black hole. But we know its existence and properties from the energy emitted by the material surrounding it. Its size can contain millions or even billions of solar masses. General relativity predicts an event horizon - a point past which there is no pulling away from the gravitational pull of the black hole. It is also theorized that within the black hole is the singularity - a zero point that we have virtually no information about.

It is also said that when calculating the density at the singularity, the equations of general relativity return infinity - at a point that essentially has zero volume. The equations don’t return a number. They return the message that the math breaks down at the singularity and can no longer predict the black hole’s behavior for us.

The result of infinity, at the very least, is a sign that our present physical maps of reality, meet a breaking point. Einstein might have said “but there must be some hidden variable!” as he famously resisted in quantum mechanics. Maybe so. It certainly means a new model is needed past that point. Maybe the most adventurous of us will find one.

I will also say that my guru promised us that the path to liberation would lead us to “the infinite”.

In Śrīvidyā, Brahman is worshipped as “the infinite”.

Poetically, even a system that seeks to describe reality through material laws returns a symbol of what may be “the infinite”.

Given the function of Shakti in our universe, I wonder if the gravity inside of a black hole is Shakti Itself, pulling matter towards its origin as pure consciousness.

If we could see inside of the singularity, I wonder if it would be the same vision attained at the moment of nirvana.

I think the sages would tell us that if we wanted to understand what’s happening inside the singularity, we need only observe the breakdown of the egoic self in the fire of kundalini shakti, and behold nirvana for ourselves.

Current theories also propose a “bounce” at the singularity. It is suggested that beyond the singularity, new spacetime is formed with new laws. This potentially means a whole new universe. That universe would be formed after dissolution at the zero point.

If this is true, then the mahasmashan at the cosmic scale is also a cosmic womb. And this structure may be understood when we understand how the human being attains realization of the Infinite.

Now, I certainly wouldn’t shove this idea in a physicist’s face and beg, “Consider this!” I have more sense than that.

Any reasonable Tantrik practitioner would be content with their own direct experience as evidence for reality. In fact, that’s what the tradition pushes us to do - to experience the truth for ourselves, to the point where we have no questions left. My guru always said to us, “Don’t believe me. Look for yourself and find out if your Self-nature is the ultimate reality.”

So why write this essay? I only hope to express the joy I have, as a yogini, in seeing the Mother’s power operate at such massive scale. And if others may take joy in the connection, then so be it.

I also wonder if our current models are breaking down because they don’t accept consciousness as fundamental. Will that ever change? I don’t know. Maybe it’s true that there’s some secret hidden variable that will unfold a deeper map of the universe from the singularity. Perhaps that model doesn’t involve consciousness at all.

However, I cannot help but see the power of Shakti inside of the black hole too. Perhaps the black hole is the Divine’s own constructed temple, dedicated to illustrating Its own power.

Who knows?

In true yogini fashion, I am a devotee of that infinite Power.

I don’t know if my hypothesis is true, or if it’s worth it to try to prove it. What I do know is that contemplating the Shakti of the black hole makes me weep tears of love, the same tears I weep when I think of my Mother, Maa Kaamakhya.

The author, Meenakshi Manivannan, explores these ideas more deeply in her upcoming book on Śrīvidyā, which is titled Tirukalyanam. Her book is an exegesis on the philosophy of Shiva and Shakti. You may follow her work here on Substack and sign up for her book mailing list here.