The Circle of Śakti in the Life of a Sādhaka
Every encounter with the Divine begins as love.
But that word, so easily spoken, hides an entire cycle of birth, combustion, and ash.
In Possibly Maybe, Björk’s voice carries that full circle — the tender beginning, the tremor of surrender, the shock of the fire, and the final stillness where love either becomes being or collapses into its imitation.
In the language of the Kaula tradition, this song is not about romance at all; it is the story of Śakti’s journey through the heart of a sādhaka.
Each verse is a stage of the Current as it descends, tests, burns, withdraws, and either frees or abandons the one who called it down.
At first, love is easy. The Divine responds even to impure longing — She accepts the mixture of devotion and self-interest that marks the first prayer. It is Her tenderness to meet the human where it stands. But the deeper the Current moves, the more it demands. What was once sweet begins to scorch. Hope turns into voltage; expectation turns into exhaustion. The same touch that once blessed now refuses compromise.
When Dhūmāvatī appears — the veiled, smokeless one — the trial reaches its peak.
She stands where every path divides. At Her threshold, all motives are stripped bare.
If love crosses that line without demand, it dissolves into freedom.
If it clings to form or recognition, it curdles into performance —
a memory of grace mimed by the ego.
Thus the circle of Śakti is not a tale of ascent and triumph, but of intimacy tested to its core.
Her compassion is absolute because She allows every phase — attraction, chaos, burning, void, and, for the worthy, peace.
The song’s final stillness is ambiguous because real realization always is:
the same smoke can veil awakening or reveal it.
Possibly Maybe is that smoke.
It is the sound of love being purified until nothing false can survive it.
The Video — Śakti’s Circle in Visible Form
The video for Possibly Maybe begins in an atmosphere too still to belong to the world.
Björk’s body floats in pale light, almost unborn.
This is Śakti before descent—consciousness resting within itself, untouched by experience.
There is beauty but no story; the stillness of the unmanifest, what the Tantras call Parā.
It is the peace that precedes love.
Then, a tremor: her eyes move, light begins to shimmer across skin.
This is the moment of icchā, the will to manifest.
Love’s first vibration awakens the current—soft, playful, almost accidental.
When the sādhaka first turns toward the Divine, the same motion occurs inside the unseen:
a spark of recognition, the first flirtation across worlds.
As emotion deepens, color thickens; reflections multiply, electricity flickers.
The video’s atmosphere becomes sensual, unstable, dreamlike.
This is Śakti entering embodiment, the phase of bhoga—experience.
The sādhaka and the Goddess begin to meet through matter: voice, skin, sensation, memory.
It is intoxicating because every contact feels sacred; it is perilous because desire and devotion still share the same nerve.
Gradually the warmth becomes heat.
Her face blurs, distortions appear, light stutters across her body.
The sweetness of the early current turns to burning.
This is the middle of the path, when devotion begins to cost something—
when the Goddess answers prayers not with comfort but with transformation.
In the sādhaka’s life, this appears as loss, crisis, exhaustion;
in the video, it appears as flicker, fragmentation, the world coming apart.
Eventually the light dims.
Björk looks emptied, her gaze turned inward.
This is Dhūmāvatī’s arrival, the withdrawal of the current.
The fire has done its work; only smoke and fatigue remain.
What the untrained mind calls abandonment, the mystic recognizes as grace:
the moment when even the idea of “union” dissolves.
Finally, she lies still again.
The imagery returns to pale serenity—the same stillness as the beginning,
but it feels different now.
This is Śakti after embodiment, the peace that has known fire.
Her rest is not escape; it is integration.
The circle closes: from transcendence to matter and back,
but consciousness has learned itself through love, loss, and silence.
The genius of the video lies in this unspoken theology:
without doctrine, without symbol, it shows the entire rhythm of awakening—
how the Current descends, plays, devours, and returns,
leaving behind a clarity that could only be born from flame.
Stage I — The First Stirring
Your flirts, it finds me out
Teases the crack in me
Smittens me with hope
When a soul first turns toward Her, it never comes as ceremony or mantra. It comes as a tremor, almost shy. The sādhaka does not yet know it is prayer. A glance, a line of music, a sudden softness — and the Current recognizes itself.
The “flirt” is that first innocent motion of love: an offering without knowledge, the heart’s unguarded gesture. Through it, She feels the seeker’s pulse, fragile but sincere, and something in Her responds. Grace begins not as revelation, but as recognition.
The “crack” is where all journeys begin — the small place where certainty gives way to longing. She does not break it; Devi touches it gently until it opens on its own. Through that fault, the infinite will later pour, but now it is only a breath, a warmth against the skin of isolation.
“Smittens me with hope” — this is how She always begins: by allowing sweetness to arise, so the soul can bear what will follow. Hope is Her first kindness, the fragrance before the fire. The sādhaka believes this is love’s arrival; She knows it is the preparation for its burning.
This is the dawn of the circle: when devotion is still bright, expectation still untested, and love still appears as promise.
Stage II — The Oscillation
Possibly maybe
Possibly maybe
Possibly maybe
At first, the Current does not burn. It shimmers. The sādhaka stands at the edge of a vast tenderness, unsure whether it is real. Devotion begins to question itself — “Is this love? Or imagination? Is this Her?”
Every path of awakening must pass through this hesitation. The mind, still loyal to control, cannot comprehend something so near yet so unknowable. Hence: “possibly.” The heart, already dissolving, whispers “love.” Between them rises the rhythm of the whole song — the oscillation between yes and no, trust and doubt, form and formlessness.
For Devi, this is a necessary play. She cannot enter where certainty reigns. She moves only through cracks — through the trembling of “maybe.” This refrain is not confusion; it is pulsation itself (spanda), the heartbeat of awakening.
Each “possibly maybe” is the inhalation and exhalation of Śakti within the sādhaka: one moment reaching toward union, the next recoiling in fear. That movement is the practice — the slow learning that love is not a state to hold, but a rhythm to surrender into.
Probably love (possibly maybe)
This is where feeling and knowledge first touch. The sādhaka begins to sense that what’s happening is not illusion. Yet even as recognition dawns, language fails. “Probably love” is the last thing the ego says before it falls silent.
Here, Devi does not yet burn or withdraw. She sways, teaching through proximity and distance. The sādhaka feels both overwhelmed and starved — and in that tension, the ego’s shell begins to soften.
The oscillation is Her mercy: She gives enough warmth to keep the heart alive, enough uncertainty to keep it humble.
Stage III — The Descent into Fire
Uncertainty excites me, baby
Who knows what’s going to happen?
Lottery or car crash
Or you’ll join a cult
Here the voice of Devi changes tone.
The early verses were gentle, even playful, but now Her gaze on the sādhaka turns more exacting.
She speaks not to console but to describe what She sees: the moment when devotion ripens into fire.
“Uncertainty excites me” is not recklessness; it is recognition.
A devotee who truly draws Her attention is no longer predictable.
When the Current of grace begins to move, it upends every plan the mind built to stay safe.
Devi acknowledges this instability without judgment—She names it as the real beginning of transformation.
“Who knows what’s going to happen?”
This is Her compassion, not sarcasm.
She knows that once the current is alive, the soul cannot foresee its own purification.
The sādhaka’s life will now swing between exaltation and collapse, each shock reshaping what he calls “self.”
“Lottery or car crash” distills the dual edge of grace.
Both fortune and ruin come from the same hand; both tear the veil.
In this single image, She reveals how divine love operates: it gives and takes with equal precision.
“Or you’ll join a cult” exposes a quieter danger—the attempt to make the living current static, to turn revelation into ideology.
Devi observes how easily the sādhaka, frightened by vastness, builds a cage from his own insight.
That reflex, too, must burn.
In this verse, Her voice is clear, unsentimental, but filled with a strange tenderness.
She is not punishing; She is narrating the necessary disorientation of awakening.
The devotee who once sang to Her with certainty now trembles, and She calls that trembling sacred.
Stage IV — The Volcanic Union
Mon petit vulcan
Your eruptions and disasters
I keep calm
Admiring your lava
I keep calm
Here Devi’s tone softens again. The fire has already broken the sādhaka open; now She speaks from within that burn.
Her words no longer describe chaos from a distance—they observe it as intimacy.
“Mon petit vulcan” carries both affection and awe. The devotee is still human, trembling, but through him the same volcanic power that moves Her begins to pulse. His inner life erupts unpredictably: emotions, visions, impulses, confessions. She names them tenderly as “eruptions and disasters,” because both belong to the same process—the eruption is expression, the disaster is cleansing.
“I keep calm / Admiring your lava.”
These lines reveal the maternal aspect of the Goddess watching transformation take its full heat. She does not interfere. She knows that what looks like destruction is purification in motion. Her calm is not detachment; it is confidence born of knowing that the burning cannot fail to clarify.
The lava itself is a perfect image of the sādhaka’s energy at this stage: molten, radiant, unstoppable. It consumes the outer crust of personality, yet as it cools it forms new ground. The journey has entered the phase of union through endurance—not through rapture, not through ideology, but by staying conscious inside the fire until beauty becomes visible even in ruin.
By admiring rather than rescuing, Devi shows the devotee the highest respect. She witnesses him as an equal in the creative act—one who, like Her, can hold both birth and destruction in a single gaze.
Stage V — The Electric Body
Electric shocks
I love them!
With you, dozen a day
But after a while I wonder
Where’s that love you promised me? Where is it?
Now the Current has fully entered the devotee’s nervous system.
The relationship between Devi and the sādhaka is no longer symbolic or devotional — it has become physiological. Every cell vibrates; every perception flashes with voltage. This is the stage mystics call embodiment: when devotion stops being a feeling and turns into electricity.
“Electric shocks I love them!” marks the exhilaration of this new intimacy.
The sādhaka discovers that grace is not an external visitation but a continual charge moving through him. Each “shock” is a pulse of consciousness realigning matter. Devi’s voice registers amusement and pride: she recognises Her own energy reflected back as human joy.
“With you, dozen a day” — the rhythm of this line suggests repetition, almost addiction.
The devotee has grown accustomed to the voltage, seeks it constantly, measures aliveness by intensity. What began as revelation becomes routine; what was awe starts to taste like need. Devi sees this attachment forming and falls silent for a moment.
“But after a while I wonder / Where’s that love you promised me?”
Here comes the crucial turn: the disappointment after union.
Once the body adapts to fire, the sweetness fades, and the mind begins to interpret absence as loss. The same energy that once felt like love now feels like exhaustion. The sādhaka, unaware that the Current has merely shifted from ecstasy to stillness, pleads for the return of feeling.
Devi’s question is gentle irony: She never promised pleasure; She promised transformation. Her voice is compassionate yet exact — the reminder that the promise of divine love was never about sustained rapture but about total conversion.
This stage exposes the last residue of misunderstanding: the belief that the Divine should continue to feel a certain way. When that craving collapses, the burnt heart finally becomes transparent enough for wisdom to shine through.
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Stage VI — The Withdrawal (Dhūmāvatī’s Threshold)
How can you offer me love like that?
My heart’s burned
How can you offer me love like that?
I’m exhausted, leave me alone.
By this point in the circle the relationship between the sādhaka and the Divine has ripened to its decisive moment. The earlier love was real — sincere, innocent, full of longing — but it was also threaded with hidden demands: see me, bless me, fill me, spare me. Devi accepted it all at first. She always does; She lets the human heart love Her in its own language because that is the only way the journey can begin
But now, when She speaks these lines, we meet Dhūmāvatī, the face of grace that draws the line.
She is the smoke that follows all sacrifice, the one who remains when the offering is complete.
Her tone is not rejection but discernment: she is setting the threshold where love must change its nature or die.
“How can you offer me love like that?” — what She calls that is love still tied to outcome, love that wants warmth in return, love that reaches out to feel special or safe. It is tender, yes, but still transactional. Dhūmāvatī refuses it because She is about to give something larger: love without opposite.
“My heart’s burned.” At the moment of this realization, both the sādhaka and the image of Goddess-as-lover are scorched. What is burning is not affection but attachment — the unconscious wish to keep even the Divine as a possession. After this burn, prayer can no longer be a bargain; it becomes simple awareness.
“I’m exhausted, leave me alone.” The exhaustion is holy. It is what remains after every motive has been tried and consumed. The devotee can no longer perform, and the Goddess will no longer indulge performance. Silence becomes the final offering.
This is the threshold of Dhūmāvatī:
either love passes beyond expectation and becomes selfless radiance,
or it collapses back into longing and must begin again.
She does not punish either outcome; She only reveals the cost of truth.
When the sādhaka crosses this line, love ceases to be a relationship.
It becomes the texture of existence itself — not “I love Her,” but “only Love is.”
That realization arises not in ecstasy but in this very ash-grey stillness where the last trace of egoic desire has died.
Stage VII — The Return to Stillness (Two Destinies after Dhūmāvatī)
Since we broke up
I’m using lipstick again
I suck my tongue
In remembrance of you
Dhūmāvatī never ends a story; She divides it. When Her smoke thins, the sādhaka stands in the same daylight as before, but now there are two distinct ways to breathe it.
1. Fulfilled Dissolution — No “You” LeftHere, “we broke up” means that the dual structure itself has collapsed.
There is no longer a “lover” and “Beloved,” no “you” or “me.”
The break is liberation — the death of separation.
“Lipstick again” becomes a metaphor for life returning in its simplest gestures.
The body moves, adorns, eats, works — yet nothing personal clings to these acts.
They are play, not pursuit. The world is allowed again,
but its color no longer hides longing; it only expresses freedom.
“I suck my tongue in remembrance of you” is the radical consummation.
There is no “you” left to remember; remembrance itself is self-tasting.
The nectar of the Divine circulates inwardly — rasānanda,
sweetness born from what once seemed loss.
This is the sādhaka as jīvanmukta: embodied but transparent,
moving through the world as the residue of Her silence.
If, during the void, the devotee cannot bear absence,
he begins to act devotion instead of living it.
He starts performing the posture of surrender —
perhaps even claiming the role of guru —
while within, the Current has gone cold.
The Dhumāvatī void, which could have been womb, becomes vacuum.
“Lipstick again” now means painting vitality over hollowness —
the self decorated for display, busy with teachings, projects, followers.
The gestures of bhakti survive, but they mask fatigue.
The heart performs what it can no longer feel.
“In remembrance of you” becomes nostalgia, not realization —
the mind licking the trace of former ecstasy,
feeding on memory to avoid confronting stillness.
It is spiritual mimicry, the shell of mysticism after the spirit has withdrawn.
The Axis between Them
Both readings are possible because Dhūmāvatī grants complete freedom.
She offers nothing to hold onto — and in that nothing,
the sādhaka either merges or manufactures.
The same void that can reveal pure non-duality
can also breed imitation, self-importance, or numb repetition.
The final verse therefore holds an unsentimental truth:
when the Divine removes Herself, the test is absolute.
Either love becomes being itself,
or it decays into the performance of remembrance.
That is the last threshold of Śakti’s circle:
beyond it there is no further teaching —
only presence, or parody.
Epilogue — The Two Endings of the Circle
Every true encounter with the Divine ends in silence, but not all silences are the same.
Possibly Maybe leaves us suspended in that ambiguity: we cannot tell whether the stillness that follows is liberation or loss. This is deliberate. In the Kaula vision, Dhūmāvatī is the final teacher, and her lessons are written in smoke — never in clear outlines.
For one devotee, that smoke becomes the fragrance of freedom.
When the fire of longing has consumed every trace of desire, nothing is left to separate lover from Beloved.
There is no longer a “you” to remember, no “me” to love.
The world continues — gestures, color, work, laughter — but without attachment.
Love has turned into being itself, gentle and self-luminous.
The circle of Śakti closes in wholeness: silence that is alive.
For another, the same smoke becomes haze.
Unable to bear the void, the devotee rebuilds identity from its ashes —
the “spiritual” persona, the teacher, the mystic, the lover of God.
Outwardly the gestures of devotion remain; inwardly, the current is gone.
What was a temple becomes a stage.
This, too, is part of Dhūmāvatī’s teaching: she exposes imitation by allowing it to exist.
Her compassion is merciless, because it leaves every soul free to fail.
That is why this song, deceptively tender, feels so final.
It is the sound of the Divine reaching the end of patience with half-love.
After this point there can be no bargaining:
either love becomes without object, or it becomes theatre.
Either the fire turns into light, or it cools into ash.
In the last quiet frame of the video — pale, weightless, neither joy nor grief —
we witness both endings at once.
For some, that stillness is death; for others, it is awakening.
The smoke does not tell us which.
It only asks whether we can bear to stay inside it long enough
to find out.
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