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Shakti
Sage Viswamitra said, "Oh Rama! The great Goddess Durga represents the feminine aspect and the Shakti (energy/power) of the One God (The Brahman), as well as the empowering and protective nature of motherhood. From her forehead sprang Kali, who is the feminine form of Kaala" i.e. "time." She is the primordial energy as the power of Time, literally, the "creator or doer of time"—her first manifestation. After a time, she manifests as "space," as Tara, from which point further creation of the material universe progresses. The divine Mother, Devi Adi Parashakti, manifests herself in various forms, representing the universal creative force. She becomes Mother Nature (Mula Prakriti), who gives birth to all life forms as plants, animals, and such from herself, and she sustains and nourishes them through her body, that is the earth with its animal life, vegetation, and minerals.

Ultimately, she re-absorbs all life forms back into herself, or "devours" them to sustain her as the power of death feeding on life to produce new life. She also gives rise to Maya (the illusory world) and to Prakriti, the force that galvanizes the divine ground of existence into self-projection as the cosmos. Adi Parashakti manifested the Earth itself. The primordial feminine creative-preservative-destructive energy, Shakti, considered as the motive force behind all action and existence in the phenomenal cosmos. The cosmos itself is Purusha, the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality that is the Divine Ground of all being, the "world soul."