the working the body necessarily presupposes and finds such a static support, hence perhaps the name Muladhara, the fundamental support. In one sense, the static Shakti at the Muladhara is necessarily coexistent with the creating and evolving Shakti of the body, because the dynamic aspect or pole can never be without its static counterpart. In another sense, it is the Shakti left over (you have yourself pointed this out, and the italics are yours), after the Prithivi--the last of the Bhutas--has been created, a magazine of power to be drawn upon and utilized for further activity, if there should arise any need for such. Taking the two senses together (yours as well as mine), Shakti at the Muladhara is both coexistent with every act of creation or manifestation and is the residual effect of such act--both cause and effect, in fact--an idea which, deeply looked into, shows no real contradiction. There is, in fact, what the physicist will describe as a cycle or circuit in action. Let us take the impregnated ovum--the earliest embryological stage of the living body. In it the Kundali

[paragraph continues] Shakti is already presented in its two polar aspects: the ovum, which the mother-element represents, one pole (possibly the static), and the , which is the father-element, represents the other (possibly the dynamic). From their fusion proceed those processes which the biologist calls differentiation and integration; but in all this process of creation the cycle can be fairly easily traced. Shakti flows out of the germinal cell (fertilised ovum), seizes upon foreign matter, and assimilates it and thereby grows in bulk; divides and subdivides itself, and then again co-ordinates all its divided parts into one organic whole. Now in all this we have the cycle. Seizing upon foreign matter is an outwardly directed activity, assimilation is an inwardly directed activity or return current; cell division and multiplication is an outwardly directed operation, co-ordination is inwardly directed; and so on. The force in the germ-cell is overflowing, but also continuously it is flowing back into itself, the two operations presupposing and sustaining each other, as in every circuit.