Within the Shakta vision, ultimate reality is understood as Shakti, the Divine Mother, who is not a secondary power or mere consort but the very essence of consciousness and its dynamic potency. Shakti is the primordial, cosmic energy that creates, sustains, and dissolves the universe, and at the same time is identical with Brahman, the absolute. Rather than a static, featureless ground, this absolute is emphasized as living, creative, self-aware power. All deities and all phenomena are regarded as manifestations or expressions of this one Shakti, who is the source, substance, and sustainer of everything that appears.

This ultimate reality is described as both transcendent and immanent, impersonal and personal. As the formless, attributeless absolute, Shakti is pure consciousness-power beyond all names and forms; as the personal Divine Mother, she appears as various goddesses through whom devotees relate to the sacred. Shakti thus pervades all existence as the underlying energy in every being and event, so that the entire universe may be viewed as her body or field of expression. The same reality that is worshiped as a compassionate, protective, and sometimes fiercely transformative Mother is simultaneously the unmanifest ground in which all worlds arise and into which they return.

Shaktism also stresses the inseparable unity of consciousness and power, often symbolized as Shiva and Shakti. Conceptually, consciousness (Shiva) and its power (Shakti) can be distinguished, yet they are ultimately one non-dual reality, two aspects of a single absolute. Shakti is therefore not something added to consciousness from outside, but consciousness itself in its active, creative mode. Spiritual realization, in this framework, consists in recognizing that the true Self is not other than this Shakti-Brahman, and that one’s own consciousness is fundamentally non-different from the Divine Mother who is the ultimate reality.