If you ask this question to Sri Krishna, he would perhaps reply that where is my Power to save and liberate coming from? He will possibly also draw our attention to his own Daivi Prakriti, Divine Nature (other than the lower nature in which the jiva is entangled) from which the jiva has emerged, Paraprakriti Jivabhoota and who pushes him towards his true path and goal through the swabhava.
If we insist, as some Vedantins do, to separate the Purusha and the Prakriti, Sri Krishna may well point out the experience of tantric mystics who say that it is impossible to have the Grace of Sri Krishna without the Grace of Radha and that before Sri Krishna liberates us, Kali must first clear the path as she did in the Kurukshetra as an incarnation in Draupadi. He may even point out the teaching of the Mahabhagawat Purana according to which Shyama or Kali became Shyam and Shiva became Radha.
Sri Aurobindo reminds us in Savitri this profound truth of the unity of the Ishwara and His Shakti everywhere whether explicitly stated or not.
‘He is the substance, he the self of things;
She has forged from him her works of skill and might:
She wraps him in the magic of her moods
And makes of his myriad truths her countless dreams.
The Master of being has come down to her,
An immortal child born in the fugitive years.
In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives,
Dreaming she chases her idea of him,
And catches here a look and there a gest:
Ever he repeats in them his ceaseless births.
He is the Maker and the world he made,
He is the vision and he is the Seer;
He is himself the actor and the act,
He is himself the knower and the known,
He is himself the dreamer and the dream.
There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;
In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met
And light and darkness are their eyes’ interchange;
Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,
Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;
They are married secretly in our thought and life.
The universe is an endless masquerade:
For nothing here is utterly what it seems;
It is a dream-fact vision of a truth
Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,
A phenomenon stands out significant
Against dim backgrounds of eternity;
We accept its face and pass by all it means;
A part is seen, we take it for the whole.
Thus have they made their play with us for roles:
Author and actor with himself as scene,
He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she.’
‘As long as Nature lasts, he too is there,
For this is sure that he and she are one;
Even when he sleeps, he keeps her on his breast:
Whoever leaves her, he will not depart
To repose without her in the Unknowable.’
There is a truth to know, a work to do;
Her play is real; a Mystery he fulfils:
There is a plan in the Mother’s deep world-whim,
A purpose in her vast and random game.
This ever she meant since the first dawn of life,
This constant will she covered with her sport,
To evoke a Person in the impersonal Void,
With the Truth-Light strike earth’s massive roots of trance,
Wake a dumb self in the inconscient depths
And raise a lost Power from its python sleep
That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time
And the world manifest the unveiled Divine.
For this he left his white infinity
And laid on the spirit the burden of the flesh,
That Godhead’s seed might flower in mindless Space.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
