"The Self that is always shining as 'I'"

Dear readers,

First of all, I must thank everybody who have kindly written to me after reading my first blog post. I am deeply grateful for your support and encouragement! Secondly, I must apologise for not having written anything in months. It has been an intense time (it seems working on a PhD always is), but I will try to write more often in future.

Anyway, let’s continue where we stopped. (For those who have not yet read the introductory post I advise you to read it first before continuing with this one.)

“[...] the wrong notion, "I am not the Lord" which is due to ignorance in the worldly people, in regard to the Self, that is always shining as "I", is removed by the Śāstra as follows: -

(1) He, who is possessed of power of freedom in respect of knowledge and action, is " Īśvara", as is the one whom we know through Purāṇas and Āgamas. You are such.” (Iyer, Pandey, Dwivedi, 1986: 164) 

Some of the most important notions of the pratyabhijñā school (and non-dual Kashmir Śaivism in general) are mentioned here: “the Self, that is always shining as “I”” and “power of freedom in respect of knowledge and action”. What does it mean that the Self is “shining” and that it is “shining as “I””? According to pratyabhijñā (from Utpaladeva onwards), two aspects of absolute Consciousness can be identified, prakāśa (light) and vimarśa (self-awareness). Prakāśa, as already the name suggests, is the quality of the absolute Consciousness that makes everything manifest. To be precise, it is actually not a quality but the nature of the Consciousness as such. It is the nature of Consciousness to manifest and Consciousness is that without which, according to pratyabhijñā, nothing could manifest. Without light, everything would vanish in darkness, and without the light of Consciousness, nothing at all would appear. If anything apperas, it is because the Consciousness illuminates it. Consciousness is the ultimate Illuminatior - it is the absolute Consciousness alone that “shines” and it shines as “I”. Now this “I” is of course not the little ego bound to any particular individual identity, but the pure “I-ness”, the sheer fact of subjectivity. If we forget the contents of consciousness (which is, of course, immensely hard) and concentrate on consciousness as such, if we are able to empty the consciousness of all objects, only the supreme “I”, the Subject, the Self remains. Even to say that we “concentrate” on consciousness as such is a mistake, since there is nothing to concentrate upon - consciousness can never become an object of concentration or meditation. It is not the thing illumined, it is not a concept, it is what is always shining and illuminating everything else, shining as pure “I”. 

According to non-dual Kashmir Śaivism, the supreme Consciousness in not a static, non-personal and strictly transcendental entity, but rather full of vibrant force and absolutley free. The divine freedom or sovereignty (svātantrya) is actually one of the most important and distinctive notions of the non-dual Kashmir Śaivism. The absolute Self is aboslutely free “in respect of knowledge and action” - omniscient and omnipotent. It creates, maintains and eventually destroys the cosmos (viśva) by its trinity of powers, the power of will (icchā śakti), the power of knowledge (jñāna śakti) and the power of action (kriyā śakti).

It may all sound very abstract and difficult to comprehend and there is also an additional danger with trying to make sense of Kashmir Śaivism and that is projecting dualistic notions to the system that is essentially as monistic as it gets. In order to make the whole thing more palpable, what I find very illustrative is the dream analogy.

For a moment, imagine that you are Śiva (and according to Kashmir Śaivism, the fact that you are indeed Śiva is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so you are actually not imagining but just recognising the ultimate Reality). You need not worry about being blue, sitting on a tiger’s fur, carrying all those snakes and the trisul - that is of the least importance to our task at hand. There is only one accessory that you need and that is your consciousness and its power of imagination. Forget everything but consciousness. There is nothing but consciousness. Nothing outside consciousness. Now being conscious, you have the power to imagine anything. You have full freedom to imagine anything. Nothing outside conditions your imagination. If you try to be aware of consciousness empty of any specific content, just aware of the fact that you are indeed able to create anything in your consciousness, you might feel this potentiality of consciousness as a cretain inner tension or rather a vibration - in non-dual Kashmir Śaivism the inherently dynamic, vibratory nature of consciousness is called spanda. Now, when you decide you’ve had enough of resting in the nature of consciousness as such, try to feel the power of will to create, to imagine, to express - not anything specific, yet, just the will to imagine something … This stage is analogous to icchā śakti, the power of will. In the next step, decide what it is that you will imagine - let’s say you are bold and decide to imagine a tiger. At the moment, you are not yet imagining any specific tiger, you just have a vague ideat of an abstract tiger that you will imagine - the capacity of consciousness at work at that stage is called jñāna śakti, the power of knowledge. Finally, visualise your inner tiger as vividly as possible. A tiger is sitting in front of you in your inner vision as if it was real. The power of your consciousness that has made the tiger is kriyā śakti. Through all those stages, you are aware both of the object you are creating (the tiger) as well as of yourself as the subject-creator. 

But in order to have more fun with your beautifully imagined tiger, you may want to forget you have created it. The best way to do it is to fall asleep and to forget it is you who are the creator of the dream world - to forget yourself as the subject-creator and to identify fully with the created object(s). It is what happens in the next stage of creation, when the Consciousness does what is - according to the texts - “the most difficult” and hides itself from itself using its own power of illusion (māyā śakti). So now you may dream you are the tiger or you may create another object to identify with. Let’s say you dream you are a young princess taking a stroll by the river. Everything you imagine, the whole dream world, the tiger, the princess and the river are, of course, nothing but the dreaming consciousness and yet in the dream you happen to identify with the princess and observe the dream world through her eyes. Your perspective now being bound to the object “the princess”, which in your dream you mistake to be the subject (“I”), you are prone to like certain things and dislike others. Daydreaming of a beautiful young prince, whom you like, you happen to come across something you strongly dislike - the terrible tiger. You are immensely afraid of the tiger, especially since it shows a serious intention of attacking you. He jumps towards you - and what usually happens in such moments in a dream is that you wake up. The sacred texts also report that what might happen in cases of great fear is that the consciousness expands and awakens from its dream. (That is one of the reasons why the terrible aspects of the divine are worshipped.) However, the analogy is useful only to some extent - from a dream you awake to a seemingly other reality of a waking state and realise the dream was only an illusion. You are not a princess and there is no tiger attacking you, you are someone else in a safe warm bed. That is why the dream analogy is more often used by those schools that claim the phenomenal world is an unreal illusion, most tipically by advaita vedānta. It is therefore somewhat tricky to use it as an illustration of Kashmir Śaivism. In Kashmir Śaivism, the awakening does not mean realising the phenomenal world to be unreal but instead realising the phenomenal world is actually nothing but consciousness! Since there is nothing outside absolute Consciousness, no level of creation is more or less real. Can you say your consciousness is less real when you are dreaming than when you are meditating? Not if you understand it the way Kashmir Śaivism does, as the ultimate substratum. The conscoiousness does not change, it only shifts awareness between being aware of itself as Subject (pure “I”), Subject and Object or objects (the world). 

To conclude with, let me quote one of the poems (actually “sayings”, vākhs) by the fourteenth-century Kashmiri poet and mystic Lal Děd (also known as Lalla, Lalleśvarī and Lal’ ārifa) (in Ranjit Hoskote’s traslation):

Neither You nor I, neither object nor meditation,

just the All-Creator, lost in His dreams.

Some don’t get it, but those who do

are carried away on the wave of Him. 

(Hoskote, 2011:118)

… to be continued … 

References 

Hoskote, R. (trans.) (2011). I, Lalla. The Poems of Lal Děd. Delhi: Penguin Books India. 

Iyer, K. A., Pandey, K. C., & Dwivedi, R. C. (1986). Īśvara-pratyabhijñā-vimarśinī of Abhinavagupta: Doctrine of divine recognition. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

"You are such"

Dear reader,

welcome to SARVAṂ SARVĀTMAKAM, a blog dedicated to pondering over selected excerpts from the texts of non-dual Kasmir Śaivism as well as academic studies on the topic. I am a graduate student of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana (capital of Slovenia). For someone studying philosophy in Ljubljana, I have chosen quite an unusual research topic - the philosophy of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism (specifically, I am interested in the correspondences between ontology and aesthetics). I am immensely grateful to my mentor (herself a specialist in Asian philosophies, especially Chinese and Japanese) for her invaluable support as well as to other members of the Department of Philosophy for their open-mindedness. However, studying Kashmir Śaivism in Slovenia, a tiny country of no more than 2 million inhabitants, can be a lonesome enterprise at times. Through this blog, I would like to reach out to others also interested in Kashmir Śaivism. Any response on your behalf will be greatly appreciated!

To begin with, I have chosen a short passage from Abhinavagupta’s Īśvara-pratyabhijñā-vimarśinī  (ĪPV) (for English translation, see Iyer, Pandey and Dwivedi, 1986; probably the quickest and easiest way to access the original text is via Muktabodha on-line digital library), one of those classical works anybody interested in the philosophy of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism would stumble upon rather sooner than later. It is itself a commentary of another classical text, Utpaladeva’s Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā (ĪPK) (see Torella, 2002), a text in which many key-features of what is commonly perceived as the philosophy of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism are established. One of those - if not THE one - for which non-dual Kashmir Śaivism is most famous, is the notion of the Self as Śiva. (An interesting further reading on the topic of Self in non-dual Kashmir Śaivism, especially with reference to Utpaladeva’s contribution, is Dyczkowski, 1990.)

The age-old question to which Indian traditions are trying to find an answer is, of course, “Who am I?” Who or what is “the Self”? Who is this mysterious “I” that can never become an object of thought, this pure subjectivity that seems to enliven everything else? The body, the vital energy, the mind, can all become an object of thought - we sure do identify with them in every-day life, but we can as well dis-identify from them, as the practitioners of meditation have testified time and again. If I am not the body, if I am not the mind, if I am not the senses or prāṇa - who, then, am I? Tat tvam asi, “You are that”, aham brahmāsmi, “I am Brahman”, famously proclaim the Upaniṣads. But what exactly is this “that”, tat, what is the nature of Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, and how does the eternal divine principle relate to the small individual self that seems to be so frustrated, so tormented in worldly bondage?

The philosophy of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism is a  series of stunning, profound, complex and amazingly beautiful answers to those questions - to truly understand it is a goal to which ancient as well as contemporary giants of spirit have dedicated their whole lives. I can in no way claim to be fit for this task. What follows is therefore only a very limited simplification.

The Ultimate Reality, the Masters say, is Śiva - the Absolute. It is absolute consciousness (cit), constantly aware of itself - this self-awarensess (vimarśa) of the absolute consciousness is absolute bliss (ānanda). It is a bliss that is inherently dynamic, a subtle inner vibration (spanda) of the Absolute. The blissful absolute consciousness is immensely potent and creative - it is sheer essence of life, pure divine power (Śakti), and by its own will, it manifests itself as the Cosmos. In the Cosmos, Śiva is both immanent and transcendent - there is nothing in Cosmos that is not Śiva, but there is much in Śiva that is beyond cosmic manifestation.  Due to certain mechanisms in its own divine play (krīḍā), the absolute consciousness willingly limits itself through a sort of self-forgetfulness, by which it forgets about two of its key characteristics - omnipotence and omniscience. But what was fogotten can be remebered again - the Self, though seemingly limited, can be led to recognition (pratyabhijñā) of its own true nature. And this is exactly what is the task of scriptures - and of philosophy, as well. It is a bold bet of the pratyabhijñā school of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism that the Self can be made to recognise itself with a little help of argumentation. Thus Abhinavagupta writes:       

“[...] the wrong notion, "I am not the Lord" which is due to ignorance in the worldly people, in regard to the Self, that is always shining as "I", is removed by the  Śāstra as follows: -

(1) He, who is possessed of power of freedom in respect of knowledge and action, is " Īśvara", as is the onewhom we know through Purāṇas and  Āgamas. You are such.” 

(Iyer, Pandey, Dwivedi, 1986: 164)

… to be continued …

References

Dyczkowski, M. S. G. (1990). Self Awareness, Own Being and Egoity. Varanasi: Ratna Printing Works.

Iyer, K. A., Pandey, K. C., & Dwivedi, R. C. (1986). Īśvara-pratyabhijñā-vimarśinī of Abhinavagupta: Doctrine of divine recognition. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Torella, R. (2002). The Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā of Utpaladeva with the author's vṛtti: Critical edition and annotated translation. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.