Some readers may have noticed that I claim to “practice and teach in the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. “

What does this mean?

Kashmir Shaivism is the name that modern-day scholars have given to a cosmological View and body of practices gathered together and synthesized from ancient Tantrik traditions by a group of yogi-philosophers living in Kashmir from about the 8th to the 12th centuries AD. Back then, the tradition, or aspects of it, were known by terms such as Trika and Pratyabhijna (Self-recognition). The most successful practitioner and sophisticated philosopher was Abhinavagupta.

Abhinavagupta was the best kind of philosopher: one who was comfortable with the unknowable, with paradox, and with whatever lies beyond paradox. He pulled together a number of different strands of Tantra into an incredibly open, exploratory, life-affirming world View based on yogic experience.

Over the centuries, commentators and interpreters have sometimes to try to pin Abhinavagupta down in ways that limit the View of Reality being presented as Kashmir Shaivism. So the short explanation I offer here may differ from what you read elsewhere.

Despite the complexities of Abhinava’s writing, he was a practical guy who always took the shortest route to Reality.

For instance, the Advaitists had been claiming that dualism, the appearing of the world as separate objects, is an illusion to be transcended. In fact, they claimed that the world itself is an illusion. Only Brahman is real.

Abhinava said, why get so complicated about things? “This is unreal; that is real.” It all leads to a big, clunky mess.

Abhinava’s View as a philosopher and a yogi was that duality and nonduality are both facts. Neither one is supreme. They come together in one package.

Why? Because that’s what the world does. It appears as different things. It appears as continuous, and it appears as one. Or you could say it appears as difference, as difference/nondifference, and as nondifference. That is its essential nature, or its essential freedom, as Abhinava would say.

This is the first point. There is no question of illusion or nonillusion. There is just one, all-encompassing world process of which you can have a limited, or less limited, or limitless View.

For instance, the world of an ant is generally more circumscribed than the world of a human being. Each being has its characteristic View. On the other hand, the View, or world, of an aggressive, anxious, overworking, typically “successful” type-A person is more circumscribed than that of a yogi. And so on.

The Tantrik practitioner does not rip away the everyday world to discover the transcendent real world. She relaxes her own limitations to discover a wider View, a more inclusive Reality that was always there, perfect from the beginning. Ultimately, the Tantrik practitioner discovers that all of life, in every form or state of formlessness, is of “one taste”: the taste of beauty, wisdom, and compassion.

Second, the entire cosmos, manifest and unmanifest, is nothing but consciousness and energy. Consciousness and energy, or Shiva and Shakti, are not really two separate phenomena, but they can appear as such. This is exactly the same as saying that the cosmos has the freedom to appear in various ways. It is also exactly the same as saying that the world is continuous, and that it is of “one taste.”

You don’t have to believe me. If you do enough sadhana, or just luck out, you will know this first hand.

In fact, all of the basics of the View of Kashmir Shaivism derive from first-hand experience, and so are accessible to anyone who cares to “go there.”

Third, the world is expressive. It expresses itself. There is a communicative aspect. We call this Duality. Duality is an expression, and it is a theater of expression. Only in the appearing of duality is the play of communication possible, for instance, the play of communication between Guru and disciple. Duality is a rich field of freedom of expression, not a curse. It only feels like a curse when we are convinced that separateness is our base condition, or if we treat individual experiencing as something bad to be transcended.

Fourth, the creation operates in a simple way. Everything works the same way all the way through every level of creation. For instance, making a baby in the usual way, making an object appear out of “thin air” as some yogis can, and making the world appear all happen through the same fundamental life process of Shiva/Shakti, or consciousness and energy. They only look like different processes from a certain point of View.

Finally, the point of practice is to realize one’s nondifference from the entire world process.

Another way of saying this is that we practice to relax our limitations of View so that we can participate fully in life as human beings.

And yet another way of saying this is that, through practice, we gain a much expanded embodied knowledge of the world process.

In considering any of these statements, it is important to realize that embodied knowledge means useable knowledge, not conceptual knowing.

The search for ultimate truth and knowing is a dead end, in the View of Kashmir Shaivism. The essential characteristic of the universe is openness, or infinite potential. This cannot be known in the usual sense. But it can be embodied with awareness. And that is a very sweet fruit indeed.

OM Shanti,
Shambhavi

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