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Stalking the Strange Serpent

Death-throes of a seeker
Philip Davies
January 2009

“Love is the sea of not-being, and there intellect drowns.” Rumi

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CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Reality – The True Home
3. The Void
4. The Plenum
5. Bad Move?
6. To Be or Not to Be?
7. The One and the Paradox of Manifestation
8. The Self and the Paradox of Consciousness
9. Holograms and Fractals
10. Concepts of Identity
11. The Illusion of Continuity
12. The Paradox of Identification – ‘Asmita’
13. I Think, Therefore I Am (I think) –aren’t I?
14. Creation and ‘Maya’
15. Quantum physics
16. The Bad News - Limitation
17. Whose illusion? The Purusha Paradox
18. The Divine Actor and the Paradox of Omnipotence
19. The Good News – The Bluffing Serpent
20. Mind the Big Bang!
21. The Problem of Solipsism
22. The Multi-player ‘Omega’ Game
23. The Story so Far…
24. The Divine Nescience
25. Free Will – The Paradox of Choice
26. Spiritual methods – The Paradox of Practice
27. Who awakens? – The Paradox of Enlightenment
28. The Divine Omniscience
29. New Age confusion 1 – ‘Create Your Life!’
30. New Age confusion 2 – ‘Parallel Universes’
31. Ancient confusion 1 – ‘The Hierarchy in Creation’
32. Ancient confusion 2 – ‘The Hierarchy in Consciousness’
33. Uncoiling the Serpent - Liberation
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1. Introduction

1.1
This essay is an exploration of our true nature, Reality,
Consciousness and manifestation/creation. It is a personal overview
that necessarily must leave out a mass of interesting detail in order to
focus on the main structural elements. I dare say there is not a single
original idea in it. If there is anything original it is in the synthesis of
these ideas into my own overview (though many may have come to a
similar view). I set it down on paper for two reasons: I have not come
across a similar summary elsewhere, though there may be one; and
because of the fun of making explicit ideas that have been floating
around within me for years. I hope to make these ideas as clear as
possible, not least for my own benefit. I hope I have avoided any
abstruse or over-technical philosophical ideas or arguments, and hope
that anyone with an interest in these matters could follow the account
fairly easily. The ideas are presented concisely so their full impact
may need some time for reflection, and perhaps some re-reading.
They also form, I hope, one more or less integrated picture, so
skipping over sections is not recommended!

1.2
I draw freely from the many metaphysical/philosophical traditions
that I have trawled through over the years. Of these there are three or
four which seem to me to be the most adequate, and to which we can
refer to illustrate our points. Yet none are without their problems and
paradoxes, and this is perhaps inevitable when dealing with ultimate
matters. The net of understanding gets all tangled when it tries to
capture its own threads.
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1.3
It does not take much to tie the thinking process up in knots. Take
the sentence – ‘This statement is false’. If that statement is false then
its opposite must be true i.e. the statement is true. But if what it says
is true then we are back with it being false. If it is true, it is false; and
vice versa. We seem to be stuck with a contradiction, an
inconsistency, whichever way we turn. This might seem a trite verbal
conundrum but it is the most succinct example of a group of
anomalies known as self-referential paradoxes. These have been a
veritable ‘snake in the grass’ for some philosophical system builders,
leading to, at best, some inconvenient re-working; at worst, a fatal
poisoning. This kind of paradox will play a perhaps surprisingly
central part in our account.

1.4
The metaphysical traditions are also never really complete, and this is
perhaps also inevitable when dealing with ultimate matters. Mental
understanding is a finite function and must miss much when trying to
apprehend the infinite. There is a delightful result in mathematical
logic known as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. This shows that no
matter how powerful a coherent theory is, there must always be
truths (recognised as such by the theory) which can never be proved
by the theory. This helps develops a healthy respect for the
unknowable - something must always slip through the net of
understanding.

1.5
Whilst bearing in mind, then, that we are perhaps bound to be prone
to paradox and incompleteness, we can draw freely from some eastern
traditions: – Kashmir Shaivism, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, Sufism
and the Samkhya system; and from the west we can look at the Neo-
Platonism of Plotinus and, in passing, concepts from Kant, Descartes
and Wittgenstein. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my fellow truth-
seeker, John Jamieson, for help with clarity on the ideas in section
22, which draws on insights from his philosophical model, ‘The
Omega Shift’. It is useful as well to bring simple analogies from
modern scientific culture, and to look at parallels in Quantum
physics. We can also look at some contemporary (‘New Age’)
confusions arising from these concepts. If the ideas seem excessively
abstract I would encourage a little persistence, as their ramifications
(for those interested in ‘spiritual’ matters) become clearer the more
account progresses.

2. Reality – the True Home

In an age of hard-headed scientific materialism it can seem odd to link

two such seemingly distinct concepts. ‘Reality’ – the ultimate stuff of
the (physical) world - has a cold, objective ring to it; what has that to
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do with me or my ‘true home’? For that is a notion that seems

personal, warm and intimate. The link is Consciousness. The concept
of ‘Consciousness’ is perhaps the most profound and inscrutable of
all. Yet it alone can answer the needs of an inclusive account of
Reality. For nothing is more immediate or intimate than our
consciousness, the source of all our subjectivity. But as we shall see,
it is much more than that. It is also transcendent, utterly beyond
‘me’, the changeless Source of the ‘external’ world. As such it is a
notion that would satisfy the hardest of scientific heads seeking
substantial objective permanence. It includes all ‘subjects’ and all
‘objects’ and is also beyond them all. We can perhaps say that these
two concepts reflect different aspects of our nature. ‘Reality’ answers
to our desire for the solid ground of complete understanding – clarity
in the ‘head’, whilst the concept of ‘coming Home’ reflects the longing
in the ‘heart’ for ultimate peace. Both head and heart are included in
our nature as Consciousness.

3. The Void

3.1
We may as well start with nothing. To be truly at home, in the deepest
sense, is surely to be profoundly happy; yet being ‘happy’ is actually
very hard to describe. We continually project ideas about what
happiness consists in, and actively pursue courses of action to obtain
the right situations, circumstances, relations and objects that would
seem to guarantee it. Yet experience reveals that there are no such
situations etc. that can guarantee it. Conversely, in moments of true
happiness the prevailing circumstances can seem incidental. There is
nothing that one could point to, as it were, and say with any surety
–‘this is (or creates) happiness’. Happiness is a no-thing, or nothing.

3.2
I remember once as a student staying up for two days and nights.
When I finally lay down to sleep I was astonished at how much pure
joy and happiness welled up from within. I remember contemplating
that I had spent two days and nights running around pursuing
happiness, basically, when all the happiness I could want was there
as I entered the (temporary) oblivion of sleep. It was as if all the
contents of my mental consciousness obscured a prior happiness that
only started to show its face as all that content (and the sense of ‘me’)
was being obliterated. It seemed as if I’d had a glance at something
usually obscured by a veil of normal ‘wakefulness’, but which came
into its own during sleep – hence the refreshing power of sleep. It
seemed desirable, then, to be able to extend that glance and
experience that happiness while somehow remaining conscious; not
merely to have access to it during the unconsciousness of sleep.
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3.3
It is probably because of a similar perspective that some traditions
approach this matter negatively – to arrive at Reality/Home not by
pursuing or attaining something; rather, by losing something, by a
process of elimination of the covering veils. Christian mystics talk of
the ‘Via Negativa’. These veils must include a host of concepts and a
habitual ‘understanding’; and a host of limiting or painful feelings –
suffering. One would arrive at Reality as the end of a process of
elimination, a place empty of obscuring concepts and feelings.

3.4
So in terms of conceptual understanding we often see, in the various
traditions, Reality described only negatively. We note the Vedantic
maxim which describes Reality (‘Brahman’) as ‘Neti, Neti’ – ‘not this,
not this’; or in Plotinus’ philosophy where Reality (the ‘One’) is strictly
indescribable and can only be referred to as ‘the not this’ (Enneads
5.5.6.13). There is a pithy Sufi aphorism – “As a matter of fact, it is not
so”. We may also note the Christian mystic classic work which says
that we must pass through a ‘Cloud of Unknowing’. There is also the
remarkable Sutra in Kashmir Shaivism – ‘[conceptual] Knowledge is
bondage’ - (‘Jnanam Bandhaha’, Shiva Sutras I.2).

3.5
In terms of the veils constituted by painful feelings, we see the
emphasis in Buddhism on the cessation of suffering (which is
regarded as the sole justification for doing metaphysics). The
beautiful Buddhist teaching known as ‘The Chain of Dependent
Origination’ outlines the resolving of each factor in suffering, as the
links in the chain of its causation successively come to an end. At the
endpoint of this process of ‘emptying out’ we reach the cessation of
suffering and an absorption in bliss – the state of Nirvana.

3.6
Perhaps the concept that best synthesises the ‘emptying out’ of both
aspects (conceptual understanding and suffering), is the Yogic one of
‘Nirvikalpa Samadhi’ as outlined in Samkhya philosophy; in particular
the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. ‘Nirvikalpa Samadhi’ is considered the
highest realisation of Reality, reached by the complete and permanent
cessation of all agitation, suffering and ignorance. Typically this
means the suspension of all mental/emotional functioning that could
obscure the prior Reality/Consciousness /Happiness –
‘SatChitAnanda’ that is our true Home. This ‘suspension’ is the
purpose and end of the yogic discipline and its various stages.
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3.7
All this description of ‘cessation’ or ‘suspension’ and ‘non-
conceptualisation’ does leave one feeling that Reality is a kind of Void
or ultimate emptiness. Indeed it is precisely characterised as such by
the Buddhist description of it as ‘Shunya’ – emptiness, or a Void,
‘Shunyata’. It is also mind-boggling – for the Void is not any kind of
‘thing’ or place. In that sense it does not ‘exist’.

3.8
Depending upon one’s temperament or experience this may or may
not seem satisfying. If one has had a pretty hard time of things, one
may relish the Void as I relished sleep in my example above. If life is a
living hell and there seems no way it can be redeemed, the Void
sounds pretty appealing. If one is generally having a good time, one
may feel differently. One may ask – ‘does everything have to end in
order for Reality to be recognised, to be able to go Home?’

4. The Plenum

4.1
And so we must look to the other side of this coin. It is just as
possible, after all, to use a positive term – to intuit the presence of a
quality rather than simply assert the absence of its opposite. The
Shaivite philosopher Ksemaraja equates the complete absence of
agitation or suffering with the positive quality ‘Ananda’ –
bliss/love/happiness. By extension to other qualities Reality is thus
full of: (higher) Knowledge/Consciousness – known as ‘Chiti’ (absence
of ignorance or inert confusion or dullness); Freedom – known as
‘Svatantrya’ (absence of constraint or limitation or boundary); Power –
known as ‘Shakti’ (absence of powerlessness or weakness); and so on.
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4.2
The system of Kashmir Shaivism is pre-eminent in describing Reality
as a Plenum – absolutely and perfectly full and complete (‘Purna’),
lacking nothing. In particular, it emphasises the numerous powers,
or ‘shaktis’, that give potency to this fullness or Plenum. It contains
all possibilities and the powers to actualise them. But at the same
time it is not bound by being any particular thing or object, nor any
particular self or subject. In it there is no conflict, because there are
no objects to collide, nor subjects who may be in disharmony. It is
one and indivisible for there is nothing to divide it. So it seems we
have a picture of Reality as simultaneously Void and Plenum – perfect
pristine infinite emptiness, yet brim full, vibrant and alive. It is also
our true nature, our original nature, as the Buddhists have it.
Sounds pretty good – in fact the Platonic systems refer to it as ‘The
Good’.

5. Bad Move?

5.1
If Reality/Home is so Good then, why, one may ask, was there ever a
journey away (even if only apparently)? Why did Reality create
something apparently ‘other’? How did this happen? These two
questions are, of course, among the ultimate metaphysical questions.
In religious terms – ‘Why and how did God create the universe?’ For
there seems to be quite a lot of work to do, to reconcile the
consequences of this move away from Home, with the nature of the
Reality that initiated it. As Douglas Adams has put it:

“The story so far:

In the beginning the universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as
a bad move.”
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As regards the ‘How?’ this will be looked at below in sections 8

onwards.

5.2
As to the ‘Why?’ there are two traditional kinds of answers.
The first kind of answer is that something was gained by the ‘move
away’ and the ‘return’. Perhaps it is most beautifully expressed in the
poetry of T.S. Eliot: (Four Quartets, Little Gidding)

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The crucial line is the final one. The journey away and the return
arouse a Knowledge or Recognition (even appreciation) of Reality. As
the old adage has it – ‘you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til you lose it’.
The Sufis have a traditional saying – ‘I was a Hidden Treasure and I
longed to be known, so I created the World.’ In a truly wonderful
account of his own realisation, Dr. Franklin Merrell -Wolff (‘Philosophy
of Consciousness without an Object’) uses the analogy of health. A
totally healthy body can go unnoticed –whereas returning to health
from sickness can lead to an appreciation of health that was not there
formerly. Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son is a human drama that
can act as a literary analogy of these ideas. As appealing as these
ideas are, from a strictly metaphysical point of view they are fatally
flawed. For the simple reason that they all imply some lack of
knowledge or appreciation of Reality in the ‘first place’. A lack that is
remedied by undergoing the journey. But there is no such lack in the
Plenum.

5.3
The other kind of answer is that it is simply in the nature of Reality to
express itself in a creation. It is brim full of creativity, and it would be
unnatural for it not to create. In some commentaries on the Shiva
Sutras of Kashmir Shaivism it is stated that if Reality (known as
‘Paramashiva’ in this system) did not express itself in creation then it
would not be the vibrant, alive Consciousness that it is, but rather
something inert, ‘like a jar’ ! In Plotinus’ system it is simply in the
superabundant nature of the One to create:

“This, we may say, is the first act of generation: the One, perfect because
it seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing, overflows, as it were,
and its superabundance makes something other than itself.”

This seems more straight-forward, but there can be objections here

that are more subtle and force one to delve more deeply. One way into
this is noting a remark made by one modern commentator on Kashmir
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Shaivism – ‘Just as an artist cannot contain his delight within himself,

but pours it out into a song, or a poem, even so Paramashiva pours out
the delightful wonder of His splendour into manifestation ’ (Jaideva
Singh –The Shiva Sutras Intro vii).

5.4
One may ask here whether there is any compulsion involved in
creation or manifestation. Not external compulsion obviously, but one
internal, as it were, to Paramashiva Himself – He must follow his own
nature? On the face of it the absolute freedom (‘svatantrya’) of
Paramashiva would imply not – He is not bound by His own creativity,
not forced to act merely because He can. But then we haven’t
answered our question, merely pushed it back further. We may now
ask – ‘if Paramashiva is not forced to exercise His creative power, then
why did He?’ The reply might be that it is not merely an incidental
quality of Paramashiva that He might be creative, but an essential
part of His identity – He would not be what He is if He didn’t manifest.

5.5
But is there anything essential about Paramashiva? Does He possess
an ‘essence’ with which He is bound to be identical? Is He, like all
other objects, bound by the Law of Identity (For all ‘A’, ‘A=A’)? Or does
His absolute freedom (‘svatantrya’) grant Him freedom from even
Himself? In order to answer this we must determine whether, in the
final analysis, Paramashiva or Reality is a kind of ‘Self’ at all. It is to
this arcane question we must now turn, before leaving the question
‘Why?’, and before venturing into the ‘How?’ of manifestation.

6. To Be or Not to Be?

6.1
To help us navigate this rarefied atmosphere it may prove fruitful to
backtrack somewhat, and take another look at how we got to this
question. In section 3 we noticed that the happiness of our true Home
cannot consist in anything objective, and I gave the example of the joy
experienced in the oblivion of sleep. I noted in passing that this
temporary oblivion included the loss of the sense of ‘me’ or ‘self’ (at
least in the case of deep dreamless sleep). This happens to us all
every twenty four hours, though out of a lazy linguistic habit and/or
lack of inquiry we, upon waking, ascribe ownership of the deep sleep
to one’s waking self and say ‘I slept’. By an extension of the logic of
the case of deep sleep, some traditions outline that in the journey to
the permanent peace of our true Home, there needs to be a permanent
loss of the ‘me’, since the ‘me’ is not our true nature. The Buddhist
goal of ‘Nirvana’ actually means, in translation, ‘snuffing out’ or
‘extinguishing’. In the Void or ‘Shunya’ there is no room for a self.
Similarly the Sufi mystical tradition talks of ‘Fana’ or ‘annihilation’,
which must happen before ‘Baqa’ or abiding in God.
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6.2
In the Vedantic and Shaivite traditions though, as there is a loss of
the habitual sense of self there can be an awakening to a deeper or
‘higher’ Self or Atman. Although being continually anchored in the
Atman, the unenlightened are unaware of this due to exclusive
identification with a habitual ‘self’ or ego. The journey Home thus
does indeed involve a loss (of false identification) but this is replaced
by the revelation of a more expanded ‘higher’ Self. In the end this
process reveals that the Highest Self or Atman is identical with Reality
or Brahman, and we have the famous Great Statements (Mahavakyas)
of Vedanta: “Atman is Brahman”, “I am That”, “That am I”, “I am
Brahman” etc. In Kashmir Shaivism the highest Reality or
Paramashiva is conceived as the highest Experient or Subject/Self (cf.
Spanda-Karikas verse 3).

6.3
So we have two seemingly parallel tracks in our journey Home: firstly,
a ‘via Negativa’ which strips away all that is false and leaves us in the
perfect primordial Void (though ‘we’ are not there to sully it!); and,
secondly, a path of expansion revealing higher states of being that
culminate in the Plenum which is a perfectly full, ultimate Self.

Are these two tracks not just two different perspectives on the same
journey, as has been implied above in our Void/Plenum equivalence?
It would seem so - except for one vital difference: is the end
destination a Self or a not-Self? This question forms the great,
centuries-old debate between the Void-loving Buddhists (whose
foundational principle is ‘The Doctrine of Anatman’ – No-Self), and the
Plenum-loving Shaivites for whom Paramashiva is the Highest
Experient or Self, the be-all and end-all of all selves and their objects.
Perhaps the most powerful exposition of the ‘Doctrine of Anatman’ can
be found in The Buddhist ‘Diamond’ Sutra (see section XVII – No-one
Attains Transcendental Wisdom, or section III – The Real Teaching of
the Great Way). The Shaivite position is best summarised in the
‘Pratyabhijnahrdayam’.

6.4
The Vedantic tradition is more ambiguous on this matter. Many of the
Vedantic Upanishads talk of Brahman as a Supreme Self which is
identical with Atman – the ‘Higher’ Self in Man. But there is also a
distinction between ‘Saguna’ (‘with qualities’) Brahman, and ‘Nirguna’
(‘without qualities’) Brahman; the latter seems to be a version of The
Void, though it is unclear as to whether this still constitutes a ‘Self’.

6.5
Both Buddhist and Shaivite traditions think that the other represents
a lower or more limited vision than its own. For the Buddhist, the
Shaivites are stuck when they identify with a supreme Self or
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Paramashiva, (see section IX of the Diamond Sutra), whereas in

Reality this Self arises spontaneously from an infinitely vast ground of
non-Being or Void, which is pre-eminently prior. Whereas for the
Shaivite, the Void is merely the supreme Self during a period of
inactivity. As one commentator has put it: “In the meditation on the
Void, since there is the absence of objectivity, to conclude that there is
the cessation of the Self is sheer delusion.” (Ramakantha)

6.6
My own view is that neither the Buddhist nor the Shaivite traditions
are wholly adequate here, and that their Self/No-Self positions are two
halves of a dialectic that requires a higher synthesis. A synthesis that
is hard to find in any of the metaphysical traditions - with good
reason, because we have to strictly go beyond language and logic, and
the result can seem incoherent. As Nisargadatta Maharaj has put it:
“The boundary of being and non-being is intellect-boggling, because it is
here that the intellect subsides.”

Notwithstanding this, I have come across three accounts which seem

to approach this territory. Two are mentioned above: the first is the
metaphysics of Plotinus; and the second a near-contemporary
experiential account by Dr. Wolff. We can use both these writings to
elucidate our synthesis, and in the process address our question as to
the ‘Why?’ and ‘How? of manifestation/creation. [The third account is
an esoteric Sufi teaching concerning the ‘chambers of the Heart’,
which we will examine at the end in section 33.]
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7. The One

7.1
Plotinus’ writings on Reality, which he refers to as the ‘One’ are
amongst the most beautiful in all philosophy, illuminating and darkly
paradoxical. He writes of the One generating Being and manifestation
- it is the inexhaustible Source. Like the endless energy of a spring
that ever replenishes itself, it is the engine of all creation.

7.2
In writing about the question as to why the One created or
manifested, he denies that the One did so in conformity with His
nature or essence or Being - for He is beyond Being. He is the root
Principle that generated Being. But He is not non-Being, for that is
merely the absence of Being – The Void. He is the root Principle that
makes possible non-Being. [In these sentences we have said “He is….
” – but this is inadequate since He is never the subject of the verb ‘To
Be’ - so we can only use language paradoxically here].

In Enneads VI.8.19 we have:

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“Seeing the One as it really is we lay aside all reasoning about it… none
would dare to talk of it as ‘happening to Be’, or indeed be able to utter a
word. With all his courage he would stand astounded…So are we to
understand the Beyond-Being hinted at darkly by the ancients: it is not
merely that He generated Being, but that He is subject neither to Being
nor to Himself; His Being is not His Principle, rather He is the prior
Principle to Being and not for Himself did He make it; producing it He
left it outside of Himself: He had no need of Being, who brought it to Be.
Thus His making of Being is not an action ‘in accordance with his Being’
... “

Since He is not subject even to Himself he is not bound by the logical

Law of Self-identity mentioned above in section 5. Since He has no
need of even His own being, he is wholly transcendent; as
Nisargadatta has said “The Highest is useless to the Highest.”

7.3
We can perhaps approach it positively by saying that if the One can be
‘considered’ as both the Void and the Plenum, then in Itself prior to
such considering it is the Principle at the root of both, beyond both.

A simple objective analogy used by Dr. Klein can be useful here:

imagine you own a beautiful wall-hanging that has hung on the wall
in your lounge for a long time. One day, without your knowing, it is
taken down to be cleaned. You come home and look over to where it
normally hangs; what you notice is not the wall – rather you notice
the absence of the hanging. The hanging represents the Plenum of
Being; its absence is the Void of non-Being. The One is the wall. The
wall is neither the hanging nor its absence; nor is it something
entirely disconnected with either, for when you notice the absence of
the hanging what you see is the wall. You only ‘see’ the wall when the
hanging is absent, so in a way the absence (the Void) seems ‘nearer’ to
the wall (The One) than does the hanging (The Plenum). But ultimately
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the wall it is not limited by whether it happens to support the hanging

or not – that is incidental to its being the wall. So even the
Void/Plenum is incidental to The One.

So we can approach the One negatively by employing Nagarjuna’s

famous four-fold negation – in this context it would be:

“Neither Being nor not-Being, nor both, nor neither.”

When considered subjectively we can say that all sense of identity

finds its roots in the Plenum, whereas in the Void all identity is
dissolved. The One is what makes both possible. It is clear then that
the One is never in itself any kind of subject or object, and has no
intrinsic subjective identity. It is just as much a No-One, as the One.

7.4
Dr. Wolff provides a beautiful experiential account wherein his
habitual sense of self was entirely left behind as he expanded
infinitely to experience himself as the Plenum – a Nirvanic, blissful
Self beyond the clutches of space, time, karma and (small) selfhood.
It was in this blissful state of liberation, which he considered as the
ultimate goal, that a further, unexpected revelation occurred. Beyond
the blissful supreme Self was a deeper Reality he referred to as the
‘High Indifference’ (without the usual negative connotations of that
word). This was a Reality that did not need the Bliss or a Self, which
Self was then seen as a condition balancing the pain of limitation and
ignorant unconsciousness. Beyond the need of this balancing
condition was a place of perfect Equilibrium that was not a Self and
had no need of bliss or liberation, though was the Source of both:

“ ..although I find the Self to be an element of consciousness of more

fundamental importance than Time, Space or individual experience, yet
in the end it, also, is reduced to a derivative position in a more ultimate
Reality. So my outlook must deviate from those that represent the Self
as the final Reality. In certain fundamental respects, at least, the
formulation must accord with the Anatmic Doctrine of Buddha…”

7.5
Dr. Wolff is careful not to say that in all respects did his outlook
accord with the ‘Anatman’ doctrine. Doubtless this was out of need to
distance his outlook from purely that of a Buddhist Void. He also goes
on to say that no philosophic system does it full justice. Maybe this
was due to ignorance of the depth and subtlety of Plotinus’ vision of
the One, or a misinterpretation of it (there are many). In any case,
although he doesn’t mention it, the Plotinian One seems to me to
occupy that place of perfect Equilibrium beyond the pairs of opposites.
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[There are also interesting parallels between Wolff’s

philosophical/metaphysical ‘High Indifference’ and the
religious/Christian mystical system of Meister Eckhart who writes of
the ultimate Disinterest of the Godhood beyond God…]

In short: my true nature is in and as the One. Free from all, free even
from Myself, I dwell as the root of all Being and Non-Being, neither
one nor the other, nor both nor neither.

7.6
Why then did manifestation happen? This can now be seen as an
unanswerable question, since there is no material left with which to
furnish an explanation. There are no considerations external to
Myself as The One (any such have not yet come into being); nor is
there any internal essence or nature to compel. In a sense the
question is invalid since to ask for an explanation for the existence of
something is to ask to know the other factors which caused it. But
here there are no other factors; we are at the Root of all roots. We
cannot even say it is Self-caused, for there is no Self yet. We can only
throw the question back and ask ‘Why not?’
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7.7
As regards the ‘How?’ we face a certain tricky logical problem. For the
One is an indivisible unity - if it were diverse or complex it could not
be the root principle, but would be composite in some way. In this
indivisible unity there is no ‘otherness’, there are no ‘others’. But
manifestation is an apparent ‘other’, the Void/Plenum arises from its
root source, the One; and from that arising follow the all the manifold
‘others’ in creation. Plotinus’ answer here seems quite artful (one
commentator regards it as a stroke of philosophic genius): The One is
all indivisible unity, with no trace of ‘otherness’; the ‘otherness’ does
not belong to the One, but to the ‘others’. The apparent otherness of
manifestation is part of manifestation, not part of the One. In a sense
then, the One recognises no manifestation, it recognises only Itself.

7.8
But this answer leads us to a self-referential paradox: if the
‘otherness’ required to bring manifestation into being has its’ source
in manifestation, then prior to manifestation how did it all start? It’s
no good asking the One – it would reply ‘what manifestation?’
So right at the beginning of the process of manifestation we have a
mind-boggling loop: manifestation seems to have kick-started itself,
boot-strapped itself into being, for it supplied the sense of ‘otherness’
needed to begin its own process. This is the Paradox of Manifestation.
The One, as source, provided the energy for this, made it possible; but
is otherwise non-implicated.
 18

As with our question ‘Why?’, so with our question ‘How?’: there is no

material to furnish an explanation of how manifestation occurs
outside of manifestation itself. So to seek such an explanation is, in
the end, meaningless. Finally, we can only say ‘It happens’.

Having addressed that, (or rather having failed to), we may now turn
to somewhere where something may usefully be said: the fullness of
the Plenum, the fountain of Being from which springs the rest of the
process of manifestation. Here the Kashmir Shaivite tradition proves
pre-eminent (with a little help from concepts in Quantum mechanics,
virtual reality, computing and other concepts in Physics). We leave
the inscrutable One and the fathomless Void of Non-Being behind and
examine the Plenum of Being and its Powers.

8. The Self and The Paradox of Consciousness

8.1
The Plenum of Being with all its Powers or ‘Shaktis’ is not quite yet a
(The) Self. Though traditionally replete with
Being/Bliss/Consciousness – known as ‘Sat/chit/ananda’, we need
here to make a distinction between Awareness and Consciousness.
We can use ‘Awareness’ to refer to the primal potential or capacity for
sentience/knowledge. When this potential is not actually in use,
Awareness is without object (on an individual level this could be deep
sleep). When it is in use, i.e. has an object, we can refer to it as
Consciousness. We may then ask - ‘the Plenum may be replete with
Awareness, but how can we talk of Consciousness when there are as
yet no objects?’ The answer is that Awareness becomes its own
‘object’. The first Consciousness is Awareness of (its own source)
Awareness. This reflexive act of primal Awareness manifests as the
first field of Consciousness we may call The Self. It is often visualised
as a ‘space’ or ‘akasha’ - an infinite space without boundary that
nonetheless ‘contains’ ItSelf.

8.2
It is worth reflecting a while on this reflexivity which is built into the
very notion of a self. It is no exaggeration to say that centuries of
philosophical inquiry have focussed on the nature of
self/soul/identity, and always the mind gets giddy as it uncovers a
self-referential paradox at the root of things here.

It is possible to conceive of elementary forms of awareness that do not

involve a notion of self –e.g. we imagine many primitive forms of life to
be in such a category. There may be primitive cognition of immediate
objects in the environment which lead to responses necessary for
survival. But when it comes to being a ‘self’ there is necessary
reflexive action of awareness: being aware not only of objects, but also
 19

of that situation: aware of itself being aware of those objects. Now

here we have a strange situation: we have (1) awareness of - an object;
then (2) awareness of - being aware of an object; but then if this is
the situation, there must be awareness of that as well; so we have (3)
awareness of –being aware of being aware of an object; and so on. By
its very nature awareness seems to generate an infinite regress: we
never arrive at a fixed ‘subject’ [Technically we call this a ‘recursion’,
when each term of a series is generated by its predecessor – we shall
see this again in 9.2].

8.3
We can envisage this infinite regress of awareness as a spiral, with a
centre being the object, with the awareness of it, (and awareness of
awareness etc. of it) spiralling out without limit, without a fixed
‘subject’ to terminate it. Now in the situation we are contemplating,
namely the beginnings of manifestation, there is no ‘other’ object. So
at the centre of the spiral is only the spiral itself. This means that the
spiral spirals in without limit as well. So we have no outer or inner
termination of the spiral, no ultimate ‘subject’ or ‘object’, only the
infinite potential of awareness itself.

8.4
But then something mysterious and paradoxical happens. It is as if
awareness provides its own termination of the infinite spiral: it
becomes its own subject/object. Just as mathematicians say:
“parallel lines ‘meet’ at infinity”; so what happens here is that the
spiral spirals in and out to the same infinity, where they ‘meet’ as one,
in the same infinite space. Or another way of putting it is that the
‘ends’ of the spiral meet to form what is, ultimately, a loop.
 20

So primal Awareness becomes Consciousness – an infinite Self that is

its own object. Now generally in a subject/object relation
consciousness is ascribed to the subject of the relation. But since
here the subject is the object, we then have the loop: the
consciousness of the subject is the subject of the consciousness. Then
when we ask how did this whole situation arise we have a chicken–
and-egg situation; worse than that, for here the chicken that produced
the egg came out of the same egg that it produced. This is the
Paradox of Consciousness. In one way this can be regarded as a
parallel loop that kick-started manifestation as a whole (addressed
above in the previous section), though reflected here, a stage ‘later’ in
the process, as the rise of the Consciousness that is The Self.

8.5
One is reminded here of the ancient symbol of the Ouroborous – the
primal serpent that curls back in a loop eating (being sustained by) its
own tail. Taken as a symbol of infinity and wholeness, it is regarded
by Plato as an image of the first, perfectly self-sustaining being in
creation:
“The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing
remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to
be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor
would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might
receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there
was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was
nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste
providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in
and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-
sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything.”
(Plato, ‘Timaeus’ 33.1)
 21

8.6
An analogy used in Kashmir Shaivism can be used to illustrate this
further. The power of Awareness is likened to the energy of light, the
power to illuminate. This power is referred to as ‘Prakasha’. That
which is illuminated or revealed/recognised by the light is referred to
as ‘Vimarsha’. It is the nature of light to illumine all, including its own
source: when you turn on a light-bulb in an otherwise empty,
darkened room the content of the room is revealed, and this content is
the light-bulb that is the source of the light. The illumination of the
room is ‘Prakasha’; the recognition of the light-bulb is ‘Vimarsha’.
Awareness is both Prakasha and Vimarsha. But our simple analogy
breaks down when we consider the situation at the beginning of
manifestation where the Light and its source are one and the same. It
is as if the light-bulb was created by light - the light that it itself
produced…

8.7
The Consciousness that is the Self has boot-strapped itself into being
– the Paradox of Consciousness. As Hofstadter has said (“The Mind’s
I” p.283): “There is a loop lurking here, one that bears a lot of
investigation…a primal loop deeply implicated in the plot of
consciousness”. [Perhaps no other philosopher has investigated the
necessary reflexivity of Consciousness more than Kant - in particular
the Transcendental Deduction sections in the Transcendental Analytic
of his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. The denseness of his argument is
made more transparent in P.F. Strawson’s excellent study, ‘The
Bounds of Sense’]. The question as to why exactly this boot-strapping
occurs may not be quite as unanswerable as in our questions relating
to the first Paradox of Manifestation in section 7. For the plenum is
full of qualities with which to furnish an answer. In particular, it
 22

seems in the very nature, ‘svarupa’ of Awareness to be aware, and so

to become its own object – there is an essence being expressed here.

8.8
So the primal Power of Awareness in the Plenum becomes its own
object, and generates The Self: Consciousness functioning as both the
subject and its only object in an undivided unity. Nor is there even
any real differentiation. The apparent differentiation of subject and
object is a ‘virtual’ polarisation, reflecting the reflexivity of one and the
same Self. Continuing our analogy of Awareness as light or energy,
we could consider this unified field of Consciousness as an emanation
from, or vibration in, the Plenum of Being. This vibration is known as
‘Spanda’ in Kashmir Shaivism, where it plays a central role. It is a
term that emphasises the infinite aliveness of this unified field.

8.9
There is a play going on here as The Self contemplates its powers
(shaktis) appearing as different aspects of the subject/object
polarisation or complementarity in the undivided unity. This is the
realm of the ‘Mahavakyas’ (Great Statements), where the supreme ‘I’
contemplates its identity with the Plenum of Being –‘That’ or
‘Brahman’. In Shaivism this playground is organised into five
principles or ‘Tattvas’ as each aspect is explored:

Shiva Tattva – I Am (I as Consciousness – Chiti)

Shakti Tattva – I Am (‘Amness’ the Bliss of Being – Ananda)
Sadashiva Tattva – I Am That (the power Will – Iccha)
Ishvara Tattva – I Am That’] (power of Knowledge – Jnana)
Shuddha Vidya Tattva – I Am That (power of Action – Kriya)
 23

We can make a distinction between the ‘manifestation’ of these

Tattvas, and the ‘creation’ which is generated subsequently.
‘Manifestation’ is outside time (eternal), whereas ‘creation’ is not.
All of these Tattvas can be thought of in the Shaivism of the Spanda-
Karikas as particular modalities of one fundamental vibration -
‘Spanda’ - which is the well-spring of, and power (‘spanda-shakti’)
behind, creation.

Before we go on to look at the subsequent creation, (section 14

onwards) it will be useful to look at some concepts in physics and
logic which will furnish the explanation with some useful analogies or
metaphors. This may seem a detour, but it is worth it, to be flesh out
some of the more abstract notions.

9. Fractals and Holograms

9.1
As we have said, in the unified field of Consciousness that is the Self,
there is no division or differentiation – so there is a sameness or
equality (‘samata’) prevailing. There is a concept in physics – that of
‘self-similarity’ which works well here. A system, process or object
exhibits self-similarity if any part of it has the same properties as the
whole, and if the properties of the whole are found in every part. In
Vedanta there is an old adage that “The Self is a circle whose
circumference is nowhere, and whose centre is everywhere”. This
partially captures that idea: ‘centres everywhere’ means that there are
no pre-eminent points in the field of the Self – all are equally ‘where
it’s at’, all points are at the hub; ‘circumference nowhere’ means that
nothing is peripheral. Another example might be that each point in
the field of the Self exhibits the same subject/object virtual polarity:
just as the north/south polarised magnetic field of a magnet re-
establishes itself in each part when a magnet is divided. The ancient
alchemists realised that this property of self-similarity is one essential
to creation, and this led to the formulation of their famous maxim: ‘As
 24

above, so below’. In the Shiva Sutras also we find the same concept -
(III.14): ‘As here, so elsewhere’. Or in other terms: ‘The microcosm is
the macrocosm’.

9.2
There are two systems exhibiting the property of self-similarity that
can act as useful models for the process of creation as a whole:
fractals and holograms. Fractals are beautiful, complex patterns that
are generated by recursive mathematical formulae; this means that
each successive term in the formula is generated by the application of
the same rule to preceding terms. At each level of complexity of the
pattern the same rule is exhibited, and this can go on indefinitely: one
can ‘zoom’ in or out without limit on such a pattern and the ‘same’
configurations appear: infinitely various applications of the same
underlying recursion:

9.3
Holograms are wonderful ‘light-recordings’ of objects. They can project
‘virtual’ objects in space. A beam of coherent light (laser) is shone
onto a recording medium – this is the ‘reference’ beam. Another beam
of light shines on the object – the ‘illumination’ beam. Light from this
beam reflects off the object creating a diffraction pattern of light, the
wavefront of which then meets that of the reference beam; here there
is an interaction which creates an ‘interference’ pattern that is
recorded on the recording medium. If you take the original object
away and then shine the reference beam again onto the recording
 25

medium, a pattern of light is projected into space that has the same
configuration as the original diffraction pattern reflected by the object.
A ‘virtual object’ – the hologram - just like the original, ‘appears’ in,
and can be viewed in, 3D space just like the original object. The
remarkable thing is that the holographic image exhibits the property
of self-similarity: if the recording medium is broken up, each part of it
contains the image of the whole object. It is like a ‘window’ on a
virtual object – if much of the window is blocked off, the whole object
can still be seen through the little that is left unblocked.

9.4
We can apply this analogy already to the manifestation of the Self in
the Plenum. The reference beam is ‘Prakasha’; the illumination beam
is ‘Vimarsha’. Here both the object and the recording medium is
Awareness itself (for there is no other here): cf. Pratyabhijnahrdayam
2 – ‘…Chiti Shakti projects the universe on its own screen’. The ‘virtual
object’ projected here is none other than that aspect of Awareness that
is aware of itself as its own ‘object’ – i.e. The Self. The self-similarity
of the hologram is the equality (samata) that prevails across the space
of the Self. Light interferes with Itself to create ‘objects’ of light. There
are echoes here of Mohammed’s ‘Light’ prayer, which has the line:
“O Light of all light. Thy light is praised by all light.”
Or the ‘light’ Sura of the Koran where creation is ‘Light upon light’.

We will meet this hologram analogy again later on in the process of

creation as well, for the process is recursive. Before we get to that
though, there is one concept, or rather set of concepts, that becomes
crucial for further exploration of this process - that of ‘Identity’. This
is another inscrutable notion that has generated centuries of
 26

philosophical argument. For our purposes we need to have some

minimal, workable clarity about what we mean by ‘identity’, in relation
to subjects and objects.

10.Concepts of Identity

10.1
On the face of it, ‘Identity’ seems like a redundant concept. Why, for
example, would one ever need to say of two things, that they were
identical? If they are two separate things they can’t be identical, else
they wouldn’t be two. On the other hand, if ‘they’ aren’t two, but one,
why would that ever need to be asserted? What does it tell you of a
thing to say that it is identical with itself?
Maybe there is some profound point that led Bishop Butler to
famously say: “Everything is what it is, and not some other thing”.
Perhaps he intuited the dark Reality of the One - which, as we have
seen, is not bound by this ‘Law’ - and was repelled by it…

10.2
However there are good practical applications for the notion, and I
outline here three notions of identity and their uses:
(i) Numerical Identity
(ii) Qualitative Identity
(iii) Functional Identity

Numerical Identity: There is a descriptive phrase for a heavenly body

– ‘The morning star’. This phrase was coined to refer to the star that
is the most clearly seen low in the sky early in the morning. There
was another phrase – ‘The Evening Star’ - coined for the parallel
reason. Now it so happens that both these phrases refer to the same
object – the planet Venus; this may not have been known to those who
first coined the phrases. For them it is an important piece of
information to realise the truth of the statement of identity: ‘The
Morning Star is the Evening Star”. This is the strictest form of
identity. It is not an assertion of two things that they are identical. It
is an assertion of two descriptions, that they refer to numerically (the
same) one object.

Qualitative Identity: This is a looser form of identity. One might say of

two billiard balls that they need to be identical, in order to play the
game properly. Here the (numerically) two objects share precisely the
same qualities or properties and are thus said to be identical. This is
perhaps the most common use of the term ‘identical’.

Functional Identity: This is a yet looser form of identity. Two things

might be for practical purposes considered ‘identical’ even though
numerically two, and somewhat different in their qualities, if they
happen to fulfil the same function: e.g. ‘Both Peace treaties were
signed by the same official – the President of the United States’. This
 27

might be true even though the President who signed one treaty might
be a different person (numerically and qualitatively) to the one who
signed the other.

Many of the ‘problems’ of identity can be traced to a confusion over

these different types or degrees of identity. To illustrate this best (and
because it leads into the topic of the next section) we need look no
further than the famous, philosophical conundrum known as ‘Hume’s
broom’. The Scottish philosopher David Hume tells the story (I
paraphrase and summarise) of how one evening, as he left his
gentleman’s club, he saw the porter sweeping up with large, pristine-
looking broom. A dialogue ensued:

DH: Good evening, my man. I see you are doing a spot of cleaning
and you certainly have the tool for the job!
P: Yes sir, it’s been my favourite broom for the past twenty years!
DH: (astonished) …my goodness that broom is in remarkably good
condition considering its twenty years…
P: Yes, sir - I look after it well…
DH: You must do…
P: Yes, sir – I give the broom a new head every other year.
DH: Oh well, that changes the picture…still the broomstick has fared
well…
P: Yes, sir – in the years that I don’t give it a new head, I give it a
new broomstick.
DH: Oh come, my man, you can hardly say then that you’ve had the
same broom for twenty years – it’s a different one every two years!

Then follows a philosophical dialogue (for the porter is no mean

metaphysician) where the problem is discussed as to exactly how
many parts of a thing can be changed whilst still being the ‘same’
thing. A car does not become a different car just because the tyres
are changed etc. The porter comes off better in the dialogue and
Hume leaves confused and in a bad mood.

10.3
Using our (above discussed) concepts of identity, we could say that
the porter has confused functional and numerical identity. We could
say there is functional identity here – it has remained ‘the club’s
broom’, used in the same way, living in the same cupboard etc. But it
is not the numerically same physical object – not one particle of it is
shared by the ‘club’s broom’ of two years ago. We could say here that
the porter is subject to an ‘illusion of continuity’. He has been misled
into thinking that because there is a continuity of function, that there
has been numerical identity. [Of course he is not really so misled, but
uses his apparent confusion to lure Hume into a discussion on the
topic of the criteria of numerical identity – a thorny one, as Hume
discovers, to his chagrin]. We shall find this phenomenon of ‘the
illusion of continuity’ a very useful one in the following sections and
 28

we can usefully explore other instances of it, together with an

associated one – ‘reification’.

11. The Illusion of Continuity

11.1
If we cast a stone into a lake we see ripples extending out in
concentric circles. If we stand on the shore we see a wave coming
towards us. It’s very tempting to think of this as a body of water
moving closer. But this is an illusion – there is no body of water
moving from the centre of the ripples out to the periphery and the
shore. The water stays more or less where it is, but moves up and
down due to the disturbance created by the stone. This up and down
motion in turn disturbs the water adjacent, and this disturbance
spreads out equally in all directions, hence its circular shape. The eye
catches the ‘top’, the ‘up’ of each up and down movement, and as each
successively adjacent body of water comes ‘up’, rapidly and
continuously, seems to see a ‘wave’ travelling horizontally – coming
closer. A surfer talks of riding the ‘same’ wave from off-shore right
onto the beach. But there is no ‘same wave’ in the sense of one body
of water travelling in to the shore. The wave that crashes on the beach
is made of more or less the same water that was always hanging
around the beach.

11.2
It is important to note that, as in any mirage, it is not the eye that is
deluded. What is seen is seen. It is the way the mind conceptualises
and understands what the eye has seen that contains the error. The
error here is to assume a substantially enduring, numerically identical
‘thing’, where there is only a continuous ‘process’. This is allied to the
process of ‘reification’ whereby something abstract is considered a
concrete thing. When I was a student at Oxford I was asked by an
American tourist who was wandering around the colleges – “I’ve seen
some lovely colleges and libraries, but where is the University?” He
was upset when I told him that the university is only an idea.
[A synonym for ‘reify’ is ‘hypostasize’. It is interesting to note that the
noun ‘hypostasis’ has come to mean ‘foundational principle’. Indeed
Plotinus used it as his term for the successive creative principles,
analogous to the Shaivite ‘Tattvas’. Metaphysicians need a keen sense
of reality: a ‘supporting principle’ may not be a substantial, concrete
reality, but a will o’ the wisp of an idea.]

11.3
Three more examples will serve our further discussion well:
I am sure we have all enjoyed whirling a ‘sparkler’ (firework) on a dark
night and seen it trace a ‘circle’ of light in the air. Of course there is
no circle; there is only the burning point of the sparkler being revolved
at high speed. Due to the speed and continuity of the motion of the
 29

point, the illusion arises of a complete circle with a boundary, an

inside and outside.

11.4
The continuity that gives rise to the illusion of a ‘thing’ does not even
have to be a real continuity – by the same error, a discontinuous
phenomenon can seem continuous. There can be levels within the
illusion. A string of small ‘fairy lights’ in a festive display can give rise
to a delightful illusion: if each light is momentarily turned on, and
then off just as the adjacent one is turned on (and so on) it can seem
as if a point of light is travelling ‘along’ the string. Focus on the light
and the illusion of motion is sustained. Focus on one bulb and see it
switch on and off, the illusion vanishes. Combining that with our
previous example, we could imagine a string of lights curled in circle,
and turned on in the way just described, only very fast. First we see a
complete circle of light; then as the speed reduces we realise – ‘there is
no circle of light, it was just a point of light moving in a circular path’.
If it goes slower still, or if we adjust our focus, we could realise – ‘there
is no single moving point of light, there are many static lights which
are mostly off, but each flash momentarily at just the right time to
create the illusion.’ This nested set of illusions is the kind of
structure we will encounter in our look at the process of creation.

11.5
Perhaps the most common example of our continuity illusion is one
we encounter everyday on our T.V. screens. The moving image is in
fact a series of still images (frames) that are projected onto the screen
 30

at a fast rate – usually 24 frames in every second. We can’t help but

track ‘objects’ and ‘characters’ in the screen where there are only
really lifeless, coloured images. We identify with the ‘characters’ and
experience all manner of emotions as the dramas are played out; but
there is no-one there – it is all a play of light.

11.6
In our last, similar, example (from Nisargadatta) we imagine a moist
pen-point moving over a (big) sheet of paper. The ink used fades very
fast, but not so fast that shapes cannot be made out. The shapes are
recognised as letters; which group to form words, which collect into
sentences; which describe characters in scenes. The characters grow,
learn, fall in love, fight wars, amass and lose fortunes, and experience
all the dramas imaginable. But none of it ever happened. There was
only a moving moist pen-point that knows nothing except the joy of
doodling.

11.7
These illusions have arisen because of a misapprehension concerning
the nature of the object(s). There is also a set of illusions concerning
a misapprehension of the subject. These in a way are more beguiling;
we are looking here not at the illusory nature of the perceived, but
illusions in regard to the nature of the perceiver. Again, due to an
apparent continuity of thoughts and perceptions, (whereas in fact
 31

these may be discontinuous, though arising rapidly) there may appear

to be a thread or ‘story’ that can furnish a memory: i.e. there can be
the illusion of an enduring identical subject of these experiences. It
may be that there is an apparent unity among these perceptions (what
Kant called the ‘synthetic unity of apperception’) and that this is so
compelling that an act of reification of a supposed ‘subject’ occurs:
that the unity of perception is taken to be a perception of a unity – a
‘self’ or subject.

11.8
The field of perceptions ‘creates’ a sense of self, and then this ‘self’
takes itself to be the source, or at least owner, of these perceptions –
and we have a ‘lower-level’ version of the same loop that we saw in
section 8.2 Here the self produces the perceptions that ‘create’ the
self. It could be regarded as an example of mistaking a functional
identity - the intermittent stuff of a ‘story-line’, for a numerical one –
an identical, enduring substantial self.
 32

11.9
This act of ‘taking itself to be the apparent ‘unity’ (falsely identifying
with it) gives a further vital twist to the illusion – a twist lacking in a
mere misapprehension of an object. For here the perceiver is no
longer an unaffected witness to an illusory light-show, but is deeply
implicated in a tragicomedy revolving around a case of mistaken
identity. These kind of illusions involving false self-identification,
which we can loosely group under the title of ‘Asmita’ (a term for them
used in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali), form a vital part in the creative
process, as we shall see; for the presumed ‘subject’ can go on to make
further reifications and false self-identifications of its own.

12. The Paradox of Identification – ‘Asmita’

12.1
In the Yoga Sutras, ‘Asmita’ is the second of the chain of five ‘kleshas’
or painful afflictions, that the truth-seeker tries to free him/herself
from. [It forms a parallel to the aforementioned Buddhist ‘Chain of
Dependent Origination’]. The first is ‘Avidya’ – ignorance of one’s true
nature. Because of this primal ignorance as to who or what one is,
there arises the impulse to identify with something in the field of
consciousness in the hope, as it were, that it feels like the ‘true’ self.
 33

12.2
This impulse is ‘Asmita’ and is bound to fail, ultimately – any such
‘identification’ is false since one’s true nature is not in the field of
consciousness, but prior to it, as its source. Having once succumbed
to ‘Asmita’, though, there is a problem: nothing in the field of
consciousness is permanent. All is at the very least transient - if not
directly under threat. (This is the first Noble Truth of Buddhism). So
this gives rise to the third ‘klesha’, ‘Raga’ – ‘attraction’: one is
compelled to be attracted to anything that appears to affirm or bolster
one’s (false) identity. And inevitably, then the fourth ‘klesha’, ‘Dvesha’
– ‘aversion’: one is compelled to be averse to anything that appears to
deny or threaten one’s (false) identity. This all culminates in the fifth
‘klesha’ –‘Abhinivesha’: blind clinging to life, and fear of death.

12.3
These five ‘kleshas’ pretty much sum up, beautifully (and horribly),
the whole of the playing out of the human drama. All of ‘history’ is
the playing out of dramas, wars and conflicts fuelled by identifications
with one’s Empire, Nation, Tribe, Race, Community, Family, Class,
Status, Wealth, Sex, etc, etc – all of them false. A modern parable
might be the wonderful tragedy of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’
concerning a young and gifted man of no wealth or social standing. It
starts with the tiniest of random details (that accursed doodler!): he
gets lent a smart jacket so that he can blend in at a high-class event.
He doesn’t notice that the jacket bears the crest of a prestigious
university (that he had never attended). Someone at the event
assumes the jacket is his, that he had indeed attended the university
– a mistake that our Mr. Ripley does not rectify, for fear of being
shown up. This is the beginning of a long drama involving further
mistaken identities and false impersonations, love, disillusionment
and, finally, murder and mayhem. At the end our anti-hero,
regretting the whole experience, confesses (to his final victim): ‘ …you
see, I thought it would be better to be a fake somebody, than a real
nobody’.

12.4
Some false identification may be conscious and deliberate, like an
actor identifying with his role (or as in the case of Mr. Ripley). But in
most it is not – it is unconsciously taken as an essential ingredient in
one’s identity. In fact, one’s assumed identity is a product of ‘Asmita’.
This distinction between conscious and unconscious ‘asmita’ has
important consequences, as we shall see later. To give two simplistic
examples of unconscious ‘asmita’: an ardent patriot may be genuinely
convinced that in his true nature he is English or French or whatever.
In war, one’s over-identification with being (say) English can eclipse
one’s deeper identity as human, and lead one to perpetrate horrors on
one’s fellow (non-English) humans. In a nightmare one may assume
the identity of someone in awful circumstances and feel genuine
distress as long as the dream lasts. On awakening from the dream
 34

the identity of the waking subject is re-asserted - the false

identification with dream character (an object in the field of
consciousness) is shattered along with its dream world all its
associated suffering. The point here is that while the false
identification persists, the original identity of the subject is eclipsed.
This is particularly so in the case of unconscious ‘asmita’; whereas in
conscious identification (say an actor playing a role), the sense of the
original subject is not so eclipsed.

12.5
What most people consider their ‘normal’ identity may very well be a
case of unconscious ‘asmita’, an identity having the status of a dream-
character. It is as if there is an unstoppable tendency for the subject
to identify itself with whatever appears as the most predominant and
persisting object in its field of consciousness. (How could someone
born and brought up in a tribe not end up with tribal membership as
a defining characteristic of their identity?) There is nothing inherently
negative about this: many of the assumed roles are joyful. In any case
it is a pre-requisite of playing a role in the drama of conscious
creation. Having said that, it is important to reiterate its illusory
nature: ‘Asmita’ casts a veil of distortion over the whole field of
consciousness in which it is operating. Nothing (including the subject)
is seen for what it truly is; rather, it is perceived through the filters of
‘Raga-Dvesha’. In the classic Vedantic example: due to fear, born of
ignorance, a rope is mistaken for a serpent…and many consequences
follow.

12.6
It is worth reiterating the formal structure of what is happening in
‘Asmita’: In a field of consciousness with subject and object(s) there
arises a false identification of the subject with an object in its field; if
this happens unconsciously it seems that the original identity of the
subject is eclipsed. This is a ‘loop in consciousness’: there is an
infolding (involution) of the consciousness of the subject which loops
onto an object in its own field, which is then taken to be a new (false)
subject. This paradoxical ability of consciousness to usurp its own
subjective pole we can call the Paradox of Identification.

12.7
We can also see how there is a structural similarity between our two
sets of illusions: that of the presumed identity of an ‘object’ (due to
the apparent ‘continuity’ of a process); and the presumed identity of a
subject (due to the continuity, predominance and persistence of some
of the content in the field of consciousness). In fact these two kinds of
illusion are aspects of one underlying process of reification in
creation, as we shall see.
 35

Before we resume the account of the creative process (for which we

needed these concepts), it is worth looking briefly at the case ‘par
excellence’ of philosophic ‘asmita’. It illustrates perfectly, as a
microcosm, the clash between modern ‘rationalist’ philosophy, and the
ancient metaphysics (East and West).

13. I Think, Therefore I Am (I think) – aren’t I?

13.1
One of the most seminal texts in eastern philosophy is the ‘Yoga
Sutras’ - its author, Patanjali, is often referred to as the ‘Founder of
Yoga’. One of the most seminal texts in modern western philosophy is
‘Meditations’ by Rene Descartes, who is often referred to as the ‘Father
of modern philosophy’.
The very kernel of the Yoga Sutras consists in its sutras 2, 3 and 4,
which I paraphrase (for the purposes of comparison):

2. Yoga is the stilling of the ‘experiences’ of the mind-stuff.

3. For then the subject rests in its true nature.
4. Otherwise, there is identification with the ‘experiences’ of the mind-
stuff.

The very kernel of Descartes’ ‘Meditations’ is:

“I ‘experience’, therefore I am”.

[Descartes’ dictum is famously ‘Cogito ergo Sum’, usually translated

as ‘I think, therefore I am’. However in the text it is clear that his use
of ‘cogito’ goes beyond what we narrowly mean by ‘thinking’, to
include perception and conception as a whole – in short, ‘experience’.
Patanjali’s term ‘vritti’, usually translated as ‘modification’ (of the
mind-stuff), is likewise unpacked in the text to include all perception,
thinking, sleep – in short, ‘experience’.]

13.2
Yoga is the cure for Avidya and Asmita. If the subject is falsely
identified with an object in its field, then the solution is to ‘still’ (i.e.
allow to subside and disappear) all the objects. The spell will then be
broken as the subject realises that it IS when all objects are not, so it
cannot be an object.

Descartes on the other hand, in his quest for absolute certainty,

allows himself to doubt the truth of any of his experiences, but rests
on (for him) the bedrock of the fact that, true or not, ‘experiencing’ is
going on. Therefore ‘experiencing’, ‘cogito’, is my very nature – I
experience, so I am.
 36

(He then, via a tortuous and invalid ‘ontological’ argument, firstly

proves God’s existence: my concept of God is so perfect that to say ‘He
doesn’t exist’ would be a contradiction – ergo, He does; and secondly,
shows that since God is the good guy that He is, He wouldn’t let all
my experiencing be delusional, therefore it isn’t; so I’m back home
safe and sound.)

One can see straight away here that ‘Cogito ergo Sum’ is, quite
precisely and exactly, the very essence of Sutra 4 – identification with
the ‘experiences’ of the mind-stuff. In short what for Descartes is the
foundational principle of his philosophy, is for Patanjali the very
definition of Ignorance.

[This could be seen as perfectly summing up the centuries-old

contrast (though now fading rapidly) between western and eastern
culture. In the modern west, truth is to be found by thinking and
experiencing (theorising and experimentation). In the east, Truth is to
be found by tracing experience and thought back to its Source,
beyond thought and prior to experience.]

14. Creation and Maya

14.1
We are now in a position to resume our account of the creative
process that we left off at the end of section 8. By that point we had
described the Plenum and its shaktis and outlined the first five tattvas
wherein The Self contemplates aspects of its true nature or Being.
These contemplations form the substance of the ‘Mahavakyas’ –
variations on ‘I am That’. There is no real duality in ‘I’ and ‘That’ for
they are both Consciousness. In the language of perception we could
say there was a primal ‘perceiving’ without a separate ‘perceiver’ or
‘perceived’. This perceiving was perceiving only perceiving – only
itself. Though there was no division, there was a subtle polarisation
or complementarity, for that is the paradoxical nature of
Consciousness: Awareness aware of itself, able to focus on itself as
 37

object, and by implication as subject of that object. This infinitely

rapid change of ‘focus’ sets up an ‘oscillation’ between subject and
object, a primary powerful vibration - ‘Spanda-shakti’. [The medium in
which this vibration occurs has been called ‘Chiti’ – the ‘substance’ of
pure Consciousness, as it were].

14.2
In the fifth Shuddha Vidya Tattva this Spanda-shakti takes on the
form of Kriya-shakti - the unlimited power to Act (see 8.9).

Then a miracle/disaster occurs: the Spanda-shakti vibrates with such

intensity that each pole of its oscillation - I am That - appears to take
on an existence of its own: A two-fold process of reification occurs.
The intensity of vibration at the subjective pole gives it such a
magnetic, predominant attraction that there arises the illusion that it
exists independently, together with the tendency for consciousness to
identify with it – an illusion of Asmita, false identification.

Simultaneously, the rapid oscillation at the objective pole gives rise to

the appearance (reification) of an independent objective ‘world’ – just
as a ‘circles of light’ could appear, though there were only moving
points of light, or series of momentary flashes, in our example above –
an illusion of continuity. This two-fold principle of reification/asmita
we can call ‘Maya’. We now have a duality, a division of
Consciousness into independent subject and object.

14.3
We can introduce one more term from Kashmir Shaivism to help get a
descriptive handle here. The independent, separate subject can be
called ‘Purusha’ and the independent object(s), the ‘world’.
As Purusha and the world arise due to Maya this represents a
different mode of the vibration of Spanda-shakti, a ‘denser’ mode, if
you will. The Self appears as a self (purusha), its substance Chiti
(pure Consciousness) becomes ‘Chitta’ (the mind). Though duality has
‘arisen’, the underlying unity of The Self has, of course, not been
shattered – merely concealed, in a way: just as it’s not possible to see
the rope whilst seeing the ‘serpent’, though the rope is always there.
Whilst seeing the ‘serpent’ though, this concealment means that the
sense of the original identity (as The Self) is eclipsed (as in 12.4).

14.4
There is another important principle at work here: because of the
underlying, unbroken unity, each Purusha perfectly complements its
world (just as, when a cell divides, each new cell shares the same
genetic information as the other and the original). There is a vital
sutra (I shall label these VS1 etc.) in the Pratyabhijnahrdayam that
deals with this:
 38

VS1: “The universe is manifold because of the differentiation of

reciprocally adapted, complementary subjects and objects.”
(Pratyabhijnahrdayam 3).

So we must speak not so much of the Purusha (self) and the ‘world’ of
object(s), rather of the Purusha and its’ world. This principle of
complementarity is perhaps best imaged in the ancient, Chinese icon
of yin and yang:

The black and white serpents are inextricably entwined as the black
contains within it the ‘seed’ (small circle) of the white, and vice versa.
So there is something ‘objective’ about every subject: namely, that it is
‘reified’; there is something ‘subjective’ about every object: namely,
that it is always ‘object’ to some subject.

14.5
But there is a very important non-symmetry here also that needs
delving into. The two-fold illusion that is Maya contains non-
symmetry as there is only reification of the object, but reification and
actual identification with the subject. The Self takes itself to be
Purusha (the reified subject), and because of that Purusha is
conscious of (reified) objects, the ‘world’. The world appears in the
consciousness of Purusha, though conceived (reified) as separate. For
The Self prior to identification there is no ‘world’. There is a (timeless!)
 39

‘order’ here: the first reification to arise is that of the subject, together
with the false identification. This gives rise to the second reification,
that of the world of objects. However, one cannot happen without the
other – a subject needs its complementary object(s). So the Purusha
arises, and within it, its world of objects.

14.6
The principle of complementarity means that whatever the
predominant quality of vibration is implicated in the identification
with the Purusha, that same quality will predominate in that
Purushas ‘world’. For example a Purusha that vibrates with a
modality of ‘power’, will perceive its ‘world’ principally in terms of
relations of power– so a Hitler or a Caesar will see their worlds in
terms of power-politics. A Purusha that results from vibration in an
aesthetic ‘sound’ modality, will manifest as a Mozart living in, and
creating, a world of beautiful sounds. Consciousness identified as
being a dog will see its world as being comprised of dog-members of
its (or a rivals’) pack, and things which may or may not be dog-food.
 40

14.7
There is another vital sutra in the Pratyabhijnahrdayam which
encapsulates, this process, in terms of the substance of The Self,
‘chiti’ (pure consciousness), and that of Purusha, ‘chitta’ (mind):

VS2: “Chiti, descending from the plane of pure consciousness, becomes

the mind, chitta, by contracting in accordance with object(s) perceived”
(Pratyabhijnahrdayam 5)

This formulation is excellent because it reminds us that we are talking

of one underlying substance, chiti, that ‘becomes’ chitta. ‘Contraction
in accordance with the object perceived’ is another perspective on the
appearance of the duality of subject and object. ‘Chiti’ is pure
consciousness, the substance of The Self, and ‘Chitta’ is the mind, or
the subject, and its ‘world’ is the objective pole that the subject is ‘in
accord’ with, i.e. is complementing. It is all a process in ‘chiti’, pure
consciousness. The power of ‘chiti’, ‘chiti-shakti’, is an aspect of the
primary vibration, spanda-shakti, and so therefore is chitta. Chitta is
merely spanda-shakti vibrating in a ‘denser’ mode, as we mentioned
above.

14.8
So from the perspective of spanda-shakti nothing has really occurred,
nothing has been ‘created’ or produced. It may seem so because of
Maya-shakti. But Maya-shakti is also just an aspect of spanda-
shakti. It is all a play of spanda-shakti. So, we have yet another truly
vital sutra, from a commentary on the Spanda-Karikas:

VS3: “In reality nothing arises, nothing subsides, only the divine
spanda-shakti which, though free of succession (time), appears in
different aspects as if arising, and as if subsiding.”
(Ksemaraj, commentary on Spanda-Karikas. I)

These sutras, taken together, answer the old metaphysical question as

to whether the creation is real or merely an appearance. The answer
is that it is both. It has real being for it is spanda-shakti, the
vibration of, not different from, Being. It is an appearance, because in
reality, nothing arises. Anything less than both these taken together
would be an incomplete picture. The old metaphysical question poses
a false dichotomy – it is not ‘either/or’. Perhaps we can find a
Buddhist ‘middle’ way here and use a modern concept: ‘creation’ is
real and unreal, or both, or neither – it is ‘virtual’. It is from this
embracing of both sides of a false dichotomy that we also get the
foundational teaching of Buddhism in the Heart Sutra: ‘form is
emptiness, and emptiness is form’.
 41

14.9
Also it is here where our hologram analogy is useful again. For Chiti
is the pure reference beam and the illumination beam. Chitta (the
mind) is the diffraction pattern that interacts with it to create the
interference pattern, which, when illuminated by chiti, projects the
‘virtual’ world of ‘virtual’ objects on its own screen. [Again cf.
Pratyabhijnahrdayam 2 – ‘…Chiti Shakti projects the universe on its
own screen’]

The astute will have noticed another paradoxical loop here. For what
is the original ‘object’ that reflects the diffraction pattern? Answer: it’s
the same as the ‘virtual’ object projected. This loop is the objective
analogue of the paradox concerning the subject of 12.6. Objects are
‘virtual’ - projected by consciousness; but the pattern used for the
projection is a reflection of the object – i.e. objects create their own
pattern of projection. The object pole of consciousness also infolds to
loop onto the subject in the field of consciousness and imprints the
pattern for its own projection. This also parallels exactly the Paradox
of Manifestation, where the sense of ‘otherness’ needed is supplied by
manifestation itself. Indeed, it is the same paradox reflected ‘lower’
down in the process of creation. This Paradox of Projection (we may
call it) is the ‘objective’ counterpart to the ‘subjective’ Paradox of
Identification (12.6).
 42

15. Quantum Physics

15.1
Quantum theory was such a revolution in physics partly because it
seemed to put consciousness centre stage in an account of physical
reality. Up until then modern physics had been materialistic and
objective.
But the world of very small particles seemed not to play ball. While
performing experiments to settle the old dispute as to whether light
was made of particles (photons) or was wave-like, some startling
results emerged: how it behaved seemed to depend on whether it was
observed or measured. These particles lost their status as
independently existing material things, but rather seemed to have
only virtual or probabilistic existence; an existence that became actual
and determinate only at a point of observation. Their indeterminate
behaviour was described by ‘waves’ of probability (the Schrodinger
wave equation) that ceased at the moment of their observation, when
their behaviour became determinate; this was known as the ‘collapse
of the wave function’. Prior to that, their behaviour could only be
described indeterminately, within the parameters of the famous
‘uncertainty principle’ of Heisenberg.

15.2
Nor was this remarkable behaviour limited to the world of the very
small. By a famous thought experiment called ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’, a
situation was envisaged whereby indeterminate particle behaviour was
linked to a large scale event – in this case whether a cat, in a box, had
been poisoned or not, by a mechanism triggered by the particles
behaviour. Since it was in principle impossible to determine its
behaviour until it was observed, likewise it was now in principle
meaningless to say either that the cat was dead, or that it was alive,
until the box was opened and the situation observed.
 43

The age-old philosophical problem as to whether something exists

when not perceived was revived, with the issue being firmly settled on
the side of Berkeley’s famous dictum: ‘to be is to be perceived’ – ‘esse
est percipi’. This interpretation was widely resisted by more
classically-minded physicists (including Einstein); they objected both
to its probabilistic element (Einstein said ‘God does not play dice’) and
for its central reliance on consciousness in the form of an observer.

15.3
However, the philosophically-minded were soon to notice parallels
with Eastern thought (Capra’s ‘The Tao of Physics’ made this popular).
We can see how these ideas tie in very nicely to our second vital sutra
VS2: “Chiti, descending from the plane of pure consciousness, becomes
the mind, chitta, by contracting in accordance with object(s) perceived”.
‘Contracting in accordance with the object perceived’ becomes, in this
context, a way of describing the ‘collapse of the wave function’. The
formless, indeterminate play of Chiti becomes an observing mind,
Chitta, at the point of its perception (observation) of its object. This
parallel is all the more remarkable considering the wide gulf,
historically and culturally, that exists between those who formulated
these systems.

15.4
Bringing consciousness into a centre stage position in physical
science gave rise to paradox – not surprising considering its otherwise
objective and materialistic bias. The most striking of these (which has
the by now familiar shape of a self-referential loop) is known as the
‘strong anthropic principle’ which states: ‘Matter must organise itself in
such a way as to support life; life must evolve in such a way as to give
rise to consciousness; for without consciousness to perceive it, nothing
(including matter) can exist’.
 44

Needless to say, many scientists have found such ideas abhorrent,

and as a result there were different interpretations of quantum
mechanics which developed to avoid these conclusions. The above
interpretation is referred to as the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation, but
there are others.

15.5
Perhaps the most notable stems from the work of Hugh Everett, who
developed the ‘Many-Worlds interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. In
brief, this does away with the need for an ‘observer’ to settle the issue
as to whether Schrodinger’s Cat is dead or not, by saying that it is, in
effect, both: the quantum event leads to both outcomes, each in its
own world. At every quantum event there is a branching of reality
into separate worlds – in this case a world with a dead cat, and
another with a living one. There is no need of an ‘indeterminate’ cat
waiting to be observed to find out if it is dead or not.

15.6
Whilst doing away with the need for consciousness to play such a
central role - and thus restoring a more objective and materialistic
stance for the physics - many thought the consequences even more
fantastical, and Everett’s ideas were marginalised for quite a while.
More recently they have been developed seriously, and popular culture
has latched onto the idea in a big way, producing numerous tales and
films involving ‘parallel worlds’ and the paradoxes of time travel. We
shall have reason to visit the idea again later (section 29), but for now
it is well to notice one important feature: Everett’s ‘many’ worlds were
not ‘parallel’. There was in principle no way anything could ‘travel’
from ‘one to another’. A little thought will reveal that the very idea is
meaningless in this context: a thing, or object of any sort, comes into
existence as a result of previous quantum events in its world. A
different world contains the different outcomes of those events and
produces different things. The idea that one and the same thing could
somehow inhabit more than one of the ‘many’ worlds contradicts the
very point and meaning of the concept.

16. The Bad News - Limitation

16.1
To resume our account of the creative process: the two-fold illusion
(reification and false identification) we have called Maya acts on The
Self, giving rise to a division – a separation into Purusha and its
world. This process - described above (section 14) - is truly a
miraculous happening; but it is also a disaster. For with the rise of
this duality there is an apparent fragmentation in the fullness of the
plenum. All of the unbounded positive qualities of The Self become
subject to limitation as there is an apparent loss of completeness
(purna) or wholeness. This is of course the traditional Fall, the loss of
 45

Paradise. The principle of Maya turns out to be the serpent in the

Garden of Eden, seducing The Self with knowledge of duality - the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil – and thereby forgetting
the primal unity. Falsely identifying with Purusha, It now inhabits the
‘world’ of the Purusha instead of the unity of the Eden of The Self.

16.2
In Kashmir Shaivism the five Tattvas that express the aspects of the
unlimited powers or shaktis of The Self, give way to five corresponding
Tattvas of limitation – the ‘Kanchukas’ - which limit the
Consciousness, Bliss, Will, Knowledge and power to Act of The Self.
These Kanchukas are bad news. For now, all the unbounded qualities
of The Self will manifest only in a limited way: as qualities inherent in
Purusha and projected by it as principles which create its objective
world. In particular, the limitation with respect to Chit–shakti gives
rise to the dimension of time, and that in respect of Ananda-shakti
gives rise to the dimensions of space. Most importantly, the loss of
wholeness leads to a limited Purusha subject to a spatially limited
body, the decay of time, and all the fear this entails.

16.3
The traditions of Buddhism, Shaivism and Vedanta all differ in the
detail and order of things here, but the gist is all the same: with the
creation of space and time, Purusha projects the mental functions of
intellect, ego-sense, and organising memory, which operate on the
further projections of the senses, their (subtle) objects and their
 46

(gross) material constituents. The Purusha functions as the pure

‘witnessing’ subject of its world, while all its projections (intellect, ego-
sense etc) are the objective content of its world. We can recognise
some of the functioning here from our previous discussion. The
organising memory works on the data of the senses, with the concepts
of the intellect, to create a unity of experience, that is reified as an
ego-sense and as the ‘objects’ of the world. More on this in section 20.

16.4
It is important, it seems, not to underestimate the possible, apparent
effect of this ‘Fall’. If Consciousness identifies as Purusha which then
projects and identifies with the mental functions, and then the senses
and ultimately as a gross perishable body, then the ‘subject’ can have
the experience of being completely overwhelmed by the objective
‘world’; more than that, even devoured by it. The serpent not only
seduces us into limitation, but it does so as a prelude to apparently
consuming us entirely.

16.5
So we have a picture of a miraculous act of creation which is at the
same time a disaster of limitation and apparent death. The various
traditions have taken every possible stance in relation to this. There
are pessimistic ones whose predominant theme, not surprisingly, is to
want to undo the whole thing as an unnecessary evil. Buddhism, in
some of its manifestations, comes under this category, as does
Gnosticism, whose ‘creator god’ is an evil demiurge. The many ascetic
traditions embody an attitude which is pessimistic in the sense that a
wise person will have as little to do with the energies of creation as
possible – these are manifest in the ‘monastic’ branches of most
religions.

16.6
There is also the semi-pessimistic attitude that, although evil, the
whole thing is somehow necessary. We have seen this before in
section 5.2 The wise man learns to exercise great discernment and
discrimination and eventually acquires the ‘pearl beyond price’ that is
 47

Self-knowledge - all as a result of apparently being caught up in this

process. This was a predominant theme in the classical Greek
philosophies, and was central to Platonism and the Neo-Platonism of
Plotinus.

16.7
Some traditions seem to feel the need to make out that creation must
be good because God, the source, is good. So we relish ‘all things
bright and beautiful’ and change the subject when it comes to all that
isn’t. Others, such as Kashmir Shaivism, positively delight in the
creation that is an explosion of the joyful ‘spanda-shakti’ – though, it
has to be said, it seems that only the adept yogis of the tradition can
enjoy this vision – the rest are bound souls (‘samsarin’) deluded and
devoured by their own serpent shaktis (cf. Pratyabhijnahrdayam 12).

16.8
Whatever the stance, one thing underlies it all: the apparent loss of
wholeness compels the Purusha, willy-nilly, to seek its restoration.
For there can be no true peace until the essential completeness and
perfection is realised.

17. Whose Illusion? – The Purusha Paradox

17.1
Before we look at further ramifications of the creative process, we
need to pause a little; for there is another paradoxical snake hidden in
the grass here which needs to be exposed. The principle of Maya, it
seems, is the cause of all the trouble. This principle is a two-fold
reification and a false identification (‘asmita’) giving rise to the illusion
of separation and the duality of Purusha and its world. But we need
to look more closely here: for who or what exactly is the subject of this
illusion? In section 14.3 we talked of the unity of the Self being
concealed – but concealed from whom, or from what? Not The Self,
surely: for it is the Consciousness of the plenum, full of knowledge,
Jnana-shakti, and not tainted by any delusion. But not the Purusha
either: for the Purusha is the product of the illusion, not its source.
The Purusha is only an apparent, reified subject, and did not exist
prior to the illusion. How did this illusion arise in the first place?

17.2
In section 14 we said that “The intensity of vibration at the subjective
pole gives it such a magnetic, predominant attraction that there arises
the illusion that it exists independently, together with the tendency for
consciousness to identify with it – an illusion of Asmita, false
identification”. But how could this illusion and this tendency arise –
how can The Self, full of knowledge, fall for an illusion; how can there
 48

be a tendency for The Self, replete with Bliss, to want to identify with
some imaginary, lesser, apparent ‘other’?

17.3
When we looked at Asmita in section 12, we saw that it was the
second of the five ‘kleshas’ or afflictions (in the Yoga Sutras) that the
yogi is trying to overcome: “The first is ‘Avidya’ – ignorance of one’s
true nature. Because of this primal ignorance as to who or what one is,
there arises the impulse to identify with something in the field of
consciousness in the hope, as it were, that it feels like the ‘true’ self.”
But if it is ‘Avidya’ – ignorance of one’s true nature – that leads to
Asmita, then how can this apply to The Self? We have merely pushed
the question a stage further back.

And so we uncover the age-old debate in the various schools of

Vedanta, as to whether, and how, Avidya may have arisen in The Self,
whose very nature precludes it. In short, how does Maya get a
foothold to start with? [In the Samkhya tradition, where the Yoga
Sutras are rooted, there is an easy answer, for that system is
dualistic: there are two eternal principles – Consciousness and Matter
(Prakriti). For any given Purusha the two principles can be entangled
and the cause of this entanglement is Avidya, whose source is in
Matter. The task of the yogi is to uproot this ignorance, disentangle
the principles and remain free as Consciousness alone. This
entanglement is a beginning-less appearance as there is an infinity of
purushas to sustain it - though for any given one Purusha freedom
from it is possible. But philosophers have rarely been happy with
dualistic systems for long – there is always the desire to find some
underlying unity.]

17.4
Even in non-dual (Advaita) texts we find the sages struggling to avoid
confusion over this issue. We see, for example, in the ‘Atma Bodha’ of
Shankara, where, after having said (in Sutra 25) that the Self
undergoes no change, we find the text going on to say, nonetheless:
“The Self regarding Itself as Purusha is overcome by fear, just like the
man who regards a rope as a snake. The Self regains fearlessness by
realising that It is not a Purusha, but the Supreme Self.” (Sutra 26)
But of course to talk of The Self as becoming fearful and then
regaining fearlessness is contradictory, especially in light of the
previous Sutra 25.

17.5
We have a situation here where it is almost as if there is (1) The Self,
(2) the Purusha and also (3) some third mysterious entity which can
either identify as The Self, or as the Purusha. But if we allow a third
entity we are poised on the edge of another infinite regress: for what is
 49

that third entity when not identifying with either The Self or the
Purusha? We will need a fourth something – something that can be
either The Self or the Purusha or the third entity, when that third
entity is not identifying as either (1) or (2)... and so on to a fifth, sixth
etc. entity, without limit.

17.6
So there is no such easy answer for the more prevalent, avowedly
monistic systems that we have been considering. Buddhism has more
typically shied away from the question (likewise regarding Avidya as
beginning-less) but exhorting the seeker to shun ‘abstract’ questions
as to its origin, in favour of getting on with the business of uprooting
it - and thereby bringing the suffering, consequent upon it, to an end.
For a serious metaphysician though, this is an admission of defeat,
and we can delve deeper before giving up!

17.7
The clearest and most eloquent refutation of the idea that Avidya lies
mysteriously latent in The Self somehow (and ready to manifest Maya
at some point) was made by Jnaneshwar in his “Nectar of Self-
Awareness” - ‘Amritanubhav’, chapter 7, ‘Refutation of the Doctrine of
Ignorance’. But in it he never really addresses the question as to the
origin of ignorance, given, as he shows, it is not in The Self. He
merely notices how peculiar ignorance is, because it can never be
found – the minute one casts the light of consciousness on it, it
vanishes as if it never were.

17.8
If instead, then, we try and push this ignorance onto the Purusha, we
end up with another paradoxical loop: the illusion of Maya exists in
 50

the consciousness of the Purusha – even though the Purusha is an

illusory ‘subject’ created by Maya. This we may call the Purusha
Paradox. Both Maya and the Purusha become products of each other.
One contemporary teacher of Advaita, Dr. Klein, when talking of what
a burden is created by identifying with what one is not, was asked: ‘a
burden for whom?’ He answered ‘a burden for the burden itself…’
The illusion, it seems, is not even a real illusion; it is an illusory
illusion.

17.9
When confronted with the choices of attributing the origin of Maya
either: to The Self – which leads to direct contradiction with the
nature of The Self; or, to the Purusha – which leads to a paradoxical
loop, the Vedantic approach was to refuse both. Instead it was simply
declared that Maya has no discernible origin – it is neither real nor
unreal, and by its very nature ‘inscrutable’, ‘anirvacaniya’.
Unfortunately this is not very illuminating, and amounts to a defeat
with a technical-sounding term.

Rather than accepting contradiction, or accommodating ourselves to

another paradox, we might take a different approach. Instead of
couching things in Vedantic terms, with its stress on ‘illusion’, we will
take a different look at the same situation from a Kashmir Shaivite
position, and see if that progresses the account.

18. The Divine Actor and the Paradox of Omnipotence

18.1
In section 14.3 we described the manifestation of the Purusha and its
world as spanda-shakti vibrating in a ‘denser’ mode. And our vital
sutra VS2 has ‘chiti’ becoming ‘chitta’ – the substance of The Self
becomes the mind-stuff of Purusha, by contraction. In this
formulation, looking as it were, from the ‘outside’, there appears no
paradox. What about from ‘within’? Well, ‘chiti’ and ‘chitta’ (pure
consciousness and mind) are both vibrations of consciousness – there
is no mention of ignorance or unconsciousness. So if there is any
false identification (asmita) involved, it must be conscious and
deliberate, as it were. In section 12.3 we noted that in cases of
conscious ‘asmita’ the original identity of the subject is not eclipsed,
and we took the case of an actor as an example. However deeply
involved an actor is in the role, he or she can snap out of acting at any
instant – there is no real loss of the sense of one’s original identity.

18.2
In the Shiva Sutras it seems as if this is indeed the kind of process
envisaged in the manifestation of Purusha and its world (‘chitta’, mind
and its’ object). For we have both:
‘Atma Chittam’ - ‘the mind is a form of the Self’ (Shiva Sutras III.1)
and
 51

‘Nartaka Atma’ - ‘the Self is an actor’ (Shiva Sutras III.9)

So there is no ‘ignorance’ (Avidya) in The Self, which would lead to a

false identification (Asmita) as Purusha. Also in reality the
‘Kanchukas’ (16.2) do not represent the ‘bad news’ of a Fall, a real loss
of fullness or perfection. It is rather a deliberate Self-limitation to take
on a role, in order to act out a drama. However, in order to do justice
to our actual experience, it is clear that the analogy with ordinary
acting will not stretch far enough. For it seems that in the majority of
cases the sense of the original identity is indeed eclipsed. Unlike a
normal actor, we do not appear to have the ability to snap out of the
role at will, in an instant.

18.3
It is as if, in order to make the drama really interesting, The Self
hypnotises Itself into believing it actually is a limited, (potentially or
actually) suffering purusha, in order to experience the full dramatic
potential of its’ creation. It has to fall for Its’ own trick, in order to sell
itself on Its’ own story.

In order to really feel the part of a finite purusha, subject to the

limitations of the ‘Kanchukas’, the Self seems to deprive Itself of its’
ability to relinquish the role It has assigned to Itself. We may ask ‘but
is this really possible?’ To which the answer must come –‘Of course,
the Self has infinite power to act – Kriya-shakti!’ But here we have
another loop forming when see that, in this situation, the infinite
power to act is acting on Itself to curb Itself – with the consequence
that It is no longer an infinite power…
 52

18.4
So we arrive here at the well-known ‘Paradox of Omnipotence’, known
in its’ childish, simple guise as a puzzle about God: ‘can God make
stone so heavy even He can’t lift it?’ Whether we answer yes or no we
always end up with a God who is not omnipotent: either He can’t lift
the stone, or He can’t make it. Nor is this kind of paradox limited to
God. In England the Parliament holds the right to enact legislation on
any issue, anywhere. But it has to stop short on passing legislation
that would bind future Parliaments. Even if it didn’t voluntarily do so,
and tried to pass a law limiting a future Parliament, that future
Parliament, being as potent as its predecessor, would simply repeal
the original legislation. But if such a (future) act is specifically made
illegal under the previous law, Parliament paradoxically undermines
itself when exercising its supreme power now, in repealing it. To avoid
this situation, Parliament never attempts to bind a future Parliament.

We also see a similar paradox when a debating society, upholding the

principles of democracy and free-speech, denies a platform to a
speaker on the grounds that the speaker holds anti-democratic views
that would threaten the society. In denying a platform in that way, of
course, the society itself becomes anti-democratic, denying free-
speech. In seeking to preserve itself, it self-destructs.

18.5
So it seems then, as if our Divine Actor takes an irreversible course of
action when He deliberately limits Himself to perform His role. For
once having done so, He forgets His real identity and thereby loses the
ability to relinquish the role – for He no longer thinks that He is
performing a role, but really is the limited Purusha, caught up in a
real-life drama.
 53

What this means is that, although perhaps setting out consciously

and deliberately to play a role, it actually ends up being a case of
unconscious ‘asmita’, after all; at least in the sense that the original
subjects’ identity is eclipsed, and that the role cannot be relinquished
at will; because it is not considered a ‘role’ at all – it is felt as the true
identity.

18.6
Some of the force of this ‘paradox of omnipotence’ may seem mitigated
by the fact that the parameters of the role are fixed in ‘advance’, as it
were, by the Self, who is author and actor here. When the play is
finished, the role dissolves and the Actor is left as He was. It is
mitigated by remembering the illusory nature of time (one of the
limiting Kanchukas): it’s not that first of all He knew Himself, then
forgot Himself, and then recognised Himself again. Because, for The
Self there is no ‘time’ – so there was no ‘time’ during which he was not
omnipotent. For The Self, nothing happened (cf.VS3). There is a
delightful Sufi tale wherein a powerful Sultan expresses doubt, to his
Sufi advisor, about the account of the Prophet Mohammed being
caught up in prayer in the ‘heavens’ for several days and nights,
though when he returned, no time has passed. To illustrate how this
could be true, the Sufi asks the Sultan to put his head in a big jar of
water. On doing so all the Sultans’ surroundings disappear and he
finds himself alone on a deserted beach. There then follows a seven-
year drama in which he desperately tries to sustain himself, meets up
with other bedraggled travellers, marries, has a child who dies
tragically; again and again he is reduced to miserable penury, and
finally, hungry and thirsty, he pours his heart out to a stranger, since
none of his habitual companions believe his crazy story of having once
been a great Sultan. This stranger offers him a big jar of water to
immerse his head in, to refresh himself. When he pulls his head out
he finds himself back in his palace. Angry with the Sufi for using a
magical power to curse him to seven years misery, he threatens to
have him executed. But as a servant confirms, the Sufi replies that
no time had elapsed – and the Sultan notices with astonishment that
he is not hungry or thirsty and has not aged at all. All the grief of his
experiences likewise vanishes like a mist.

!8.7
Even though this reflection (that time is subject to consciousness and
not vice versa) mitigates somewhat the effect of the ‘paradox of
omnipotence’ it does so at the expense of raising again the previous
paradox of the status of the Purusha (section 17). For, unlike our Sufi
tale (where, despite the illusion of space and time involved, the Sultan
retains a sense of identity throughout), we are dealing with a case
where not only are the ‘surroundings’ (i.e. the ‘world’) radically new,
but so also is its principle observer – the Purusha of that ‘world’.
There is no apparent continuity of identity carried over from the
Consciousness of The Self to the mind of the Purusha, in so far as the
 54

Purusha is concerned; whereas from the point of view of The Self

nothing happened. The Purusha is not a real identity that happens to
be suffering from an external illusion. Being that Purusha of its
‘world’ is the illusion. And our unanswered question (the Purusha
Paradox) remains – ‘whose illusion is it?’ When the Zen master asks
the famous question (koan) ‘What was your Face before you were
born?’ he confronts this paradox head-on.

18.8
So our approach to the arising of the Purusha and its’ ‘world’ as a
deliberate role played by The Self as Divine Actor did not, then, release
us from paradox. For we are confronted by the Paradox of
Omnipotence, which is only mitigated by suggesting that The Self
never really loses its’ omnipotence because the role it plays is brought
about by the illusion of time. But then the Purusha Paradox reappears
when we ask - ‘who is it, then, who is relatively limited and impotent?’
It is no good answering that it is the Purusha, because the Purusha
only appears as an effect of the Self- limitation. A dream-character
does not create the dream it is caught up in.

18.9
Perhaps we can see now why the ancient philosophers were so baffled
by the inscrutable (‘anirvacaniya’) nature of Maya. For whichever way
we turn we are confronted by paradox. If the arising of the Purusha
and its world is somehow illusory we are faced with the Purusha
Paradox. If it is a real drama played out by The Self we are faced with
Paradox of Omnipotence. We shall be returning to these paradoxes in
section 27 when we ‘reverse’ the process of creation in our
consideration of ‘Enlightenment’.

19. The Good News – The Bluffing Serpent

19.1
In India there are second rate snake-charmers whose ‘dance’ with a
deadly poisonous cobra is not as death-defying as it seems. For they
have previously drawn the poison fang from the snake, rendering it
harmless, despite its’ menacing appearance. Whatever attitude we
take to the creative process as outlined above, it now appears that the
‘bad news’ of section 16 – the limitation of the Kanchukas – may not
be so bad after all. For sections 17 and 18 now seem to show that
any suffering involved in the creation process is either some kind of
illusion, or some kind of role-playing act. Whichever of these it may
be, it seems that the ‘sting’ has been taken out of the serpent of Maya,
who seduced us out of Paradise. The serpent is playful, and if it
seems menacing it is only to play out a drama. In reality, no harm
can actually come from this snake.
 55

It may be that under the illusory spell of Maya the appearance of

suffering is taken for a reality; or that when The Self acts out its
Self-limiting role with such conviction the suffering of the character
played is felt as real. As the illusion dissolves, or as the play
comes to an end, the perspective of The Self prevails; a perspective
that knows no real suffering.

19.2
In Dr. Wolff’s remarkable account, he describes in detail the effect
of the dissolution of his habitual, limited (purusha) sense of self,
and how things now appeared from the perspective of the
expansive space (‘akasha’) of The Self:

“I remembered my former belief in the reality of suffering in the

world. It had no more force than the memory of a dream. I saw that,
in reality, there is no suffering anywhere, that there is no creature in
need of an aiding hand. The essential consciousness and life of all
beings are already in that State [of The Self], and both never had
been, and could not be, divorced from it. The world field with all its
 56

striving and pain, seemingly lasting through billions of years,

actually is a dream occurring during a passing wink of sleep. I
simply could not feel any need or duty that would call me back to
action in the ‘world-field’. There was no question of departing from or
deserting anybody or any duty, for I found myself so identical with
all, that the last most infinitesimal element of distance was dissolved.
I remembered that it had been said that there were offices of
compassion to be performed in the world, but this idea had no reality
in the State because none there was or ever could be who had need
for ought, although those who were playing with the dream of life, in
form, might delude themselves with imagining that a need existed.
But I knew there was no reality in this dream.”

So if the ‘bad news’ of limitation is only a ‘dream occurring in a

passing wink of sleep’, then in reality the snake of Maya is a toothless
playmate, an accomplice to our world of make-believe.

19.3
If this is so, I can only reflect this back to the reader, and ask of all us
‘fallen angels’ who may feel excluded from the paradise of The Self: ‘Is
our suffering really real, or is it merely play-acting, or a dream?’
 57

20. Mind the Big Bang !

20.1
By the end of section 16.3 we had very succinctly looked at the effects
of Maya in giving rise to the Purusha, the witnessing subject, and its’
‘world’ - the intellect, ego-sense, and organising memory, which
operate on the further projections of the senses, their (subtle) objects
and their (gross) material constituents. In our section 16.4 we rushed
over important stages somewhat, in order to quickly see the logical
and possibly grisly outcome of the process. We need to look at this a
little more closely to see what is happening and in order to continue
the story. For this we now need to re-introduce a principle we
encountered in 9.1, which we now label as our vital sutra 4:

VS4: “As above, so below; as here, so elsewhere”.

We had previously the function of Maya acting on The Self to give rise
(mysteriously and paradoxically) to the Purusha and its’ ‘world’. The
awareness of The Self is apparently eclipsed and its’ Consciousness
(chiti) contracts to become the mind (chitta) of Purusha. Because the
awareness of The Self is eclipsed, the Purusha usurps its position, as
it were, and acts as the apparent source of its creation. Now because
of the first half of VS4, the situation replicates itself – the function of
Maya acts on Purusha, to lead it to falsely identify with one of its own
objects: Purusha identifies with the ego-sense (termed ‘ahamkara’) to
create a ‘person’. The Purusha ‘forgets’ its’ position as pure subject,
or ‘witness’ of its’ world, and identifies with the most predominant
 58

‘character’ that populates its’ ‘world’ – the ‘I’ or ego-sense. In that role
it functions as the apparent primary ‘agent’ in its ‘world’, becoming a
‘doer’. This resultant ‘person’ can then go on to make further
reifications and identifications of its own. It may heavily identify with
its occupation, nationality etc (as outlined in 12.3). It may even
become a novelist or film-maker or actor and identify (more
temporarily) with a character of its own creation. Even film-goers may
temporarily lose their habitual identity and be wrapped up in the fate
of the ‘hero’, experiencing a whole gamut of emotions vicariously.

20.2
We need to generalise this principle to expand to infinite possibilities
here. The Self has infinite potentiality, so when the function of Maya
operates repeatedly (recursively), it can do so infinitely: a Purusha can
project and then identify with an element of its own creation, which
may then go on to do the same etc. without a finite limit. We have
taken a few steps from The Self to Purusha to person to fictional
character etc, but we can imagine an infinite ‘nesting’ of such
identities and ‘worlds’ – we can generalise the term ‘purusha’ to cover
them all – in an infinite hierarchy with no end: a ‘first generation’
purusha (and its ‘world’) manifesting in The Self, and projecting and
identifying as a ‘second generation’ purusha etc on to an Nth
generation purusha projecting an N+1 generation one, and so on,
without limit. And we must imagine this happening at the speed of
thought – i.e. instantaneously, to all intents and purposes. This is a
veritable ‘big bang’ of consciousness manifesting purushas, (‘minds’,
or ‘selves in worlds’) in an infinite, ‘vertical’ dimension: as above, so
below.
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20.3
In the second half of our VS4, namely, ‘as here, so elsewhere’, we have
another consideration: although The Self is often imaged as an infinite
‘space’ (‘akasha’), it is also imaged as an infinitesimal point (‘bindu’) –
a seed from which creation sprouts. These may seem, at first glance,
very opposite images; but there is an equivalence here, which results
in the property of ‘self-similarity’ we introduced in 9.1. In the arcane
study of Transfinite Mathematics pioneered by Georg Cantor (and
communicated to him by God, or so he thought) it can be shown that
there are as many points in infinite multi-dimensional space as there
are on the shortest line one may care to specify. This counter-
intuitive result exemplifies the self-similarity of multi-dimensional
space – the ‘continuum’: however large or small a ‘sample’ is taken
from the continuum, its numerical ‘size’ is always the same.
[This size is actually 2 to the power of ‫א‬, where ‫ א‬is the ‘infinite
number’ of natural numbers. (I appreciate that this may be gobbledy-
gook to many, and it can be safely passed over – or better, treated as
an invitation to study the mind-expanding field of Transfinite
Mathematics!)]

This is an example of the remarkable ancient philosophical dictum of

‘the microcosm is the macrocosm’, which is simply another form of
our VS4.
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20.4
For our purposes it has significance, for it infinitely enriches the
account of the creative process: so far, we have outlined how The Self,
acted on by the function of Maya, manifests the Purusha and its
‘world’ – and have treated the matter in the singular. But the potency
of The Self exists, in its entirety, in every ‘point’ (bindu) in its infinite
field (‘akasha’). So there exists the possibility that every such ‘bindu’
also manifests a Purusha and its ‘world’. There is not just one first
generation Purusha, but a possible infinity of them, each of which can
project within itself infinitely further ‘nested’ generations, as outlined
in the previous section. So we have a picture of a possible infinite
number of first generation Purushas and ‘worlds’, projecting within
themselves (in parallel, as it were) a further possible infinite number
of ‘nested’ purushas and their ‘worlds’. So the ‘big bang’ of
Consciousness extends not only in a ‘vertical’ dimension, but in all of
the multi-dimensions of the space (‘akasha’) of The Self. So the
pattern of Purushas is not only ‘nested’, but also ‘fractal’ – repeating
itself recursively across all the multi-dimensions of the infinite space
of The Self.

20.5
To complete the picture here we need to see further ramifications of
our VS4: within the infinite space (‘akasha’) of The Self an infinity of
Purushas and worlds manifest. But ‘as above, so below’: each
 61

Purusha is also its own space, each point within which can give rise to
further manifestation; so, depending on the potency of the Purusha, it
can project many purushas and their worlds within itself. The
‘nesting’ need not be strictly ‘linear’, but may contain any number of
possible ‘branches’: a Purusha can project many parallel purushas
and their ‘worlds’ within itself. An author can write a play with many
characters and can identify with them all ‘simultaneously’ (or perhaps
‘in turn’ with the speed of thought as each character speaks his or her
part).

20.6
There is not one ‘universe’ or world: there are as many universes as
there are purushas – there can be infinitely many of these in each of
the indefinitely many dimensions of the infinite Self. At every point in
any ‘universe’ there exists the potentiality to manifest another. To
really let this in is a mind-expanding exercise. The traditional
metaphysics that best explores this infinitude is the remarkable work
the Yoga Vasistha. Page after page of exploration of worlds within
minds, within worlds of ‘higher’ minds etc without end, is a giddy
delight. As an example the text describes a celestial being who visits a
sage and describes her ‘world’ as existing in a rock, on a mountain, in
a mountain range in the corner of some other ‘world’:
 62

“O sage, that world of ours within that rock is just like your world
out here! In our world, too, there are heaven and hell, gods and
demons, the sun and the moon, the firmament and the stars, the
mobile and the immobile creatures, hills and oceans, and the
particles of dust that are known as living beings. The sage
replies: ‘In the eternal space (dimension) of infinite
consciousness, in the infinite play of the infinite, there are infinite
minds and infinite worlds in them. In every one of them there are
continents and mountains, villages and cities with houses
inhabited by people who have their own time-scale and life span.
When these purushas reach the end of the life span, if they are
not enlightened, they continue to exist in infinite space, creating
their own worlds. Within them are other people within whom are
minds; within those minds are worlds in which there are more
people, ad infinitum. This appearance has no beginning and no
end; it is Brahman and Brahman alone. 0 Rama, in all these
diverse objects there is nothing but pure Consciousness.’”

This possible infinite branching and complex ‘nesting’ of minds and

worlds within other minds etc leads us to another important topic
which addresses the possible relations of purushas to each other, and
the old philosophical problem of solipsism.

21. The Problem of Solipsism

21.1
When reading much of the traditional metaphysics, whether it be
Vedantic (Yogic), Shaivistic, Buddhist, or western (Neo) Platonism and
its successors, there is a distinctly solipsistic flavour, which can be
problematic: in all the talk of minds or purushas projecting worlds
within themselves, there can be a problem with regard to the status of
other beings who inhabit the projected ‘world’ – who are they, exactly?
Do they only exist as projected ‘dream-characters’ of the purusha? It
can seem as if the ‘others’ in my world do not have the same status as
‘I’ do. The metaphysical theory called ‘Solipsism’ establishes this as a
principle: only ‘I’ really exist, all ‘others’ exist in so far as they appear
in ‘my’ consciousness.

As I am the consciousness in which ‘they’ all appear, I am, in that

sense, ‘alone’. Just as The Self is, in reality, one indivisible space and
therefore ‘Alone’. Indeed, the journey from ignorance to
enlightenment, from false identification to realisation of The Self, has
been famously called (by Plotinus) the ‘journey from the alone to the
Alone’.
 63

21.2
On the face of it the principle of solipsism is a flawed, hopelessly ego-
centric or narcissistic idea. If a person was to behave as though the
whole world revolved around him or her alone, and that all other
people were only subsidiary in some way, that behaviour would
regarded as more-or-less crazy: anywhere from being marginally self-
centred to pathologically self-obsessed – variations on the conviction
that ‘it’s all about me’.

Speaking as if I alone exist, when I am in fact just one character in a

world of characters, would be insane.
 64

21.3
The difficulty comes when I consider that I am, it seems, not just one
character: that character habitually referred to as ‘me’ is, after all, an
object amongst other objects. Whereas the true ‘I’ is the subject of all
those objects: the Purusha is a ‘witness’ of its ‘world’ (see 16.3). But
because of the predominance of, and false identification with that
object, the Purusha identifies as the ego-sense ‘ahamkara’ (see 20.1),
resulting in that character or person being considered ‘me’. But when
Purusha is not so identified, i.e. when realised as sole witness of the
‘world’, I could indeed be said to be ‘alone’. The principle of solipsism
is wrong in so far as it says (while confusing the Purusha with the
character), that only the character ‘me’ and its consciousness can be
really said to exist; but it may seem to be right when it says that the
Purusha is alone as sole witness of its ‘world’. Ultimately, of course,
solipsism must be true where there are no ‘others’ at all – i.e. for The
Self.

21.4
But we have to go further if we want to get to the bottom of this. The
Purusha, as pure subject or witness of its ‘world’, may be said to be
 65

prone to identify with a predominant object of its ‘world’ - the

character ‘me’. But what is so special about that particular character
that is identified with? If we are to truly escape solipsism (in the way
in which it is wrong), our account must be able to treat all the
characters that inhabit the ‘world’ equally; and not give pre-eminence
to the ‘me’ in any way. Which opens up the following consideration:
just as there is more to the ‘I’ than just being the character ‘me’ (for ‘I’
exist as witness to the ‘me’), then cannot the same be said for all the
other characters? That is, may not each of the other characters in the
‘world’ also be a ‘me’ witnessed by a Purusha? If we are to escape
solipsism completely we must feel compelled to answer ‘yes’ to this.

21.5
But here we run into a structural problem: for we have talked of all
the characters in the world each having their own witnessing Purusha
principle. But we have forgotten the fact that there is no such thing
as ‘the world’. In sections 14.4 to 14.6 we saw that creation is an
apparent division of the unified field of Consciousness (The Self) into a
separate reified subject and its object – The Purusha and its ‘world’;
and our VS1 (14.4) outlines the principle of complementarity. Indeed
in the ramifications of this principle in section 14.6 we saw how the
‘world’ of the Purusha is uniquely its own ‘world’ - acting as a
reflection of its own quality of vibration. Now if this principle is not to
lead to a narcissistic solipsism on the level of the ‘character’, a further
insight, and corresponding structural principle, will be needed.

21.6
Somehow we have to square the fact that, for me as Purusha, the
world is uniquely ‘my world’, with the fact that there is nothing special
about the character I predominantly identify with; and that all the
other characters in ‘my world’ also each have a witnessing Purusha
principle for whom the world is ‘their world’, which acts as a unique
mirror reflecting back to them their energetic vibration; and that
 66

somehow the character I predominantly identify with is, for the other
Purushas, just one of the ‘other’ characters in ‘their world’. This
seems like a tall order: we seem to need to have a common 3D ‘world’
in which all the characters can interact equally (without solipsistic
bias), and yet have each characters’ witnessing Purusha principle only
projecting its own unique world. This seems contradictory at first
sight, but modern information technology can provide us with an
analogy that will show how this is perhaps possible after all.

22. The Multi-player ‘Omega’ Game

22.1
One of the functions of Maya is to create ‘space’, which it does via one
of the Self-limiting Kanchukas (16.2) (the ‘Niyati tattva). But the
purpose of creating space is to act as a ‘stage’ on which the Divine
Actor can play out the roles. For if there is to be only one role it would
be a very limited drama indeed.

The illusion of a 3D spatial ‘world’ serves the purpose of providing

common dimensions in which the multiple roles necessary for a good
drama can interact. If we want to see beneath the illusion we need, at
the same time, to hold onto the purpose it serves. There is a way in
which the characters can have all that is necessary (equally and in
common) for them to interact in their roles whilst still holding onto the
fact that every Purusha projects its own unique ‘world’.

22.2
The modern analogy that helps to show the kind of structure needed
is that of a multi-player computer game played over the internet.
Each player (purusha) has his or her own monitor (‘world’). In the
game played in the monitor there is one game-character (‘avatar’ is the
term used) with which the player identifies and in whose interests the
game-character acts (namely to win). Each monitor (‘world’) is
different and the appearance of the game in that monitor can be
tailor-made to suit each player – the scenes, background, choice (or
construction) of avatar, level of difficulty etc can be uniquely suited to
each player. So in the relevant sense each player creates his or her
own game-world that reflects back his or her own tastes – the
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purusha projects its ‘world’ according to VS1. However what makes it

possible to play the game with other players is the deep programming
of the game which is the same for all players; even though how that
programming makes the game-worlds appear is different in each
monitor according to the tastes of the player and the perspective of
each ‘avatar’. What connects each ‘avatar’ is not their outer
appearance in the game-world, but their ‘inner’ connection determined
their positions in one and the same game program. It is the fact that
all avatars and players are determined by this deep program equally
that rescues the situation from the solipsism of any one player or
‘avatar’.

But, coming out of the analogy now, what is the equivalent of the deep
program of the game? What is the information source that co-
ordinates all the purushas projecting their different characters in their
different ‘worlds’ so that their interactions form one common drama?

22.3
Now this is where we have to remember the situation of ‘nested’ and
‘branching’ purushas that we saw in 20.5 above. For the information
source needed to co-ordinate all the purushas and their characters
lies in the fact that they must all be ‘nested’ in, as different ‘branches’
of, one over-arching Purusha. Ultimately the information source that
determines all Purushas and their ‘worlds’ is The Infinite Self – but
within that (zooming in on the fractal pattern, as it were) there are
scenarios where, for example: one Purusha (say P) is projecting several
other purushas (say p1, p2, p3) who are projecting characters
(c1,c2,c3) in several separate ‘worlds’. The illusion is that the
characters interact in one common ‘world’. The reality here is that
each character c1, c2, c3 is projected by separate purushas p1, p2, p3
projecting their own ‘worlds’. The perfect and appropriate interaction
between the purushas and their characters (required by VS1) is made
possible by the fact that it is all projected by one over-arching
Purusha P. This can be summed up with the following ‘Omega’
principle, which forms our final vital sutra.

VS5: “When it appears that several beings interact in one world, it is

really one being acting in several ‘worlds’” (Omega principle)

22.4
The above paragraphs of this section may seem rather abstract, so we
can flesh out these principles in an example which may make things
clearer. We can outline a three-level scenario, from the bottom up:

“I am a warrior by nature: an aggressive personality in a powerful

body, trained and equipped with vicious weapons. But my fate is a
difficult one, for I have been commanded to defend an outlying city of
our empire which is under attack by our enemies. But strangely we
are short of reinforcements. The few of us who are here are facing a
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daunting task in repelling so many. Doubtless my commanders know

of my reputation, and have full faith in my prowess. I am determined
not to let them down…”

What our warrior doesn’t know is that he is a game-character in a

computer war game being played on the internet by a businessman, in
his office in his lunch-break.

“I am businessman on my lunch-break playing my favourite game.

I’ve never met the other player, though he logs on to the internet at
the same time every lunch time so we can play. He has an aggressive,
confident style, but can be hasty. I’m more careful and calculating.
I’ve lured him into a trap by weakly defending one of my game-cities to
act as a sacrifice. He will win the city, but it will divert him from my
real attack happening elsewhere…things are looking good. I will have
to continue this tomorrow though, as I have a business meeting
now…”

What our businessman doesn’t realise is that he does, in fact, know

his opponent. The one who logs on every lunch time is not a ‘him’,
but a ‘her’ – she is a businesswoman, and she will be present at the
business meeting he is about to go to. [In her game she identifies with
and controls the warrior-characters who are attacking the city].

During the business meeting he is his usual confident, brash self but
the businesswoman, representing the other side, seems quite timid
and hesitant. It is only much later that he realises that he was taken
in by her appearance, because the fine detail of the agreement they
came to unexpectedly gives the other side a distinct advantage…

What both our business people don’t know is that they are both
fictional characters in a novel - a novel whose author is keen to
explore issues about how fantasy role-playing can interact with real
life. Both the main characters are very different in their fantasy-role
than they are in their real life. The businessman wins his game but
loses out in the business deal – for the businesswoman it is the other
way round…

The ordered interaction of the warriors in their game-‘worlds’, and the

business people in their ‘worlds’, is made possible by all being
projections of the one author of the novel. (Omega principle).

22.5
So the author is the over-arching Purusha P, the business people are
the purushas p1, p2, the game-warriors are the characters c1 etc.
Only the author here can be a ‘solipsist’ – and only then in relation to
the novel, not in the rest of his/her life outside writing. For the
business people and for the game-warriors, interacting with their
fellow-characters is their very raison-d’être – they exist to further the
 69

plots on their respective levels. Notice also the role of ‘fate’ or ‘irony’
here: the warrior was created and placed deliberately to ‘fail’, in its
own terms - as was the businessman, in business terms. But they
both ‘succeeded’ in serving the aims of the author.

This clearly raises issues about Free Will – it seems that our poor
warrior and businessman had no choice; they were doomed to ‘fail’ in
their own terms from the outset. This is another age-old philosophical
conundrum which we will address more fully below in section 26.

23. The Story So Far

23.1
Now is a good point to take a breath and review our account of
creation (from section 14 on), for we have covered the salient
structural points; and while there are very interesting considerations
still to come, they will made against the back-drop of this structure.
For that reason it is worth very briefly summarising our account of
creation by simply stating in order the principles involved. Rather
than putting them in the order they appeared in the above account
(done for narrative reasons), we place them in the logical order of their
application.

“In reality nothing arises, nothing subsides, only the divine spanda-
shakti which, though free of succession (time), appears in different
aspects as if arising, and as if subsiding.” (VS3 14.8)

“Chiti, descending from the plane of pure consciousness, becomes the

mind, chitta, by contracting in accordance with object(s) perceived”
(VS2 14.7)

“The universe is manifold because of the differentiation of reciprocally

adapted, complementary subjects and objects.” (VS1 14.4)

“As above, so below; as here, so elsewhere” (VS4 9.1, 20.1)

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“When it appears that several beings interact in one world, it is really

one being acting in several ‘worlds’” (VS5 22.3)

23.2
These five principles apply from the edge of manifestation onwards
into the dualities of creation (section 14 onwards). The considerations
we made up to 8.7 were exclusively to do with (timeless) manifestation
and they will play a vital part again in our story before we are
finished. For now though, we can explore further ramifications of our
creation structure.

24. The Divine Nescience

24.1
In section 5.1 we quoted the author Douglas Adams. The characters
in his story travel far and wide across galaxies, and at one point
manage to track down God. God turns out to be a strange fellow
living in a shack on a remote planet with only a cat for company.
Much to one of the travellers distress, God turns out to be some kind
of crazy solipsist who doesn’t even think that anything outside His
shack exists. Far from taking responsibility for the Universe that He
created, He doesn’t even know its there. Far from being the
omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent Deity our traveller was hoping
for, He seemed to know nothing, care nothing for power, and was
necessarily indifferent to a universe that He didn’t know about…
 71

There may be an element of truth to this fable, and it is worth looking

briefly at the concept of ‘knowledge’ and considering what can
meaningfully be ‘known’.

24.2
Whatever else may be involved in the concept of ‘knowledge’ it is
clearly, at least, a relation between a conscious subject and an object
in its field of consciousness. A subject perceives an object and, on the
basis of that perception, forms concepts to categorise those
perceptions into an orderly whole – ‘knowledge of the object’.
In terms of our creation structure then, what can we say about the
‘knowledge’ of The Self? In 8.4 we outlined the rise of the
Consciousness that is The Self, where it was described as a unified,
polarised field that was its own subject and only object. So The Self
knows only itSelf and that is All. That ‘knowing’ is its vibration -
spanda-shakti - and according to VS3 that is all there really is. For
The Self there is no creation; true, The Self is brim full of Jnana-
shakti (tattva IV 8.4), which is the potential, or power, to ‘know’, but
this is Self-directed, for there is no other object. The Self is our divine
doodler (11.6) that knows nothing but the joy of doodling. So it seems
that The Self is not a very good candidate for being God.
 72

24.3
Obviously the first dualistic subject/object relation where there are
separate objects that may be ‘known’, occurs in the first generation of
Purushas, who each project and ‘know’ the objects in their ‘worlds’.
In that sense each Purusha is a ‘god’ of its ‘world’. This corresponds
in a way to the creator god ‘Brahma’ in Hinduism – in which there
may be many such Brahma creating ‘worlds’ in endless cycles.
(‘Brahma’ is distinct from ‘Brahman’ who is The Self from whom all
Brahma arise). So the Purushas can know their ‘worlds’. This of
course applies to all purushas of whatever ‘generation’.

24.4
It is worth pausing to remember exactly what a Purusha is here: in
14.2 and 14.3 we outlined how the Purusha is an illusory, reified
subject that appears to take on an independent existence. The Self
takes itself to be Purusha (paradoxically, as we saw) in order, as it
were, to be the subject of an objective ‘world’. In a sense then we can
say that The Self knows ‘worlds’: but in order to do so, it identifies as
the Purusha of the ‘world’ It wants to know. In a way we could say
that the Purusha is the means by which The Self exercises its
unbounded Jnana-shakti - its window of knowledge on a ‘world’.
But also remember there is paradox here, for in identifying with
Purusha it apparently ‘loses’ its identity as The Self. The same
situation applies, of course, at any level of purusha. The over-arching
Purusha identifies with its projected purushas in order to have access
to their ‘worlds’ – at the cost of forgetting itself in the process. We
can see then that at every level in the ‘downward’ process of creation
there is the projection of a purusha that knows its ‘world’ just as its
own source becomes unknown.

24.5
So, strictly speaking, The Self knows only ItSelf. The Purusha knows
only its ‘world’ and no other. What of the Purushas’ knowledge of
other Purushas? Here we have the curious situation that, although a
Purusha can have knowledge of the next generation of purushas,
projected by itself, it cannot in principle have any knowledge of
‘parallel’ Purushas of the same generation or of any of their projected
purushas. For in 14.5 we showed how each Purusha projects its
‘world’ within itself, even though each ‘world’ is reified as ‘objective’.
If same generation Purushas are both so doing, there is no way they
can ever be objects to each other. Even though, because of VS4, they
must in principle exist, they can never be known directly by each
other. [This is an example of the kind of delightful, unknowable truth
we referred to in 1.4]. In the Yoga Vasistha we have: ‘On account of
the fact that the purusha is surrounded on all sides by the world that
arises from it, the purushas do not see one another, do not understand
one another.’
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24.6
It is this fact of the Purushas’ mutually unknowable status that has
made the problem of solipsism so hard to crack. ‘Parallel’ Purushas
have the same kind of status as the ‘many worlds’ of Hugh Everett
(15.5 and 15.6). We shall visit this again in section 28.3.

For the moment it is worth noting that there seems as much, if not
more, ‘unknowing’ in creation, as there is ‘knowing’: The One knows
no manifestation; The Self knows nothing except ItSelf; the Purusha
knows nothing except its ‘world’. So we can see why we noted (in 3.4)
that the negative approach to reality involves letting go of ‘knowing’.
Each Purusha and its ‘world’ is a little island of knowledge in the vast
sea of the unknown.

25. The Illusion of Choice - The Paradox of Free Will

25.1
If there is not as much ‘knowledge’ in creation as one might at first
suppose, what can we say of ‘freedom’? Do the Purushas (of what ever
generation) or their projected characters have freedom of choice, or
are their roles determined? At the end of 22.5 we had uncovered the
seeds of contradiction or paradox: in our example we had, on the one
hand, a businessman free to make choices (about the strategy in both
his game and his business); on the other hand we saw that he is only
a fictional character and that the choices he made were predetermined
to serve the author’s plot – in that sense he seems not free at all. This
seeming contradiction is the Paradox of Free Will.
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25.2
What we have here is really a confusion of levels – similar to that as
was partly implicated in the problem of solipsism (see 21.3). On the
level of our businessman, there are apparent choices to be freely
made. On the level of the novelist it is important to remember that
the fictional character is just that – fictional - i.e. it doesn’t exist. It is
not that the novelist is imposing a whole set of situations on some
poor unsuspecting, pre-existent character, without his or her consent.
The character only exists in the context of its situation. There is no
question, ultimately, of such a character being either free or not free,
for there is no-one there. Of course the novelist might also be an
imaginary creation in the mind of another higher-level Purusha, so the
same considerations apply. We can see, in general, that each
Purusha/person/character, considered on its own level, has the
freedom of apparent choices. Looked at from a higher level, it is not
that the Purusha/person/character is ‘bound’ by its ‘story’ – for it
only exists in the context of the ‘story’. We can also see here a pointer
towards an answer to our question of 18.8, in the context of our
Paradox of omnipotence, as to who it is that feels relatively limited and
impotent - for it is no-one. This answer seems somewhat of a deflation,
but its full import we will see at the end in section 33.
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25.3
The Paradox of Free Will is also a confusion between subjective and
objective perspectives on a person or character. Every person can be
known objectively, from the ‘outside’. The greater the degree of such
knowledge, the more it is tempting to think of that person as
objectively determined – i.e. not free. For example, you may know
someone very well and know that they have a strong liking for coffee.
In a situation where they are offered a choice of coffee or tea, you may
accurately predict that they will choose coffee every time. But that
does not mean that that person, subjectively considered, from ‘inside’,
has no freedom in the matter. Freedom of choice means freedom to
follow one’s predilections, not a complete absence of them. To be
bound means to be in a situation where one is constrained not to be
able to follow them - e.g. when locked up in jail. It may be that those
predilections have been created by conditioning, or placed there by the
creator of that character – but the fact that they are there provides the
character with the means to make the choice; without any
predilections of any sort there would be complete indifference in any
situation of choice.

25.4
Of course there may be more complex situations where there are
competing impulses within one person – one may be addicted to coffee
and simultaneously wish to be free of such addiction. The apparent
choice is then on a deeper subjective level – the opposing impulses are
‘objects’ to be chosen between. But the apparent, or relative, freedom
is still there. From a higher level the whole drama is just that – a
fictional drama of conflicting interests, revolving around a fictional
character dreamt up just in order to play it all out. Without the
apparent ‘freedom’ of the character there would be no story to tell.
Even if the role of the character is that in the story he is in jail, or in
some other way not ‘free’, the dramatic value would be in how that
situation is dealt with – in the apparent choices of attitude and so on.

25.5
Perhaps the reason why the notion of Free Will can be such a charged
issue is in response to the problem of suffering, and the need for
‘justice’ or ‘fairness’. We can be repelled by the thought that we are
mere puppets or pawns in another’s game, and bemoan a fate over
which we have no control – especially if we suffer in the role. So
Shakespeare complained in ‘King Lear’: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we
to the gods: they kill us for their sport’.
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Somehow we need to hold on to control by exercising our Free Will to

determine our own destiny. Any binding conditions can be seen as the
effects of ‘karma’ – which is the result of previous (good or bad)
exercise of our Free Will. We are free to make choices to burn away
our previous bad ‘karma’ and create our own life anew. We will
consider this further in section 29.

25.6
For the moment it is enough to note our two perspectives: from the
point of view of any Purusha/person/character there is relative or
apparent choice at its own level. From the point of view of a higher
Purusha there is no issue – for there is no-one there to be free or not.
So either there is apparent freedom, or else the issue is irrelevant. But
is there such a thing as Absolute Freedom? We can only say
negatively at this point that, if there were such a thing, it would apply
only to that which is never an object – either to itself, or to some
projecting Purusha. We will consider this, also, in section 33.
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For now we consider the situation of the suffering character and the
rationale of him or her practising ‘spiritual methods’ to break the spell
of illusion.

26. Spiritual Methods – The Paradox of Practice

26.1
In section 16 we saw how the bad news of limitation results in
apparent loss of the wholeness of the plenum, and that this was the
result of the operation of Maya. In section 14 we saw how Maya is a
two-fold illusion – the reification of a supposed ‘subject’, plus a false
identification with that ‘subject’ (which automatically projects its
‘world’). Since it seems desirable to undo the effects of Maya, and be
restored to the plenum, it seems desirable to discover, or devise,
methods to enable a dis-identification with the supposed ‘subject’
together with a seeing through of the illusion of continuity that gave
rise to its reification in the first place.

26.2
Perhaps the first thing that needs to be emphasised is that, for the
most part, there is most likely no need or even conscious desire to end
the illusion at all. As well as an illusion it is also a game or role being
played out; any dwelling on the question as to its ultimate reality is
only likely to spoil the game – and for that reason is instinctively
avoided.
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26.3
Given that one does wish to seek the truth of the matter though, the
outline consideration seems to be: any activity which ‘lightens’ the
false identification and makes the illusion of continuity more see-
through needs to be followed; and conversely anything which
strengthens the identification, or makes the illusion seem more solid
or heavier, needs to be avoided. All the traditional injunctions to be
virtuous and to avoid vice only have their justification in so far as they
lead to this ‘lightness’. And in any case this is only to provide a
favourable context in which the dispelling of the illusion is more likely,
and is not an end in itself. Of all the plethora of religious and
spiritual practices available, we need only focus on their underlying
principles, and thereby pick out three over-lapping categories of
practice.

26.4
The first category is based on considerations of energy. In 14.3 and
14.7 we noticed how the creative process involves energy vibrating in
a ‘denser’ mode (‘chiti’ becoming ‘chitta’ in our VS2). So by reversing
this process the mind becomes pure consciousness again. The
serpent that seduced us away from paradise becomes the serpent
‘kundalini’ that takes us back. So we have a whole group of practices
to ‘raise the energy/vibration’. Everything from virtuous living,
physical ‘purity’, special diets (or drugs!), body and breathing
exercises to chanting, mantra repetition and ‘kundalini’ work – all
direct interventions in the energy levels of the physical and mental
systems.
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26.5
The second category is that of meditation. In our examples of the
illusion of continuity (section 11) it was largely the speed of the
underlying phenomena that gave rise to the illusion – the fast circling
point of light, the fast 24 frames per second etc. So the rationale of
meditation is to turn away from the distractions in the objective
‘world’. To meditate is to turn within and allow all the arising
thoughts, images, memories and anticipations to slow down – ideally
to attain an inner stillness. Not as an end in itself, but because it
then becomes easier to see that there is no ‘subject’ or ‘self’ – merely
the arising of thoughts and memories that display a certain apparent
unity (cf. 11.7 and 11.8).

Here there is a possibility of seeing through the ‘gaps’ in the illusion

and becoming aware of the underlying background of pure
consciousness, ‘chiti’. So we have techniques of focussing on the still
point at the end of each inhalation and exhalation, or on the thought-
free space between thoughts, or on the gap between the waking and
sleep states. These are all progressive techniques designed to
culminate in an instantaneous Recognition of The Self at some point
as the illusion of ‘self’ or ‘subject’ gradually or suddenly dissolves.

26.6
The third category is that of simply and directly using consciousness
to investigate its own source and nature by inquiring ‘Who Am I?’
 80

This is to confront the illusion of a separate ‘self’ head-on. ‘Who or

what is the ‘self’ that wants to be free?’ Investigation might reveal the
paradoxical loop of the ‘self’ (see 11.8). For the ‘self’ can never be
‘found’ as any kind of object: there is no ‘self’ apart from the
questioning itself – there is no ‘thing’, only a functioning. With this
recognition the illusion of separation may dissolve, and the loop
unravel.

This seems the most direct approach for, in a sense, no preparation is

needed. It doesn’t matter what energy level, ‘purity’ or stillness may
or may not be attained; for the underlying reality is that a timeless,
impersonal play of consciousness gives rise to the illusion of an
enduring, time-bound, personal entity – the ‘self’; this illusion is
sustained timelessly moment by moment, and can cease in a moment.
This cessation in no way depends on the ‘qualities’ (of energy, purity,
stillness etc) of the ‘self’ – how could it? For those ‘qualities’ are part of
the illusion!

26.7
Now we may see that in all considerations of practice we are faced
with this following Paradox of Practice: In 26.3 we noted that any
activity that reinforces the false identification or makes the ‘self’ seem
more solid should be avoided. But any practice undertaken to dispel
the ‘self’ may only reinforce it – for who is it that is going to ‘practice’?
If the idea is that by pursuing some practice one is somehow going to
benefit thereby, all that is happening is that the circle of ‘self’-interest
 81

is sustained. Whatever strategy is adopted by the ‘self’, with whatever

outcome, there must be a simultaneous bolstering of the strategising
‘self’. One cannot dig one’s way out of a hole. Nor is ‘doing nothing’
any kind of solution; for the same reason – it bolsters the ‘doer’ of that
‘nothing’. If there is to be an awakening from the illusion of ‘self’, it
must be in spite of, not because of, that ‘self’. (More on this in section
29).

So this leads on to our next consideration – that of ‘Enlightenment’ or

‘Awakening’: what is it and how does it happen?

27. Who Awakens? – The Paradox of Enlightenment

27.1
The naïve idea of ‘Awakening’ or ‘Enlightenment’ is that it is an event
that happens to somebody – one might say: “Firstly I am asleep in
ignorance and miserable, then something wonderful happens to me
and I get ‘woken up’. Now I am ‘Enlightened’ and blissful, and my life
is much better than before…” We have seen enough already in our
account to realise that this naïve idea cannot hold – for we have seen
that the very idea of a ‘me’ or an ‘I’ is precisely what is at stake. The
seeking ‘self’ finds itself in the curious predicament of wanting to
dissolve itself and yet still be around afterwards to enjoy the supposed
benefits of such a dissolution.
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27.2
Of course a real dissolution would hold no guarantees; it would be
more of an unconditional leap into the unknown – a kind of suicide.
Moreover, we have seen from the previous section that it couldn’t
really be undertaken as a self-willed act. It would be more like a
spontaneous assent to a process of dissolution that was happening
anyway – because it would be seen that there is no point in resisting
it, or in trying to go ‘back’.
But from the point of view of our account of the creation process, is
there any light that can shed on this leap into the unknown?

27.3
Our description of creation has outlined the idea that it is all a
projection in Consciousness involving many reified ‘identities’ at
perhaps infinitely many levels: The Self projects Purushas (and their
‘worlds’) who in turn project purushas etc, who project
persons/characters in a mind-boggling, infinitely ‘nested’ and
‘branching’ explosion of Consciousness. This happens as a result of
Maya: a two-fold illusion of reification and false identification. Now we
saw how an essential feature of this ‘downward’ process of involution
is that the false identification (asmita) involved is somehow
‘unconscious’ or automatic – see 12.4, 14.3 and 18.5. (The mysterious
source of this ‘unconsciousness’ was fuel for the Paradoxes of
Purusha and Omnipotence). If there is to be such a thing as
‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’ it must consist in reversing this
process, which means, in part, the elimination of the ‘unconscious’
element in creation thereby enabling an evolution - a seeing of it fully
and consciously. What does this mean for our creation structure?

27.4
In section 18 we envisaged our divine author/actor who writes and
then acts a part in a play; the crucial part of the paradox we
encountered was that the author/actor forgets his true identity and
loses himself entirely in the role. The Paradox of Omnipotence meant
that the actor cannot snap out of the role at will; indeed it is not seen
as a role at all – rather it seems one’s true identity. Obviously this
illusion is dispelled at the end of the play when the role ends; then the
author/actor comes out of his self-imposed ‘trance’, recognises his
true identity and realises it was all make-believe. There remains the
possibility, though, that the author/actor ‘comes to’ or awakens while
the play is still going on. How this might happen is a mystery, since it
cannot happen as a result of the efforts (or ‘practice’) of the character,
as we saw in 26.7 with the Paradox of Practice.

27.5
Now, there are two different situations here: the first is where the
author/actor is himself a Purusha, and the role played is one of his
own created characters. The second is where the Author/Actor is The
Infinite Self, and the role is a Purusha.
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In the first situation the Purusha creates a character in a play, forgets

himself entirely in playing the role, and then ‘awakens’ to himself
again whilst playing the role. [The whole process is subject to time, as
is the Purusha itself, since its appearance happens with the
limitations created by the Kanchukas (see 16.2)]. From the point of
view of the character the situation is far more radical. The character is
happily or unhappily living out his or her life with any number of
dramas going on – involving romance, career and achievement,
sickness and tragedy – whatever it might be… What happens next,
gradually or suddenly (and there must be infinitely many subtle
scenarios here), is that there may develop a sense that it is all
questionable – its value or meaning and finally even its reality comes
under threat as it starts to deconstruct. The Sufis talk of ‘a corridor
of madness’ that may have to be walked down as the fabric of one’s
life comes under pressure from the energies of consciousness. [For a
wonderful account of one such experience see Dr. R. Moss “The Black
Butterfly”].
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Then there comes a moment when one goes over the cliff - the pattern
of one’s life dissolves. Then, miraculously, the consciousness re-forms
in a more expanded configuration as the realisation dawns: “It was all
make-believe – a story of my own creation, and I am the Author!” The
Purusha awakens.

27.6
It may be that, at the point of awakening, the Purusha simply brings
the play to an end. For in a way there seems little point in its
continuing – all the ‘heat’ has been taken out of the drama, for it is
seen that the central character doesn’t really exist. All the dilemmas
and strategies to bring about the desired life for the character fall
away as the central lynch-pin dissolves. The awakening of the
Purusha acts as a kind of transcendent ‘Deus ex Machina’ that winds
everything up without the need to work out the issues from within the
play itself.

However there also exists the possibility that the Purusha may
continue with the play, but this time having a conscious identification
with the character – without losing its sense of identity as the Author.
In a sense there is a rapid alternation of identification as Author and
identification as character, which can culminate in a ‘merging’ into
one Awakened consciousness. In some traditions the image here is of
a character (ego) that has been ‘emptied’ of all the ‘drama’, leaving
only a husk, or the empty ‘skin’ of a character, which can still
function in its ‘world’, but whose essential sense of identity has ‘gone’
from the set and is now identified as the Author.
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Again, there may be infinitely many subtle scenarios here as the

quality of the role, and therefore the plot, changes as a response to
the author/character knowing that it doesn’t exist (as only the
character). Having at the same time the consciousness of the Author,
the character knows it is all the ‘other’ characters (and the creator of
the ‘set’ i.e. the ‘world’) as well – ‘It’s all Me!’
[Notice here the similarity of expression of ‘It’s all Me!’ with the
completely different sense of ‘It’s all about me’ that we saw in 21.2. The
first is an expression of awakening; the second is the expression of
massive ego-inflation. Differentiating between the two may not be as
easy as all that, even though they are actually opposite ends of a
spectrum of self-identification!]

There can be a creative feedback loop - between consciousness

identifying as the Author, and consciousness identifying as the
character - which enlivens the play in previously unpredictable ways.
The character will see the deep meaning in all of the roles as they
contribute to the whole drama.
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In particular the character may wish to communicate to the other

characters the fact that it’s all just a play. The character adds to its
role the function of a Teacher - out of a compassionate response to the
‘others’ who are still convinced their role is ‘real’ and suffer as a
result. Of course, this is a paradoxical play as it is also seen that their
suffering, along with the rest of their role, is not real (see section 19).
The character may play the role of ‘bodhisattva’ and vow not to
relinquish the play until all the players are awakened to their
witnessing Purusha/Author consciousness.

27.7
The situation we have outlined is where a purusha awakens out of its
identification with one of its projected characters. But of course the
purusha may itself be a character projected by a higher-level (earlier
generation) over-arching Purusha. The purushas’ awakening is part
of the plot written by the over-arching Purusha. The mind boggles to
contemplate the fact that there maybe many levels of Purusha (see
section 20), and therefore similarly many levels of ‘awakening’.

There was a Zen master who said at the end of his life that he didn’t
know whether he was enlightened or not. When asked by his
mystified disciples to clarify his statement he replied that he had had
seven major ‘awakenings’ in his life – and that on each ‘awakening’ he
was initially convinced he’d awoken to his ‘true’ identity. This turned
out not be so, as his consciousness underwent further transformation
and there was subsequently a higher ‘awakening’. This had happened
seven times in all, and he honestly wasn’t sure whether the identity he
was presently rooted in was his ultimately true identity, or whether
there were further ‘awakenings’ lying ahead!

For clarity we can use the term ‘awakening’ to refer to the situation
where a Purusha awakens out of identification with its projected
creations - as contrasted with ‘enlightenment’ which we consider next.

27.8
We can use the term ‘enlightenment’ in the context of the second of
the two situations we outlined at 27.5 – namely where the
Author/Actor is The Self and the role played is Purusha. All of the
above comments in 27.5, 27.6 and 27.7 still apply, but there are two
further essential differences.

The first is: when a purusha awakens out of identification, it still

remains as a separate ‘subject’ – it is still a product of Maya. It
functions on a higher level, obviously, than its own projected
characters, and is a more expanded consciousness. But it is still a
reified ‘subject’ projecting its ‘world’. As such it is still subject to the
limitation of the Kanchukas, and does not experience the fullness of
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the Plenum. In a certain sense it does not matter how many

‘awakenings’, through however many levels of purusha, take place -
for the identity still remains in separation.

When there is dissolution of all purushas, though, there is a

realisation of The Infinite Self: separation ends, and there is the
experience of the fullness of the Plenum, a ‘return’ to paradise.

27.9
In the second essential difference we confront again a situation of
paradox. For we noted, in 27.5, that the drama of false identification
and subsequent awakening of the Purusha is subject to time; whereas
The Self is not. So at no time did The Self ever identify with the
projected Purusha. It was therefore never ‘asleep’, and so could not
‘awaken’. In short we have the unanswerable question – ‘Who is
enlightened’? Not The Self, for it was never in ignorance; nor the
Purusha, for it dissolves. ‘Who gets enlightened?’ This is the Paradox
of Enlightenment.

Of course, it should be simple to see by now that this Paradox of

Enlightenment is really the reverse side of the Purusha Paradox of
section 17, where we had the unanswerable question: ‘Whose
illusion?’ These two Paradoxes can neatly dovetail together: whatever
it was that was subject to illusion, it is that that gets enlightened –
although what that is seems to be delightfully unknowable.

One is reminded here of the tale of the Buddhist monk who shows a
lighted candle to his disciple and asks ‘Where does the flame come
from?’ The disciple blows out the candle and cheekily replies “You tell
me where it went, and I’ll tell you where it came from…”

28. The Divine Omniscience

28.1
In section 24.4 we reminded ourselves about the nature of the
Purusha and how, in a way, it could be seen as a ‘window’ onto its
‘world’ for The Self to see through – though at the cost of falsely
identifying therewith. We said: ‘ We can see then that at every level in
the ‘downward’ process of creation there is the projection of a purusha
that knows its ‘world’ just as its own source becomes unknown.’

Now the previous section on ‘awakening’ and ‘enlightenment’ has

allowed us to see the possibility of reversing the ‘downward’ process of
creation, and to ‘ascend’. This ascension is a letting go of one’s ‘world’
and an awakening to a higher one. The source of the purusha and its
‘world’ no longer remains unknown as its over-arching Purusha
awakens. The possibility that this awakening may happen even while
the drama of the ‘world’ is continuing means that ‘windows’ may open
on all the ‘worlds’ as the consciousness ‘ascends’. So the Divine
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Nescience that was an essential part of the ‘downward’ creation

(section 24) now turns into the possibility of Divine Omniscience as an
awakening happens at every level in the ‘ascension’.

28.2
What have here is a view of our creation structure whose many levels
forms a ‘Great Chain of Being’ (to use Arthur Lovejoy’s phrase), linked
by a ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (to use a Biblical image), that ‘snakes’ its way
from the lowest regions to the highest heavens.
Sliding down the scales of this cosmic serpent is process of involution,
creation, identification and concealment - and involves the suffering of
ignorance. Ascending the rungs of the ladder is an unweaving, a
relinquishing of identity, an evolution and a revelation - and releases
the joy of knowing.
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28.3
In section 24 we noted how ‘parallel’ purushas were necessarily
unaware of each other; but as their over-arching (Author) Purusha
awakens and there is a possibility of a ‘merging’ of the (Author)
Purusha and projected purusha (character) consciousness (see 27.6)
then it is possible for the purushas to know each other – ‘they’re all
Me!’ So we have an extension of the quote (24.5) from the Yoga
Vasistha: ‘Each purusha has its own world-appearance. However when
this world-appearance of the purushas is enquired into it invariably
leads to the same consciousness. Just as all waves are of the same
substance and are therefore one, the awakened purushas realise their
oneness and thus understand one another.’

28.4
There is another profound consequence of our vital sutra VS4, “As
above, so below; as here, so elsewhere”; as we noted in 9.1 this sutra
reflects the self-similarity of the infinite field of The Self – the fact that
the whole pattern of manifestation is reflected in every part. This
principle, also summed up as ‘the microcosm is the macrocosm’,
entails that each purusha is a fractal image of the whole pattern:
every purusha ‘contains’, in that sense, every other purusha. To the
extent, then, that a purusha awakens it can be a ‘window’ on every
other purusha; there is real sense then that an awakened purusha
has the potential for omniscience. There is an indissoluble oneness
that links all manifestation; it is a reflection, in the diversity of
manifestation, of the primal Unity of The Self. The extent to which
there is awakening in manifestation, to that extent all can be known
by every part (for every part is the whole). This is perhaps the meaning
behind the old adage that ‘He who saves one life saves the world
entire’; and also behind the experience that, upon awakening your
whole ‘world’ awakens with you, hence our good news of section 19.

I was at a meeting of Sufis once where the teacher announced that

many years ago the drop of her individual consciousness had
dissolved into the ocean of universal consciousness; but that a further
realisation had recently occurred: ‘Only now after twenty-seven years,
do I see that the ocean dissolved into the drop!’

28.5
In section 24.2 we noted how The Self knows only itSelf, and is
ignorant of any ‘world’. However the same ‘merging’ of consciousness
that we noted in 27.6 may allow the paradoxically ‘enlightened’
Purusha to be the consciousnesses of The Self while the Purusha and
its ‘world’ is still appearing. In which case The Self can ‘contact’ or
know that ‘world’ through the ‘enlightened’ Purusha. Perhaps this is
the reality behind many religious traditions’ veneration of the
enlightened ‘saint’ whose intercession enables the believers’ prayers to
be heard more effectively. For the enlightened ‘saint’/Purusha
consciousness acts as the ‘ears’ by which The Self hears the ‘prayers’
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of the characters. Without such enlightened ‘saints’ the Self knows no

‘world’. The possibility of the ‘enlightened’ Purusha makes The Self a
candidate for being God after all (see 24.2). Perhaps this is also the
principle behind the need for a Divine incarnation – the Word made
flesh – a Christ that is fully the Divine Self and fully enlightened Man
(Purusha).

28.6
Perhaps the paradoxical possibility of the ‘enlightened’ Purusha also
makes it possible for the The Self to know its own full creative
potential – to create and know a ‘world’; for the hidden treasure of The
Self to be made known to itSelf. So the downward descent and the
upward ascent finally have meaning as the ‘enlightened’ Purusha
merges with the Consciousness of The Self and ‘arrives where it
started and knows the place for the first time’ (see 5.2).

28.7
But as we have noted (in 5.2) this is paradoxical; for how can the
Plenum lack this knowledge in the first place?
And as we have noted (in 27.9) there can be no ‘enlightened’ Purusha;
for enlightenment is the dissolution of the Purusha.

Paradox all around. The cosmic serpent connects nothing with

nothing; for it is the Ouroborous whose tail disappears into its own
mouth.

29. New Age confusion 1 – ‘Create Your Life!’

29.1
It is not surprising, given the paradoxes we have encountered, that
the fundamental idea that our Consciousness projects our ‘worlds’
could give rise to much confusion. There is one brand of confusion,
though, that is worth commenting on as variations of it are so
prevalent amongst much contemporary thinking – in the ideas of the
so-called ‘New Age’. Some of the ideas of the ‘New Age’ are in fact very
old ideas that have been latched onto in a muddled-headed way and
have become distorted into a parody of themselves.

29.2
Two factors combine to create the confusion we are considering here.
The first factor is the principle: ‘You create your own reality’ (YCYOR).
The second factor is the unavoidable desire to re-create all the
qualities of the Eden (the plenum) we feel we have lost. When these
ineffable qualities get translated into a personal dimension they
inevitably appear as the desire for: personal happiness; personal love
(perfect relationships); perfect health (mental and physical); material
abundance (wealth/money); and the ability to create this in one’s life
(power).
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When these factors come together we have a recipe for creating one’s
own personal little Eden, just by tuning one’s consciousness to create
that ‘reality’.

29.3
The YCYOR principle - ‘You create your own reality’ - looks, on the
face of it, like the principles of the creation of a ‘world’ by a projection
of consciousness as summed up in our two vital sutras VS1 and VS2.
By the ‘principle of complementarity’ VS1, the ‘world’ of the purusha
is a reflection of, and perfect complement to, the energy vibration of
the purusha (see 14.6); so if the purusha can change its level or
quality of vibration, its ‘world’ will likewise change. This simple idea
has sometimes been re-cast as the ‘secret’ of ‘the law of attraction’ –
that you attract into your life the situations that reflect the same
energetic frequency at which you yourself vibrate.

29.4
So simply ‘visualise’ what you want, in order that you vibrate with its
‘energy frequency’, and it will manifest for you. This ‘magical thinking’
is actually a very ancient idea - forms of it have fuelled superstitions
in all cultures (see the notion of ‘sympathetic magic’ in Frazer’s ‘The
Golden Bough’). As well as supposedly working on an individual level,
it has been promoted to work on a community-wide or even global
level: a meditation society claimed to be able to reduce crime and
other negative phenomena in the area where their meditation was
practiced. Another organisation claimed to able to eliminate world
hunger within two decades by ‘creating the context in consciousness’
for this to happen.
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29.5
Of course these claims have proved groundless; and many people have
found that, even on an individual level, the desired results have not
been obtained.

Thousands of books have been written, and courses run, based on

variations of the idea that your world is a reflection of your attitude -
and that this is the key to get control of your life and to have all the
love, abundance and success you want. There is clearly a ‘snake in
the grass’ here – after all, if the principle had worked for those who
espouse it why would they need to write a book or run a new-age
course/workshop in it? Unless their way of ‘manifesting their
abundance’ was to take money from others for the mere privilege of
hearing about the idea. This is another loop of illusion – though here
the snake swallows your wallet whole on its way to biting its own tail.

29.6
The YCYOR fallacy here is a confusion of levels, and is in fact, at
bottom, the same confusion that fuels the problems of ‘solipsism’ and
‘free will’ (see 21.3 and 25.2). For the ‘you’ and the ‘your’ in the
phrase ‘you create your own reality’, represents two senses of the
identity ‘you’. ‘You’ as the person or character is ultimately an
illusion of false identification. It does not ‘create’ its ‘world’, but comes
into existence with its ‘world’. It is ‘You’ as the underlying
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consciousness (The Self, or an over-arching Purusha) that projects

both the person and its ‘world’ as a complementary duality.

29.7
The only way a person or character can change the energetic
frequency of its source consciousness is for there to be a relinquishing
of the false identification, and realisation of itself as the source. For
the person or character this means going over the cliff –‘dying’ to one’s
life and identity (see 27.1 and 27.2). But if one goes that far, the
original motivation to make life better for the person also goes. The
Author does not suffer from (say) the poverty or illness of its character
– on the contrary, it needs that ‘poverty’ and ‘illness’ to further the
dramatic plot.

29.8
Of course, after an awakening of the Purusha/Author, there may
indeed be changes to the plot (i.e. change of the energetic frequency)
as we envisaged in 27.6 – but all that would happen in a totally
different context: one where the character is seen as ultimately non-
existent. This change is tantamount to creating a new character, for a
character is only an energetic vibration at a particular frequency –
there is no ‘thing’, only a process or function that is reified as a ‘self’
and falsely identified with (see 11.7 and 11.8). Change the energy and
you create a new character.

29.9
The fallacy originates from wanting to hold on to identification with
the person or character (i.e. keep the energy frequency the same), with
all its urgent need to make its life ‘better’ - whilst at the same time
having the freedom of the consciousness of the Author to create
whatever situation it sees fit (i.e. change the energy frequency). This,
of course, is absurd. The clarity needed here is summed up in one
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phrase by Nisargadatta: ‘Liberation is not of the person, but from the

person.’

An absurd exaggeration may make the structure of the fallacy clearer:

Consciousness vibrates in such a way as to manifest a cow. But the
cow-consciousness decides it would prefer to leap through the sea like
a dolphin. So through extensive ‘visualisation’ it tries to vibrate with a
‘leaping-dolphin’ energy. It thereby attracts this energy to itself and –
hey-presto!

But there is no way a particular cow becomes a dolphin.

Consciousness may cease to manifest as a particular cow (the cow
dies), and may manifest as a particular dolphin (a dolphin is born);
but it is doing that all the time anyway – consciousness manifests as
cows and dolphins, but one does not ‘become’ the other.

When an actor ceases playing the role of (say) a tramp in one play and
then performs the role of a king in an entirely different play, we do not
say that the tramp became a king. That would represent confusion
over the levels of identity.

This YCYOR fallacy represents a misunderstanding of the principles

whereby consciousness projects ‘selves’ and ‘worlds’ (our VS1, VS2
etc) and distorts them into a form of unrealistic, magical thinking.
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30. New Age confusion 2 – ‘Parallel Universes’

30.1
There is also a possible further compounding of this YCYOR fallacy
into a scenario involving so-called ‘parallel’ realities. Here we are
envisaging a situation involving the YCYOR fallacy combined with a
similar confusion of levels involving free will and the appearance of
choice.

We can work our way into the compounded fallacy by following this
‘new-age’ train of thought:
“There seems to be a problem with our VS1, for the
principle of complementarity means that, if, for example,
consciousness vibrates with energy frequency of ‘Tyranny’ then it
manifests as a Tyrant purusha in its ‘world’ of tyranny and
oppression. But this requires Victim purushas, otherwise the
drama can’t work. It’s not fair that these victims are doomed to
play out their roles. But we must remember that these victims
are purushas who have freely chosen to manifest the energy
vibration of ‘victimhood’ and are creating their own reality. In this
reality they have made choices that have confirmed and
reinforced their ‘victim’ identity. If they use their free will they
can change their vibration and make different choices - they can
create, and move into, a new ‘parallel world’ where they can live
out a non-victim ‘version’ of themselves in non-tyrannical
surroundings. There are as many ‘parallel worlds’ and ‘versions’
of any self as there are frequencies of vibration in the infinite
energy of The Self! In fact all possible manifestations already
exist somewhere, so anyone can simply re-tune their vibration
and live out a different ‘version’ of themselves in a pre-existent
parallel world. We can choose from an infinite variety of parallel
worlds!”

30.2
We have already exposed the YCYOR fallacy as a confusion of levels;
but here we have confusion compounded on confusion, on different
levels at once. To unpick this mess it is perhaps best to start with the
idea of ‘choice’ and different ‘branching’ realities that result from
different, apparent choices. The idea here is common from science
fiction, and comprises fantasies based on our natural propensity to
ask ourselves ‘how would things have turned out differently if I had
made a different choice back then?’. The science fiction idea has its
roots in Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum
physics that we looked at in section 15. As a solution to the problem
of ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ Everett proposed that at every quantum event
 96

the ‘uncertain’ outcome (see 15.1) resulted in a branching of reality

into ‘many’ worlds, one for each of the possible outcomes of the event.
Remember here, though, that the whole point of Everett’s model was
to do away with the need for a conscious observer to determine
whether Schrodinger’s Cat was dead or alive – by proposing one world
for each outcome, observed or not.

30.3
So the first step (fallacious, as we shall see), is to equate the ‘freedom’
of a persons apparent choice, with an indeterminate quantum event;
then we imagine a ‘branching’ of reality into (say) two worlds – one for
each of the (say) two possible outcomes of the choice. So, for example,
imagine a woman making a choice as to whether to go for a drink with
a man. In one scenario she accepts – which leads to them getting
together and having a family; in the other, she declines – which leads
to them never seeing each other again. So the world splits into (say)
two worlds, one for each scenario:

30.4
The next step (also fallacious) is to suggest that because ‘worlds’ are
only energetic vibrations in consciousness, the single woman from one
‘world’ can, if she regrets her choice, re-tune her energy vibration and
‘travel’ to the other world and ‘become’ the married woman (who is
only a different ‘version’ of herself) in the other ‘world’.

The simplest way to deconstruct this confusion is simply to ask ‘Who

are these different ‘versions’?’
 97

Are they numerically several ‘characters’ who exist at the same time in
different worlds, but who have qualitative or functional identity? (see
section 10). In which case, even if one of them could ‘travel’ to a
different world, it could only take up the different role by ousting the
other ‘version’. In the above diagram, after the branching, there are
two worlds and four separate adults. It makes no sense to talk of the
single woman ‘becoming’ the married woman – they are separate
characters. This is a confusion of functional or qualitative identity,
with numerical identity. To use our example from 29.4, the king in
one play does not ‘become’ the king in an entirely different play just
because they are both ‘kings’ - even if played by the same actor.

30.5
Or are these ‘versions’ really numerically one and the same character
appearing in different plays? But here we have the same fallacy that
we uncovered in 29.6. The character and its ‘world’ (play) appear
together as the creation of the Author. The character cannot ‘change
its vibration’ and manifest a different play for itself. Only the author
can do that; and a change of vibration means a new character, for a
particular vibration is all that a character is. Nor does this mean that
the character lacks free will; it can have all the apparent choices it
needs relevant to its role – in our example above that may be the
choice, for example, to summon the energy to fight against being a
victim (without the need to vanish off into a parallel world!). As we
saw in section 25, there is no pre-existent character that is in any real
sense bound by its role. For a character is its role. It is this fact that
enabled the good news of section 19, that really speaking “none there
was or ever could be who had need for ought ”.

30.6
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Also, the first step (30.3) is fallacious because the apparent choice
that a character makes is not at all represented by the different
outcomes of a quantum event. The interpretation of quantum physics
that has parallels with our model of Consciousness has the
determinate outcome of a probabilistic quantum event being the
‘collapse of the wave function’; in 15.3 this was seen as the equivalent
of consciousness becoming the mind by ‘contracting in accordance
with the object perceived’ (our VS2). This, though, is not a branching
into different ‘worlds’, but rather it is the manifestation of a mind
(purusha) and its unique ‘world’. Not the ‘choice’ of a purusha, person
or character, but the process involved in its very creation.

This is a very different interpretation of quantum physics to that of

Everett’s ‘many world’ interpretation, which tries to eliminate
consciousness as an essential element in creation altogether.

30.7
We did indeed (in 20.4) see the possibility of parallel ‘nesting’ and
‘branching’ of purushas and their ‘worlds’. But, if understood
correctly, it would be strictly meaningless to contemplate any
character in any world ‘travelling’ to another: it would be like a film-
character turning up in a completely different film, showing on a
different screen, in a different cinema.

Indeed the impossibility of any mutual knowledge of each ‘world’ by

another was seen in 24.5 and 24.6. [Or, as we saw in section 28, such
knowledge was only possible on the release of identification with the
character, and therefore a dropping of its role, and the ‘merging’ with
the consciousness of the author.]

30.8
These kinds of confusion result from a confused ‘meta-reification’ of
the character into a substantial entity that can exist outside the
context of its inception. This kind of thinking has a place in science
fiction and cartoon fantasy, but that is where it belongs.

30.9
There is a very general fallacy that is exhibited by much of what
appears as ‘new-age’ ideas. Having once latched on to the idea that
‘anything that exists is a manifestation of consciousness’, there is a
powerful tendency to commit the fallacy of ‘affirming the consequent’:
that is, to assume that the reverse must follow - that therefore
‘everything I can dream up in my consciousness must manifest’. But
this is to forget that much of what is dreamt up is contradictory and
absurd and can never manifest except as a mental fantasy. The
principle that ‘all has its roots in consciousness’ is not a license to
blur the distinction between fantasy and fact.

31. Ancient confusion 1 – ‘The Hierarchy of Creation’

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31.1
Just as the confusion at the root of many New Age ideas revolves
around the idea that, to put it glibly, I can change my reality on a
whim, so there was an ancient confusion that was really its opposite.

This was a conviction that one’s sense of identity is something fixed,

solid and objective - and has its place in an immutable order of
creation. This order is the ‘Great Chain of Being’, that appears, in one
form or other, in all the religious traditions. In 28.2 we considered this
‘chain’ being formed of different levels of consciousness, different
degrees of Self-identification with the Purushas on every level of their
respective projections – their ‘worlds’; but in the exoteric traditions of
more ancient times there was one objective world; so the ‘chain of
being’ primarily gives order to objective realms within creation. This
great Hierarchy was an ordered collection of realms depicted as a
collection of concentric spheres. These were explicitly identified as the
spheres of the physical Earth and the elements, and the 8 spheres
(the orbits) of the moon and planets; and then the stars; beyond that
there were an equal number of angelic spheres, and finally the
Empyrean realm of Paradise where God dwells.
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31.2
In the battle for the soul there was a cosmic game of snakes and
ladders going on: ascending ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ into the heavens, but
always the danger of being tempted to slide down the snake, for the
thrill of it - but ending back where you started, or worse, in the
infernal regions. If you couldn’t be tempted by the desires of the
snake-slide, there were always the agents of the serpent – demons -
who were ready to frighten you off the ladder.

31.3
Although it was possible to ascend the ladder by ‘purifying’ oneself, in
the manner prescribed by the tenets of one’s religion, there was
always the presumption that the basic sense of identity remained
intact; this is expressed by the term ‘soul’ – which is the static,
immortal core of the temporal personality. This ‘soul’ was still
considered as something objective, though; it was something that
could be fought over by the forces of light and darkness – something
that could be ‘saved’ or ‘damned’. Of course it follows that if one’s very
‘soul’ is thus objectified, naturally its environment (the appropriate
sphere) will be objectified; and its ultimate destination will be to arrive
at an objective realm, in the presence of God (or Devil!) who is also
objective – an ‘other’.

31.4
So opposite to the ‘New-Age’ confusion – that my reality is a reflection
of ‘me’, we have, in the exoteric religious traditions, an ancient one
that Reality has little or nothing to do with me, subjectively
considered. I am a little cog in a big machine for processing souls, and
if I malfunction and fall of the ladder, then I perish; but the machine
rolls on.
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31.5
The ancient confusion consisted further in the following: while
recognising that identification with the body, ego-sense or intellect
was in some sense a ‘mistake’ – ‘the sin of pride’ – the true nature of
the false self-identification (asmita) was overlooked. What needed to be
seen was that: a ‘no-thing’ (pure consciousness) mysteriously engages
in a process that gives rise to a phenomenon that is falsely reified and
identified with (the operations of Maya - see 14.2); instead of seeing
that, though, the sense of reification and identification was detached
from its natural (and temporal) projected objects (intellect, ego-sense,
body etc) and projected onto an idealised sublimation of the sense of
self – the immortal ‘soul’. This was a self stripped of its usual and
natural embodiment, and was thus ethereal and eternal; but still
something objective, with a history and a destiny over which there
should be concern. It was even possible, in St. Paul’s famous phrase,
to ‘gain the whole world, but lose your soul’. This concept of ‘losing
one’s soul’ is of course contradictory, since one’s deepest identity is
precisely what’s left intact after all else is lost.

31.6
This all-round objectification – of one’s soul, the spheres of creation
and of God – was really the upshot of a failure to appreciate how the
process of creation is a continuous interaction between subject and
object, and not only an objective ‘fait accompli’. A failure to realise
that it is a process in consciousness and that - in Berkeley’s famous
dictum – to be is to be perceived (‘esse est percipi’).

31.7
What this means for the Hierarchy of Creation is that it is seen as a
Hierarchy in Consciousness: So at every level, the ‘angelic’ being that
appears to inhabit a more exalted realm ‘above’ is really an expanded
version of oneself – not an ‘other’, but an expression of the self-same
consciousness; an expression that has realised this identity more
deeply.
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31.8
What this means for ‘God’, is that the Divine is seen as essentially
identical to oneself in the most expanded expression: when all false
identification is dropped, the operation of Maya ceases and The
infinite Self is revealed as one’s own Divine Self. Then the previously
objectified concept of ‘God’ will be seen to have its roots in a projection
of the immature mind – an external sublimation parallel to that of the
‘Soul’ (31.5).
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31.9
Of course within many exoteric religious traditions there has existed
an inner, more esoteric teaching that recognises the centrality of
consciousness. Within Christianity we find Meister Eckhart saying ‘I
and God are one in my act of perceiving Him’ , and within Islam the Al–
Hallaj, the Sufi mystic, proclaimed ‘Ana ’l Haq!’ – ‘I am the Truth!’. But
Eckhart was judged to have been deluded by a demon posing as an
angel of light; and Al-Hallaj was executed for heresy. It is not hard to
see that any teaching that openly proclaims that the ultimate validity
and reality of Divine truths lies within our consciousness, must pose a
great threat to the authority of any objectively established religious
order. So the inner truths of creative consciousness were, for the most
part, kept secret.

[An interesting case of such a threat was that represented by the

Copernican revolution. Ostensibly about the relative position of the
Sun to the Earth in the scheme of things, it was more than just a
‘scientific’ controversy, as for centuries the Sun was also a symbol for
the Self (it functions as the principle influence in Astrology). So
putting the Sun at the centre of things was not only upsetting to the
order of the ‘chain of being’ (31.1) but also seen as a symbolic
statement of the dangerous esoteric truth that reality revolves around
the consciousness that is The Self.]

There have been traditions that were more or less exclusively ‘esoteric’
in that sense, though. In such a tradition there was not the same
danger of committing heresy. Kashmir Shaivism belongs to such a
category, and the creative process in that tradition is entirely
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described as the involution and evolution of consciousness; though

the seeing of creation as a Hierarchy in consciousness can also
harbour confusions that are worth looking at.

32. Ancient confusion 2 – ‘The Hierarchy in Consciousness’

32.1
For the esoteric traditions the objective realms of creation all had
counterparts in the inner realms of consciousness: every sphere in
creation was at the same time a level of being within consciousness.
The different traditions all had variations on this theme and we can
see the parallels in the following schema (compiled by K.Wilber):

Here the upper semicircle represents the objective realms and the
lower semicircle the subjective levels in consciousness. We exist on all
levels at once, but can be prone to identify within a more limited
spectrum – typically those of the body and psyche (in the Christian
‘cross-section’). The ‘ascent’ is the journey, not so much through the
objective spheres of the planets and the choirs of angels, but rather
within as the sense of identity expands to include the soul and spirit -
sometimes at the cost of bodily identity.

32.2
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In Kashmir Shaivism the creation schema is more exclusively ‘inner’,

with the gross, objective and physical world being relegated to the
final five lower levels (tattvas 32-36) out of a total of thirty-six:

Paramashiva is The Self and the tattvas 1-5 we have seen in 8.9;
tattva 6 is Maya, and 7-11 are the Kanchukas of limitation we saw in
16.2.
Tattva 12 is the Purusha that results from Maya and the Kanchukas,
and that we first saw in 14.3. Tattva 13 onwards comprises the
‘world’ of the Purusha, with which it is prone to further identify, as we
saw in 20.1. [There is a further complication, we need not dwell on,
due to the three ‘gunas’ which ‘colour’ the subsequent tattvas of the
‘world’ according to their qualities of harmony (sattva), action (rajas)
and inertia (tamas).] Intellect, ego-sense and memory are tattvas 14-
16, and 17-26 are the senses and powers of bodily action. The
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remaining tattvas, 27-36 are the subtle and gross elements. The vast
physical universe, as comprehended by modern science, is thus
restricted to the very bottom right-hand corner (gross elements 32-36)!
Little wonder then, that the mystic poet Rumi, knowing the ocean of
Consciousness that is Paramashiva, should say that: “a million
galaxies are a little scum on that shoreless sea.”

32.3
What is lacking in this schema is: firstly, it seems overtly solipsistic,
with one solitary purusha –this we have dealt with in section 21;
secondly, that it lacks the property of self-similarity of our VS4, which
led to the ‘big bang’ of section 20; thirdly, it doesn’t adequately deal
with the question as to whether Paramashiva is a ‘Self’ or not, and
avoids dealing with the Void of non-Being (see section 6); fourthly,
that it has a tendency to reify the tattvas – to create, in effect ‘states’
of consciousness through which one has to travel to reach The Self, or
Paramashiva. Whereas, in so far as there are ‘levels’, we exist on them
all simultaneously: the schema is really a cross-section of our Being.
It may be that, through false identification, Asmita, we identify with
only a narrow spectrum of ourselves; so we may want to drop that and
see that we are Paramashiva and all 36 Tattvas; but there is nowhere
we need to ‘go’ to do that, for we are already there – it is what we are.

So our second ancient confusion was to subtly reify consciousness

into ‘states’ which we enter and leave, and through which we ‘evolve’.
This is a subtle equivalent to the confusion of the previous section
which led to the complete objectification of creation. Now, even though
all is seen as consciousness, it is given a hierarchical structure that
binds consciousness, whilst strictly defining the terms of its
‘evolution’.

32.4
We have this ‘evolution’ described as a strict reversal of the process of
creation in the Shiva Sutras III.4 ‘The reabsorbtion of the tattvas from
Earth (tattva 36) to Shiva (Tattva 1) should be accomplished by
dissolving each into its cause.’
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The trouble with this evolutionary journey through the hierarchy is

two-fold: firstly it implies that, as we have just noted, there is a
certain distance to be covered; secondly, it begs the question: “Who, or
what, exactly is it that makes the ‘journey’?”.

32.5
As regards the first point, we have already noted in 27.8 that in a
sense it doesn’t matter how much ground is covered – however many
levels of awakening (or ‘dissolving into its cause’) occur, as long as
there is still the sense of separation: for the gulf between the finite and
the infinite is never bridged however large the expansion of the finite.
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32.6
As regards the second point, we are again faced with the operation of
Maya and the Purusha Paradox of section 17. We can remind
ourselves here of the nature of Maya as comprised of an illusion of
continuity and a subsequent false identification. If, for the moment,
we imagine all the levels of consciousness (tattvas) as a hierarchy of
concentric spheres in infinite space, then the illusion of continuity
reminds us that these spheres are not solid structures that separate
the infinite space into ‘inner’ and ‘outer’; rather they are all spherical
‘nets’ of thought that are full of ‘gaps’ (see 26.5). One may fall prey to
Maya and identify with a small ‘sphere’; one may go on a ‘journey’ and
begin to ‘dissolve’ the net and shift identification to the more
expanded, surrounding one – and this operation may be repeated
indefinitely. If it were possible to reach the outermost ‘sphere’, then on
dissolution of that there would be nothing left to identify with – only
the infinite space of The Self.

32.7
But this shift of identification – from the net to the space – can
happen at any moment; for the nets are full of gaps, and the space is
never divided. There is no need to ‘travel’ from one net, to a more
expanded one, for they are all equally illusions of continuity,
suspended in the infinite space of consciousness. Wherever one is,
one is in the infinite space – there is nowhere else to be.
Nor is there any need to ‘dissolve’ a net in order to shift identification
away from it and onto the infinite space, for it is not a substantial
entity of any sort, but a presumption. In our examples of the illusion of
continuity in section 11 we noted that the illusions are created by a
misunderstanding of what was seen, a presumption of a substantial
enduring entity, where there is only a process.

The underlying process does not necessarily have to cease in order for
the overlaid presumption to be seen through. The surfer can still ride
his ‘wave’ into the shore even though he sees there is no separate
‘wave’. You do not have to turn the T.V. off in order to know there is
nobody behind the screen. Nothing has to change; no ‘journey’ has to
be made, for there is no-one to make it. Any identity is a presumed
one – a chimerical net of thought mistaken for a ‘self’. If, in reality,
‘Nothing arises, nothing subsides’ as in our VS3, then of course there
is no hierarchy in consciousness – only an illusory self-created, reified
one.

32.8
An apparent tension between a hierarchical and a non-hierarchical
view of reality has fuelled an ancient debate between the ‘gradual’ and
‘sudden’ schools of enlightenment. Clearly a hierarchical view would
lend itself to a view of ‘gradual’ enlightenment, attained in stages as
one progresses ‘up’ through the hierarchy. Whereas the
considerations of the preceding paragraph might lead one to suppose
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that enlightenment is necessarily ‘sudden’ – the instantaneous seeing-

through of an illusion.

This dichotomy of gradual vs. sudden enlightenment can be seen as a

false one, though: for The Self is not bound by the limitations of time
(which is one of the Kanchukas, tattva 10). So the realisation of The
Self is not strictly an event in time at all; it is neither of indefinitely
short duration nor of a more prolonged one. If it can be called ‘an
event’ at all, it is in a non-measurable dimension of Being. A ‘lower
reflection’ of this event may trace a ‘path’ in temporal consciousness,
but this is purely incidental. Just as an object flying in a vertical
dimension may incidentally, by flying diagonally up, cast a shadow
that traverses a distance on the horizontal plane; the height the object
reaches is quite independent of the horizontal distance covered by its
shadow on the ground (e.g. if it flies absolutely vertically to an
indefinite height, with the sun directly overhead, the shadow doesn’t
move at all).

32.9
The ultimately illusory nature of the hierarchy of consciousness is
also what allows room for the magical or miraculous; for in a sense
these are occurrences where there is a ‘leaking through’ of phenomena
into a different level in the virtual hierarchy. For example, in our three
level structure of author, businessman, and game-character of section
22.4 we can see that, from the level of the author, the other two levels
are purely fictional, that there is no-one really there. Having once so
constructed the levels, the author would be quite at liberty to ‘break
the rules’ of the respective realities and loop one into the other: one
could have a magical fantasy where the warrior who was cruelly used
as a strategic sacrifice manages to ‘awaken’ and break out of his game
reality into the ‘real’ world of the businessman, and come looking for
revenge on the player of the game.

From the point of view of the businessman this would be a hideous

and miraculous impossibility. From the warriors’ point of view it
would be a mind-exploding realisation. From the point of view of the
author, it is a change to the kind of novel being written, but no big
deal - for it is all fiction. It is a delightful play of creating structures
only to distort or destroy them. The world of magical manifestations,
miraculous powers or events, and other open-ended, infinite
impossibilities of life can all be given expression through this kind of
structural warping or looping.

Just such a looping occurs in the Yoga Vasishta where the sage
Vasishta, while instructing his student Rama, gives an account of how
one mind projected several different ‘selves’ who then went on to
project further ‘minds’ – one of whom was the mind that supposedly
started the whole process in the first place! More than that, all the
projected ‘identities’ end up getting together in the same ‘reality’ in
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order to discuss how they all came into existence – to much mutual
astonishment.

Of course, in the light of this one may ask: “Isn’t the account of the
creation process given here an illusory, reified and hierarchical one –
the ‘nested’ and ‘branching’ purushas, the successive applications of
the Maya principle?” To which the answer must of course be ‘Yes!’ So
we must wrap up our investigations by undoing what we have done –
by looping back to our starting point and perhaps knowing it for the
first time.

33. Uncoiling the Serpent – Liberation

33.1
Our account of Reality has comprised considerations of The One,
which led to the Void and then the Plenum and its consciousness, The
Self; from there, via the reification and false identification that is
Maya, we considered the separate subject, the Purusha; and then its
further projections as the ‘person or ‘character’ (based in general on
further reifications – principally the ego-sense (see 20.1)). We also
considered that there could be an indefinite ‘nesting’ and ‘branching’
of purushas and their projections in the explosion of infinite
consciousness.
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At each stage of these considerations we were confronted by paradox:

In the process of manifestation or involution

(1) From the One to the Void/Plenum – in 7.8 - The Paradox of
Manifestation)
(2) From the Plenum to The Self – in 8.7 - The Paradox of
Consciousness
(3) From The Self to Maya – in 12.6 - The Paradox of Identification and
– in 14.9 – The Paradox of Projection
(4) From Maya to Purusha – in 17.8 - The Purusha Paradox and - in
18.4 – The Paradox of Omnipotence

The Paradox of Manifestation in unity is reflected as The Paradox of

Projection in the operation of Maya to produce separation.

The Paradox of Consciousness in unity is reflected as The Paradox of

Identification in the operation of Maya to produce separation.

In the process of awakening or evolution

(5) From person to Purusha – in 25.1- The Paradox of Free Will and –
in 26.7 - The Paradox of Practice
(6) From Purusha to The Self – in 27.9 - The Paradox of
Enlightenment

33.2
Whilst bearing in mind the potentially infinite levels of consciousness
in the ‘nested’ and ‘branching’ purushas, we can, nonetheless, discern
five broad structural levels: The One, The Void, The Plenum/Self, The
Purusha and the Person (or character).

There happens to be one esoteric tradition from the Naqshandi lineage

of Sufis that mirrors this precisely: a teaching on the Lataif, or
spiritual centres in the human being. According to this tradition (not
found in any mainstream Islamic or Sufi texts) there are five
chambers in the spiritual Heart of man, from the innermost chamber
of Truth, to the more peripheral ones relating to consciousness in
separation – the person – and the return Home.

The outermost chamber (Latifat al Qalb) is the chamber of the heart

where the spiritual longing of the separate person is first awakened.

The next (nearer) chamber (Latifat al Ruh) is the detached spirit, the
serene witness of the ‘world’ – the Purusha.

Nearer still is the ‘secret’ chamber (Latifat as Sir) where, after the
annihilation (fana) of separation, there is abiding in the Oneness of
The Self (Baqa), or enlightenment.
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When even the consciousness of The Self fades, there is an entering

into the chamber (Latifat al Khafa) of Non-Being – the Void. Here all
vestige of existence or manifestation is destroyed. It is the ultimate
remedy of all ills, beyond the need to be anything whatsoever, in
separation or unity.

The innermost chamber (Latifat al Akhfa) is the domain of Absolute

Truth, The One. Neither Being nor Non-Being, nor both, nor neither.
“Here there is neither rising nor setting, neither right nor left, neither up
nor down, neither space nor time, neither far nor near, neither night nor
day, neither heaven nor earth. Here the pen breaks, the tongue falters,
intellect sinks into nothingness, intelligence and knowledge miss the
way in the wilderness of amazement.” 14th Century Sufi mystic

33.3
We have outlined an account of Reality that is both satisfying and
unsatisfying; it feels positive to have some kind of intellectual handle
on, or map of Reality; but it is disturbing to be surrounded by so
much paradox. The term paradox actually means ‘beyond the
doctrine, or dogma/teaching’. Whatever doctrine is espoused, finally
there is a need to go beyond it since a conceptual doctrine only
engages the intellect. But if ‘going beyond’ is not to mean merely an
anarchic free-for-all – (a ‘new-age’ hell where any fantasy can count as
my truth) – then there must be a context large enough to
accommodate both a conceptual understanding, and an appreciation
of the limits of such a kind of understanding. This means having the
capacity to turn the gaze of understanding onto the process of
understanding itself, and to be comfortable with fact that this must
entail the possibility of self-referential paradox; and to ‘go beyond’ in
the sense that, just because the intellect has reached a limit (and has
to turn back on itself), that doesn’t mean that our Being is so limited.

The intellectual capacity is inextricably bound up with thought and

language and these are tools that work very well in the limited domain
of separation – the ‘subject’ and its ‘world’ of objects, the province of
the products of Maya. As Wittgenstein said:

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.
We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world,
that there is not.
For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain
possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must
get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these
limits from the other side also.
What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore
say what we cannot think.
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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Nor is it only a modern logician such as Wittgenstein or Gödel (see

1.4) with the tools of mathematical logic at their disposal that can
appreciate the limits to thought. Our 14th century Sufi mystic summed
it up precisely:

“Intellect is a failure; it cannot lead save to what is a failure like itself.

Intellect can only look upon an entity either as body, essence or quality;
or in Space and Time. It cannot go beyond these limitations. If it fixes
any of those limitations on God, it sinks to infidelity. If, bewildered, it
exclaims: ‘I do not find any existence save with these properties. So
God, being without any of these properties, is perhaps naught…’ – it is
still dragged down to infidelity. In short, Divine Knowledge depends on
Divine Illumination alone.”

Our mystic hit the nail on the head here as regards the limitations of
the intellectual process. The tools of modern logic (first developed by
Russell, Wittgenstein and their immediate inspirational predecessor
Gottlob Frege) have their foundations in the theories of propositional
and predicate calculus; here a ‘proposition’ p (the bearer of the ‘truth
values’ true or false) has the minimal form F(a), where a is a nameable
entity of some sort, and F is a property or quality of some sort.
Without this minimal structure logic cannot even get off the ground;
but the primordial realities we want to consider are prior to this
structure. This structure comes into being as the intellectual function
of Purusha – i.e. the Buddhi – and is as late as Tattva 14 in Kashmir
Shaivite schema we saw in 32.2.

Wittgenstein also intuited that the limits of thought are set at what we
have termed the Purusha – the ‘subject’ of its ‘world’:

“I am my world. (The Microcosm.)

The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the
world.
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the
human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical
subject, the limit – not a part of the world.”
(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6 and 7)

So strictly speaking we cannot think or talk of anything beyond or

prior to, the Purusha: of Maya, The Self, The Plenum, The Void and
The One, there is literally nothing to be thought or said.
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33.4
But of course the monkey-mind of man is not going to just sit quietly
– it is going to attempt the impossible and try to express the
inexpressible, even if the result is a paradoxical parody of Reality.
As we have seen, one of the central components of creation as the
manifestation of consciousness is the process of reification – to treat
as a nameable, relatively fixed entity something which is really an
ungraspable flux or process. It is not surprising then, that this same
process of reification must appear in any conceivable account of
Reality, since any account is itself a product of Buddhi and
recursively productive of further reifications.

Once aware of this we can see that in mapping the territory of the
whole of Reality it is inevitable that the map-making process itself
must be represented in some way on the map – and that this looping
of territory-mapping onto map is bound to cause paradox. That may
mean that Reality in itself is not necessarily paradoxical, but that it must
appear so to the map-making intellect. It is in this light that we must
hold our list of paradoxes (33.1).

So we have ‘reified entities’ such as ‘The One’, ‘The Void’, ‘The

Plenum’, ‘The Self’ etc. None of these are fixed entities of any sort, and
in a very real sense cannot even be said to exist. But they have to be
treated as existent entities in order for thought and language to have a
foothold. They should be seen as practical expedients, as temporary
presumptions needed in order to unfold a narrative. If nailed down too
dogmatically they can self-destruct upon examination.

For example, people like to talk of holding to, or believing in ‘Non-

duality’, meaning the realisation of oneness. But if you hold on to,
make important, or reify Non-duality, the thought process inevitably
sees it in contradistinction to ‘Duality’, which must be rejected. But
then, like it or not, we have a duality: Non-duality vs. Duality. So
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‘Non-duality’ self-destructs. What ‘Non-duality’ is trying to express

may well be true; but the minute you think it, it is gone!

Wittgenstein realised that even his talking about the limits to

language and thought, was a transgressing of those limits, and so, by
his own criteria, strictly meaningless. Nonetheless they were held by
him to have an expedient value:

“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me

finally recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out
through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw
away the ladder, after he has climbed up upon it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly.” (ibid. 6.54)

33.5
So perhaps there is some value in that, while recognising that nothing
can be said, we try to get the measure of that nothingness by
elucidating a nonsensical structure, and process, of Reality and its
manifestation.
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After all, our VS4 states that ‘As above, so below’; so there is some
rationale in trying to reverse this, and hoping that ‘As below, so
above’, and that the Buddhi can act as a mirror on manifestation (at
least sufficiently to warrant Gautama Buddha co-opting the term to
act as an appropriate title reflecting his Enlightenment).
Also, a recognition of the limits of the intellect is very far from lapsing
into an irrational anti-intellectualism, or philosophic nihilism.

That hope must underpin, for example, the Kashmir Shaivite schema
of creation we saw in the diagram of 32.2. For this schema is an
example of the kind of tail-eating serpent (territory/map looping) we
are considering. Ostensibly a map of the whole of Reality from
Paramashiva down through the 36 Tattvas, it is, as a conceptual
structure, necessarily itself a product of Tattva 14 – the Buddhi.
So the whole map loops into a small fraction of itself. The hope must
be that, as the whole is holographic and fractal in the way we have
seen above, this looping is a reflection in a reflection etc. that
nonetheless is a faithful image of the original. We even have in Shiva
Sutras III.12 (and in seeming total opposition to our 14th Century Sufi
mystic) the idea that ‘The essential nature of the light of Reality is
attained by mastery of the intellect’.

Even though what the term ‘intellect’ refers to here is debated in the
commentaries, we can nonetheless appreciate the instability of the
predicament: for the looping creates a feedback effect whereby any
distortion in the Buddhi feeds back into the map of the whole, which
in turn must distort the understanding of the position held by the
Buddhi, and so on. It is this kind of relativising of territory to map,
that leads to the fruitless gainsaying of most metaphysical debate. For
there is no authoritative map all can agree upon, and an opposing
position is assessed by reference to one’s own map.

There is the common plea that ‘the map is not the territory’, but this
is rarely, if ever, appealed to as a plea to intellectual humility and a
foregoing of all maps in favour of a more direct apprehension of
reality. Mostly it is appealed to as a plea to recognise the
independence of reality from any map; but the motive for this is to
further validate one’s own ‘true’ map – so that what it claims is valid
because reality is independently just so, not merely because it is
depicted that way on one’s map. It is built into the very nature of
metaphysical/religious belief systems that one’s own is the one ‘true
faith’. Even avowedly tolerant systems, such as e.g. the Baha’i faith,
are such just to the extent that they can incorporate the tolerated
systems into their own.

This kind of conceptual narcissism, which seems incapable of

apprehending another viewpoint except by reference to its own, is not
merely a narrow provincialism, but is actually built into the very
nature of subject/object consciousness. To see why this is so we
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must, paradoxically and inconsistently, turn to our own map, and

finally unmask the looping serpent that has poisoned our attempts at
a paradox-free, simple account of Reality.

33.6
Wittgenstein talked of a mystical feeling that comes from
contemplating the whole of reality – the desire to somehow stand
outside it all and contemplate it in its entirety. What is so awe-
inspiring is not how it happens to be, for “all happening and being-so
is accidental (ibid. 6.41) – but rather that there is anything at all. “Not
how the world is, is the mystical, but rather that it is.” (ibid 6.44) The
central question of all philosophy has been characterised by
existentialist thinkers as ‘Why is there something rather than
nothing?’

However, we have described Reality such that ‘something’ is not

opposed to ‘nothing’ – rather they form a complementary pair. As
Nisargadatta has commented: ‘every object needs its own absence’.
Were there only a Plenum and not a Void, that Plenum would finally
be burdensome; an eternal wakefulness never refreshed by sleep.

The relevant question for us is, rather, ‘Why is there this dance of
something/nothing?’ It is an unanswerable question since in the
nothing it is not, and in the totality of something there is nothing else
with which to furnish an explanation. But if the ‘why?’ is
unanswerable we may still contemplate the ‘how?’ – in effect, ‘what
keeps the cosmic dance turning?’

In our account of the creation process of Maya, we described a two-

fold process of false identification and reification which splits the
unity of The Self into a separate subject (Purusha) and object. What
we have described is how a false sense of identity apparently eclipses
or usurps the true identity of The Self. This identity is the supreme ‘I’
of the Mahavakyas – ‘I am That’. But what both The Self and the
Purusha have in common is identity.

The identity of the Purusha is created by the involution or serpent-

looping of The Self onto its own subjective pole and falsely identifying
with it. (see 12.6)

The identity of The Self is manifested by the serpent-looping of

awareness in the Plenum to become its own object. (see 8.4)

In short, our paradox-inducing, self-looping serpent is the apparent

need for identity.

By our principle of complementarity VS1, the identity of any object is a

reflection of and complementary to the identity of the subject. That is
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why it is impossible to truly take on a different, non-narcissistic

viewpoint or perspective, unless there is a relinquishing of identity.
But in the relinquishing of identity, what need can there be to take on
another perspective – for all apparent need is in relation to an identity.

When a purusha ‘awakens’ to a higher one, there is an uncoiling of a

loop of asmita and a false identity is destroyed.

In ‘enlightenment’ any separate sense of identity - of being a Purusha

of its ‘world’ - is destroyed in the identity of the Oneness of The Self.

33.7
Finally, then, any vestige of (even supreme) identity meets its
destruction in The Void, where there is an uncoiling of the serpent-
loop of awareness – an awareness that requires no object. From the
perspective of The Void (if one can make sense of such a thing) there
is no such thing as Asmita, or false identity. For all identity is false
and unnecessary. Love can be, without having to be anything, for
anyone. This cessation of identity is ‘liberation’ – but it is liberation
with no-one liberated, for it is seen by no-one that there was no-one
bound.
As our Sufi mystic said:

“Nothing can be separated from the Infinite, and attached to the non-
Infinite. Since the Origin is Him, the End is in Him. Separation and
Union, coming and going, are thus unreal. This is a long story. Discreet
Silence is here absolutely necessary.”

In non-identity the paradoxes drop out. There is no-one who is bound

or has free-will. There is no-one subject to illusion, and no-one gets
enlightened. There is no-one to have power or to lose it, or to lose
knowledge and then regain it.

33.8
This is not quite the end of our story. For in one way the Void can be
seen as the destruction of all problems, for in The Void there is no-one
for whom anything could be problematic. But it is not really that there
was a problematic identity which was destroyed. Rather, in liberation
it is seen that there never was anyone. All were characters in a divine
novel. So Being was never inherently problematic, and though
unnecessary, need never be undone. For it only is when paid attention
to, and such attention is entirely incidental. This position of perfectly
natural poise between The Void of non-Being and The Plenum of
Being, is the perspective of the One. From there, there is no paradox
of manifestation; there was no need for manifestation to mysteriously
kick-start itself – for it never was not, for there was never a need for it
not to be; moreover it holds the entirely incidental and unnecessary
possibility of Being something – and who can resist the charms of
such a seductive serpent?
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33.9
Have we tracked down our strange serpent, cornered it and fully
exposed that trickster? Not really, for it is very slippery and even while
we stare it down we may find it slips away and comes at us from
behind. Just as we think we can bear down on it to finally devour it,
we suddenly find we are biting our own tail, and we seem to be that
very serpent - and nothing seems to be the way we thought it was.

Rather than, as Bishop Butler proclaimed, “Everything is what it is,

and not some other thing”, we find ourselves, on the contrary, caught
up in game where identity skews all, and nothing is what it is, and we
are always some other thing.

In Shakespeare’s ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’ (Act 2, Scene VII) the

character Lepidus, travelling in a foreign land, finds himself
marvelling at the strange properties, described by Anthony, of a fabled
beast said to inhabit those parts. When asked by Lepidus as to ‘what
manner o’ thing’ this serpent-like beast is, Anthony answers, and a
dialogue ensues:

‘Anthony: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath

breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own
organs; it lives by that which nourisheth it…

Lepidus: What colour is it of?

Anthony: Of it own colour too.

Lepidus: ‘Tis a strange serpent.

Anthony: ‘Tis so; and the tears of it are wet.