A Beautiful and Challenging World View

For almost five years I have practiced Non Dualism rooted in Kashmir Shivaism.

Kashmir Shaivism is one of the most sophisticated Non-Dual Tantrik philosophical traditions in recorded history, originating in Kashmir around the 8th century. It holds that all of reality is an expression of one conscious reality, that recognition of this is available to ordinary people living ordinary lives, and that you are that.

In my personal opinion none of what I practice is necessary for anyone. Even as a yoga and meditation teacher of almost a decade and with a practice ever longer than that I will be the first to tell you that both Yoga and Meditation are not necessary. They are powerful and helpful tools however, and at the same time they are not for everyone. I don’t think anyone has to do or believe anything and it will never be my intent to dull out “shoulds” to anyone. Worthiness, and value are inherent in Being and Existence and being and existence don’t require anything to be done or believed.

I’m writing this post because ontology, theology, and thoughts of the nature of God fascinate me. See my other substack posts, “They Sky Won’t Open” and “What Yoga Does for My Interiority” to get a sense of just how much I nerd out on this stuff.

I’ve wrestled with how to share my experiences, what I know, and what I believe, although part of my practice is also not believing thought.

One the jewels of Kashmir Shivaism is that it was a practice for lay people and did not require renunciation of life. Every day people could practice it and it was said that awakening could happen at any moment in a single life time.

One of the many ways awakening is said to be encountered is by not believing thoughts.

Sanskrit Scholar Dr. Christopher Wallis puts it this way, “Thoughts are tools, not truths”

In my experience, my practice of not believing thought is being hyper aware of them, in mindfulness, meditation and in going about my day. My thought about the Sun is not the Sun. My thought about the next man or woman is literally not that next man or woman. My thought about myself is not me, it’s just a thought.

It gets deep because, people aren’t our stories about them, and we aren’t our stories about ourselves. People aren’t stories. We aren’t stories. Concepts are concepts and many tend to overlay concepts on life and call that real.

Yet narratives are easy to exist on. I’m an author of fourteen books in counting; I work in narratives and I see its place anthropologically and socially.

Narratives capture the mind and unfortunately narratives can also capture individuals. Narratives can sit in the body, in the gut and cause hyper fixation and paralyzation. Narratives are powerful. Concepts are powerful.

Being aware of them, and not believing them, any of them, are one of the many ways to be free.

Panpsychism, Analytical Idealism, and Why They Matter Here

Panpsychism is the philosophical position that consciousness is not produced by the brain but is instead a fundamental feature of reality itself. Every particle, every system, every apparently material thing has some form of inner experience. This is not fringe thinking. Contemporary philosophers like David Chalmers and scientists engaging the “hard problem of consciousness” take this seriously because materialism keeps failing to explain how subjective experience arises from physical matter.

Analytical Idealism goes a step further. Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup argues that consciousness is the only thing that actually exists. Matter does not produce mind. Mind is the ground. Physical reality, the universe, your body, the screen you are reading this on, all of it is a kind of excitation within a universal field of consciousness. The material world is the outside appearance of a process that is, at its core, experiential.

What is striking is that these are Western academic frameworks arriving at something Kashmir Shaivism articulated over a thousand years ago. Shaiva Tantra holds that the universe is the self-expression of one conscious reality, called Shiva or Para Samvit, Supreme Consciousness. There is no separate dead matter on one side and conscious beings on the other. Consciousness is the ground of everything, and the apparent world arises within it.

In the tradition, this is the foundational ontology. Reality is not made of stuff. Reality is made of awareness.

Abhinavagupta

One of the great sages of this worldview was Abhinavagupta. He lived in Kashmir around the 10th and 11th centuries and is widely considered one of the most brilliant philosophical and spiritual minds in recorded history. He was a polymath: a philosopher, mystic, aesthetician, and poet. His masterwork, the Tantraloka, is a comprehensive synthesis of the entire Non-Dual Shaiva Tantrik tradition. It runs to thousands of verses and draws together dozens of earlier texts into a single unified framework.

What set Abhinavagupta apart was his ability to take the direct, often fierce experiential teachings of the tradition and give them precise philosophical grounding without losing their living quality. He was writing as someone who had recognized what the texts were pointing at.

He also developed the concept of rasa in aesthetic theory: the idea that beauty and art can trigger a recognition of one’s own deepest nature. Experiencing great art, in his view, was structurally similar to spiritual recognition. The moment you are genuinely moved by music or poetry, the ordinary sense of a separate self temporarily drops. Abhinavagupta said that moment of absorption is a glimpse of what the yogis are pointing at.

His work is what I keep returning to. Dr. Christopher Wallis has made much of it accessible to English readers, and I am grateful for that bridge.

A famous metaphor is the “drop in the ocean” or “wave in the ocean” when talking about the vastness of the divine and our place in it. This has always been helpful for me. I also think on a biological level it might be helpful.

Consider a single human body. That body expresses itself as trillions of cells. Each cell has its own function, its own membrane, its own interior life in a sense. A liver cell does liver things. A neuron fires and communicates. A red blood cell carries oxygen. Each one is distinct, bounded, doing its specific work. And yet none of them are separate from the body. There is no liver cell floating free of the organism it belongs to. The body is not a collection of cells that happened to organize. The cells are the body expressing itself at that scale.

The ocean and the wave work the same way. The wave is not a separate thing that sits on top of the ocean. The wave is the ocean moving. When the wave subsides, nothing is lost. The ocean did not lose a wave. It just stopped moving in that shape.

Kashmir Shaivism points at something similar. You are not a fragment of consciousness dropped into a material world, trying to find your way back to something larger. You are consciousness expressing itself in this form, in this life, the way a body expresses itself as a cell. The apparent individuality is real. The separateness is the illusion. God so loved the world that God choose to express Godself as you.

And me.

And the fabric of reality.

Constantly.

Right now.

This process is ceaseless.

A personal note on the self that is real:

The me that is separate is the me that is not real. Ego is separate and as such is ephemeral and doing its projecting and protective work. But it’s still separate. And because in this tradition separation isn’t real then its worth setting the “me” rooted in separation down.

The me that is unique within undifferentiated life is the me that is real.

The me that is all things.

The me that is shared with every other thing that finds its own me in we, as the only one.

That distinction between uniqueness and separation is worth sitting with. We tend to collapse those two things as if they mean the same thing. They do not. Separation means there is a wall, a gap, an independence. Uniqueness means there is a signature, a specific expression, a this-ness. The wave is unique. No two waves move exactly the same way. And the wave is not separate from the ocean for even a moment. Uniqueness does not require separation. It never did.

Every cell in the body is unique. A neuron is not a liver cell. Their functions, their structures, their roles are distinct. And neither one exists outside the body. Their uniqueness is the body being specific. Their individuality is the organism expressing itself with precision.

This is what Kashmir Shaivism points at when it talks about Shiva (or in some traditions the Goddess) expressing itself as every apparently individual thing.

The diversity is real.

The individuality is real.

The separation is the part that was always a story. You are a specific expression of the one thing. Unrepeatable. And inseparable.

Life is constant change and life is expansive. That includes the experience of my self-concepts, and the thoughts, energy, and information tied to those self-concepts.

If everything is one thing, then where I am experiencing life from, what I am experiencing from life, and what I see and perceive of life are all the same thing.

Three angles on one reality. And thats just my vantage point. Imagine the uncountable other vantage points in existence.

That is deeper than a philosophical position. It is something you feel when the conceptual layer goes quiet for a moment. The experiencer, the experience, and the experienced collapse into a single event. Yoga calls this samapatti. The recognition that the boundary between inside and outside was always more concept than fact.

I have to be careful. Careful not to become overwhelmed by my self-concept, by the energy and information I feel around it, by my narratives and stories about myself and about life. The self-concept is not the problem. The problem is when I treat the self-concept as if it is fixed, as if it is final, as if it is the whole of what I am. A self-concept is a useful map. It is not the territory.

Those things are real as experiences. They are not final as truths.

The invitation is to draw from the constant freshness of direct experience instead. Before the label. Before the story. Before the interpretation settles in. Life is always arriving new. The moment I am in has never existed before. Direct experience is always ahead of the concept I reach for to describe it.

“What is the experience of this before I have a thought about it? -Dr. Christopher Wallis
That question is the practice.

I have so much more to write on this including specific practices within this tradition that have been helpful for me and I also feel it important to address some of the more challenging aspects of life in light of this world view.

I’ll end for now.

Before I forget, this article is my yogic practice. I have African practices as well, Bwiti is my ancestral (paternal) and spiritual heritage. And certain hoodoo practices from my African American heritage are part of my daily life as well. I will write separate articles about this as well. I’m taking a summer break from Substack to focus on my authorship clients and upcoming books. 

Only a few more posts are in the pipeline and then I’ll be MIA 💚

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