Vimarśa After the End of the World: Kashmiri Śaivism and Being After the End of Being
“It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.”
— “As I Walked Out One Evening”, W.H. Auden
I. Introduction
The Indian auroch, Bos primigenius namadicus, a species of cattle described as buffalo-like and even elephantine, flourished on the Indian subcontinent since the Late Pleistocene, also known as the Tarantian age of geologic time, or in glacial time, the transition between the end of the Penultimate Glacial Period and the beginning of the Last Interglacial. Or, in the language of our ordinary chronological time, the Indian auroch began to exist from somewhere around 100,000 years ago and ceased to exist 3,800 years ago. We, on the other hand, began to exist in something resembling our current form around 350,000 years ago, sometime after the beginning and before the end of the auroch. Every species is bookended by beginning and end. We just don’t know, here in the center, where our ending lies.
Just as we are born into a world where five of Kashmir’s native snowtrout are already extinct, 10th-century Kashmiri Śaivist1placeholder philosopher Utpaladeva and his inheritor Abhinavagupta were born into a world where the auroch was already extinct, gesturing with its two-thousand-year shadow at a world tens of hundreds of thousands of years older than their own. We may today consider Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta’s philosophy so chronologically distant as to invite not only a scientistic skepticism, but a reassignment from the metaphysical to artifactual: work whose primary merit is historical and cultural, rather than metaphysical – not unlike the silver denarius whose exchange value disintegrates over time into the sheerly material currency of trinket and collectible. But this is a mistake, a rounding error of our presency, of our tendency to privilege our own position in long time over others’, even when ours, too, will soon enough become the stuff of history. Time is a funhouse whose mirrors are all distorted: everyone dead once was modern; everyone modern, soon dead.
We find ourselves on the precipice of history, looking backwards through time at the long trail of what has already happened. However, we are not unique in our position on the precipice. Every being which has ever lived has lived upon such a precipice; to have a life is to stack one moment of living upon another, to enact, in this way, the forward momentum of time from each singular launching point of the present, an ephemeral launch-point that no sooner does it appear, than disappears to cleave out a place for the newer present yet ahead. We are always at its furthest point. Farness forward in time is one of presency’s sweetest and saddest illusions: we think that we are the latest thing to ever happen in the world, and we are, and we are and are again, and from this precipice we fret about the drop-off ahead which is the untapped mystery of the unrevealed future, but really, the unrevealed future has little to do with us at all, for we are never truly in it, will never plummet ourselves from its edge; we only, through living, inch forward the furthest point of ground to impinge on its territory, pushing back the unknown future with each step.
Does our cascade of presents ever cease, the ground under our feet ever fall off into the sheer indeterminacy of a yet-unlived future? Not, it seems, so long as we are inhabiting time, inhabitants of time, because to live but not live in a present seems unfathomable. We inhabit time, it seems, like we inhabit our skeletons and flesh. But after we have gone the way of the auroch, what will become of time? What is uninhabited time, post-inhabited time; auroch time after the time of the auroch, or man’s time after the time of man? Ahead, I’ll propose that Kashmiri Śaivism can offer us, even today, a framework and consolation for thinking about these questions, and ultimately, a possibility where the end of the world isn’t loss but return.
II. Time and her illusions
Time moves forward in our cultural zeitgeist like words read rightward or walking spans distance. This forward movement is reified by centuries of transatlantic litero-scholarship, from the Romans’ ‘time as arrow’ to Macbeth’s soliloquy in which “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time… Life’s but a walking shadow.” Here from the vantage-point of 21st century in Western societies, when we think or speak about time, time is a cascade of presents, present coming after present, a constellation of moments presuppositionally linked in linear series. In other words, we are assuming sequentialism.
In sequentialism, one thing comes after another. From the earliest days of our schooling, we have learned of things which come one after another – one step in front of another in order to move, one tally-mark in front of the last in order to count. Most of all, the hands of a clock move visibly forward, in analog, or rise one number at a time, in digital – in both cases, the one-after-another nature of time moving can only be visibly altered by manually moving the hands back or scrambling digits. If our eyes are to be trusted, time on a clock certainly does move, and it moves forwards. Sequentialism is the bedrock of our linear time, and once shaken, the entire structure of time as we know it could collapse.
Briefly, what, exactly is time? Time must be something under and beneath any of the forms of measurement, but what?
The hands of a clock measure clock time, which is defined by the physical processes involved in the measuring. In mechanical clocks, like grandfathers, wind-ups, and the old-school wristwatch with gears, the action of a pendulum or balance wheel translates into moving hands. Battery-powered clocks like digital alarms, phones and microwaves rely on a tiny quartz crystal which vibrates under voltage – electronic circuits, in turn, count these vibrations, and how may have occurred since a starting-point like midnight. In the ultra-precise atomic clocks of GPS satellites, which define the standard time syncing our devices, time is measured in the number of cycles between two energy states as cesium atoms are exposed to radiation.
As such, every measurement of clock time is actually a measurement of sequence: how many parts have moved in what order, how many vibrations accumulate in a certain period, or how many cycles occur since a starting-point. In the realm of clock time, time is inseparable from sequence; clock time is operationally involved with measurement, and every form of human measurement, in order to take us from zero to something not-zero, relies on a concept of sequence – one thing after another, two things after that, three things after that, and so on.
The issue of ‘real’ time is a stickier one. Does time move, underneath and outside of our tools to measure it, or is time itself created by our measurement? In older, Newtonian physics, we believed in some absolute, universal time that flowed uniformly in the universe, measured imprecisely by our clocks. Since relativity, Einstein disrupted this assumption: clocks can disagree about elapsed time when moving at different speeds, or in different gravitational fields – a clock on a GPS satellite runs further than one on Earth’s surface by about 38 microseconds per day, and it would be difficult to assert that either one is objectively more correct. As such, there is no one privileged ‘real’ time – practical variation and mechanical flaw may impair the measurement of clock time, but an ideally perfect measurement of clock time, one could say, is still impaired from objectivity by the unavoidable particularities of existing in space-time. In phenomenology, we say, there is no “view from nowhere.”2placeholder
The physicist in search of ‘real time’ may concede there is no objective, underlying form of time more perfect than our circumstantial measurements. For the French phenomenologist, this impossibility is the point – time is embodied, lived, subjective. The mathematician may suggest the real form of time is mathematical, formulaic, abstract – existing either not at all, or maybe, in an abstract space of pure mathematics inaccessible to us. The Kashmiri Śaivist is unready to relinquish the principle of an underlying reality of time, but that is not an obstacle to these dilemmas of measurement and perspective: rather, our experience of time as measured, imprecise, perspectival, is integral to what this is: a transient experience of lived time, known only to transient bodies in transient worlds, and passing, ultimately, like any other temporaneities of this life.
i. Sequence and non-sequence
Clock time is not only the visible facet of our ordinary, lived time, but the base material of it: we structure lived time by the day, by the hour, and our memories stretch backwards, but not into the future. To the Kashmiri Śaivist, it is not only ordinary time that is an illusion, but sequence itself.
At first, it might seem impossible or illogical to imagine forms of being, of existence, without sequence. Sequence is like thread stitching through the smallest unit of our daily action and behavior – unravel one strand, and the fabric of reality would fall apart. One must assume if one swings a leg out of bed, that the rest will follow in order, that one’s head won’t leap out of its own accord and whack the floor, or the body overhang the bed without the feet – that one can move a foot first, and then another, and steady oneself on an unmoving surface without the order of events scrambling beneath you. In other words, sequence is baked into the laws of movement, without which we would be unable to function coherently in this physical world.
For Utpaladeva, the father of Kashmiri Śaivism, it is not untrue that we experience and depend on sequence in these ways, but it is untrue to think that sequence is all there is, or that sequence, in a deeper sense, really is. Sequence is an appearance, like ripples on water. There is an underlying nature of things in Kashmiri Śaivism, Paramaśiva. This underlying nature can manifest in experiences like rolling out of bed in order, but that does not mean the underlying nature of the universe involves any of those functions – sequence, order – any more than it involves your particular four-poster or your particular feet. If underlying reality is like the sky, these features of lived experience are only the weather.
Utpaladeva asserts there is a God outside of sequence, whose power is nonsequential.3placeholder Let this assertion lose not the non-believer: the God of Kashmiri Śaivism is a deep source. Religious and artistic traditions both pre- and post-dating 10th-century India have depicted God4placeholder in forms ranging from the matted-haired Jaṭāmakuṭa to the many-armed dancer Natarāja. In Hinduism, Śiva takes the form of The Cosmic Dancer, the Yogi, the Half Śiva, the Divine Teacher, and the Fierce Protector. In earlier traditions, there is Śiva the Destroyer. However, underlying and transcending all of these specific representations and appearances is the formless, boundless energy of creation. Even contemporary science struggle to define the most basic substance of the universe, more elemental than our smallest observable parts, more original than the present universe. Kashmiri Śaivism offers Paramaśiva, the underlying nature of things – which is, itself, the nature of God.
Utpaladeva’s central text, the Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā or ĪPK5placeholder, explains that Śiva’s power unfolds outside of sequence. Utpaladeva’s successor Abhinavagupta clarifies this claim in his interpretive volume, the Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī or ĪPV:
“But there is no temporal sequence in the self of the knowing subject [God] who consists in [pure] consciousness…”6placeholder
In the ĪPVV (Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivṛtivimarśinī), Abhinavagupta instructs us to consider a person who wants to cook – who has, therefore, the inner will of wanting to cook, who takes as their inner will, “I want to cook.” This will is made manifest in various discrete actions – setting the fire, or, in our time, the burner alight, fetching the pot and placing it on the heat, placing food in the pot, etc. In this way, the will is made manifest in movements, which have sequential form, but the will itself bore and bears no sequential form; it was prior to movement, and to acting, and to sequence.7placeholder
Likewise, in Śiva there is a divine will encompassing all, but the will of Śiva is not yet manifest – and when it is manifest, that manifestation takes on properties, like sequence, not present in the underlying will or in the underlying nature of things.
“Exactly in the same way, the will of the Highest Lord too, which, in Him, [takes the form] ‘let sequence arise in knowing subjects and objects of knowledge,’ and which has as its ultimate reality [a realization expressed] as ‘I am going to exert my power,’ ‘I am going to flash forth,’ ‘I am going to realize,’ ‘I am going to pulsate,’ is manifest as being sequential although it is in itself free of sequence, because it assumes the appearance [uparāga] of the differences pertaining to knowing subjects and objects of knowledge – just as the surface of a mirror, although free of sequence, assumes the appearance [of] being sequential due to the sequence of a constantly flowing, large river [that is reflected in it], and due to the innumerable [reflected] forms of lightning that keep arising and disappearing [during a thunderstorm].”8placeholder
The same analogy of a flowing river recurs in the ĪPV:
“The Lord’s will… is manifest as being closely associated with the sequence… just as the surface of a mirror [seems to be] closely associated with the sequence that belongs to the current of a large, flowing river…”9placeholder
Suppose one is holding up a mirror to the moving waters of a river; in the glass, one catches movement, and yet the movement is not occurring in the glass at all, but only “assum[ing] [an] appearance”, in the same way that when you touch your finger to the reflection of itself in the mirror, your reflection does not touch you back.
In this way, Utpaladeva can account for our lived experience of sequence (directional movement), while designating such experience to the realm of appearances rather than underlying fact. In this way, action, movement, and all physical laws of the universe, only “acquire sequence as an assumed appearance.”10placeholder
We are living, in effect, inside the mirror – experiencing the appearances of things, while never knowing the underlying reality of them. This manifest world is called, māyā. In māyā, the underlying nature of things is not changed or transformed, but, transiently, obscured.
We are experiencing, through appearances, something like a thick cloudcover: move it might, but this movement and sequence we see and sense all around us is not the sky itself, but something covering up the sky – hiding unseen layers of stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and so on, all the way up to a sun and moon that remain hidden. Ratié translates Utpaladeva’s use of uparāga as “assuming an appearance,” but the Sanskrit word (उपराग) most naturally means a darkening, as in an eclipse. It might be used for something dyed or colored. As such, the appearances of things to us, here in māyā, are obscuring of their underlying nature: ironically, the appearances of things impair our sight.
ii. Divine omnitemporality
Now, we have discussed time and sequence. Time is to sequence as pulse is to heartbeat: each measures the other, realizes it, unfolds the other through the unfolding of itself. To be clear, Utpaladeva says that time is not action itself, but the sequence found in action (that is, in actions playing out in the manifest world).
“The power of time, which makes sequence manifest, is the power of the Lord Himself; and [as for] time, [it] is nothing but the sequence made manifest by this [power – a sequence].”11placeholder
In the manifest world (here), māyā, all phenomena experience sequentiality; this sequentiality bears out, in spatial phenomena, as boundedness by time. In this way, time is simply what occurs when the power of action is manifesting in space: space together with sequentiality constitutes time; all retractions and escapes from the sequential plod of time are cases in which space itself is toyed with, for example, dreams bringing you outside of space, and black holes curving and warping it.12placeholder Here in ordinary space, we are trapped in ordinary time.
Not so for God. Even pre-dating Kashmiri Śaivism, though post-dating the auroch, some of the very earliest Indian philosophy of time emerged in the Viṣṇu-Purāṇa, which takes as unit for the measurement of time a day of the creator Brāhma. And how long is a day in the time of Brāhma? 432 million years in our own.13placeholder Godly time has always pre-dated, out-measured, transcended our own. In the Veda, time itself is described in one hymn as the very first god. But in other doctrine like the Śvetāsvatara, the view of time originating all is heretical. Poetically, the ancient text Maitrī Upaniṣad posits,
“There are, assuredly, two forms of Brahma: Time and the Timeless. That which is prior to the sun is the Timeless [a-Kāla], without parts [a-Kāla]. But that which begins with the sun is Time, which has parts. Verily, the form of that which has parts is the year. From the year, in truth, are these creatures produced… Therefore the year, verily, is Prajāpatī, is Time, is food, is the Brahma-abode, and is Ātman…”14placeholder
Though Kashmiri Śaivism takes Śiva as its god instead of Brāhma, Śiva, likewise, has a form which is timeless, before all things and their parts, before years, plants, food, and all creatures, a form which even is “prior to the sun.” In a modern interpretation, we might say that Śiva is not only prior to the sun but prior to the Big Bang; in all cases, prior to time itself.15placeholder Likewise, there is a Paramaśiva or an ultimate reality which is known to and is the consciousness of this God; Paramaśiva underlies our world, but is obscured by it.
It is very difficult to grasp what it would mean for a being to be prior to time. However, this is not a penalty point towards the theory’s implausibility. To the contrary: its reflection – that is, its early iteration – of a perennially recurring unsolved problem of global philosophy and theology, that of the infinite other transcending finite comprehension, ought to make us suspect that our distant 10th-century intellectual compatriots were grasping in the same dark room as us, and probing the same quiet structures.
For example, our English translation of the ĪPV, though inescapably influenced by a background cultural Judeo-Christianism, takes up globally and historically theologically shared notions of omnipresence and eternality to explain transcendence:
“Because it is this [great being] that creates space and time – just as [it creates objects] such as the blue – , it cannot be determined by them; indeed, [only] that which is manifest as being on a par with [something else] is a determining attribute [viśeṣaṇa] for that [other entity]… and space and time are not manifest [as being] on a par with realization… Thus [the great being] is omnipresent and eternal due to the fact that it is not affected at all by space and time; and yet all places and times are affected [by it], because of their association [with it inasmuch as] it creates [them]; this is also why [the great being] is omnipresent and eternal.”16placeholder
This characterization of Śiva as eternal is constructively related to Śiva’s power of action (vimarśa). First: the will (icchā) of Śiva is “the nonsequential source from which all sequential actions unfold.”17placeholder Therefore, divine will could not arise in māyā, the site of manifest action: it would already be too late. Will is ontologically prior to action; action is bound up in lived time, each contaminating the other. As such, divine will is ontologically prior to time – it could not be located anywhere else than an the eternal, primordial spring of Śiva-consciousness.
Human will exists, but differently than that divine will which is the nonsequential source of all action. We experience will, but what we experience this side of Śiva, when we “will” to get out of bed or reach up to the top shelf for a cookie, is bounded by time and sequence. All sorts of human wills are, at best, impotent – I cannot will for the dead to be alive again and have it happen, and I cannot will to be eighteen again and have it happen; I cannot will the past to change, the future to behave, or the present to defy physical, temporal, and sequential limitations. As such, human will lies far downstream from divine will, which acts not out of necessity but creative joy, which is unbound by space and time, which arises from a perfect spontaneity before and outside of all lived causality.
iii. Divine power
This spatiotemporal freedom of Śiva is precisely what grants Śiva His power. Paramaśiva is not, we might say in our terminology, a still landscape. Rather, Paramaśiva is animated by two forces – the power of action (vimarśa) and the light of self-awareness (prakāśa), which is something like consciousness – though human consciousness involves prakāśa, and prakāśa can be cultivated to a degree, the prakāśa of Śiva is pure and complete. Paramaśiva may be called the pure, infinite consciousness underlying all things, but of course, that is using human terminology to try to describe something that is outside of all of our concepts. We think in parts and pieces, while Paramaśiva is something that is whole. That whole is the nature of God. It is characterized by these two forces, animated diffusely with them. In the ĪPV,
“Action is actually nothing but the Highest Lord’s will, the nature of which [vimarśa] is an unimpeded freedom…”18placeholder
Śiva is not an inert God; though He is not subject to the quirks and stipulations of action in the manifest world, as we are, His nature is “flashing forth” into action and into the manifest world as we know it here.19placeholder Imagine a creative force unconstrained by the bounds of our time and space: this is what Śiva is working with. The power of action, vimarśa, is not a tool which can be utilized or not like we might utilize a tactical skill; rather, it is an aspect of the underlying nature of Śiva which is continuous, unbroken, at-work even outside of any specific instance or manifestation of it. Our world as we know it is not definitive of Śiva’s power of action but reflective of it.
To understand the nature of Śiva’s creation, one must take care in describing the “flashing forth” relation between divine will and action. Divine will does not “turn into” action in the way that we think of our own will to, for example, stand up, turning into a series of neural and nerve impulses that results in corresponding bodily movement. Rather, divine action is the expression of divine will, in the same way that the qualia redness does not color the sunset like a child with chalk, but rather, gains a spatiotemporal reality in the phenomena of a red sky. This manifestation is more primordial than sequence: it is a manifestation not of cause-and-effect, goal and completion, but something more like water turning into air, a changing of forms.
This is how our world came to be.
Is water still water, is it still an is, in dry air when it has evaporated? Does water always have, in some way, the air in it, and the air, water? One might say, no, of course not – evaporated water isn’t water anymore because the water has gone and the air is here – but this gone and here is again a sequence, appearing to us, but not present in the underlying structure of things.
Likewise, when we understand the making of the manifest world as a flashing forth of Śiva in the power of action, vimarśa, this is not a picture of non-being emerging into being, but a background energy realizing itself in a simultaneous dichotomy of being and non-being. Most creation stories start with, “In the beginning…” The creation story of Kashmiri Śaivism would start with, “Before the beginning…” This is not a chronological “Before,” but an ontological “Before”: a primordial existence outside of time itself, outside of the beginnings and endings whose matrix encloses us in ordinary, lived time.
This is what we mean when we say that Śiva is “eternal”: not that He begins at a point and continues on forever, but that He is ontologically beyond and outside of beginnings and endings. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “the space-time of the world… is at bottom nothing but an emergence… This also means that beginning and end are consubstantial with space-time.”20placeholder If we accept this consubstantiality, we might well accept an insubstantiality beyond it.
iv. The original pattern
In the Vṛtti, Śiva and his underlying nature, Paramaśiva, are responsible for “the great creation,” also termed “the original pattern,” which contains all creations and resorptions. The difficulty of grasping this is critically connected to its significance: it’s not enough to admit that there is a God which creates all things; we must also try to grasp a God who is outside of time and space itself, and before all things, whose will manifests the created world, but whose will is not itself bound by our space, time and mortality.
In this way, the entirety of māyā or the created world had to, in a sense, exist before existing.21placeholder Existence itself had to arise from something else. We might call it a pre-present presence. The Vivṛti speaks of a “mere reflection” (chāyāmātra); elsewhere, “a faint outline similar to the first sketch of a painting,” described also as “dim.”22placeholder23placeholder
If one is tempted towards determinism by this vision of creation, it’s more complicated than that (or, perhaps less complicated): if God’s agency spans both being and non-being, there is nothing unspanned by the world-before-the-world, nothing which has not been covered. As such, there is an over-determinism in the world-before-the-world that would render that “sketch” predictively useless. If you peered into that faint outline to divine the future, you would be sorely disappointed: seeing not one outcome among many, but every possible outcome at once – there you are with bangs and no bangs, a physician’s coat and an astronaut’s jumpsuit, freckles from the sun and perfectly uniform skin – in Śiva is, one could say in modern terminology, every possible world. Rajanaka Kṣemarāja, disciple of Abhinavagupta, states that the “power of great creation contains in nuce the manifold display of all the creations and resorptions of the universe.”24placeholder From this manifold display of the possible, the power of action enlivens the manifest world as we know it.
One begins to sense from the sum total of texts that this great enlivening is both joyful and in a sense, like many joys, desecrating: Śiva wishes to exist in this way, there is “the will to exist in the form of a universe” which itself takes the form of the power of action. Śiva, in “entering the body”, manifests the entire panoply of the world seen and known from that body, in each body which is. The array of humans and various conscious beings inhabiting the earth is thus a many-bodied, many-mouthed, many-minded manifestation of Śiva (this generates the “monism” of Śaivistic non-dual monism). The texts suggest that Śiva experiences aesthetic and creative joy and wonder in the manifestation of the universe.25placeholder Yet, there is a splitting and atomization of what once was whole: the singular, all-constituting consciousness of Śiva becomes the multiplicitous minor consciousnesses of earthly beings, which in their boundedness to time and space have arrived too late to know the fullness of Paramaśiva.
III. Time, Space and Differentiation
One might say an auroch and man inhabit different, even uncrossable worlds, whether across the gap of thousands of years, or even side-by-side, in the irreconcilable difference of animal and human. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida extends the suspicion further to posit that man and man inhabit different worlds; that even side-by-side in human skin and flesh, we occupy fundamentally distinct spheres. As such, we do not erase the difference between animal and man, but accept and liken it to the difference between man and man.
“Neither animals of different species, nor humans of different cultures, nor any animal or human individual inhabit the same world as another, however close and similar these living individuals may be… the difference between one world and another will remain always unbridgeable…”26placeholder
In Śaiva siddhāntism,27placeholder there is a term paśu denoting the multiplicity of individual souls in their states of bondage. It commonly referred to tethered domestic animals such as cattle, and to those used in animal sacrifice, but there is also a human paśu indexed by the same term.28placeholder We are also in bondage; tethered to the earth, and to the fragile body. Just as a hunter’s snare or a birdcatcher’s net are pāśas, among the chains which tether one in paśu, so is the noose of Yama, the god of death a pāśa, and so, too, are body, mind and world. As later formalized and articulated in Kashmiri Śaivism, man is tethered to space, time, and a spatiotemporal sequentiality which hides and obscures the underlying unitariness of things.
“Between my world and any other world there is first the space and time of an infinite difference, an interruption that is incommensurable with all attempts to make passage, a bridge, an isthmus, all attempts at communication, translation, trope, and transfer that the desire for a world… will try to pose, impose, propose, stabilize. There is no world, there are only islands.”29placeholder
This is perhaps the great tragedy of creation: before this world, māyā, before “before” – that is, before time itself, and all of us dwelling within it – Śiva was unitary, but here in the manifestation of things, He becomes fragmented.
“All momentary cognitions are various aspects of one single lasting consciousness. But [Utpaladeva] does not content himself with establishing that this consciousness is unitary: his goal is to show that it manifests itself in the form of the universe, that is, as insentient objects and as conscious beings that are limited in space and time. In other words, he wants to establish a kind of absolute idealism, and he shares with the Buddhist Vijñānavādins the conviction that perceived objects, which we ordinarily believe to be external to consciousness, are in fact mere aspects of appearances taken on by consciousness.”30placeholder
Consciousness is no longer “confined to itself”. In this splitting-apart, this remanifestation of Śiva in the multiplicity of māyā, there is a gain and a twin loss permeating all. In fact, the fragmentary nature of the manifest world is echoed and mirrored in the fragmentary nature of each of its objects; “the distinct rays of a lamp are manifest as an undifferentiated [mass of light]; so are the streams of rivers in [our] cognition of the ocean, and [so] are the various flavours in a beverage…”31placeholder Time itself we experience as fragmentary, broken into seconds, and split even further by the vicissitudes of attention and memory. To exist in this manifest world is to be a fragmented thing among the fragmentary.
Reflecting the macrocosm in the microcosm pervades much of Abhinavagupta’s theology: as things are with the gods, so they are in men; as things are in men, so they are in parts of men, and in the world, as in parts of the world, and so on.32placeholder The condition of men on earth mirrors the condition of cognition to man, of light to man, of rivers to ocean.
In this fragmented condition, the “island” of the self lies in what Derrida would term the “archipelago,” a line of fragments side-by-side yet not interpenetrable any more than yellow is interpenetrable with blue. I am not only alone with myself, but alone with you.33placeholder We are trapped in singular bodies, living and dying in the locked box of the self, beyond which the prospect of a shared world is only a mirage.
IV. The End of the World
i. The Last Man Standing
When the auroch faded from the earth, it faded still into something: into history, the twin archives of archaeology and anthropology, the quasi-immortalization of books, from the scientific to philosophical. When one man fades in death, he likewise falls into the “carrying” (Celan) world which postdates him. The other is definitionally “the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me…. Structurally my survivor… the there beyond my life.”34placeholder What of when every man falls, when the last man falls?
Derrida was very taken with the story of Robinson Crusoe. For Derrida, what once terrified Robinson Crusoe on his island were the footsteps of another, unseen, unknown man, but more terrifying is the prospect of no footsteps at all, the erosion of their condition of possibility, a wreck which sinks not only the home ship, but all home, all man, the very possibility of the other: imagine you are the lone survivor not only of the ship, but of the world, and as such, when you die, there is no “structural survivor”: you only plunge, as perhaps best put by Nietzsche’s madman, “through an infinite nothing.”35placeholder
Though it is but a thought experiment, a metaphor, or on one’s worser days perhaps a fantasy, is it also the condition of contemporaneity? For decades, Derrida would indulge in a conflation of the end of the world and the end of my world; an intentional, signifying conflation, such as,
“Each time… death is nothing less than an end of the world… Death marks each time, each time in defiance of arithmetic, the absolute end of the one and only world.”36placeholder
The origin of this conflation traces to the Talmud, in which “[w]hoever destroys a single life is considered to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world.”37placeholder The island of the self is a world of its own. But there is also, of course, a world beyond that world; the prospect of an archipelago. At the turn of the century, with the U.S. preparing for the invasion of Iraq and the threat of a new world war looming overhead, Derrida began to write more explicitly on the end of the world, and increasingly less metaphorically, it seemed, his eyes less on the death of man than on the existential precarity of the survivor, the background of whose life is only the immonde, the “absence of world, the non-world.”38placeholder And why was Derrida so suddenly attracted to Robison Crusoe in these times; one must begin to sense an overlap between the end of the world seen in a death, and the end of the world seen in the death of the world, writ large, through international war, global catastrophe, or the twin existential threats of climate change and weapons of mass destruction. In fact, though, the particularized, analyzed, sometimes even fictionalized specters of nuclear world-death or pandemic world-death are only faint pre-ghosts – anticipates – of a later eventuality, that of biophysically guaranteed world-end.
Much like we don’t know exactly how the world began, we don’t know exactly how it will end. Theories abound: in case of the “Big Rip,” every particle in the universe will disintegrate infinitely into a singularity; in case of the “Big Crunch,” the universe contracts into a dimensionless point; in the “Big Bounce,” we oscillate between ripping and crunching. In the heat death hypothesis, perhaps most likely, the last of the planets and the black holes between them evaporate into a few sole unitary particles whose perfect distance from each other precludes every condition of possibility for change. The latter especially poses a point of confusion on the issue of liveliness: to marry a contemporary biophysical understanding of the universe with the Kashmiri Śaivists’, are those last few particles the last few manifestations of Śiva, who ceases to change, or are those last few particles not enlivened at all, so small as they are, and without any possibility of agency or change or energy? What does the end of the world look like for Śiva?
In fact, the key to that end is written in the beginning. In the Vivṛti, the power of action is at work in, dually, creation and dissolution: vimarśa “contains in itself the infinite variety of cosmic emissions and dissolutions.”39placeholder Utpaladeva explains, this is not a contradiction at all: creation and resorption only differ in their need for manifestation in the external (such as māyā) versus the internal (God; Paramaśiva). While creation involves an external and internal manifestation, resorption requires only internal. In other words, creation depends on us, involves us necessarily, but resorption doesn’t depend on us at all. As such, the end of an external manifestation – in common language, the end of the world – does not bode the end of the internal at all, but merely a changing of form – water, air, and mist might manifest in sequence, but sequence is not integral to them; just as there is an underlying thing that is simultaneously water, air, and mist, there is an underlying thing of the world transcending its manifestation. This thing is Paramaśiva.
ii. Return
In the Kriyādhikāra, it is clarified that the power of action involves an externalization of an internal or underlying reality, a reality that in Ratié’s words, already “exists within the subject”:
“An entity [A] that is [first] internal in relation to an [entity B] is, [once] external to that very [entity B], its effect; and [we] talk about this double existence, external and internal, in relation to the knowing subject.”40placeholder
Notably, we are here returning to the notion of sequentiality. Sequentiality emerged in the emergence of the manifest world, the manifestation of māyā out of the underlying eternality of Śiva. Sequentiality only arises in the external, the “entity B” of Śiva’s act of creation, the created world itself; as such, māyā does not come about afterwards, after the corresponding internal entity in the pure consciousness of Śiva (recollecting, here, the “faint outline,” the “dim” “first sketch…”). Rather, there is no afterwards in the before; there is no after and before, nor sequentiality at all. The internality of Śiva ontologically precedes its external manifestation: it comes before, not chronologically, but categorically, in the way that letters ontologically precede words. To state this differently: it’s not that māyā sequentially follows Paramaśiva; rather, sequence itself emerges out of Paramaśiva in accordance with the spatiotemporality of māyā, which itself is only a new form of what was always present, and is always present, and will always be, beyond our trichotomy of past, present and future.
On the flip-side, then, samhāra, resorption, isn’t an afterwards of the manifest world, but a beyond, a beyond-time that comes even when time is done for; even when all is done for, including the state of being done-for, the state of being in time. To say there is vimarśa after the end of the world is to not to say that it’s okay, there’s another chapter – rather, time itself was the book, and outside of the book is something more real, more primordial than the story we took as real while we were in it.
The afterwards of samhāra always was, in the way that the before of creation always was. Presence and absence both are outlined in the primordial inwardness of Śiva, which is, too, a postmordial inwardness; what is yet to be is already outlined in its dim pre-forms, just as the “traces” of what has already happened are already there.41placeholder The auroch already was, before its origination, and is after its ending, in the way that something is outside of beginnings and endings. The only reason we cannot find something that is gone, someone that has passed away, is that we are trapped here in the sticky marsh of time with beginnings closing in on the left and endings on the right; there is a world outside where everything not here ultimately goes, where all of this has come from, but we cannot see it here.
In Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,”42placeholder extraterrestrials arrive on the earth which can communicate only in an unfamiliar script, a language of logograms. At first, this script defies understanding; gradually, linguist Louise Banks begins to understand that the script itself is decipherable only with a very different grasp of time than our own: to read and write this alien script requires a grasp of simultaneous past, present, and future – endings are involved in beginnings just as beginnings are involved in endings. Time is not experienced as linear for the aliens, but simultaneous. Studying this strange script, she learns its underlying way of time, and catching glimpses of simultaneity, comes to know the future in its joy and heartbreak; she does not retreat from what she has seen, but walks straight forward into the future of her life. Of course, every major religion across history has in its way asked the question of why a merciful god would choose to let the world unfold as it has, with suffering unabated; just as physics tells us that matter changes forms but is not created or destroyed, the answer of Kashmiri Śaivism is that all which is already was and always will be. Joy and pain are “seeds” (bīja) in the ontological afterwards and the ontological before of time, as in all its manifest phenomena; there isn’t such a thing as joy without pain, not because God is cruel or even humanity evil, but because all things, joy and pain, always were, and all things always will be, even before and after the end of time itself.
V. The Devouring of Time
One could be forgiven for finding Derrida’s emphatic rejection of a shared world something between unsettling and devastating, but, what is a phantasm – what is it to be in a phantasm, to carry out our lives in what he terms the phantasm of a world?43placeholder A phantasm is fleeting, unreal; it is an illusion, a stand-in of one thing for another. When we look around from the vantage-point of this world, māyā, we see it standing in between one thing and another, a beginning and an ending – we see our reality, which we call the present, as in-between past and future. Like so, this world promotes the illusion of a sequential gap between beginning and end, on whose island we briefly rest. However, in the underlying reality of things, nothing is separated. This present only briefly transforms something which has always and will always be, under and beneath time itself. If Derrida is right and the phantasm of a shared world is only a dream, then to the Kashmiri Śaivist, it is a dream within a dream – the possibility of a shared world is an illusion, but the illusion of that world is also illusive, obscuring an underlying reality in which nothing is separated after all.
Is the underlying reality, the phantasmic condition of the phantasm, a tragedy or a palliative? Well, what is death, here in the phantasm, in the archipelago of lives divided by time and space? What does it mean, here and now, for one of those lives to end – an island, already afloat in uncrossable waters, sinking below the surface of the visible or communicable? What is death, beyond the island of māyā – is death in the phantasmic world, too, a phantasm?
Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta themselves are quiet on the topic, which may be due to incomplete archivization and incomplete translation of existing archives, but may also reflect the emergence of Kashmiri Śaivism out of numerous pre-existing traditions whose tenets may have been taken for granted rather than articulated. For example, the 8th-century BCE Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad understands the death of man as a re-reduction of the multiplicity of agencies constituting a body back into the one.44placeholder
In the Janmamaraṇavicāra, the term referencing death, svānta, means literally “one’s own end,” but also one’s inside, as anta is both “end” and “inside.” One’s own end as one’s own inside is rendered clearer, paradoxically, by its third meaning: the heart.45placeholder In Vāmadeva’s verse, death and the heart are unitary; the heart is also the locus of Śiva. In the stopping of a heart, in other words, the temporary singleton consciousness enlivening for a while a borrowed body is returned to unitary Paramaśiva.
In Kashmiri Śaivism, the body is not a magnifying glass for the condition of being, as contemporary phenomenologists trend towards in a theory of embodied cognition; rather, the body is fog on the window of ultimate consciousness. The body, with its brain as we think about today, confuses us into thinking we are the realest thing in the world, when we are only a manifestation. Some tantric practices have involved meditation on a corpse. A first millennium tantric veneration practice involved mentally burning away one’s physical body and replacing it with one made entirely of Śiva’s mantras.46placeholder
Death isn’t final in Kashmiri Śaivism or in its associated swath of traditions. Rather, the subtle body facilitates transmigration, through which consciousness is formed and released and re-formed in much the way we think today of atomic matter transforming and re-forming – as Carl Sagan said, “we are made of star-stuff,” literally atomically composed of dead stars.47placeholder But to the Kashmiri Śaivist, the beginning of the stars or the end of man’s ashes is not the beginning or end of all things, only a phase of it. Transmigration is not the whole story: transmigration is itself only a phase. There is an end to transmigration, in the way that there is an end to any journey; there is a liberation beyond transmigration, a liberation that lies in death itself, beyond the possibility of reincarnation, beyond manifest worlds and their beautiful, strange, tragic illusions.48placeholder
There is māyā, the enlivened phase of the world, the lifetime, that is, of the world – here, now – and there are waves of variegated matter which organize themselves here in time and sequence, and then there is stillness beyond all time and sequence; in the end of the world there is, perhaps, a liberation for Śiva otherwise known only to the man liberated in death. Derrida suggests that Robinson Crusoe, much like ourselves, harbored a great implacable fear of dying a peculiar kind of death, of,
“Being swallowed or devoured into the deep belly of the earth or the sea or some living creature, some living animal… he can think only of being eaten and drunk by the other, he thinks of it as a threat but with such compulsion that one wonders if the threat is not also nurtured like a promise, and therefore a desire.”49placeholder
How could there be a God who outlives time itself, who has a time after time, a life after life, a world after world, and why should we worship such a God at all, if He even exists? In the Vivṛti, Utpaladeva explains what feels perhaps entirely natural to Robinson Crusoe or any man who harbors that same fear or secret desire, to be swallowed into the deep belly of something: “His nature… is necessarily free of sequence because, due to [its] devouring all the objects that are constrained by time, it also devours time [itself].”50placeholder
There is no end to vimarśa in the end of the world; vimarśa lights on this manifest world like a bird might light on a branch, but its nature is unconstrained by specific manifestations. The thing left over when all is gone is not inert, but animated by the nature of a God whose nature is flashing forth. It is impossible to know exactly what it looks like after the end of the world, not because astrophysics hasn’t yet succeeded in describing it, but because we are in the world, in the vise of time, and trying to see beyond it, when our present – our being in time – has us closed in on both sides. We might think of something like boundless, empty space superseding us. But the God of Kashmiri Śaivism is a God of unconstrained power, whose nature is one of action even at rest. Should this God be at rest, at the end of the world, He is at rest in a space beyond the dichotomy of action and rest – He is at work in stillness, and in emptiness. The theory of Abhinavagupta extends into what we call dual-aspect monism – objects that seem inert, like a clay pot, are still diffused by divine consciousness, and only seem inert to us because they are resting in inertia – they are in a phase which is not animated by the self-aware light of consciousness. So in this way are the bodies of the dead diffused by an underlying substance even when they rest in inertia.51placeholder To speak of the world after the end of the world, we speak not of a great emptiness, but a world after separations and dualities; the separations and dualities which stole the soul from the clay have dissolved into a pure unification (re-unification) of soul and matter.
Ten centuries after the death of Abhinavagupta, poet Joshua Weiner will write that the man swallowed by a fish is “swallowed by a sound… he lives inside a song”; is “eaten as a pathway to god.”52placeholder The belly of a whale, after all, is a place to “rest and wait”;53placeholder “if God exists,” after all, “I think they might be a whale.”54placeholder
The end of the world, then, that fear at the heart of all fears, which in its secret depths may really be desire, is only that selfsame original desire of religions across the turn of centuries and crossing of thousands of miles, tracing back to something underneath all such spatiotemporal illusions of difference: that of being swallowed back into the belly of God himself, a place to stay when place has passed away, when time itself has been devoured. In the belly of Him who devours all, there is, after all, a world after the end of the world.
Works Cited
Albergotti, Dan. 2008. “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” from The Boatloads. BOA Editions, Ltd.
Bantiff, Freya. 2022. “God the Whale.” The Poetry Society. Accessed 5th June, 2025. <https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/god-the-whale>
Biernacki, Loriliai. 2024. The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and the New Materialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chiang, Ted. 2002. “Story of Your Life.” In Stories of Your Life and Others. New York: Tor Books.Coward, Harold. 1982. “TIME (KĀLA) IN BHARTṚHARI’S ‘VĀKYPADĪYA.’” Journal of Indian Philosophy 10, no. 3: 277–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23444092.
Davis, Richard H. 1991. Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshipping Siva in Medieval India. Princeton: Princeton Legacy Library.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. New York: Fordham University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2017 (2002-2003). The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida), trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakshmanjoo, Swami. 2015. Hymns to Shiva: Utpaladeva’s Shivastoravali: Songs of Devotion in Kashmir Shaivism. Universal Shaiva Fellowship.
Naas, Michael. 2015. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar. New York: Fordham University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2021. The Fragile Skin of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nemec, John. 2024. “The Language of Life and Death: Diametrical Contemplation in Bhaṭṭa Vāmadeva’s Janmamaraṇavicāra.” In Comme une qui entra dans le forêt bruissant / Like One Who Entered the Rustling Forest. Hommage à Marie-Claude Porcher, 713-738. Paris: Association française pour les études indiennes.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. New York: Vintage Books.
Payne, Richard and Hayes, Glen. 2024. The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ratié, Isabelle. 2021. Utpaladeva on the Power of Action: A First Edition, Annotated Translation and Study of Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivṛti, Chapter 2.1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Sagan, Carl. 1980. “The Lives of the Stars.” Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Episode 9. PBS. Aired November 25, 1980.
Weiner, Joshua. 2013. “‘The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish'” from The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Of note: for ease of reading, I will most commonly use the popular term Kashmiri Śaivism to reflect the thought of Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta, and their various scholars. However, I am more specifically referring to the Pratyabhijñā school of non-dual Śaivism which they systematized, although did not exclusively represent.
First coined by Thomas Nagel, 1986; also adopted by Merleau-Ponty.
Shiva’s power of action is called vimarśa; vimarśa is not a specific action, but a broad motivating force under which things become manifest.
I will use God interchangeably with Śiva, also commonly written as Shiva.
ĪPK 2.1.8.
ĪPV, vol. II, p. 20, via Ratié, 2021, 262.
ĪPV, vol. II, pp 22-23, via Ratié, 2021, 274.
ĪPVV, vol. III, pp 24-25, via Ratié, 2021, 275.
ĪPV, vol. II, pp 23-24, via Ratié, 2021, 276.
ĪPVV, vol. III, pp 24-25, via Ratié, 2021, 275.
“Space” is perhaps another term for understanding, e.g., the situation in which Śiva makes it such that certain things can never exist simultaneously, as described by Ratié.
Coward, 1982, 277.
Maitrī 6:15, via Coward, 1982, 278.
A clarification: “prior” has a dual usage of either prior (chronologically) or prior (ontologically). “Prior to time” is only legible in the latter use of prior, as the former itself relies on time. The “great creation,” and Śiva even beyond and “before” it, are not chronologically, but ontologically primordial, as described by Ratié. See, e.g., Ratie, 2021, 282.
ĪPV, vol. I, pp 210-211, via Ratié, 2021, 280.
Ratié, 2021, 273.
ĪPV, vol. II, pp 22-23, via Ratié, 2021, 273.
Vṛtti on ĪPK 1.5.14, p 23, via Ratié, 2021, 278.
Nancy, 2021, 4.
Ratié suggests in this realm of the before, consciousness (God’s consciousness) apprehends all things, but only in the way of an all-knowing consciousness knowing that all of this is only self-identical and nothing more (297).
ĪPVV, vol III, p 264.
PTV, 83, via Ratié, 2021, 282.
“The Śaiva nondualists, however, consider that the reason for the countless manifestations constituting the world is… the freedom (svātantrya) of the universal consciousness relishing its own creativity. (92)
A tradition slightly pre-dating Abhinavagupta’s non-dual Śaivism, though influencing and interweaving with it.
Davis, 1991, 23.
BS II 8/31.
Ratié, 2021, 91.
Vrrti, p. 51; via Ratié, 2021, 164.
Biernacki, 63-64.
BS II 1/21.
BS II 131/194.
Nietzsche, 1882, 119.
Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5.
BS II 9/32.
Ratié, 2021, 282.
See, e.g., Ratié, 2021, 283.
And its film incarnation in Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 Arrival.
On the shared world as phantasm: see Naas, 2015, 59.
Nemec, 2024, 718.
Payne, 2024, 1046.
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos.
“Let me live in this universe [or] mṛtaṁ, let me die in this universe, [or] let me have this liberation from repeated births and deaths.” Hymns to Shiva, Chapter 13 (07:53).
BS II 77/122-123.
See, for example, Biernacki, 2023, 28-31.
Weiner, 2013.
Albergotti, 2016.
Bantiff, 2022.