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Kashmir Shaivism and Spanda: The Cosmic Selfie of Consciousness

How the practice of Recognition can transform our daily perception of reality

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Have you ever found, while watching sunlight filter through the leaves or looking upon the face of a loved one, that for an instant the boundaries between you and the world vanish? A thrill of unity, a flash in which everything seems to gaze back at you, as if in a mirror.

A thousand years ago, in a remote valley nestled among the peaks of the Himalayas, a group of extraordinary philosophers and mystics would have called that experience “recognition,” the revelation of the true nature of reality. This is the story of non-dual Kashmir Shaivism, one of the most radical schools of thought ever conceived. And to understand it, we must imagine the universe not as a static place, but as a film projected at an infinite speed.

A Spiritual Rebellion: The World is Real, The World is Divine
Flourishing mainly between the 9th and 12th centuries, this thought was a revolution. While other major philosophical schools often saw the material world as an illusion (māyā), the masters of Kashmir said something staggering: no, the world is real, it is vibrant, and it…