Part III Kashmir Shaivism: Spanda: Phenomenology of Creative Pulsation

Kashmir Shaivism does not explain multiplicity by positing a temporal “creation-event,” nor by retreating to an inert monism. It offers, instead, a phenomenology of consciousness-in-act. The tradition’s technical name for this act is spanda,“throb,” “quiver,” “creative pulsation.” The thesis is : consciousness (citi) is not a passive luminosity shining on a ready-made world; it is a sovereign power whose very self-revelation is world. Hence the canonical pairing: the Shivasutra concentrates prakasha (illumination), while the Spanda literature elaborates vimarsha (self-reflexive dynamism). Read together, they yield a single, nondual vision: light is intrinsically self-aware, and self-awareness is intrinsically dynamic. The Spandakarika,a laconic Kashmiri treatise in circulation by the 9^th - 10th centuries,functions as an elucidation of the Shivasutra. Classical sources preserve two lines on authorship (as disussed already in Part 1). Closely associated are four classical commentaries: (1) Kallata’s Vrtti; (2) a Vivrti transmitted in the line (often linked to Rama-kantha); (3) Bhatta Utpala’s Spandapradipika; and (4) Ksemaraja’s paired works, the concise Spanda-sandoha and the full Spanda-nirnaya.

Commentators insist that spanda is not motion in space-time, motion presupposes coordinates and succession, which the Absolute does not inhabit. Hence early exegesis glosses spanda as svabhava (awareness’s own living nature) and, under influence of allied lineages, aunmukhya (the ever-fresh “leaning-toward” manifestation). Abhinavagupta highlights the concessive particle kiñcit (“as if”): the immovable only as if moves; succession is only as if present. Ksemaraja’s ring of near-synonyms- vimarsha, parashakti, svatantrya, aishvarya, kartrtva, sphurataa, hrdaya, spanda, underscores a single sovereignty of awareness, not a second principle. In sum, spanda is dynamic self-presentation without change of essence, the condition of possibility for every changing presentation.

In the opening of the Spandakarika, the author salutes Shiva, ‘whose unmesa and nimesa’ figuratively, the ‘opening’ and ‘closing’, are the very manifestation and reabsorption of the cosmos. In his Spandasandoha and Spandanirnaya, Ksemaraja makes explicit that this ‘opening/closing’ must not be read as a temporal blink: it is described as if sequential for pedagogical purposes, whereas in the ground (adhyatmika level) manifestation and withdrawal are yugapad (simultaneous). On this reading, the tradition’s image of a shakti-cakra (‘wheel of powers’) avoids two opposite errors at once: it affirms both appearing and reabsorption as real modes of awareness, while denying any depletion of the power that appears. This line of interpretation, already presupposed in Kallata’s Vrtti and developed in Bhattotpala’s Spandapradipika and the transmitted Vivrti, and consolidated by Ksemaraja is also dramatized in the modern oral exposition of Swami Lakshmanjoo, who deploys the trope (‘with each “opening” and “closing,” innumerable worlds arise and resolve’) precisely to prevent reifying spanda as a minor flutter inside a pre-given universe. Here, ‘world’ just is this pulsing self-presentation of awareness.

Ksemaraja reads shakti-cakra-vibhava-prabhava- the “wheel of power in its arising and return”, on several, overlapping levels. Think (i) of a Krama-style cycle of goddesses (Kashmiri Shaiva stream that explains reality as a sequence of phases. It often personifies those phases as goddesses each goddess names a moment in the sequence, first emergence, then stabilization, then withdrawal, then return to the ground) that stage appearance and withdrawal; (ii) of the natural joining and parting of energies already shimmering in Shiva’s own light; (iii) of the world itself as the full spread of those powers; (iv) of an inner circuit of shaktis (Vamashvari, Khecari, Gocari, Dikcari, Bhucari); (v) of the senses working together like a power-wheel; (vi) of the mantras as a wheel of power; and (vii) of the deities of language (e.g., Brahmi) who guide articulation. The upshot is simple: “power” can’t be flattened to one meaning, and genuine mastery is not collecting techniques but recognizing how these powers already unfold within awareness.

Early karikas ground the doctrine phenomenologically. Across waking, dream, and deep sleep, one and the same Experient (upalabdhr) abides; the states rise and subside, yet the “stable movement” (sthira-gati) of awareness is unbroken. From this, the manuals derive a hallmark pedagogy: madhya-centering. The Shivasutra already binds awareness to breath, hinting at a “middle” where attention does not deviate “left or right.” The Spanda commentaries generalize: seek the center “between one cognition and the next,” for “two thoughts are invariably divided.” In that structurally present interval, nirvikalpa in the strict sense of “preconceptual”,pratibha (creative intuition) flashes. This is not a contrived gap but the unnoticed architecture of mentation. To abide there is to see that object and seer were never truly separate. Ksemaraja integrates this micro-phenomenology with the tattva cosmology. From the object’s side, unmesa is the first stirring toward presentation; nimesa its withdrawal. From the subject’s side, they map onto Ishvara-tattva (“this universe is me”) and Sadashiva-tattva (“I am this universe”), two faces of one nondual intelligence tasting itself as world. The point is not taxonomy, but the training of perception to read each transition, of thought, sensation, affect,as a miniature unmesa-nimesa of the Heart (hrdaya).

Classical Spanda teaching is simple: our senses don’t see or act by themselves- a corpse’s eye proves it. What makes them work is the “touch” of awareness, the quiet throb (spanda) that animates every perception. Practice is just learning to feel that pulse in the very act of seeing, thinking, moving, and to recognize it as your own awareness. As Lakshmanjoo says, it is “vibrationless vibration”: thoughts and sensations come and go, yet the Subject never moves. The knack is to notice this in the storm, not afterwards.

After training introvertive madhya-centering (nimilana), the karikas turn outward. Sahaja-vidya,“innate knowledge”, is to behold the same pulsation in and as the differentiated field. Even mantra-phenomena are demythologized: syllable, word, and meaning derive their efficacy from spanda and resolve back into it. This “extrovertive” samadhi (unmilana) does not denigrate manifestation; it re-reads it. Nothing stands outside Shiva because all standing-out (pratha) is Shiva’s power to show forth. The result is a non-denigrating nonduality: world as abhasa (luminous appearing) rather than maya in the sense of unreality.

The third outflow (nihsyanda )lists by-products that may surface in practice: visionary lights, inner sounds, attenuation of hunger, heightened insight,even modalities of omniscience. Spandakarika immediately deflates their soteriological pretensions. Powers are distractions unless subordinated to recognition. More fundamentally, the section diagnoses bondage: severed from the sovereignty of iccha-jñana-kriya (will-knowledge-action), the empirical subject slips under the rule of verbal construction (Shabda) and ideation, and is thereby pashu (bound). The corrective is not suppression of thought but seeing that ideation’s dynamism is kriya-Shakti which, recognized aright, is none other than para-Shakti,i.e., spanda itself. Thus even the “chain” of language is Shakti; its yoke is broken not by muting speech but by tracing its pulse back to the Heart.

The classical manuals return to a disciplined handful of protocols:

1. 
   Breath as axis. Stabilize attention where the swing of prana pauses; sense the “middle corridor” (madhya) as lucid repose rather than as a spatial point.
2. 
   Intervals of mind. At the end of one thought and before the next, relax vigilance into the bright, contentless interval; allow pratiba to announce itself.
3. 
   Transitions of world. Track the micro-dawn between perceptions where one form fades and another begins; learn to ride these as home.
4. 
   Affect and aesthetic shock. Take beauty, sorrow, wonder, sudden sound as apertures; intensity is spanda showing itself.
5. 
   Integration. Over time, recognize the unmesa-nimesa cadence in breath, gaze, gesture, thought, and rest, until life itself becomes schooling in return to the Heart.

Across the commentarial literature the refrain is identical: pedagogical sobriety joined to ontological boldness. Method is catalyst, not cause; it discloses a fact that never ceased to be.

Because spanda is awareness-in-act, vak (speech) lies within it. The Paratrimshika (a short Trika text) and the Spanda line read matrka (phonemes), mantra, and shabda (verbal power) as the same pulsation. Hence mantra is shakti-svarupa, not a code. To take up mantra is to ride that wave of the Heart; to handle speech crudely is to stiffen it. In practice, sound-discipline pairs with madhya-centering: we trace speech back-from vaikhari (articulated utterance) to madhyama (inward speech) to pashyanti (visionary level) to para (ground)-until the current is felt as spanda itself.

Placed beside Advaita Vedanta, spanda refuses an inert Brahman: stillness is inherently dynamic; dynamism inherently still. The Absolute is not compromised by activity because activity is its mode of appearing. Placed beside Buddhist Shunyata, spanda affirms purnata (plenitude): the interval is not lack but the plenum of uncolored awareness out of which forms ceaselessly arise and into which they gently resolve. The tradition’s favorite simile,a white cloth that becomes white again between dyes,captures how, in each “between,” awareness returns to pristine luminosity without effort.

Three axes shift:

1)
Agency (kartrtva). Action is no longer an ego’s extrusion into an alien field but awareness’s own initiative (unmesa). The practical effect is a deep relaxation of doership without passivity: spontaneity and lucidity cease to be at odds.

2)
Affect and ethics. Emotions cease to be obstacles and become thresholds. The task is not suppression but the refinement of attention such that each affect self-reveals as a doorway to the Centre. Ethical life becomes responsiveness to how spanda invites clarity in each circumstance.

3)
Time. The tyranny of before-and-after eases. Because every transition is lit by the same luminosity, one learns to value the “between”,until even the sense of a “between” relaxes into seamless throb.

This is the force of Swami Lakshmanjoo’s phrase “vibrationless vibration”: not a doctrine to be believed but a knack to be learned in medias res.

The Spanda literature does not duplicate the Pratyabhijña’s dialectics; it complements them. Where Pratyabhijña establishes,against Buddhist momentariness, Nyaya substance-realism, and Vedantic maya-doctrine,that consciousness is reflexive and sovereign, the Spanda manuals train perception to taste that reflexivity as the invariant pulse “between thoughts,” “between breaths,” “between perceptions.” The two streams converge in a single soteriology: bondage is inattention to what is always the case; liberation is the irreversible recognition of the same,here bodying forth as the felt throb of awareness.

Shoaib Mohammad (KAS),

Chief Accounts Officer,J&K Govt.