Updated: April 14, 2025
Shiva Sutras continued, tatpravṛttāvapyanirāsaḥ saṁvettṛbhāvāt I'm gonna skip the Lakshmanjoo commentary and translation right now. It's a bit difficult and arcane. So let's go with a contemporary interpretation which still holds true to the ancient wisdom. So this Shiva Sutra is saying that awareness remains as awareness throughout the cycles of creativity, maintenance, destruction, concealment, and resurrection. This is the creative process. So let's examine this. OK, purusha is pure consciousness and purusha
is frequently also equated or in this system, Kashmir Shivaism purusha
is the same as pure consciousness, infinite possibilities, infinite correlation, entanglement, nonlocal correlation. That's number two, number three, unpredictability, you can recognize some quantum mechanical principles here. Number three, unpredictability. Number four, the source of attention and intention. You might even call that the observer effect in any way. Those are the five most important qualities of pure consciousness, infinite possibilities, nonlocal correlation, unpredictability and what we call the observer effect, attention and intention.
There are others: self regulation, self organization, self evolution, recycling and progression. But this consciousness engages in the creative process through these five cycles. Creativity, which is the first movement of consciousness, creativity and what is creativity, it is a disruption, it's non algorithmic. It's the closest you can think of it is Gödel's theorem. You know, some thing that is true but can't be proven. And yet it is non algorithmic. It's a disruption. So that's how creativity starts from pure consciousness. And that creative process includes complementarity, which means the understanding that opposites are complementary aspects of the same underlying reality. That's one thing. The second aspect is recycling and evolution of everything that is created information, energy matter and fragmented awareness as well. So recycling but then evolution to higher levels of abstraction and so on. That creative process then involves interaction between seemingly unrelated parts or activities.
Once again, that's entanglement, interactive intelligence. If you want to call it that between elements and forces that have already been created. But then there's a, there's something called maintenance, sustenance, sustainability. What is created is sustained at a micro level for a very short time, like maybe a fraction of a second, a photon blips in and out of existence, an electron does the same thing. But in a cosmic level at a very macro level from you might say black hole to the heat death of absolute zero.
And yet we can think of this as underlying principles of the same reality from microcosm to macrocosm. Some physicists also call this or some thinkers also called this recursion. So there's maintenance and then there's destruction. What has been created is destroyed to what purpose? What is the role of destruction? You've heard that phrase maybe from from Alfred Lord Tennyson and idols of the king. The old order change a healing place to new and God fulfill, fulfills himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world. So even the good has to be destroyed at some point because it is no longer relevant. So the destruction is actually part of the creative process. A new meaning, a new context, new relationship, a new story has to emerge destruction. That's the third aspect of Shiva pure consciousness. The fourth is concealment or incubation. The creative process always needs incubation in the field of all possibilities so that it can harness entanglement into a new experience. A
new perception, new idea, new thought, new relationship, new context, new story that happens in incubation, incubation also happens in deep sleep. And also of course, supreme incubation in death.
And then after an uncertain period of incubation, there's suddenly insight, revelation, movement, discontinuity, new context, new meaning, new relationship, new story, the old recycles but also evolves into the new, these are also referred to. So that's called resurrection, death, and resurrection. You can include even metaphors like virgin birth and all that. They have some metaphorical meaning. So all this is happening where in awareness, awareness remains aware, its experiences change in the creative process in that period of sustainability. In that phase of destruction in incubation, no experience but awareness of absence of experience and finally resurrection. The old has been discarded and the new is born. This is happening to all of creation from microcosm to macrocosm, from human body to cosmic body.
Or you can say the body of an insect or a caterpillar to any life form. And this creative process involves the tatvas. Tatvas means cosmic consciousness, cosmic mind, cosmic identity, ego, identity. You might call it God if you want to but you don't have to. But then it filters down to the microcosmic level, mind, intellect, ego, the five sensory organs, the five motor organs, the five elements symbolic representation of those five perceptual activities and the five the subtle senses all are actually modes of awareness, knowing itself as experience and understanding and knowing, experience, understanding and knowing. Awareness remains aware in all its un manifest and manifest expressions. Just looking at my notes to see if I should say anything else. No, this is what the sutra is saying. So see you soon..
