Are we Real?

Recently one passage struck me, “The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet is not. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has not cause and serves no purpose. It just happens when we are absent-minded. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it, nor meaning…”

This passage has been pulling me back continuously for a while now. I have been reflecting on what is real, what has meaning, purpose, and why I get tied up thinking the world does, rather than recognising it as ‘but a show’. Where is the faultiness in my thinking? How do I move beyond this perception?

And then, I started questioning my assumption that Nisargadatta must be correct. Why am I accepting his assertion that the world has no meaning, no purpose? Why am I trying to align my approach to this?

It seems to me, if everything is pure consciousness, and we are all manifestations of dynamic consciousness for the purpose of pure consciousness experiencing itself in every manifestation, then, by definition, we must have a purpose and a meaning. To use the analogy of the cinema screen, as is often done, if we are just the image on the screen, ‘but a show’, then pure consciousness cannot be experiencing us as ‘real’ manifestations but merely as projections. This, it seems to me, would be pointless, as pure consciousness would not then be ‘experiencing’ all of manifestation, but merely those projections.

This might seem strange, but it hadn’t dawned on me that, while Trika Tantra (Kashmiri Shaivism) as outlined by Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta and Ksemaraja (and many others), influenced the Nath School, Nisargadatta has taken a different stance. Kashmiri Shaivism teaches that we are all as one with pure consciousness (Shiva). We have merely forgotten this due to ignorance (Maya). It also teaches that there are three aspects of consciousness, pure consciousness (Shiva) and dynamic consciousness (Shakti) which is the active, pulsating expression of freedom, manifested through us, ie, the world and everything else. As such, it affirms the ‘reality’ of the world.

Indeed, Utpaladeva in Īśvarapratyabhijñā-Kārikā (Verses on the Recognition of the Lord), state, “There is only one Great Divinity, and it is the very inner Self of all creatures. It embodies itself as all things, full of unbroken awareness of three kinds: I, this, and I am this.”

Bringing it all together

In Kashmir Shaivism there are three realities which are One; pure consciousness which is transcendent (Shiva), dynamic consciousness which is immanent (Shakti) and is the link between the macrocosm and the microcosm, and the limited atom (Anu) or individual (Jiva, ie, you and me) that is the phenomenal world that is the manifestation of this consciousness. There is no difference. We are One. Therefore, the world is a real appearance, rather than ‘but as show’ as Nisargadatta proposes.

This, of course, has the significant implication that liberation, freedom, or awakening, is not about transcendence, leaving and isolating ourselves from the world, but rather of transforming ourselves, going up and then coming down into the Heart, for an integration into the world.

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