The Spanda Principle

1

Consciousness is continually going out from itself to look at, attend to, grasp external objects or circumstances, thought-constructs, phrases, images, impressions…

There is an attraction there: we gravitate to what appeals, draws along, seduces, enflames, what satisfies or pleases at some level (or could). This appeal however is a conditioned fact, it is a habit of attending and following-on. As conditioned, it can be reprogrammed, decommissioned, deactivated. It can be seen as a habit of going-out which need have no further control over our mind and behavior if we withdraw the sanction. When we see those appeals as part of a universal process—which entails degrees of limitation, ignorance and wrong view—they are no longer binding but the stuff to be transformed.

In rhythm with the going-out of consciousness, there is also continually a returning-in. It is this expansion out and withdrawal back in that characterizes our naïve experience of the contact between consciousness and world. Yoga means focusing on the drawing-back-in: on the source of the conscious going-out as not determined by those external appeals of content. Observing the going-out and returning-in, one notices that there is always restoration to this source—even if only at the moment of oblivion in dreamless sleep.

The traditional goal of yoga is to eradicate whatever disturbance (vritti) provokes consciousness to go-out unduly, and so it induces, through physical practice, a steady state of resting in the ‘inside’, in the drawn-back-in state. By accustoming oneself to this—the joy of a firm, ‘independently wealthy’ consciousness, not dependent on mental contents—the yogi progressively gains alert dominion over the entire phenomenon of going-out.

2

Upon reflection, one can easily see how all appeals from-without last no time at all compared to the inside-of-consciousness that receives them. The appeals are always shifting, variations on a recurring pattern, one desire substituting for another along a metonymic chain, never coming to rest on its own, only leap-frogging from one hit to the next, restlessly, never satisfied. For no matter how pleasurable the external consumption, one is confronted again and again with the question of the source of going-out: what underlies all apprehension, desire, enjoyment, comprehension and experience? The answer, in a symbolic register, is Siva, who you are…

The cessation or “voiding” of thought-constructs (vritti nirodha) is the consequence of remaining with(in) that source which is inherently free of them and, in the process, watching the rhythm of expansion and contraction without identifying with it, nor with the respondent to any appeal. Siva is that Consciousness, Shakti is its Play: pure “I” or will-force and pure plenum-manifold when experienced as the inherent and permanent richness of Being without necessity of addition, sufficient unto itself, “purposeless”—and thereby supremely powerful and free to Become, to go-out and back-in, to give itself. The Divine self-overcoming the divine in the Divine is the rhythm of Spanda…

This vibration (spanda) is in the nature of Siva’s creative power; whatever it emits it resorbs, everything put out is cradled back in, such that in the rhythm of creation and destruction the world is not other than this source, though never exactly identical with it either—hence its fundamental longing for the dimension of the unbound. That is why one feels obliged to describe the source as Unmanifest, as unchanging and all-transcending, etc. In reality it is just that consciousness-power to which all going-out through appeal inevitably comes back via withdrawal, restoration, centration, or penetration into that Pure Subjectivity or Eternal Life which is “vacuous and divested of all outer supports… not directed anywhere outside itself” (Dyczkowski, 181).

The most expedient way to discover this is to dwell just prior to the moment when consciousness goes to go-out—to catch that element of pre-succession, that first moment of perception “when the power of the will to perceive is activated” (180). Consciousness is in an ontological priority vis-à-vis every appeal and every response to an appeal (this is the meaning of “internal”), hence it is prior to world, thought-constructs, sensation—all the Tattvas—yet united to them as the net of their return-resorption. To abide in this sub- or pre-perception, in the interval between thoughts (unmesa), is to abide just prior to the separating differentiation between subject and object, jiva and Siva, such that the bliss of the Vibratory Center pervades every aspect of existence (185) without the obscuration of mental representation, craving after pleasure, and “binding extroversion” (217).

3

Narrativization of a self or a life (even that of being a perfect recipient of Siva’s grace) and any form of initiatory action (even to engrave Siva’s name at every threshold) are expressions of and from the Vibratory Center. And what if an act, a life-story, did its work without departing from that consciousness-power? Without getting lost from it in limitations that occlude it and dampen its potential power? That would be the ideal point of the earth’s divinization: when an individual vessel (body, mind, jiva) manifests Siva’s own motive and intention (these are metaphors for the free play) in and through whatever is.

The individual vessel by nature wants to cleave, for its reality, to the Eternal Life of Siva-Shakti; it need not ‘add’ consciousness. Yet prior to that addition, the risk of misuse or misdirection in the existential project is high, due to the poisons and obscurations that afflict the vessel via limitation.

To cleave to Siva deliberately means to reject any action that comes more from an outside-appeal than from an innerly-directed outpouring. It is to act from his Eternal Life, inside the Vibratory Center, the self-exceeding ‘material’ delight that is Mahashakti. Such that whenever one notices distrayal occurring or in the works, one draws the attention back, replants oneself in the soil of that self-abiding consciousness-power which, lacking any need to go-out, is able to go-out freely and creatively and command power there aright.

This expansion without alienation in what expands, nor in the medium of expansion (both are Shakti), this outpouring that remains in full possession of itself and loses nothing in giving its everything, is itself the progenitive bliss of consciousness, the creative “trident” of power, will, and knowledge: Siva-Shakti as sovereign of the universe.

4

This is why, when it comes to projects and products, all that counts is the source-point from which they proceed—for they will return to that source-point in the end, and they will draw whoever comes under their influence or is seduced by them to it.

The nearer the source-point of the work is to the Vibratory Center, the less obscuring and distraying: then it is simultaneously both more essential, because of the essence, and less necessary, because of the freely-there, of the divinely gone-out. Projects and products further away will inevitably have some twist in their appeal—they will themselves crave, obscure, and bind, for they will retain needs of their own: needs of attention that do not leave consciousness free for attention to the cosmicality and supracosmicality of Spanda in its sublime comedy and jubilant tragedy.

Put otherwise, a work of consciousness-power traverses spontaneously and easily all the mental representations and errant material habits it succeeds in dissolving to transform; it is a use of thought-constructs and the stuff of bodies that decommissions them from any motive ulterior to liberation or “free use”; that deactivates the oppositionality of categories to localize the fund of an all-encompassing wisdom-experience; that undoes the concept-boundedness of the world and the vice-grip of mentality; and that therefore sets the world free for a stronger and more sovereign Siva-persuasion: a more evident and striking apprehension of the pervasion that is always-there or -just-prior, which nears whatever is to itself…

The process of such a working and the works it produces originate from, and abide originarily in, a dissolution and overpowering of external dictates and constraints. They are products of an enlightened will that selects and decides, that discriminates between finite and infinite and so is capable of uniting the two. They begin from the assumption, made joyfully, that the Fire of Time has already reduced the work to cinders, “the white ashes of the undivided light of consciousness” (211), “the ashes of a vital praxis” (Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 246); such that when compared to the apprehension of the Vibratory Center which is source and goal, it does not even really exist, or need to want to exist. Such a work is free, is gift and gratuity itself, unseparate from Spanda, which is continuously composing the rise and fall, the beauty and glory of the universe.

Aides to what is always and everywhere powerful and in play, these mediating constructions serve at best as vicarious inductions to Siva’s immemoriality and bliss, memory aides for the deluded who have forgotten the unforgettable. But such a work is only ‘spontaneous and easy’ by cleaving to Siva: by letting the individual ego of obscuration, craving, and extroverted binding “die”; by letting the latent mental impressions (vasanas) and other impurities and defilements (mala, klesha) be annihilated in the Fire of Time; by spiritually and physically—physiologically—dissolving one’s (impression of) separateness from the Continuity of Being and the Totality of Becoming; by progressively preparing one’s vessel to bear the power, will, and knowledge of Siva-Shakti, and so to become a force of intelligible infinity for the world.

A simple task, in the end: to abide in the source of oneself, vigilantly and persistently to reject any appeal to stray out of that source; and to not ‘let oneself go’, not forget the delight of the mission; and above all, whatever the moment may bring, to trust and entrust oneself to that all-sufficing Heart-Center, the union of Eternal Life and All.

—June 23, 2024
—For references see Mark Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration, ch 2 and Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, pg. 246 and Karman, pgs. 78-83.
—See also on this site: Anti-Mysticism