>>20314038

these are the most based threads on Yea Forums

keep telling yourself that loser

run along back to your "waldun" threads, little one
this thread is for adults

why don't you also study some other tradition?

>your every post reeks of desperation and insecurity, if Advaita was all you claim it to be you'd have a life by now
And yet here you are, seething to yourself like a distraught female in the middle of a conversation between me and Frater Asemlen on metaphysics that I was trying to continue.... how delightfully amusing

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>why don't you also study some other tradition?
I plan to and I would have done so more extensively already if I had more free time. All of my self-studying of Advaita and reading through all of Shankara has been accomplished despite me working full-time in a career that has absolutely nothing to do with Indian philosophy. And not only have I had to do so in my limited free time, but I also have other hobbies/interests that I value almost as much as studying eastern thought, so in my limited free time I have to balance Indian philosophy, my other hobbies, and my active social life; thus not leaving me a lot of additional time to read through all of Ramanuja or Abhinavagupta as well (though I would like to and I plan to do so eventually).

There is also the point that I find Advaita more compelling than any of the other schools of thought, so I feel just as compelled to read post-Shankara Advaita thinkers like Suresvara and Madhusudana Saraswati as I feel compelled to study some other kind of Hindu thought. I find other types of Hindu thought and non-Hindu eastern philosophy intriguing and I already know a good deal of information about non-Advaita schools, but all of the non-Advaita schools contain teachings which it seems self-evident to me are not correct, even if they do get a lot of other stuff correct; which means they don't have the same allure for me that Advaita does.

wait wait wait! there's alot of things not making sense here
>20312966
>The unfolding of the illusion of maya involves the arising of minds within maya, and when these maya-minds receive the light of the unaffected luminous Atman-Brahman, that light illuminates their mind and thereby allows it to do things, experience things, be deluded etc
if the illusion is prior to the "maya-mind" then who's being "victim" of this illusion then? certainly can't be the maya-mind since is somethign that happens after the casting of this first movement of the illusion

> I maintain that colors and sounds etc are not self-aware and that the awareness, even the 'intentional' awareness or Shakti that knows them is itself partless, colorless, soundless and non-identical with the perceived mental sound and colors.

Shakti is the source of them and from which they arise and is the perception of them, they cannot be said to have any existence beyond the perception of them.

> Is it a similar kind of idea being posited when you say Shiva remains but with shakti made unmanifest?

More or less since the perception is just shakti, the self/transcendental ego remains it’s just not perceiving anything.

> Shiva (partless non-intentional self-revealing awareness) is dependent on the Shakti unless I'm misunderstanding Shiva.

You are, you must see shakti as awareness and shiva as that which the shakti is aware of, which in the shiva tattva are an identical thing but are divided into the shiva and shakti tattva due to one being the perceived I and one being the perception of it, the perception of I (shiva) requires the perception (shakti) in order to be perceived, the perception (shakti) requires the I who is received (shiva) in order to perceive. Thus we can say shiva has primacy but also that they are identical yet also two.

> Parashiva's immediate non-dual knowledge of himself, beyond even a subject united with an object,

Once more, higher/abstraction is not considered more divine but rather, the object and subject already exist within Para shiva but hidden, thus the tattvas in their nuanced relationships are revealed, so ultimately the object and subject unity is the revealed essence of the parashiva.

> Shiva being alone present in dreamless while Shakti is absent/withdrawn?

For she still exists, being simply hidden, for she is nothing but his awareness. His awareness seeing nothing does not mean shiva is without awareness, thus in dreamless sleep the totality of the awareness is of Shiva without the revealing aspects of shakti, though again the nuance is that even shiva is itself a kind of shakti.

> why they are being distinguished

This distinction is done by consciousness and recognizing their unity is key, the distinction is simply one of Para shiva being that which is made aware and use realized as being shiva.

Cont

> What do you mean by "divide the conscious from the transcendental ego", isn't the transcendental ego conscious in an immediate, reflexive, non-discursive, unmediated manner by virtue of self-disclosure of itself to itself? I don't see how the very self-disclosure of the transcendental ego to itself can be made a part of Shakti or reliant upon Shakti without denying the the transcendental ego its own nature such that it's rendered totally insentient, non-luminous and without 'I' and without even a non-dual presence without 'I'

That immediate conscious and self conscious nature IS shakti, that unity IS shiva, to give an allegory, the number 1 as it is would be Parashiva, the referent to when I refer to the number one, that thing referred to by me would be shiva, that perception and act of referring it, of knowing the One, that is shakti;

Thus this is actually a nondual analysis, for the One is never not the question, we simply are speaking of the One, the One we know and the self-conscious of the One.

I explain the tantrik perception on this here.

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>if the illusion is prior to the "maya-mind" then who's being "victim" of this illusion then? certainly can't be the maya-mind since is somethign that happens after the casting of this first movement of the illusion
There is no "first"

The maya-minds and the greater maya they are all a part of both have beginningless relative-existence as the ontological category of the indeterminate ajnana/falsity/maya. There is no beginning to maya and there is no beginning to the ignorance and transmigration of the jiva. Hence, there is no "first casting" of the maya illusion, if you seek for its origin in time you will just go back into a beginningless past of circular time that's all located within maya still, and no matter how far you go there is no past limit. Temporality is an illusionary distinction that only ""exists"" relatively within the mental framework imposed on maya-minds by the illusionary maya, Brahman is atemporal.

Maya is not dependent on individual jivas, it continues for the collective of jivas when one jiva is liberated from maya. Things that are parts of maya depend on maya being what it is for those consequences or parts to take place within maya as a part of maya, even though both are beginningless. If the totality of maya vanished, all maya-minds would vanish in the same instant.

Thoughts, perceptions and beliefs don't inhere in awareness according to both Advaita and classical Sankhya-Yoga, they are material structures comprised of the tanmatras (subtle elements) and inhere in the insentient manas/buddhi (both in subtle body). When the material structure of the components of the subtle body receives the illumination of the light of the Atman, it allows these translucent material structures to glow with the light imparted by awareness and thereby seem as if they themselves are conscious. The "victim" of the illusion of maya is just this material structure existing in a sort of beginningless complex with ignorance, and so the experience of being a transmigrating being in maya, the experience of ignorance etc is just this beginningless material structure being perpetually invested with the light of unaffected unconditioned Atman in a beginningless manner, thereby having the beginningless false notion that the Buddhi itself is conscious instead of it being an unconscious thing illumined by unaffected luminous self-awareness. The Atman remains independent and unaffected while providing it's light to all these beginningless jivas.

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Maya is fundamentally the knowledge-ignorance paradox, the atoms, which is to say, the principles which constitute Maya are simply a further folding in on itself done by the first 5 pure tattvas, obscuring themselves to reveal themselves.

In this regard Maya can be constituted as evil (as the ignorance origin.)
In this regard maya can be constituted as good (as the knowledge origin)
And on account these two, the proper position towards it is anutara, there being no river to cross, no inherent problem, neither benefit nor malefic beyond the further richness of the original five principles.

>Shakti is the source of them and from which they arise and is the perception of them, they cannot be said to have any existence beyond the perception of them.
When blue is seen, do you recognize and agree that the awareness which knows the blue itself as awareness lacks color and that the awareness is instead revealing that color as something different from itself?

If yes, then how can it justifiably be said that they lack existence apart from that awareness which doesn't share their quality of having a color? KS is a realist system as far as I understand that has a two-way ontology of being/non-being, so I don't see any leeway here for positing the color as neither the awareness, nor a separate existing thing, but which somehow despite this still has different attributes from the awareness (color vs colorless, observer vs observed, arising and falling vs constantly present etc)

If not, that is if you disagree and say that the subjective knowledge of blue is identical with the objective qualia of 'blueness', then how can you possibly explain the unity of the conscious witness if all sensory phenomena are self-knowing? This would mean that at any given moment, the sounds you hear are a self-knowing awareness that knows its own qualia of a specific sound, the colors you see are also a self-knowing awareness, and the touch of the clothes on your skin is also a self-knowing awareness etc. But we only have the experience of having a singular undivided center of awareness, we dont feel like there are 6 or 7 different centers of sentience or conscious Selves all competing with one another which is what this would entail. Moreover, witnessing the transition between one sensory phenomena and another could only be witnessed by an awareness that wasn't identical with that phenomena, because when the self-awareness of 'blue' has vanished when blue is no longer perceived, the self-awareness of the 'blue' cannot still be present to watch itself be replaced with 'red', nor can that red be already present to be the observer before its arisen in order to witness the transition.

>>unless I'm misunderstanding Shiva.
>You are, you must see shakti as awareness and shiva as that which the shakti is aware of, which in the shiva tattva are an identical thing but are divided into the shiva and shakti tattva due to one being the perceived I and one being the perception of it, the perception of I (shiva) requires the perception (shakti) in order to be perceived, the perception (shakti) requires the I who is received (shiva) in order to perceive. Thus we can say shiva has primacy but also that they are identical yet also two.
How can Shiva be the object of awareness (as in what the Shakti is aware of) if Shiva is supposed to be the transcendental ego? The transcendental ego as the most fundamental and irreducible luminous subjectivity can never become the object of anything else since that implies a division of the transcendental ego (which is partless and irreducible) with one part of it becoming estranged from itself to observe the other, original half of itself. And since all knowledge of an object requires and presupposes self-knowledge/self-awareness in the form of firsthand access of consciousness to that presentation of the awareness of other (sight occurring with no firsthand access of consciousness to that sight isn't practically different from there being no knowledge of sight at all), wouldn't having Shakti be aware of Shiva as her object require Shakti to both have Shiva as the necessary "I" subjective pole presupposed by that 'knowledge of other', while at the same time forming the objective content that is known as Shiva/"I"? At this point Shiva seems to become both the subject and object and Shakti is their relation, but when awareness meets awareness where do you even draw the line between subject and object if both are identically awareness? Doesn't any distinction just become arbitrary like pointing to undivided space and saying "here, space meets space"?

At this point, why wouldn't you just say that self-disclosure is the very nature of consciousness or the transcendental ego? Also, doesn't saying that Shiva and Shakti are identical yet also two and possess different natures violate the law of non-contradiction? If they were really identical then they should fully share every single predicate or property, as Leibniz points out with his 'identity of indiscernibles'

>thus in dreamless sleep the totality of the awareness is of Shiva without the revealing aspects of shakti, though again the nuance is that even shiva is itself a kind of shakti.
So all shaktis aside from the shiva-that-is-a-shakti are hidden? Does 'revealing' mean something different from disclosure or self-disclosure to you? Because awareness without disclosure (of either itself *as* awareness to itself or of an other) sounds like a meaningless concept to me, but you say that the disclosure of awareness is apparently Shakti; so I guess what I'm asking is does the removal of all shaktis aside from shiva-as-shakti also include the removal of the self-disclosure of Shiva to Shiva as the transcendental ego during sleep, or does it not remove this and it's left intact. If it's left intact and Shiva-as-a-shakti discloses to himself even in sleep then saying that disclosure depends on the other Shaktis seems to become superfluous and it becomes a position like Advaita where consciousness is identical with self-luminosity or self-disclosure without any other parts required, but if this disclosure of Shiva to himself is removed then I don't see how Shiva without self-disclosure can even be remotely considered as 'conscious' or 'aware' or even as an 'transcendental ego' or 'Self' anymore.

>That immediate conscious and self conscious nature IS shakti, that unity IS shiva, to give an allegory, the number 1 as it is would be Parashiva, the referent to when I refer to the number one, that thing referred to by me would be shiva, that perception and act of referring it, of knowing the One, that is shakti;
I have several questions about this part:

How do you distinguish Parashiva as it is and when you say 'as the referred' it is Shiva? Isn't the Parashiva, as it is, the thing that is being referred to in that allegory?

You also say that "the immediate conscious and self conscious nature IS Shakti", and the "unity is Shiva", by which I assume you mean "the unity of that nature as Shakti WITH the "I" that is Shiva, as that very unity is Shiva". But doesn't saying "the union of A and B, as that very unity forms B", lead to a regress, since one cannot talk about B and A forming a union if B already requires and presupposes A to be united with it, before that nature of B(including A) and A (on its own) can then be considered as being in a union? It seems to involve A being both identical with and different from itself at the same time before the A that is identical with itself and the A that is the combined with something else (and hence different from A that is identical with itself) are then combined, but doesn't sound very logical. This may have been a misunderstanding on my behalf though.

More to the point, on what basis can that immediate conscious and self-conscious nature that you are calling Shakti be distinguished from the transcendental ego or foundational consciousness? If that immediate self-disclosure is the very nature of consciousness, isn't then the nature of consciousness and the entity-hood or entity-ness of consciousness distinguishable only in name but not in reality? You've said that the Shakti is the awareness of other, but since in the self-disclosure and immediate intuitive knowledge of "I" to "I" there is no 'other' involved', wouldn't saying that this disclosure of "I" to itself *is itself* Shakti contradict the premise that Shakti is always awareness of other?

>The maya-minds and the greater maya they are all a part of both have beginningless relative-existence as the ontological category of the indeterminate ajnana/falsity/maya. There is no beginning to maya and there is no beginning to the ignorance and transmigration of the jiva
that really doesn't solve the problem, since you're using a temporal category to a problem of cause and effect
the problem is not"what is first, maya or the maya-mind?" the problem is how brahma can cast an illusion if there's nothing that can be a victim of that illusion? thus, how can brahma cast the illusion to anything other than himself since he's everything that can exist?

Buddhism won. Cope and seethe.

>the problem is not"what is first, maya or the maya-mind?" the problem is how brahma can cast an illusion if there's nothing that can be a victim of that illusion?
the victim and its mental experience of the illusion are both identical with the illusion by being a part of it, but this isn't saying everything is an illusion all the way down because the actually real Atman illuminates the material structure of the metaphysically false subtle body and this receiving of light by the subtle body produces the experience for that subtle body of being a victim of illusion. So, by saying "maya is casted", the victim is already defacto included by that statement and no other parts or steps are needed since it means both the totality of maya and its parts are present already.

> When blue is seen, do you recognize and agree that the awareness which knows the blue itself as awareness lacks color and that the awareness is instead revealing that color as something different from itself?

This is simply the distinction of perception and perceived, the tantriks and Kabbalists both agree with these being distinct (thus the perception being clear) but the fabric of the perceived color arising from the perception itself (thus these being nondual.)

> then how can it justifiably be said that they lack existence apart from that awareness which doesn't share their quality of having a color?

Simply a further revelation of what perception is, perception as the shakti tattva has no color, perception as perceived existent (as revealed via the whole complex family of relations) is colored with the experience, thus shakti is maya, the key to tantrik realization is to hold to both that maya has its colors and arises from colorless shakti, but that colorless shakti reveals its opulence in many-colored maya.

> But we only have the experience of having a singular undivided center of awareness, we dont feel like there are 6 or 7 different centers of sentience or conscious Selves all competing with one another which is what this would entail.

Wrong! We actually do, this is where the nuances of the purity of tamas come into play, I will try to have some brevity in my explanation on this.

Shiva is the I in perception,
Shakti is the arising of object in perception being perception itself,

Sattva is when the subjectivity, the light of shiva is seen in the thing and nothing else,
Tamas is when shiva is not seen but rather the perception is simply perception, wherein shiva is veiled, this is object perception.

Cont

Friendly reminder that Hindu gods are demons.

>For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens.

Rajas is the interaction of perception of self with other, the oscillation between the two. And in this is the great secret of double negation and the positive nature of lack; by this I mean to say.

I/shiva has primacy, perception of objects is simply a modification of perception of shiva, to perceive “not i” you must consider it as NOT+I, there is never a void or lack or otherness that truly lacks in shiva, for negation of shiva requires shiva, the Tamas then is just a form of sattva that has, like Shiva hid as the Jivan, revealed itself in the object world. Thus you DO have endless part perception, this is why Kala (parts) is bound in the mundane mind but perfectly reconciles the three paras in the mind of the adept, for at once he is perceived as being in time and himself the singular, God is manifest as him, and he is all the true God, all reconciled at once. I will use an allegory.

To breathe in is Para, the infinite God,
To breathe out is Apara, the finite and the tamasic, for one may breathe in endlessly without ending but is limited in the amount of air he may exhale, but just as the amount of exhaled breath is dependent on and is simply a form of the infinitely breathed in breath, so Also is tamas but a revelation of sattva.

> How can Shiva be the object of awareness (as in what the Shakti is aware of) if Shiva is supposed to be the transcendental ego? The transcendental ego as the most fundamental and irreducible luminous subjectivity can never become the object of anything else since that implies a division of the transcendental ego (which is partless and irreducible) with one part of it becoming estranged from itself to observe the other, original half of itself.

For the tattvas are not emanations but revelations and the process is simply the

Cont

light of the transcendental ego with itself, the Light of Ego is simply lightening itself, and the revelation of parts is a GOOD thing, for in tantra we argue that the infinity if it is infinite must contain all numbers, it must contain all that is countable, and as such since it contains the totality and is truly infinite it must contain both the infinite as a group (para) and must also continue the individual elements, chiefly the Many (parapara) and the Individual part (apara) each of these being revelations of the opulence and nature of Godhead, which having infinite attributes manifests these.

Another problem with your shiva disclosure question is that you are now dividing shiva and shakti too much, for they are always in perichoresis, there is never a point where they can be said to be without each other, this awareness of shiva as shiva tattva(thus shakti) is the self disclosure of the light and shakti tattva is the awareness of that light, but the light and illuminating aspect of the light cannot ever be said to be apart from each other.

> Shakti WITH the "I" that is Shiva,

Not so, shiva is the unified one and not the conscious that is conscious of, for in the role of conscious of-, it is a shakti.

Finally on the topic of non-contradiction, perichoresis is absolutely the core of the ontology, I personally am a meinongian thus do not have the limit of the law of non-contradiction but that’s neither here nor there, it’s no different from the perichoresis arguments of Christianity.

guenonfag gets destroyed in his own threads yet again

Daily reminder that God made the demons, and as products of God's work, demons must be good, or at least better than the most morally perfect human beings.

>the victim and its mental experience of the illusion are both identical with the illusion by being a part of it,
but that defeats the purpouse of an illusion, if an illusion is meant to cast a "false" reality onto someone who could perceive "real" reality, that is the illusion is an ofuscation, some sort of veil onto someone's eyes, if that same person is also an illusion, then there's no one being the victim of the illusion to begging with, it's like saying "the music listens to itself"

>but the fabric of the perceived color arising from the perception itself (thus these being nondual.)
What do you mean exactly by non-dual? You said that one arises from the other, but this seems more like a relation of causation or contingency than a denial of duality (separateness or difference), something arising from something else would seem to presuppose a duality of what-has-arisen vs arisen-from
>Simply a further revelation of what perception is, perception as the shakti tattva has no color, perception as perceived existent (as revealed via the whole complex family of relations) is colored with the experience, thus shakti is maya, the key to tantrik realization is to hold to both that maya has its colors and arises from colorless shakti, but that colorless shakti reveals its opulence in many-colored maya.
Is maya sentient or insentient in your understanding of KS? and if its the latter is that colored maya as blue the same or different awareness from the colorless shakti apprehending it? Admitting the colored maya making up the blue to be insentient seems to be the same thing in practice as saying the perceiving awareness is different from the insentient sensation of color. But if the colored maya is itself sentient, why do we only ever experience being aware from the perspective of the colorless Shakti seeing the colored, apparently-sentient maya color? If that color was equally sentient, then it would seem to follow from this that color would occasionally observe our self or color would observe sound, however we don't find that to be the case in our experience which makes that sound counterintuitive to me.

>I/shiva has primacy, perception of objects is simply a modification of perception of shiva
So, are you saying that seeing the awareness in something is akin to sattva and the perceiving of phenomena as ordinary objects of perception of tamas, and that since both gunas are shiva the difference between tamas and shiva is a matter of the changing perception causing one guna to change into or be replaced by another guna like tamas to sattva, with the rajas forming the moment in-between or some sort of other intermediary mechanism?
>I/shiva has primacy, perception of objects is simply a modification of perception of shiva, to perceive “not i” you must consider it as NOT+I,
Here, you say both 'perception' and 'consider', which have two different meanings; this leads me to wonder, what about the point that raw sense data from objects is non-conceptual? If having the mental attitude or understanding, "all appearing phenomena are awareness" imbues every moment of your existence all day every day, that doesn't change the fact that one is still receiving a constant stream of sense-data from the sense organs, and this sense-data in its non-conceptual form presents itself to awareness as something different from it, which is why the witness of the presentation abides as the same while the presentation changes.

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Even in the absence of or prior to concepts imposed upon the raw sense-data by the mind, the phenomena reveals itself to be different from awareness of its own accord; since, the phenomenal qualities change while the luminous self-awareness of the transcendental ego is a steady always-present light and insofar as that forms the subjective pole and essence of the shakti is also continually present throughout waking experience as the Shakti well, according to you yourself. So, even if you assume as the default mental attitude "all this is awareness", that would seem to be imposing a film of concepts over the raw visual or audio sensations, but underneath this film they still retain their character of presenting themselves as the changing phenomena opposed to the steady light of awareness. If seeing perception as Shiva turned that guna from tamas to sattva or replaced one with the other, then it would make sense that phenomena would cease to behave and present themselves in a way that's different from the witnessing awareness, but they don't do this even when you imposed the mental mode of "this is a unity" over them.

For example, in talking about the Sankhya-Yoga and Advaita understanding of mind or manas, one article says:

Manas is viewed essentially as an organ, the special organ of cognition, just as the eyes are the special organs of sight. Indeed, manas is held to be intimately connected with perception, since the raw data supplied by the senses must be ordered and categorized with respect to a conceptual/linguistic scheme before various objects can be perceived as members of their respective categories, and as inhabiting a world characterized by the systematic and distinguishable attributes with which sense experience is normally imbued. This imposition of conceptual/linguistic structure on the field of raw sensation is one of the basal activities of manas, and forms the distinction between brute sensation (nirvikalpaka) as opposed to differentiated perception (savikalpaka).

Do you agree with the above or reject it for something else entirely? Because in this sort of understanding imposed a mental framework over the nirvikalpaka sensations wouldn't change the fact that even after assuming that framework, they retain their nature of behaving differently from awareness. However, if perceiving them as shiva, which seems to really mean for you "mentally regarding them and all phenomena as shiva", actually involves the transition of the substance of that perception from tamas to sattva, then I don't understand why the brute sensation under the conceptual imposition or attitude would still behave as though non-aware, even if you imposed that mental mode on all experienced phenomena, a ball throw into your vision from out of sight will nevertheless not fail to distinguish itself from the observing presence by its sudden appearance in contrast to the observer which doesn't just suddenly appear.

This would seem to get back to the "why don't we have 6 or 7 centers of sentience" question, when you replied that we do, it seems like your answer is that by "seeing them as shiva", but this is not seeing another kind of raw sense data but is basically a way of thinking about the sense data that we still continue to see *as sense* regardless of the fact that we may be now viewing them *under the mental mode or attitude of regarding them as shiva*, but I don't see that as cutting the knot of this issue, because even if you impose conceptual attitude of regarding the sense of hearing as non-different from Shiva or luminous awareness or "I", they still behave differently from the "I" or the transcendental ego by suddenly imposing themselves in experience as that which is not the transcendental ego but as that which is nevertheless still known. If imposing the mental attitude of regarding them as shiva actually made them into sattva and not tamas anymore, wouldn't it be inexplicable that nirvikalpaka sensations would still take place in the same way?

>I/shiva has primacy, perception of objects is simply a modification of perception of shiva, to perceive “not i” you must consider it as NOT+I, there is never a void or lack or otherness that truly lacks in shiva, for negation of shiva requires shiva, the Tamas then is just a form of sattva that has, like Shiva hid as the Jivan, ...Thus you DO have endless part perception
Do you mean so say that we have awareness of all particular things and objects and all individual instantiations of colors, sounds etc everywhere in the universe all at once but that some are hidden from us?
>this is why Kala (parts) is bound in the mundane mind but perfectly reconciles the three paras in the mind of the adept, for at once he is perceived as being in time and himself the singular, God is manifest as him, and he is all the true God, all reconciled at once. I will use an allegory.
What are the three paras? Is that the three iterations of shiva-as-gunas or something different?

>> How can Shiva be the object of awareness
>For the tattvas are not emanations but revelations and the process is simply the light of the transcendental ego with itself, the Light of Ego is simply lightening itself, and the revelation of parts is a GOOD thing, for in tantra we argue that the infinity if it is infinite must contain all numbers, it must contain all that is countable, and as such since it contains the totality and is truly infinite it must contain both the infinite as a group (para) and must also continue the individual elements, chiefly the Many (parapara) and the Individual part (apara) each of these being revelations of the opulence and nature of Godhead, which having infinite attributes manifests these.
If Shiva is being known by awareness or the disclosure of Shiva to awareness is just the light of the transcendental ego with itself, and if that light in inalienable from that transcendental ego, then how is that different in practice from saying self-disclosure is the very intrinsic nature of Shiva or that self-disclosure is the very nature of awareness? In this case it would seem completely unnecessary to assign disclosure a separate existence as Shakti, when you can just say "the intrinsic nature of consciousness i.e. the self or transcendental ego, is self-disclosure" and express the very same idea?

And how do you square the claim that Shakti (apparently) invariably involves *knowledge of other*, if in the immediate and reflexive disclosure of I to I, Self to Self, there is no 'otherness' involved? If you try to say that the disclosure of the Self (shiva) itself to itself isn't self-contained in the nature of Shiva but involves Shakti-as-knowledge-of-other, that seems incompatible with the point that the disclosure of our "I" to itself is immediate, spontaneous, effortless and uninterrupted and doesn't involve otherness, otherness comes in later as something different from this disclosure of I to I, and knowing otherness presupposes an I already being disclosed to I in order that I may know that I is knowing otherness..

> for in tantra we argue that the infinity if it is infinite must contain all numbers, it must contain all that is countable,
Finitude is a determination, if the in-(non)-finite etymologically means the negation of the determination of finitude, it leaves the infinite as that which is not bound by the determination of finitude, and indeed not bound by any determinations. Does it make sense logically to you to say that which is free from, not bound by, or above all determinations, itself as the non-determined, emerges from the multiplication or addition of various determined things until you get the totality of them? To me that makes about as much sense as saying that if you sit around and multiply 0 by 0 enough times that '1' will eventually spontaneously emerge, or that sentience will eventually magically emerge as a property of a mixture of insentient matter.

>Another problem with your shiva disclosure question is that you are now dividing shiva and shakti too much, for they are always in perichoresis, there is never a point where they can be said to be without each other, this awareness of shiva as shiva tattva(thus shakti) is the self disclosure of the light and shakti tattva is the awareness of that light, but the light and illuminating aspect of the light cannot ever be said to be apart from each other.
In the Christian understanding of perichoresis though they have a set rule of one substance (ousia) and three persons (hypostaseis), in the metaphysical and epistemic distinctions you are making there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason, but sometimes in some of the distinctions it's necessary to emphasize one (shakti) over the other (shiva), as in e.g. dreamless sleep vs waking perceptual knowledge, but if they were equally interpenetrating each other like the trinity, then that would seem to be inconsistent with the necessity of one sometimes being emphasized in combination with the downplaying of the other according tot he specific subtype of various epistemological category or stage of metaphysical realization or psychophysical state. Then it starts to look less like any consistent perichoresis but more like a nebulous middle ground that can remain undefined and undetermined until one different side of it is emphasized according to the demands of the present situation, but without any overarching principle providing a consistent guideline for this like one substance in three persons, unless there's something I'm missing.

>Finally on the topic of non-contradiction, perichoresis is absolutely the core of the ontology, I personally am a meinongian thus do not have the limit of the law of non-contradiction but that’s neither here nor there, it’s no different from the perichoresis arguments of Christianity.
KS is a realist ontology that doesn't admit anything besides being or non-being though, I thought that they accordingly consider as valid and don't reject the LNC as well. Does your interpretation here differ from Abhinavagupta's? Does he ever directly address the topic of shiva and shakti being the same but different violating the LNC or the indiscernibility of identicals in his writing or does he ignore it and you differ from him by not considering the LNC as an issue? How much do you differ in your interpretation of KS from him, aside from your perennialism that mixes Christianity, Kabbalah, etc? Also, I thought that mainstream Christian theology holds that the perichoresis of the trinity doesn't violate the LNC and that they endeavor to explain why. But now it seems like you are saying that not accepting or being limited by the LNC is the same as what is implied by the trinity, was I wrong to think that mainstream Christian theology doesn't reject the LNC and that they consider the perichoresis of the trinity as not incompatible with accepting the LNC fully?

>but that defeats the purpouse of an illusion, if an illusion is meant to cast a "false" reality onto someone who could perceive "real" reality, that is the illusion is an ofuscation, some sort of veil onto someone's eyes
The illusion *isn't* an obfuscation of something able to perceive reality, since the jiva doesn't ever perceive reality (reality is ever self-knowing and not known by anyone or anything else), both when the jiva is laboring under delusion and when it is no longer laboring under illusion in both cases reality is known to itself and the jivas doesn't know reality, the difference between the former and the latter is that the tanmatras of its subtle body are not arranged into the configuration of 'superimposition' anymore and when this superimpositon is no longer present, the jiva stops superimposing non-self, agentship, bondage etc onto the Atman, which is ever known to itself. Both before and after this superimposition there is no change in the Atman and its unaffected by the superimposition. And since all living beings have the Atman as their real Self that is ever known to itself, enlightenment/liberation is just this Self continuing on being known to Itself just like It always is immutably, but without the jiva superimposing other things on it, the jiva doesn't directly know the Atman which is impossible.
>if that same person is also an illusion, then there's no one being the victim of the illusion to begging with, it's like saying "the music listens to itself"
That has already been answered, being the victim entails having experiences, all experiences that have distinct qualities and differences like the subjective experience of seeming to be embodied within maya and all the particular elements comprising this *as subjective experiences* are just different configurations of tanmatras in the subtle body. All these different configurations of the tanmatras receive the light of the Atman like a stained-glass window in a church receiving the light of the sun, and just like the stained-glass window thereby glows with light and seems, maybe to a stupid person or an unintelligent animal, to be the actual source of illumination (instead of the real source of illumination being the sun) the tanmatras in the subtle body illumined with the light of the Atman is perceived by the minds of indiscriminating jivas as being the self, and as the real consciousness, when it's not. And this 'perceiving' of that is just a further part of the tanmatras that are illuminated by the light of the Atman. When the pure light of consciousness which is non-dual and hence beyond subject and object distinctions is present as the illuminating impartite presence, the mental configuration of the indiscriminating mind takes that light and wrongly interprets it as being the witness, the subject, and intentional, when all these designations are completely incidental to how the mind interprets it and they don't actually characterize its real nature.

I know this is a bit offtopic but what are the most relevant vajrayana buddhism texts?

maybe he should just let her get on on top once in a while
m.youtube.com/watch?v=N7GeSKw9TsU

> What do you mean exactly by non-dual? You said that one arises from the other, but this seems more like a relation of causation or contingency than a denial of duality (separateness or difference), something arising from something else would seem to presuppose a duality of what-has-arisen vs arisen-from

Perhaps another traditional allegory is helpful here, Shiva is akin to a dancer, shakti akin to the movements of him, maya is the Dance, there is no separation between the movement and the dance, though the causal origin and totality of nature of the dance is the movement, and in actuality the dance is simply an aggregation of movement.

> Is maya sentient or insentient in your understanding of KS?

Maya is shakti is shiva, the consciousness of Blue is the consciousness of perception is me, and to say we only experience the colorless shakti, this is not true to the realities of experience and dhyana, no rather whatever we focus in one, our perception is married to that object being one thing with it, Sloterdijk's allegory of the bubble is perfect here, it is alike to a child seeing a bubble and then sum of his intentionality and perception being one with the object of the bubble, his perception having such a perfect inter mixture that the sphere of his perception and the sphere of the bubble are identical in the sphere of sensation/perception, such that when the bubble pops the entirety of the perception faculty momentarily dissolves also.

This I believe is a good allegory for the tantrik conception.

Cont

> So, are you saying that seeing the awareness in something is akin to sattva and the perceiving of phenomena as ordinary objects of perception of tamas, and that since both gunas are shiva

It’s more seeing the Ego/shiva in awareness is shiva/sattva and not seeing this ego is tamas, and the relation of self and other in perception is rajas, consider the allegory of the taiji, the self and other’s interrelation causes the “spin” of the yin yang, likewise the relation of perception of self and other is the drumming of shakti, thus Rajas deified is Brahma the creative deity. But yes fundamentally both are shiva, to say “not I, ignorant” you must first negate i, meaning the essential nature of I still pervades it, the I nature is simply turned inwards.

> that doesn't change the fact that one is still receiving a constant stream of sense-data from the sense organs, and this sense-data in its non-conceptual form presents itself to awareness as something different from it,

The objects of the senses derive as further tattvas (thus are fundamentally identical, being a folding of, the higher tattvas of the senses themselves.) the nuance is they must be perceived as both identical (shiva) and different (shakti) and the marriage of both (The heart, bhairava.) for this is the doctrine of the paras.

On the manas question, do please read my pastebin I treat the subject in some depth there.

> What are the three paras? Is that the three iterations of shiva-as-gunas or something different?

Different yet same, the Gunas are a further enfoldmet/development/revelation of which the original is the paras, The three paras arise in the shakti tattva, their allegory is that the three points of the trident of shiva are they, whereas the shaft is shiva. To summarize the paras are

Shakti (perception of) as Infinite/ultimate (Thus God the vast, as Brahman.)
Shakti as Infinite-in-finite, (thus the great multiplicity, the Avatar deities before you, the perception of God within man.)
AND THIS IS KEY,
Shakti as Apara(God as the particular finite thing, this is to perceive the rock, the seed, the fruit, the flower, the hand, the empirical ego self, the individual and them momentary as the Godhead.)

The Tantric argument is that the Vedanta practitioner seeks the upper two paras (with parapara fulfilled by a personal deity such as Krishna, and the para fulfilled by Brahman.) while denying the inherent divinity, goodness and essential nature of the Apara as itself the divinity being revealed, the interaction of these three perceptions of godhead are the original cause that results in the Maya being formed, Maya being a matrix where these three can interact freely.

Cont

> separate existence as Shakti,

They are essentially one God, they are not separate, in the same way that the ego and consciousness can be constituted as one thing and for further nuance and elaboration explained as “ego and conscious.”

> Finitude is a determination

Once more, tantra does not fear the manifest, it sees the finite as a codependent arising with the infinite, to say something is without limitation is to say something can have limitation, this codependency means both are modes shakti may reveal shiva as, and on account of this, the infinite (having no bondage or limitation.) necessarily has the ground by which bondage and limitation can arise, thus the infinite results in the finite, both equalized and inter penetrating in the body of God.

> Then it starts to look less like any consistent perichoresis but more like a nebulous middle ground

Not so, for essentially they are all just the revelation of Parashiva and are only distinct as conscious has divided them in order to partake of apara, shiva in dreamless sleep is not without shakti, shakti is simply viewing only shiva for shiva itself is a shakti, there is no real time they are ever away from each other, only veiled and the parts modified.

Gold melted into a multitude of forms is essentially still Gold, the presence of Gold may dissolve as a perception of gold if melted, and it may take on the form of a statue, a brick, a sword, but in all of these it remains Gold and remains a presence of gold.

> KS is a realist ontology that doesn't admit anything besides being or non-being though,

Nah tantra is trika all the way down, the synthesis of both in the Heart/Jivan is well attested and this is again just the same question as the paras.

>I thought that they accordingly consider as valid and don't reject the LNC as well.

Within the world of Apara they see the law of non-contradiction as the case, within the world of Parapara this is not so, the reconciliation of time and timeless, part and partless etc is the entire key to “recognition” for this recognition maintains both.

>Does your interpretation here differ from Abhinavagupta's?

I have arguments and positions different from his but all that I’ve argued concerning tantra can be found with enough study of the Tantraloka and related literature.

>Does he ever directly address the topic of shiva and shakti being the same but different violating the LNC or the indiscernibility of identicals in his writing or does he ignore it and you differ from him by not considering the LNC as an issue?

It’s just the problem of recognition of the nature of the heart.

Depends on what you want, in general first you should study the normative Mahayana canon then you should study the concealed essence of the hevajra tantra, the various treasury texts of longchenpa, the various vajrakila tantras,I would also recommend the text of the The Twenty-One Nails, and while I don’t recommend getting involved with them, NKD has actually leaked various secret Tibetan tantrik doctrines and methodologies If you actually put some time and investigate the books their people put out, I could name some names but I’d have to check my books for the titles, do some footwork!

On an unrelated note I would recommend the lankavatara sutra for though it’s not explicitly relevant it is very relevant in terms of insight and doctrine.

Imma hop off for the night, I actually wrote a poem today very relevant to the topics we discussed here, here’s the poem.

Bask: a meditation

I bask in Bosky brooks of green,
That ever seem,
To stream and bask the morning sun,
In water’s run,
That running basks the dewy leaves,
That light receives,
To bask itself in selfsame gleam,
The rounding beam,
That basks the sprig and basks the rays
In ever Grace.
Gift from God the going growth,
Trice to trice from mo to mo,
Velum mouth to throat-inwit,
There I drink and there I sit,
Where the grigs that crick the sound,
And the grigs that drift abound,
There I’m found where windring gale,
Mutinous hail and snows pale
Do not harm the vale and comb,
Hushing not the soft sea foam,
Hushing not the thrush’s hum,
All at once the sounds become,
As one echoing and yet,
Count I still my ev’ry breath.
Dulcet gaud, meander’d letters,
Troding ‘fore and past hereafter,
Sweet is laughter laughed sans mew,
Soaring through the spangled hues
Of the sphery flames of eyne,
To the oes far more divine,
Where my lode’s design was wrought,
There the lodestars flame with ought.
Great God! these the leaves are lines
First forged from before all time!
Lief to achromatic life,
Loathe to leave this honyed hive,
But without the many hues,
All became an oozy slew,
Slaty lights environed all,
But then strangely silver brawled.
Grazing grass I gazed the vast,
With my galleon I passed,
An illimitable pale
Marked by margents made to veil,
So i sailed the gullies bright,
Trailing “I” the selfsame’s light.
Once I was the traveler,
Once I was the reveler,
Now revealed I transverse earth,
Place and planes of dimmer dirt.
Walking past the earthly lanes,
In the dusky fell demesnes,
Fell on causy foot in fall,
Fell on verdant grasses all,
Why I asked am I to pass
Streets of verdigris stained brass?
What to find and what to seek,
Asking what? i could not speak,
Who to speak then, i should ask,
Yet I could not face that task.
For a mo with woe i went,
Woe to know what all things meant,
There I dreamt my shadow me,
There I dreamt by sorcery,
Forms of thronging shadows cast,
Four by four and both ways fast,
For my four were fast to leave,
and my four to fasten cleaved,
I believe the meaning this,
For I felt a kind of bliss,
I was this and yet was not,
Shadows being naught I thought
were the paramount of lack,
Why then in there colly black
Was my body’s form and trace
Marching past and yet in chase
Of my self to self attend,
Dwelling darkling swerve to bend,
Without end my friends would walk,
“These be they? then let us talk”
Thronging self in nothing drest,
Where “I” lacks there I’m impressed!
Blessed be this epiphany,
Void is the epitome
Of my self as much as I,
For by “not” I know me by,

Cont

All things God has given shade,
Twinning shadows in their play,
Ever turning shade of time,
Ever lurking shade sublime,
Sweeter than the many lights
Is to know this sweet delight,
Mingled multitudes of forms
In monadic flame and storm,
Are reborn more than the one,
Not as single not as none,
Massy, mazy, many, my,
God is both, beyond confine,
Search the mind until you find,
God in kind and undefined;
From inverted heights of night,
Innermost shines ego’s light,
From the checkered streaks of night,
The ineffably still light,
Checkers self with other’s hint,
Checkers other with the dint
Of the mark of marks bereft,
Weaving’s whorl the webbing’s weft,
Warp and woof the wefting kedge,
Warping folds from edge to edge,
From stern head to straightened bow,
Bending trunk and staying bough,
Flaming font and kelson soft,
Swelling skies and oceans waft,
Lofty lightning leaps the land,
What of sand? can god fold sand?
Am I soft sift sands adrift?
Am I dolent grains in shift?
Lone to come, again to pass?
And alas are you the glass
Of some hourglass of years,
Coldly ordering the spheres?
God oh God I am the Cold!
You are warm to touch and hold,
You are fold and rose and hook,
You are gold and gross and book,
You are quincunx’d crisscrossed Christ,
Fourfold letters with one geist,
Good and evil, more and less
Trellis trellised in one breast.
Double shadows sweine the brine,
Shine from murk and murk from shine,
Circles words with all and naught,
Clothing God with God for cloth,
God the Flag of God I droop,
Most high and the nether loops,
Symbolized and broken sign,
Signified ensigns assigned,
God has strung and God is wad,
Shadows cast the colored God.
Peacock, peacock, peacock light,
Wherewith rainbow colors dight,
Burst the abrasaxon egg,
Stting still leg over leg,
Perichoresis ablaze
All eidolon idols slain,
Phantasmagoria dreamed,
Fresh eyed by the flowing stream,
God the bosky brooks unmasked!
All in all things always basks.

Who is NKD? Could you elaborate on this a bit further, and why do you not recommend getting involved with them?

Could it be "New Kadampa Tradition?"

Depends on the school because Vajrayana isn't an unified whole but consists of different schools (which used to fight for territorial control in the so-called Tibetan Dark Age)
Some principle texts are
Guhyasamaja (one of the oldest and most influential tantras. Alex Wayman translation and Wedemeyer's translation of Aryadeva's Caryamelapakapradipa - an important commentary on the root text)
Hevajra tantra (read both the Snellgrove and Menon's translations)
Chakrasamvara tantra (Gray translation)
Kalachakra tantra (no full translation is available at the moment, but you can read the translation of a commentary - The Ornament of The Stainless Light
Other important areas a beginner must know about in Vajryana are
The Six Yogas of Naropa
Mahamudra
Dzogchen
But I can't recommend any books because I didn't study them properly, and can't say nothing outside of general knowledge.
For a better understanding it's necessary to know the foundational principles of Buddhism - the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the doctrine of no self and the skandha theory - and major Mahayana developments and philosophies - the bodhisattva ideal, Madhuamika, Yogacara, and Tathagatagarbha.
Some good general literature
David Snellgrove. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
Ronald Davidson. Indian Esoteric Buddhism.
Ronald Davidson. The Tibetan Renaissance.
Geoffrey and Samuel. Origins of Yoga and Tantra.
Don't go with the Vajrakila tantras, translated by Martin Boord, since they're essentially a Tibetan Buddhist version of the voodoo doll cursing magic: nothing but low sorcery given Buddhist form.
And I don't recommend following the Frater here since he makes obvious rookie mistakes.
The most obvious is that he treats Abhinavagupta's system - which was a marginal, niche thing in 9th - 10th century Kashmir that couldn't outcompete either the Shaiva Siddhanta or the Svaccahandrabhairava cult - as a stand-in for the whole Hindu tantra, itself a motley crew of doctrines running from the dualist to the non-dual, and featuring cults outside of Shakti and Shiva (there is tantric Vishnu, tantric Surya, even tantric Ganesha), which shows that his knowledge of the tantric world is limited and biased. For example Shaiva siddhanta, a dualist system that wouldn't agree with Abhinavagupta's Trika system, is considered a part of the tantric world, too.

I have another question have you looked into Yamantaka tantra, any opinions on it?

It's over for guenonfag. It's OVER.

>For example Shaiva siddhanta, a dualist system that wouldn't agree with Abhinavagupta's Trika system, is considered a part of the tantric world, too.
Starting in the early-modern and later-medieval era and continuing up to the present day, southern Indian Shaiva Siddhanta has largely switch to a monist/non-dual theology and they now downplay the earlier dualist writings

the vedas, the upanishads

It is not that I am ignorant of these existing, it is that I am bias, for this is what I am initiated into and what I consider the best. When asked about Christianity I will shill the modes of Christianity I agree with, when asked about Taoism I will do the same, etc.

I've read in a publication by the Himalayan Academy (southern Shaiva Siddhanta) that there are currently both dualist and non-dualist sects.

The dualist ones still exist, I didn't mean to imply there was a complete 100% switch, just that at least in southern India the new monist iteration seems to have become increasingly predominant as time went on. Elaine Fisher's article: 'Remaking South Indian Śaivism: Greater Śaiva Advaita and the Legacy of the Śaktiviśiṣṭādvaita Vīraśaiva Tradition' discusses this as part of the greater phenomenon of different types of southern Shaivism being influenced by Advaita

>Logically speaking, then, Saiddhantika theology would seem a rather poor fit with the nondualist precepts of Advaita Vedanta philosophy. Nevertheless, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Saiddhantika exegetes had so thoroughly assimilated the conventions of an Advaita-inflected theology that their treatises in both Sanskrit and Tamil—and even redactions of Saiddhantika scriptures—were reimagined in the idiom of classical Vedanta. One particularly striking example of this trend is the commentary of a certain Kumarasvamin (circa fifteenth century) on the Tattvaprakāśa of Bhojadeva, a succinct encapsulation on Saiva Siddhanta theology. Unlike previous commentators such as Aghorasiva, who scrupulously adhere to the canon of Saiddhantika doctrine, Kumarasvamin repeatedly launches into lengthy digressions about the Vedic roots of the Saiva Agamas and Tantras, never hesitating to intersperse his discourses with
references to Mımamsa categories of ritual, even going so far as to assert that Siva himself consists of the Vedas.

>I plan to
What traditions do you plan to?
You’re American right?
Catholicism?
Freemasonry?

Thank you for replying to most of my questions with detailed answers. I understand how different parts of KS doctrine relate to each other more now. Some parts of it seem unnecessarily convoluted to me, almost Byzantine, and I don't see the necessity of or basis for separating disclosure as Shakti from Shiva/transcendental Ego/prakasha/the light of consciousness, as I see it, self-disclosure *IS* this very light. Taking away the disclosure removes any connection with luminosity and vice-versa. Sometimes you seem close to agreeing with this when you say the disclosure is just the light of the Self with itself, but to me the most reasonable thing and the thing most in accordance with my experience in this situation is to just say that self-disclosure *IS* the prakasha or the self-luminous Shiva instead of saying "the self-disclosure is both identical to and different from the transcendental Self", and this move seems to additionally contradict the premise that you've articulated that shakti is the 'conscious of other' or 'intentional consciousness'.

I understand the immediate, effortless, constant and spontaneous self-disclosure of "I" to "I" to occur without any differences, without parts and without any distinction of "being conscious of" vs "what I am conscious of", it's just one completely seamless primordial unity instead, like space. To say that the disclosure of "I" to "I" involves something else that is both identical to and different from the I at the same time seems to me to proceed from a place of dogma and it doesn't seem to be something that can be substantiated either logically or from a phenomenological analysis of the experience of how consciousness actually discloses to itself as a perfectly seamless unity.

If I say that some of the things you say sound contradictory, it's not because I am trying to engage in cheap 'gotchas', but it's because I accept the LNC as valid, as does most of classical Indian philosophy. Most of the arguments in classical Indian philosophy assume it and so from reading the classical non-Tantric philosophy, I am just used to thinking about things this way. When the Shaiva tantrists argued against other schools like Buddhism or dualists or Advaitins, don't some of their arguments presume to expose errors in their opponents by ostensibly demonstrating a contradiction? If they reject the LNC to resolve paradoxes in their own system, it seems kind of hypocritical to point to what they call contradictions elsewhere, thereby implicating assuming the LNC as valid when arguing against others but then consistently adhering to it themselves.

On a semi-unrelated note, if you reject contradiction as a test of what is true and what is false, what is your standard or method for determining what is true and what is not true?

Attached: chamunda-300x300.jpg (300x300, 29.39K)

>Perhaps another traditional allegory is helpful here, Shiva is akin to a dancer, shakti akin to the movements of him, maya is the Dance, there is no separation between the movement and the dance, though the causal origin and totality of nature of the dance is the movement, and in actuality the dance is simply an aggregation of movement.
How is this not just another iteration of Bhedabheda, or 'difference-and-nondifference', like Vishishtadvaita is as well? To even speak of the unity of two things that each have their own separate natures involves the preservation of both difference and non-difference. Difference (bheda) is being laminated with a film of unity or non-difference (abheda), but never fully erased, for if it was there would not even be separate natures/qualities and one would not be even speaking of a dancer and a dance to conceive as united in the first place.

>Maya is shakti is shiva, the consciousness of Blue is the consciousness of perception is me, and to say we only experience the colorless shakti, this is not true to the realities of experience and dhyana, no rather whatever we focus in one, our perception is married to that object being one thing with it,
Of course we experience the color in perception, but we never experience color being aware of our Self, or color being aware of sounds, or color being aware of tastes, which is what one would expect if colors were equally luminous awareness, since we do find luminous awareness disclosing itself in all moments as our self, and we find it to reveal phenomenal qualities in experience as well.
>Sloterdijk's allegory of the bubble is perfect here, it is alike to a child seeing a bubble and then sum of his intentionality and perception being one with the object of the bubble, his perception having such a perfect inter mixture that the sphere of his perception and the sphere of the bubble are identical in the sphere of sensation/perception, such that when the bubble pops the entirety of the perception faculty momentarily dissolves also.
But when the bubble pops, one's vision remains intact and the vision of the bubble is just replaced with the vision of the objects/scenery behind it, even if the mind has to quickly impose a conceptual/linguistic scheme on that new vision

>The objects of the senses derive as further tattvas (thus are fundamentally identical, being a folding of, the higher tattvas of the senses themselves.) the nuance is they must be perceived as both identical (shiva) and different (shakti) and the marriage of both (The heart, bhairava.) for this is the doctrine of the paras.
Consciousness doesn't have to perceive itself as both identical and different to itself though, it's just disclosed to itself non-conceptually and non-discursively as prakasha, to even speak about that we should impose a conceptual framework on something seems to be a hint to me that what you are talking about isn't consciousness, since the prakasha constituting the transcendental ego doesn't have to do this to know itself, the knowing or disclosing of itself to itself in fact occurs non-discursively, without the involvement of any conceptual overlay.

>The Tantric argument is that the Vedanta practitioner seeks the upper two paras (with parapara fulfilled by a personal deity such as Krishna, and the para fulfilled by Brahman.) while denying the inherent divinity, goodness and essential nature of the Apara as itself the divinity being revealed
Even in Advaita maya is regarded as the energy of Brahman, and Brahman understood to constitute all phenomena as in being the invisible reality that is within and without all forms, sound, phenomenal qualities etc as the non-phenomenal reality that provides for them. The realized aspirant is left perceiving everything as the Brahman shining through the auspices of form, while at the same time transcending them, which is why Brahman isn't shining *as* them.

>> Finitude is a determination
>Once more, tantra does not fear the manifest,
Saying the metaphysical position of Advaita proceeds from a "fear" of the manifest seems like a cheap and unfair attempt at psychopathologizing that ignores their actual reasons for holding that position
>it sees the finite as a codependent arising with the infinite, to say something is without limitation is to say something can have limitation, this codependency means both are modes shakti may reveal shiva as, and on account of this, the infinite (having no bondage or limitation.) necessarily has the ground by which bondage and limitation can arise, thus the infinite results in the finite, both equalized and inter penetrating in the body of God.
I'm not a big fan of arguing over semantics, but I disagree fundamentally with the statement that "saying something is without limitation is to say something can have limitation", the contrary is true, by establishing X as non-determined and not delimited, it leaves X remaining in that mode unless something else later changes via some circumstance changing, in which case you wouldn't be talking about the same non-determined X anymore, but something else that has a contrary nature to X. X that is without determination isn't the same non-determined X if it accepts determinations. Having the nature of being above all determinations precludes something from being determined unless it's very nature changes, which makes it not the same thing anymore. The infinite being the basis or adisthana of determinations doesn't necessarily involve the infinite being determined since X being the basis of Y presupposes that there are different, otherwise speaking of one being a "basis" would have no purpose. Have you read Guenon's arguments in his book on calculus on why it's illogical to conceive of infinity as being comprised of the finite and do you have any thoughts on them?