Select quotations from:
Spanda Karikas: The Divine Creative Pulsation
Jaideva Singh
As long as there is the appearance of different objects, so long the individual is surely bound. When by means of the teaching imparted before, he has the unswerving knowledge that every thing is identical with Self, then he is liberated while alive.
(p. 161)
As the empirical individual becomes subject to words and ideas that are the product of sensori-motor experiences, he becomes their prisoner and loses the power of creative thinking and is thus banished from the realm of immortal bliss for that is the reality of a different dimension which is not within the province of though-constructs. He thus becomes a bound soul.
(p. 162)
Brahmi and other Powers are ever in readiness to conceal his real nature, for without the association of words, ideas cannot arise.
(p. 162)
Sakti has been called ‘this’, because she manifests herself in the form of objectivity. She is the venerable Spanda principle. She is known as operative power (kriya sakti), because she brings about the state of variety of the universe. As described before, she exists in Siva who has assumed the role of a bound soul. She besprinkles this bound soul who is identified with prana and the subtle body (purystaka) with a drop of I-consciousness which makes him an agent or doer. Reduced to this state, he does not recognize his real nature which is veiled by her and gets involved in the misery of seizing and relinquishing. Thus she becomes a source of bondage. When the yogi recognizes this operative power as the supreme power (para Sakti), the means of approach to his real nature which is Siva then…she brings about the highest achievement full of supreme bliss.
(p. 165-166)
Besieged by purastaka which rises from tanmatras and exists in mind, I[feeling, and the determinative faculty, he (the bound soul) becomes subservient and undergoes the experiences that arise from it in the form of ideas about certain objects and the pleasure or pain that accrues from them. Owing to the continuance of the puryastaka, he (the bound soul) leads transmigratory existence.
(p. 167)
The bound soul undergoes the experiences arising from the subtle body (purystaka). Since there arises the experiences of pleasure, etc. through the ideas, therefore, on account of the emergence of these ideas, the bond soul becomes subservient i.e. through the association of words, he is, at every step, driven hither and thither by Brahmi and other goddesses. He is not independent like the fully awakened yogi.
Owing to the continuance of that subtle body (purystaka), the residual traces of cravings and desires lying submerged in it are awakened again and again and thus he transmigrates from one form of life to another, getting bodies suited for the appropriate experiences of those lives. Thus he assumes and gives up body after body (i.e. at each birth he assumes a body and at each death, he gives it up).
As it is so, therefore we are going to explain immediately the cause i.e. the easy means of the extirpation of the transmigratory tendency of this individual besieged by the subtle body (purystaka) through the total extermination of the impurities inherent in it. The author has himself described the means in this treatise.
On account of the play of Maya sakti, the soul loses its pristine jnana and kriya sakti and comes to have only limited knowledge and limited power of action. Secondly, he falls prey to the veiled powers that arise from the multitude of words. In his present life, he acquires ideas through his experience of sense-objects, and education, but these ideas are not possible without words. So ultimately words come to acquire tremendous influence over his life.
The subtle body (purystaka) plays the moste important role (in determining the destiny of the individual0. Man is a very complex being. He has not only a physical body, but also a subtle one knows as purystaka which consists of the five tanmatras or the subtle aspects of the gross physical objects and buddhi, manas and ahamkara. The impressions of our desires and thoughts are deposited in this purystaka. When a man dies, it is only his physical body that is dissolved. The puryastaka remains as the subtle vehicle of the soul after his death. As has already been said, it contains the residual traces of the desires, et. Of the previous life. The desires and ideas deposited in the puryastaka are not inert elements but tremendous psychic forces seeking expression. So in the next life, man gets a body suited for the expression of the desires, etc. deposited in the puryastaka and is born in an environment suited for that expression.
The purystaka plays a double role. In this present life, our ideas are formed according to our interest, and desires. The purystaka is the repository of our interests and desires. Our idas are largely determined in the present life by the constitution of our puryastaka, and our future life is wholly determined by our purystaka. That is why Ksemaraja says, ‘The transmigratory existence can be stopped by the extermination of the impurities of the puryastaka.
When, however, he, by constant practice of the means that have been taught of entering into the highest principle, becomes fully and unswervingly established in the Spanda principel which is the perfect I-conscious i.e. when he becomes identical with it, then he can bring under his control the emergence and the dissolution of the purystaka and through it also of the universe by means of the introversive and extroversive meditation, and in accordance with the principle established in the first verse, he by bringing about the manifestation and dissolution of the universe by means of the one essential nature which is Sankara becomes the Supreme Enjoyer, and thus by assimilation to himself all the objective categories from the earth up to Siva by the process of recognition rises to the status of the Supreme Experience that he was already. Thence onward he becomes the lord of the saktis referred to in the first verse, i.e., of the collective whole of the rays of his essential Self. In other words, he attains to the highest lordship in this very body.
A spark of the Divine flame descends into matter and forgets its divine origin. Like an exile it wanders into distant lands and in different forms. At the human stage, it acquires the gift of speech and mentation. It has now reached a definite station in the evolutionary march. The human being as now knows sows his wild oats, reaps the consequences and learns the inexorable laws of life in the bitter school of experience. A time comes when he is filed with nostalgia, and now begins his journey homeward. He has not to go far. He has only to throw off the mask of the pseudo-I and enter his essential, real I, which is the Spanda, the heart-beat of Siva. He now becomes what he always was. The universe is now longer a foreign land. The I and the This, the Subject and the object become one. That is an experience for which there is no word in the human language.
(p. 168-170)