Jacques Fitzhenry

Treatise On Spanda Karikas Jacques Fitzhenry

The spandakarikas are a number of verses that serve as a sort of commentary on the Siva-sutras. According to Saivagama, the divine consciousness is not simply cold, inert intellection. It is rather spanda, active, dynamic, throbbing with life, creative pulsation. The book are not a work of academic scholarship but a result of meditation in the form of an original metaphysical treatise on Spanda. They 'approach anew' (abhi-nava) the whole notion of Spanda - showing its relation to the nature of consciousness, space and time, using it to challenge the foundations of quantum physics and the much-distorted concept of 'energy' - whose roots lie not in Indian but in Greek thought. As a result, this new karakas are also able to offer a radically new metaphysical understanding of the nature of 'matter', the modern scientific 'mystery' of so-called 'dark matter and 'dark energy' and - last but not least - the true essence of music. Spanda is understood for the first time as primordial creative tension between a dark and inexhaustible womb of unmanifest potentialities of awareness or 'non-being - symbolized by the blackness of the great goddess Kali - with the realm of actuality or 'being' illuminated by the invisible light of awareness identical with the great god Shiva. Through a primordial awareness of the realm of potentiality, the autonomous powers of actualization or Shaktis latent within it are released - giving rise to a constant process of creative manifestation of all possible actualities and all possible consciousnesses or 'beings'.