u/DualSock1

In KS, since phenomenal experience is considered an ontologically-real expression of Śiva's play, do Jīva and one's sense of self/identity (small-s self) have this same ontological status?

I'm transgender, and have spent a long time thinking about the strange phenomena we call "gender" and "identity," which in my opinion we have very flawed and limited language for, especially for English speakers in the modern West. I think about how, when someone's ability to express this sense of selfhood in the world is systemically denied, it pretty consistently results in profound depression and often self-annihilation. I no longer experience this personally, as I'm now lucky enough to be able to express myself in the way as feels right to me and am at peace with my place in the world in this regard.

However, I sometimes get the sense that there is something that people like myself in the modern West are not accounting for when it comes to the sense of self, or at least I have not yet found the language that feels right. I have no problem with the idea that Śiva's play manifests in countless ways including what we call "suffering," "good," "evil," etc. But I can't shake the question, "Why would Śiva commit to the play of His own sense of selfhood so intensely that He would rather dis-incarnate, closing off an entire universe of play and experience, than express a selfhood that feels untrue or inauthentic? And what exactly accounts for the sheer power of this dynamic of authenticity and inauthenticity? It feels to me like it's not just the body or social/cultural contingencies, but that there's something more metaphysically fundamental going on.

This, of course, applies to anyone, not just transgender people. Many people who experience depression to a fatal extent do so as a result of being unable to live in a way that is faithful to their sense of self. And yet the world is full of so many things to experience and play within, why would a master actor like Śiva be contracted so acutely as to self-destroy rather than slightly rewrite His character? Perhaps that is just a how masterful an actor He can be? Is He "committing to the bit" even if means death?

I'm not sure if this is defensible scripturally, but perhaps it makes sense to regard Jīva as a bit like an incredibly powerful force of nature, like an ocean or a nebula, in the sense that it is a contraction of Śiva's absolute freedom and yet still contains an immense amount of power relative to the other contracted phenomena it is embedded within. But unlike an ocean or a nebula, "identity" writ large as a principle or concept or phenomenon feels so elusive and intangible, so I suppose I'm baffled that it can have so much power and am wondering what KS might make of this.

In many nondual traditions there is an emphasis on the idea that you are neither your body nor the pain that it experiences, and that the more one identifies with their own pain, the more one locks themselves into a cycle of suffering and misperception.

I experience a chronic illness that can make my spiritual progress feel quite slow and difficult at times, but that has also taught me important lessons about the body. It seems that disidentifying from my own pain should be a major point of focus for me. What are the best sources to look toward in KS and the Shakta tradition that discuss pain and illness?

Synchronicity is usually defined broadly as "meaningful coincidence," but it is more comprehensively understood as 1.) The experience of coincidence that is so radically improbable and personal that it cannot be attributed to random chance or causal mechanisms and 2.) An acausal principle that defines the "realm of potentiality" which exists outside of time and space, and which manifests as events at various points in time which are connected to one another through meaning.

This has had me thinking about the KS understanding of grace and — since synchronicity often provokes questions of fate and free will — the notion of svātantrya.

In contemporary Western ceremonial magic, it is often understood that undertaking a magical ritual to manifest an intent is a way to experience a specific and desirable synchronicity, one that makes the intent a reality. I think the following example gives us an interesting way to respond to Western understandings of free will, fate, and grace:

A practitioner undertakes a ritual to receive money in the exact amount of $285.67. The next day, the practitioner receives a check in the mail for this exact amount. The specificity of the amount makes random chance radically improbable, yet the check arrived from far away and was mailed before the practitioner undertook the ritual.

Many different interpretations of an event like this might be raised by Western practitioners, one of them being what's called "retrocausality", where events in the past are caused by events in the present. Others might resort to various forms of quantum theory etc. Meanwhile, there may also be a temptation to say that all of this was predetermined as part of an inescapable causal chain. All of these ideas are prone to stick with a more or less conventional Western understanding of causality and free will; i.e., we live in an at least partially deterministic reality and one's outlook depends on the extent to which free will exists within that reality.

In the process of learning the philosophical ideas in the schools of KS, I've come to realize that a truly nondual perspective on a phenomenon like this would say something quite different, and it's the only view that really makes sense for me. Correct me if I am wrong, but would a KS point of view say that:

1. It is not a question as to whether or not we "have free will," but rather, to what extent a given ego consciousness (as a contraction of Śiva) has remembered or recovered or recognized its always-already nature of absolute svātantrya.
2. The ritual and the "result" together are not separate events but a single unfolding of consciousness (in a way that the individual perceives as simultaneously "subjective" and "objective).
3. In a sense, an event which defies causal logic to this extent is one in which the nature of the individual as identical to Śiva is especially and even shockingly apparent to them, and therefore constitutes a form of grace and recognition.
4. We are always-already propelled by and suffused by grace, but it is with certain kinds of events that recognition becomes particularly potent to ego-consciousness and ideally leads one to liberation. (I am not saying that doing magic to receive money is a good way to pursue liberation, this was just an example for the sake of contemplation)

Let me know where I'm off-base here, and insight is very much appreciated. Thank you!