Unfolding Kashmir Shaivism

Through a Deleuzian Looking Glass

This isn’t really a first post. It’s just the first post this time. Things rarely start when we say they do, anyway. What you’re reading is the result of a stray idea that lodged itself in my nervous system years ago, back when I was new to yoga and still thought “insight” meant closure. Some ideas have to be written down to stop echoing. That’s how this Substack started: the aftershock of one persistent hunch, now tangled up with a whole bunch of others that wouldn’t let go. If any of them land for you, good. If not, they’re here as a kind of record of how one practice gets shaped by, and shapes, all the others.

While yoga is personal, it’s important not to take it personally. The act of paying attention to the body—this body—ends up pressing out into every corner of your life. It forces you to renegotiate with your own stories, then with culture, sometimes even with politics. The idea that practice is private, sealed off from the world, is one of those comforting fictions that doesn’t last long. What you do on the mat, or the floor, or in whatever space you’ve claimed, has a way of bleeding into how you relate, how you vote, how you walk through a grocery store. Not every post will be as worked over as this one. Most will show up with more rough edges, half-formed, unfinished—because that’s how practice works. But if you want an honest snapshot of where I’m starting from, this is as good a place as any.

I didn’t know what people meant by a “critical lens” before Deleuze entered my life during graduate school. The phrase sounded like something a critical thinker would say, but more like a visualization technique a therapist encourages. But after reading Deleuze, the world got a lot more tangled, less predictable, and impossible to unsee. Patterns overlapped; everything was always in motion. Getting “comfortable” with Deleuze is a contradiction in terms. He’s the philosophical version of living with someone who rearranges your furniture in the middle of the night. You get up to find that nothing is where you left it, but eventually you stop expecting it to be. The upside is that you start to notice rhythms you missed before. You stop looking for closure and start listening for what’s shifting. Deleuze gave me language for things I’d already sensed but never had the nerve—or the vocabulary—to say out loud. It didn’t take long before those same threads led me straight into Kashmir Shaivism, a school of Tantra that, when you wipe off the imported mystique, turns out to be ferociously practical. The connection felt less like a cross-cultural discovery and more like realizing you’ve been living in the same house with someone and only just learned their name.

Kashmir Shaivism circles around the idea of universal consciousness—a reality that is always in process, never frozen. Deleuze, for all his French detachment, keeps orbiting similar territory. He doesn’t use the same words, and his style is less incense, more streetlight, but the engine’s the same: difference, process, no final arrival. Where Shaivism describes the world as the self-expression of consciousness, Deleuze calls it immanence—everything fully present, nothing outsourced to a second, more “real” world. It’s all here, all the way down.

Shaivism’s universe is a single, unbroken field. The divine isn’t stashed away in some celestial VIP lounge; it’s right in the tangled mess of particulars, the details we trip over every day. Deleuze refuses any kind of transcendence that lets you cash out and move on. There’s no court of appeals, no outside judge. Being just keeps showing up as itself, over and over, each time a little different. The game is always on, and the rules keep shifting.

Difference is not the thing that needs explaining away—it’s the thing that explains. For Shaivism, every form, every twist, every fracture is the play of consciousness trying itself out from new angles. Multiplicity isn’t some cosmic glitch. It’s the point, the whole plot. Deleuze has no patience for the drive to flatten everything into oneness. Multiplicity, variation, the refusal to settle—these are reality’s real work, not distractions from some perfect state.

Desire usually gets cast as a problem to be solved—a gap, a hunger, a sign that something’s missing. Both Shaivism and Deleuze toss that script. For Shaivism, iccha—desire—isn’t the thing that knocks you off the path; it’s the fuel, the principle that starts the fire. Every act of creation, every beginning, starts with desire, not lack. Deleuze slices desire free from deficiency, too. For him, desire is the pulse that keeps the system moving—world as output, not wound. Wanting isn’t a problem; it’s the very structure of becoming.

Both systems have no time for easy dualisms. Shaivism sees everything as a fold of consciousness, no clean lines separating sacred from ordinary. Deleuze treats every threshold as a fold, another twist in the same plane. No “two worlds,” no safe splits. Just difference, repetition, contact—again and again.

Nothing ever stays put. Shaivism is all about pulse and cycling—creation, sustenance, dissolution—never one-way, never done. Deleuze lives inside the process, not the product. “Finally” is not in his vocabulary. There’s always another edge, another arrangement, another risk.

If you’re hunting for closure or a clean takeaway, you’ll get bored here. Both Shaivism and Deleuze push you to keep the questions alive. Stay inside the feedback. Let the mess, the difference and the process have their say.

If all this leaves you a little exposed, good. That’s the only place the system breathes. If you’re lucky, that’s where something happens. If not, at least the furniture will have moved.