Kṣemarāja connects the fifteenth Sūtra with a practice: the practitioner attends closely to perception as it comes forth and recedes. To do so, he allows the powers of the senses to stream out and draws them back in. He thus contemplates creation and dissolution not only as cosmic concepts, but within his own experience.

What it means to “attain power”

The power sought (bala) is Awareness itself when the superimposition produced by identification with body, vital energy, and similar limitations recedes and its own form comes forth. It is therefore not acquired from outside.

Within this power, the practitioner makes the world “his own”. Kṣemarāja does not explain this as an act of possession. Everything from earth up to Sadāśiva appears in non-difference from one’s own nature. As a kindled fire consumes fuel, Awareness absorbs into itself the objects of the senses that function as bonds.

Unity is not first produced

An objection asks why this experience of unity should count as the goal if it occurs only occasionally. Kṣemarāja replies that only the arising and receding of identification with the body makes unity appear intermittent. Awareness itself shines without interruption. Without it, even the body could not appear.

Practice should therefore cause the perceiver’s false equation with body, breath, and similar limitations to subside. It does not first produce the ever-present, self-luminous perceiver.

For Kṣemarāja, cid-ānanda, the joy of Awareness, is the experience in which the whole world is absorbed as not different from one’s own Self. Liberation while alive (jīvanmukti) begins where this unity remains firm even in ordinary experience.

On returning from deep absorption, body, vital energy, colours, and feelings appear again. They now seem like individual limbs or leaves within a single whole. The imprint formed in absorption and the methods explained in the following portion of the text consolidate the insight that everything is one consciousness.

Kṣemarāja calls this state liberation even though the person continues to live and his vital powers are sustained. His bonds have melted because he has recognised his own nature. A Spanda verse cited by Kṣemarāja describes the consequence: one who perceives the whole world as the play of Awareness and remains continuously joined to it is, beyond doubt, liberated while alive.