The seventh Sūtra lists seemingly enigmatic numbers. Kṣemarāja turns them into several perspectives on the same perceiver. Properly recognised, they lead to liberation. Treated as independent realities, they become a cause of saṃsāra.

• One: In respect of his light, the perceiver is Śiva himself. Light cannot be divided by place and time into several mutually independent awarenesses.
• Twofold: He is pure light and, at the same time, the shining forth of a contracted form.
• Consisting of three: He is covered by three “impurities” (mala): the experience of one’s own incompleteness (āṇava), the perception of separate objects (māyīya), and bondage to limited action (kārma).
• Fourfold: His layers are emptiness, vital energy, the subtle body conceived as eightfold (puryaṣṭaka), and the physical body.
• Seven pentads: He encompasses the thirty-five principles (tattva) from Śiva down to earth.
• Seven: He appears as seven classes of perceivers, from Śiva down to the fully limited sakala.
• Five: In his own nature, he possesses the powers of consciousness, joy, will, knowledge, and action. Under the influence of non-recognition, they appear limited by the five coverings of restricted agency (kalā), restricted knowledge (vidyā), desire (rāga), time (kāla), and determination (niyati).

One who recognises himself as the one Śiva throughout all these levels finds liberation, according to Kṣemarāja. One who takes them as separate and autonomous realities remains bound by their limitations.

Kṣemarāja reads the words of the eighth Sūtra in two ways. Both show how many apparently separate experiences find their place within the one Awareness.

Philosophical systems as an actor’s roles

In the first reading, the positions of all philosophical systems are freely chosen roles of the one Self. Kṣemarāja compares it to an actor who assumes different characters on stage:

• The Cārvākas regard the body endowed with consciousness as the Self.
• Nyāya and related systems locate it in the bearer of knowledge and other qualities, near the level of the intellect; liberation appears to them almost as emptiness after these qualities have ceased.
• Mīmāṃsā recognises the Self through the experience of “I”, but sees it as overlaid by pleasure, pain, and other determinations and thus likewise remains at the level of the intellect.
• Buddhist schools that posit a stream of moments of cognition remain with movements of the intellect. Madhyamaka is assigned to emptiness.
• Some Vedāntins equate the Self with vital energy. Teachings of a “non-being Brahman” rest in emptiness, while other Vedāntins, with their claim of primordial being, rest at the level of Īśvara.
• The Pāñcarātras locate the ultimate ground in the unmanifest higher nature from which individual souls emerge like sparks. Sāṃkhya and related teachings reach a level resembling that of the vijñānākalas.
• The grammarians understand the Self as Word-Brahman at the paśyantī level and are assigned to Sadāśiva.
• Tantric teachings define the Self either as transcending the world, as the whole world in the Kula traditions, or, in Trika, as both world-transcending and world-encompassing.

Kṣemarāja does not intend to place these positions alongside one another as an equal number of ultimate realities. They are gradations in which the freedom of the one consciousness is more or less concealed or revealed. A limited view takes one partial domain for the whole. In Kṣemarāja’s account, comprehensive penetration becomes accessible only through the highest śaktipāta. His quotations also underscore a sharp traditional boundary: even serious seekers of liberation can be held fast by Māyā within a limited teaching.

The resting points of every perception

In the second reading, darśana does not mean a philosophical system, but a concrete act of perception—seeing blue or feeling joy, for example. Its sthiti, its coming to rest, can become a “stage” upon which one’s own nature as Awareness and joy reveals itself.

Kṣemarāja describes a recurring sequence:

1. An outward-directed appearance comes to rest in one’s own Awareness.
2. The external object is withdrawn and a quiet inner condition comes forth.
3. From there, the series of newly arising cognitions is already stretched out.

The “fourth” power of consciousness (turīyā) is active in this alternation of appearance, persistence, withdrawal, and union. It brings the respective movements of creation and dissolution forth from itself and takes them back into itself. Kṣemarāja calls it at once full and subtle, both and neither: it is not confined to any single phase. As this level is cultivated with increasing steadiness, it draws the devoted person into itself.