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Kashmir Sivaism

"Lord Shiva is infinite and eternal. He is beyond limitation and yet by his independent free will (svatantrya) he has the power to appear limited. He creates the universe for his own play, without beginning or end."

"Let Shiva, who has taken the form of my individual being, offer salutation to his Universal Being Shiva, through media, which is also Shiva, for the removal of obstacles which are, indeed, one with Shiva."

Kashmir Shaivism explains how phenomenal existence came into being through a successive process of contraction and self-limitation of the Absolute.

God hides himself from his creation to give himself the joy of discovering God. God is both Creator and the Created.

"Shiva cannot be imprisoned in the castle of transcendence. Within Shiva there always occurs an overflowing, a surging vibration that leads the infinity of Shiva continuously to surpass itself. Any boundary that might be set for Shiva, any limit that one might attempt to impose in order to contain Shiva will, by the very definition of Shiva as freedom, be overthown. The boundary will be destroyed and the unbounded freedom of Shiva will assert itself. In fact, this process of self-transcendence is self-referential: when we define Shiva as unbounded freedom, he immediately goes beyond this definition and plays the game of hide-and-seek, by manifesting the boundaries of the finite self and the limited experience of the visible world. He thus transcends unbounded freedom by becoming bound and not free... ... As soon as the process of manifestation of boundaries occurs, Shiva initiates the process by which it may overflow these boundaries which he has imposed on himself. He structures the path of return traversed by himself, in the guise of the ignorant, finite self."

"Even as Shiva creates the very real game of breaking himself into parts which suffer transformation, division, extinction and emptiness, he is nevertheless able to maintain himself free of the game and intact as Shiva, all the while taking on the roles required by the game."

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