"Unless there were this unity with Śiva, cognitions could not exist as facts of daily life:
"Unity with God is proved by the unity of light. He is the one knower (or illuminator of cognitions).
"He is Maheśvara, the great Lord, by reason of the unbroken continuity of objects:
"Pure knowledge and action are the playful activity of the deity."
The following is an explanation of Abhinava-gupta:—The text, "After that as it shines shines the all of things, by the light of that shines diversely this All," teaches that God illumines the whole round of things by the glory of His luminous intelligence, and that the diversity or plurality of the object world, whereby the light which irradiates objects is a blue, a yellow light, and the like, arises from diversity of tint cast upon the light by the object. In reality, God is without plurality or difference, as transcending all limitations of space, time, and figure. He is pure intelligence, self-luminousness, the manifester; and thus we may read in the Śaiva aphorisms, "Self is intelligence." His synonymous titles are Intelligential Essence, Unintermitted Cognition, Irrespective Intuition, Existence as a mass of Beatitude, Supreme Domination. This self-same existing self is knowledge.
By pure knowledge and action (in the passage of Sománandanátha cited above) are meant real or transcendent cognition and activity. Of these, the cognition is self-luminousness, the activity is energy constructive of the world or series of spheres of transmigratory experience. This is described in the section on activity—
"He by his power of bliss gives light unto these objects, through the efficacy of his will: this activity is creativeness."
And at the close of the same section—
"The mere will of God, when he wills to become the world under its forms of jar, of cloth, and other objects, is his activity worked out by motive and agent.
"This process of essence into emanation, whereby if this be that comes to be, cannot be attributed to motiveless, insentient things."