The Matter of Wonder

In the early 11th century, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta proposed panentheism-seeing the divine as both immanent in the world and at the same time as transcendent—as a way to reclaim the material world as something real, something solid. His theology understood the world itself, with its manifold inhabitants—from gods to humans to insects down to the merest rock-as part of the unfolding of a single conscious reality, Siva. This conscious singularity-the word "god" here does not quite do it justice—with its capacity to choose and will, pervades all through, top to bottom; as Abhinavagupta writes, "even down to a worm — when they do their own deeds, that which is to be done first stirs in the heart." His panentheism proposed an answer to a familiar conundrum, one we still grapple with today: Consciousness is so unlike matter. How does consciousness actually connect to the materiality of our world? To put this in more familar twenty-first-century…