70 Spirituality Studies 11-2 Fall 2025 2.2 On Knowledge, Understanding, (Artificial) Intelligence and Consciousness As discussed earlier, svādhyāya comprises two main phases: first the understanding of sacred texts must take place, then contemplation and mediation come using, for example, purificator mantras. In the following, we analyse how knowledge, understanding, intelligence and consciousness relate to each other from modern scientific and traditional point of view to examine if an AI could practice real selfstudy. “Consciousness” (Sa. Cit) can be characterized through Pratyabhijñāhr̥dayam (Kṣemarā ja 2014, 4–6, 8, 16, 27) where an elaborated description about He/She/It and the “Absolute” (Sa. Anuttara) is provided. Con-sciousness (i.e., psychological I–Consciousness) connotes subject-object relation, knower-known duality. However, Reality in its ultimate aspect is Cit – pure Consciousness, which is a non-relational changeless principle behind all changing experience, where the “I” (Sa. Aham) and the “This” (Sa. Idam) are in an indistinguishable unity. It is important to underline that a leading scientific understanding of consciousness today is phenomenal or “subjective” that is related to the experience of thinking, emotions and so on which is a fundamental need to perform any type of responsible action as far as we attribute actions to individuals. Thus, in this interpretation consciousness is equated with sentience or subjective experience, and having conscious experience is when there is “something it is like” for the system to be the subject of that experience (Nagel 1974, 3). Chalmers (2022, 3) underlines this concept by stating that “As I use the terms, consciousness and sentience are roughly equivalent. Consciousness and sentience, as I understand them, are subjective experience. A being is conscious if it has subjective experience, like the experience of seeing, of feeling, or of thinking.” Furthermore, he writes that subjective consciousness has various dimensions such as sensory experience tied to perception, affective experience that is related to emotions and feelings, the cognitive experience of thoughts and reasoning, agentive experience to make an action or not, and self-consciousness, the awareness of oneself. From a more traditional point of view, “subjective” consciousness is only a relative derivative of an indeterministic, all-pervasive Absolute Consciousness in and by which every phenomenon is manifested, preserved and withdrawn, without any inherent change in Itself (Kṣemarā ja 2014, 5). As Mishra elaborates it (Mishra 2011, 78–79), tantra (e.g., Trika school of Kashmir Śaivism) claims that “knowledge” (Sa. jñāna) is an effortless “activity” (Sa. kriyā). Effortless, because knowing an object requires a sort of grasping which is an involuntary and effortless activity of the knower. Without knowing one cannot assume understanding either. The phenomenon of knowledge is analogous to reflection. Being aware of the sensation is an active involvement on behalf of the knowing Consciousness, otherwise the mind or the attention of the knower would be diverted somewhere else, and the sensation couldn’t be understood. Thus, according to the Tantric exposition, knowledge is the act of knowing like paying attention to something. That’s why jñāna and kriyā are inherently the same. This tantric model further elaborates on subjective consciousness as follows: The limited individual (Sa. puruṣ a) is the subjective manifestation of Absolute Consciousness when putting Itself under the influence of mā yā – measurable experience and the “five limiting powers” (Sa. kañ cukā s) [2]. This subjectivity comes though with its counterpart called prakṛ ti (Sa. the source of objectivity from buddhi down to earth), which is the root of objectivity of puruṣ a storing the seeds of personalized experiences in accordance with the law of karma. Here, the Trika Śaivism believes, that there is a distinct prakṛ ti for each puruṣ a. Prakṛ ti then gets differentiated into what can be termed as the psychic apparatus or “inner instrument” (Sa. antaḥ karana), the “senses” (Sa. indriyas) and “matter” (Sa. bhū tas). The psychic apparatus consists of three tattvas: the “ascertaining and discerning intellect” (Sa. buddhi), the sense of I–ness, the power of self-appropriation (Sa. ahaṁ kāra) [3], and the means of mental operation (Sa. manas) that builds up the perception, images and concepts in collaboration with the senses (Kṣemarā ja 2014, 14). We can see, what an important role the triangle of buddhi, ahaṁ kāra and manas plays in the information management and decision-making process in human beings, highlighting that the sense of I–ness presented by ahaṁ kāra is merely a reflection of the Absolute Consciousness on the plane of duality.
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