Non-Dual Knowing: Epistemology Beyond Subject and Object

Series: Tantra Epistemology | Part: 5 of 10

Most knowledge operates through subject-object structure. There's you (the knower), and there's something else (the known), and knowing happens across that gap. You observe the tree, you understand the equation, you recognize your emotion. Subject here, object there, knowledge as the relationship between them.

Tantric epistemology claims there's another mode of knowing entirely—one that doesn't rely on subject-object division. Not knowing about something from outside, but knowing as something from within. Not observation but recognition. Not mediated but direct.

This sounds mystical until you notice you already do this constantly. You don't observe your arm moving—you move it. The knowing involved in intentional action isn't subject-object structured. There's no observer watching a separate entity called "arm"—there's just the integrated event of arm-moving-knowing all at once.

Tantric philosophy systematized this insight into a complete epistemology: pratyabhijna (recognition) and pratibha (direct intuitive knowing). Understanding these transforms how we think about knowledge, consciousness, and what it means to understand anything at all.

The Problem With Representational Knowing

Standard epistemology treats knowledge as representation. You build internal models that correspond to external reality. The better your model matches the territory, the more you "know" the thing. This framework—call it representational realism—underlies most of Western philosophy and cognitive science.

It works remarkably well for certain domains. Physics builds mathematical models of how matter behaves. Biology builds models of how organisms function. These models have extraordinary predictive power, suggesting they capture something real about their objects.

But representational knowing has structural limitations:

The homunculus problem. If knowing is representing, who's looking at the representation? You build a model of the world in your head—then what looks at that model? Another internal observer? What looks at that? You get infinite regress unless you posit some final knower that doesn't itself need to be represented.

The gap problem. How do you verify your representation matches reality? You'd need to compare your model to the thing itself—but you only have access to more representations. You can't step outside representation to check correspondence. All you can do is check whether representations cohere with each other.

The experience problem. Representational knowing can't explain experience itself. You can model the neurophysiology of color perception, but that model doesn't explain what red feels like. The felt quality of experience—qualia—remains outside the representational framework.

These aren't minor bugs. They point to something structurally missing in representational epistemology: it can't account for the knowing subject itself without either infinite regress or arbitrary stopping points.

Recognition Rather Than Discovery

Tantric epistemology starts elsewhere. In Kashmir Shaivism's framework, knowing isn't about building representations of a separate reality. It's about consciousness recognizing its own nature in what appears as "other."

The key Sanskrit term is pratyabhijna—recognition. Not recognizing something you already know, but recognizing that what seemed separate was never actually separate. The felt experience when a disguised friend reveals themselves: "Oh, it's you—I didn't recognize you."

Here's the radical claim: everything you know, you know through consciousness recognizing itself. When you perceive a tree, that's consciousness appearing as tree-perception. When you feel an emotion, that's consciousness appearing as emotional-knowing. When you think a thought, that's consciousness appearing as conceptual-understanding.

This isn't solipsism (nothing exists but my mind) or idealism (everything is mental). It's the recognition that consciousness isn't one thing among others—it's the ground in which subject and object both appear. The knowing isn't happening across a gap between you and the world. The knowing is the event of world-appearing-to-consciousness.

From this view, the subject-object structure is a useful fiction, not fundamental reality. Consciousness temporarily forgets its own nature and experiences itself as a separate subject facing separate objects. But this division is constructed, not given. And it can be deconstructed through recognition.

Pratibha: The Flash of Direct Knowing

Kashmir Shaivism describes another mode of knowing: pratibha—spontaneous insight, the flash of direct understanding that precedes conceptual elaboration.

You've experienced this. The moment before you articulate a solution, there's already the sense of having understood. The answer is present before you translate it into words. You grasp the pattern before you can explain it. You recognize the person before you place their name.

That immediate knowing—prior to representation, prior to subject-object division—is pratibha. It's consciousness's direct contact with itself, unmediated by conceptual structures.

Traditional examples emphasize the suddenness and certainty of pratibha. The poet receives the complete poem in a flash, then laboriously translates it into language. The mathematician sees the solution whole, then works backward to construct the proof. The practitioner recognizes the nature of mind, then spends years integrating that recognition.

This isn't anti-intellectual mysticism. Pratibha doesn't replace discursive reasoning—it grounds it. Conceptual elaboration is what you do after direct knowing to make it communicable, testable, and useful. But the knowing itself precedes and exceeds conceptualization.

How This Maps to Coherence

In AToM terms, representational knowing corresponds to building internal models—state spaces, attractor landscapes, predictions about what comes next. This is active inference: the system maintaining coherent internal models that minimize prediction error.

Non-dual knowing corresponds to something different: the system recognizing its own dynamics directly, without needing to build separate representations. This is coherence awareness—the system tracking its own coherence without mediation.

Think of the difference between watching yourself in a mirror (representational) and simply moving (direct knowing). The mirror provides useful feedback for certain purposes—checking your form, seeing what others see. But you don't need the mirror to move. The knowing involved in coordination is built into the movement itself.

Non-dual knowing is like that: the system's awareness of its own functioning doesn't require building a separate internal model. The coherence is self-evident, self-luminous, recognized directly.

This explains several otherwise puzzling features of contemplative practice:

Why insight often feels like remembering rather than learning. Because it's recognition of what was always present but obscured by representational structure.

Why the deepest understanding resists articulation. Because it's prior to the subject-object division that language requires. You can point toward it, evoke it, circle around it—but you can't capture it in propositions.

Why presence practices emphasize "just this." Because representational knowing always mediates, creates distance. Non-dual knowing is the immediate experience without gap.

Why integration matters more than information. Because coherence is accessed directly, not through accumulating representations. More concepts don't necessarily produce more knowing—sometimes they obscure direct recognition.

The Knower as Process, Not Entity

Standard epistemology treats the knowing subject as a stable entity that acquires knowledge. There's a "you" who knows various things. Your knowledge changes, but you persist as the substrate that has knowledge.

Tantric epistemology challenges this. From the recognition perspective, the knower isn't a stable entity—it's a dynamic process of consciousness recognizing itself in different forms.

When you say "I know this," what's actually happening? Awareness is present, content is present, and there's recognition—but is there a separate knower apart from this process? Or is the sense of being a knower simply another appearance within consciousness?

This isn't denying your existence. It's recognizing that what you call "I" is itself a pattern—a relatively stable attractor in the flow of experience. The knower is more like a verb than a noun. Knowing is happening, and the sense of "I" emerges within that knowing, not before it.

This has immediate practical implications. If the knower is process rather than entity, then working with knowing means working with processes—attention, recognition, integration—rather than trying to improve the knower as a thing.

You can't make "you" better at knowing in any fundamental sense, because the "you" is already part of the knowing process. What you can do is remove obstructions, increase coherence, develop capacity for different modes of knowing. But these aren't achievements of a stable subject—they're reorganizations of the knowing process itself.

Three Modes of Knowing

Tantric epistemology traditionally distinguishes three modes, each progressively more direct:

Paroksha (mediated knowing): knowledge acquired through perception, inference, testimony. Subject-object structured, representational, indirect. This is what we normally mean by knowledge—information about things.

Aparoksha (immediate knowing): direct experience without conceptual mediation. Still involves subject-object structure, but without the gap of representation. The feeling of your own body, the taste of food, the sensation of emotion—these are known directly, not through inference.

Anuttara (supreme knowing): recognition of consciousness itself, beyond subject-object division. Not knowing something but the knowing itself recognizing its own nature. This is pratyabhijna in its fullest sense.

Most people spend most of their time in paroksha—thinking about things, remembering, planning, inferring. Contemplative practice develops capacity for aparoksha—direct, immediate, present-moment awareness. And glimpses of anuttara happen spontaneously or through intensive practice—moments when the entire structure of knower-knowing-known dissolves into recognition.

The key insight: these aren't just different degrees of knowledge—they're different structures of knowing altogether. You can't get from paroksha to anuttara by accumulating more information. You need to shift the structure itself.

Practical Applications

This epistemology isn't just philosophical speculation—it changes how you work with experience:

In contemplative practice, recognizing that thoughts aren't things to be observed but movements of consciousness shifts the entire frame. You're not a subject watching mental objects—you're consciousness temporarily identifying with the watching position. Recognizing this directly loosens identification.

In therapy and trauma work, understanding that the observer position is itself constructed can free people from being trapped in witness consciousness. Sometimes healing requires not more observation but less—dropping back into direct experience before the observer crystallizes.

In creative work, learning to access pratibha—the flash of direct knowing—becomes more important than accumulating technique. The technique serves to clear the way for direct recognition, not to replace it.

In relationship, recognizing that the other person isn't just an object of your knowledge but another center of consciousness changes everything. You move from trying to model them accurately to recognizing the consciousness that's recognizing you back.

In learning, distinguishing between accumulating representations and direct recognition changes pedagogy. Sometimes the point isn't more information—it's removing obstructions to direct seeing.

Non-dual knowing isn't about rejecting representational knowledge—that would be absurd. Science, technology, and everyday functioning require building models and making inferences. But recognizing that representational knowing is one mode among others, and not the deepest mode, opens possibilities.

The Paradox of Pointing

Here's the difficulty: this entire article uses representational knowing (concepts, arguments, propositions) to point toward non-representational knowing. It's describing something that, by definition, can't be fully captured in description.

Tantric philosophers were aware of this paradox. They wrote thousands of pages explicating something that ultimately must be recognized directly. The texts function as fingers pointing at the moon—useful for orienting attention, but not to be mistaken for the moon itself.

The best conceptual explanation of non-dual knowing is still conceptual—still operating within subject-object structure, still mediated. At some point, you have to stop reading and look directly. Not at some exotic spiritual truth, but at the knowing that's happening right now as you read these words.

Who's knowing? Where is the knower? Is there a gap between awareness and what's appearing? Or is the entire event—text, reading, understanding, sense of "I"—arising together within consciousness?

That recognition, when it happens, isn't something you can have or achieve. It's what you always already are, temporarily obscured by the habit of identifying as a separate knower facing a separate known.

This is Part 5 of the Tantra Epistemology series, exploring tantric philosophy and practice through the lens of coherence geometry.

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Further Reading

• Lawrence, David Peter. Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument: A Contemporary Interpretation of Monistic Kashmir Śaivism. SUNY Press, 1999.
• Ratié, Isabelle. "Pratyabhijñā Philosophy." In Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Brill, 2015.
• Torella, Raffaele. The Philosophical Traditions of India: An Appraisal of Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam. Motilal Banarsidass, 2002.
• Muller-Ortega, Paul. The Triadic Heart of Śiva. SUNY Press, 1989.