I heard about Cristopher Wallis' resurrection and translation of Kashmiri Shaivism way back in Michael Taft's VSM 1 class. Wallis is not merely a translator, but also a practitioner of this non-dual Hindu tradition that was nearly lost in the 700 years between the Muslim conquest and Partition. Accordingly, his goal is not merely to make this historic text accessible, but to actually make it come alive as a philosophy and a practice manual. Since Wallis is also a Sanskrit scholar who has written extensively about the Tantrik tradition that the Recognition school is a part of, it seems he's almost uniquely qualified for the job. Which is a lucky break for us, because, no matter how clear the translation, the original text would remain almost totally obscure if it weren't for his extensive, line-by-line commentary on it.
While I haven't precisely tried any of the practices in this book, many of them appear to be closely related to various Buddhist techniques. For example, he discusses something like a non-conceptual shikantaza, a breathing exercise that sounds very similar to Goenka's fast body scanning, and a practice akin to Shinzen's "gone" that looks for the emptiness from which various phenomena arise and cease. Since it's difficult to learn techniques just from a book, I'm likely to stick with the versions of these I already know. As a result, for me, the book is more valuable for its philosophical stance than as a practice manual. Wallis progressively describes a version of monism that comes incredibly close to Spinoza. All phenomena are seen as simply modes in the unfolding of the non-dual God/Goddess Awareness (Shiva/Shakti). There is, however, one crucial twist that brings it closer to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche's crowning contribution to the univocity of Being. The heart of the Recognition school is the idea that you are this very awareness; you are God; you are Awareness itself, the groundless ground of Being. From a logical perspective, this suffers from all the usual recursive difficulties. But from a mystical perspective, it makes for an inspiring and bottomless vision of the world in a grain of scan.
