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." According to these principles, causality not pertaining either to the insentient or to the non-divine intelligence, the mere will of Maheśvara, the absolute Lord, when he wills to emanate into thousands of forms, as this or that difference, this or that action, this or that modification of entity, of birth, continuance, and the like, in the series of transmigratory environments,--his mere will is his progressively higher and higher activity, that is to say, his universal creativeness. How he creates the world by his will alone is clearly exhibited in the following illustration-- "The tree or jar produced by the mere will of thaumaturgists, without clay, without seed, continues to serve its proper purpose as tree or jar." If clay and similar materials were really the substantial cause of the jar and the rest, how could they be produced by the mere volition of the thaumaturgist? If you say: Some jars and some plants are made of clay, and spring from seeds, while others arise from the bare volition of the thaumaturgist; then we should inform you that it is a fact notorious to all the world that _different_ things must emanate from different materials.