Abhinavagupta

The polymath of Kashmir — philosopher, aesthetician and Tantric master, author of the enormous Tantrāloka. In his non-dual Śaivism consciousness is not a witness watching a show but an active, self-luminous power that contracts itself into every limited perceiver, and the world is its play rather than its illusion.

The Tantric material this door actually rests on — a thousand years older than the chart everyone knows, and far stranger. He is also where the letters become cosmology: the alphabet as the mātṛkā, the little mothers, from whose sounds reality is emitted. That is the Sefer Yetzirah's claim, in Sanskrit, with a different alphabet and no contact whatever.