There's a sentence at the center of Tantric ritual that quietly demolishes the ordinary idea of worship: only God can worship God. You cannot, as a small separate creature, successfully petition a great separate deity for favors. To worship Śiva, you must first become Śiva.1 The ritual doesn't start with you on your knees asking; it starts with you transforming yourself into the divine, and only then offering worship — God to God. And here's the part that should stop you: the dualists who believe the soul and God are eternally separate agree with this completely. Even they hold that you must make yourself a Śiva to worship Śiva.2 The doctrines fight bitterly on paper. At the altar, they do nearly the same thing.
This is the nondualist theory of ritual — the answer to "why does worship work, and what is it actually for?" — drawn from Abhinava Gupta's Tantrāloka chapter 15 and Alexis Sanderson's seminal articles, which Wallis studied with Sanderson himself.3
The core moves:
For Abhinava, every act of worship is a mode of samāveśa — immersion into divine Reality. And the surprising part: ritual accomplishes this immersion by the same method as meditative contemplation of ultimate Truth — through vikalpa-saṃskāra, "the refinement and purification of thought-constructs to bring them into alignment with the nature of reality" (the engine of śākta-upāya).7
This is why a nondualist like Abhinava could keep ritual at all. For him the basic impurity (mala) isn't a substance to be physically scrubbed off (the dualist view) but ignorance — so any ritual that earns a place in his system must be a form of thought-realignment, not a magical cleaning operation.8 He couldn't dispense with daily ritual (it was the most established form of Tantric practice, the base of the whole tradition), so he reinterpreted it: all the paraphernalia, summonings, and offerings are, underneath, a rehearsal in which the practitioner erodes his identity as a separate subject among separate objects and projects, via the maṇḍala, the vision of his true identity — an all-containing Self.9 Through constant repetition (abhyāsa), the visionary projection becomes his fundamental, moment-to-moment identity. Sanderson's beautiful summary: the scriptural Word-essence that entered him at initiation "speaks with ever increasing clarity... until at last it falls silent in unquestioning self-knowledge."10
This page is the why behind the structure of Tantric ritual (the what). It's ritual run as vikalpa-saṃskāra, aimed at samāveśa, and it hinges on the nondual reading of mala as ignorance not substance. The "nonduality of the factors of action" it culminates in is the practical face of kriyā vs. karma (ritual as free play, not result-seeking transaction), and the "overspill" it promises connects to everyday life as divine play.
The doctrine culminates in a single grammatically precise formula, and it rewards slow reading. Abhinava says ritual worship brings about "a state of identity of all the factors of action with Śiva."11 The factors of action are the grammatical cases of Sanskrit: the agent (who acts), the object (what's acted on), the instrument (with what), the purpose (for what), the source (from what), the locus (where). Abhinava's claim: in correct Tantric worship, all six are recognized as Śiva. So the understanding to cultivate is: "I, God, worship God, by means of God, on God, from God, and for the sake of God alone." This is "the nonduality of the factors of action."12
Sit with what that does. Ordinary worship has a structure of separation baked into its grammar: I (small, separate) petition a deity (other, superior) for (some advantage I lack). Every grammatical slot reinforces duality. Abhinava collapses the grammar itself. There's no separate agent, no separate object, no separate purpose — it's all one Consciousness, "the one white light diffracting itself into a spectrum of colors to make beautiful art." Worship becomes play (kṛīḍā), done for no reason but to express innate divinity. And this isn't decorative — Abhinava warns it's crucial, because ritual performed with the false grammar ("I, a helpless pathetic creature, petition a separate deity that I might be blessed with some advantage") actively strengthens the āṇava-mala, the root sense of separate deficiency.13 The same rite, performed with two different grammars, points in opposite directions: one toward liberation, one toward deeper contraction. Wallis names the wrong version exactly: spiritual materialism, "an insidious impostor masquerading as the true spiritual life." The case study shows the whole theory in one sentence — worship doesn't change God's mind about you; it rehearses, in grammar made flesh, the dissolution of the separation that made you think you needed to change God's mind.
The practice has a clear shape and a clear payoff. Become the deity first. Before worshipping, perform the self-divinization that makes you "a Śiva" — you cannot worship God as a separate petitioner without strengthening your sense of separation. Hold the strong-meaning bar. Don't settle for going through motions you intellectually understand (weak meaning); the aim is ritual that evokes liberating awareness as you perform it (strong meaning) — so attention and felt recognition, not correct mechanics, are the real work. Run the grammar. Cultivate, through the rite, the recognition: I-God worship God, by God, on God, from God, for God — no separate agent, object, or purpose anywhere. Let it overspill. Abhinava's image: like a well-trained horse that keeps its discipline even in chaotic battle, one for whom all the factors of action have become God through repeated ritual practice "dispels the duality of the factors of action even in everyday acts."14 Washing dishes, walking down the street, carrying laundry — all become the play of the one Actor. The ritual is a rehearsal space; its success is measured not in the temple but in whether the nondual awareness overspills into ordinary life. If it stays confined to the meditation room, you've kept exactly the spiritual/worldly divide the Tantra exists to erase.
Spiritual materialism (the petition grammar). You perform the rite as a separate creature begging a separate deity for advantages — health, money, success, even "enlightenment" as an acquisition. This doesn't just fail; it strengthens the root impurity, deepening the very separateness it should dissolve. The tell: worship that leaves you feeling small and needy, oriented around getting outcomes rather than recognizing identity.
Routinization (meaningless or merely-weak ritual). You let the rite become mechanical motion (meaningless) or stop at intellectual understanding of the symbolism (weak meaning), never letting it evoke an actual inner experience. This is exactly the mechanization Abhinava resisted. The tell: the ritual is performed correctly and changes nothing in you — the strong-meaning bar quietly abandoned for the comfort of going through the motions.
A specific, well-sourced doctrine (Abhinava's Tantrāloka 15, Sanderson's articles), presented by Wallis with unusual proximity to the scholarship.15 The genuine tension is between dualist and nondualist ritual theory — and it's subtle, because they converge on practice ("only God can worship God," shared ritual structure) while diverging on whether inner experience matters. The open question this raises: if the rituals are nearly identical and only the understanding differs, is the dualist/nondualist split a real difference in the ritual or only a difference in the practitioner's interpretation riding on top of it? Abhinava's own position — that the view you hold in ritual is what "directs the energy of your efforts toward one goal or another" — suggests the metaphysics matters enormously experientially even when it changes nothing behaviorally, which is a striking claim about the power of interpretation over identical action.
The deepest convergence-and-split here is between the dualist Saiddhāntika and the nondualist Abhinava — and Wallis stages it precisely. Both agree, remarkably, that only God can worship God: both transform the practitioner into a Śiva before worship, and both run the same ritual structure. They split on a single hinge: does it matter whether the rite produces an inner experience? The dualist says no — the ritual works ex opere operato, by correct performance, regardless of the performer's awareness; mala is a substance being mechanically removed. The nondualist says the rite is worthless unless it evokes liberating awareness, because mala is ignorance and only awareness dispels it. The shared ground is the form (become God, then worship); what differs is the locus of efficacy (the act itself vs. the awareness in the act). Read together, the two expose is something neither states cleanly: the same ritual can be a mechanical operation or a liberating recognition, and which one it is depends entirely on a metaphysical commitment that leaves no behavioral trace — two people performing visibly identical rites, one accumulating merit on a separate soul, the other dissolving the very idea of a separate soul. The doctrine of "strong meaning" is the nondualist's refusal to let ritual become the empty mechanism every religion drifts toward — and the wager that interpretation, not action, is where liberation actually lives.
The plain link: this is a theory of what ritual does to the people who perform it — how repeated symbolic action reshapes identity — which is exactly the territory of ritual psychology and the behavioral engineering of ceremony.
The Sharpest Implication If the same ritual, performed identically, either liberates you or deepens your bondage depending only on the grammar of awareness you bring to it — then the efficacy of all your spiritual practice lives in a place that leaves no external trace. Two people do the exact same meditation, say the exact same mantra, perform the exact same rite; one dissolves the separate self, the other reinforces it, and nothing observable distinguishes them. The destabilizing part: you cannot tell from the outside — or even, easily, from a checklist of correct technique — whether your own practice is liberating or quietly strengthening your sense of being a small separate creature begging the universe for advantages. The petition grammar ("please give me peace, give me progress, give me enlightenment") is the default human posture, and it can wear the full costume of devotion while doing the opposite of its purpose. The whole game is a grammar shift no one can verify but you — from "I beg God for X" to "God plays as me, worshipping God, for the joy of it." And the only honest test is the overspill: is the nonduality leaking into how you wash the dishes, or is it staying politely inside the shrine?
Generative Questions