About

Loriliai Biernacki is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests include Hinduism, the interface between religion and science, and gender. She authored her first book, 'Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra,' published by Oxford in 2007, which won the Kayden Award in 2008. She is also a co-editor of 'God’s Body: Panentheism Across World Religions,' published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Her study of the 11th century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta, titled 'The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism,' was published by Oxford University Press in 2023 and received the American Academy of Religion Book Prize for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective in 2024. Her current work explores the interstices between religion, science, and panentheism. Biernacki earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied Indian Tantric philosophy, and her Bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University, with a focus on creative writing and poetry.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Sociology
• History
• Theology
• Art
• Psychology
• Cognitive science
• Neuroscience
• Aesthetics
• Literature
• Law

Selected publications

• Defining Body and Mind

  2024-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• The Subtle Body

  2023-01-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter addresses the subtle body (sūkṣma śarīra, puryaṣṭaka) within Abhinavagupta’s Tantric philosophy, arguing that it operates to acknowledge the multiplicity of agencies that make up human volition. The subtle body affords recognition that the human is not master in its own house but instead points to an expansive ecology with multiple expressions of agency directing human choices. Addressing specifically the ideas of theology and agency, this chapter comparatively situates the concept of human agency. Drawing on Darwin’s description of his loss of faith, his rejection of theology over seeing the parasitic wasp infecting the caterpillar, I counterpose Abhinavagupta’s theological description of the subtle body as a body inhabited and directed, not by parasites, but by gods. This chapter argues that Abhinavagupta’s theological inscription of deities driving human action offers a perspectival shift whereby theology registers respect for the affective processes of the body.

  PublisherDOI

• The Matter of Wonder

  2023-01-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter addresses Abhinavagupta’s formulation of wonder (camatkāra). I suggest Abhinavagupta’s interpretation of the phenomenology of wonder may be helpful for a New Materialism in linking wonder not to a transcendence outside the body and matter, but instead to an awareness of an innate subjectivity within materiality. Referencing yogic states and practices around the breath (prāṇāyāma), Abhinavagupta connects the upward-moving breath to the Fourth State (turya), a state in India classically connected with the idea of transcendence. However, this meditative state is linked not to the up and out of the body that we usually associate with transcendence. Instead, it is figured as movement inward to a deeper sense of subjectivity. This chapter addresses one other truism of wonder and transcendence; transcendence is typically figured as a space of timelessness, above the change of the world. Abhinavagupta instead rewrites time back into this transformed notion of transcendence.

  PublisherDOI

• The Matter of Wonder

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy

  Abstract The current discourse of New Materialism seeks to chart a way of addressing our contemporary predicament around environmental destruction through reassessing our relationship and attitudes to matter. This book argues that the panentheism of the 11th-century Indian Hindu thinker Abhinavagupta offers a cogent philosophical model that gives us new ways of thinking about matter, which can help contemporary New Materialist thought. What makes panentheism an attractive model for Abhinavagupta’s philosophy is its Tantric impetus toward both the materiality of the world and the transcendence of divinity, proposing a philosophy that finds consciousness—a subjectivity as and at the very core of matter. Abhinavagupta’s articulation of a foundational and encompassing subjectivity proposes a panentheist solution to a familiar conundrum, one we are still grappling with today—that is: how does consciousness, which is so unlike matter, how does it actually connect to the materiality of our world? In familiar 21st-century terms, how does mind connect to body? This book brings this question to bear in comparative fashion on contemporary issues: our current concerns around what is sentient—animals? viruses? artificial intelligence?—set in relation to Abhinavagupta’s articulation of what gives rise to sentience through his use of the term vimarśa; our current conceptions of information as data—articulated in juxtaposition to Abhinavagupta’s theology of mantra, mystic sound; examining Abhinavagupta’s use of wonder (camatkāra) as camata a philosophical concept, and how his cosmological system (tattva) underwrites his understanding of a foundational subjectivity.

  PublisherDOI

• It from Bit, It from <i>Cit</i>

  2023-01-19

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  Abstract This chapter again takes up Darwin’s loss of faith over the parasitic wasp in light of newer findings that plants and wasps engage in information signaling. Addressing the idea of information, this chapter argues that information takes on a dual nature, both as material substance and as an element that conveys mental intentionality. Comparisons are drawn with contemporary Western ideas of information, using physicist John Wheeler’s seminal “it from bit” and Max Tegmark’s mathematical panpsychism in relation to Abhinavagupta’s panentheism. The final section ties Abhinavagupta’s articulation of subjectivity (ahantā) and being object (idantā) to account for diversity, the agonistic relations of wasps and caterpillars in Abhinavagupta’s nondualism, in a system where there is only one consciousness. This chapter suggests that Abhinavagupta interprets the tattva system, the cosmology he inherits, as a phenomenology of consciousness moving from subjectivity to object in order to explain the multiplicity and diversity that makes up our world.

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• Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism

  2023-01-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter One looks at Abhinavagupta’s conception of subjectivity (ahantā) in relation to matter, and specifically in terms of what it can impart for a New Materialism. Addressing the idea of boundaries, the boundary between matter and life, in relation to viruses and also in terms of ideas of subject and object as grammatical structure, this chapter outlines what this means for the idea that objects might have agency. This chapter also addresses panentheism in relation to atheism and animism, offering comparisons with figures such as Walt Whitman and Spinoza who are frequently invoked for a New Materialism and arguing that Abhinavagupta’s formulation of subjectivity gives voice to a more expansive articulation of immanence than we find even in as radical a thinker as Spinoza. Also, not following the model of object-oriented ontology of thinkers such as William Harman and Timothy Morton, we are not barred from accessing the inside of objects, which themselves have access to subjectivity.

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• Introduction

  2023-01-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter introduces Abhinavagupta and lays out the argument for the book, proposing that Abhinavagupta’s articulation of panentheism, centered around a foundational subjectivity, may offer a helpful intervention for our world today as we rethink our own relationship to matter. Abhinavapupta’s strategy, rethinking the boundaries of life, matter, and consciousness, offers a way to think through materiality, for a New Materialism in particular, compelling in its decentering of the human. This chapter also discusses the primary source materials, especially the section on cosmology taken from Abhinavagupta’s last extensive Sanskrit philosophical work, the Īśvara Pratyabhijñā Vivṛti Vimarśinī, which is not yet available in translation. This chapter also provides preliminary discussion of the relationship between panentheism and New Materialism, and offers an outline of each of the book’s five chapters.

  PublisherDOI

• Tantric Bodies, AI Immortality, and a Yogurt Model of Self

  2023-01-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter focuses on the power of the body to inform and transform what the self is. Drawing from Indian examples of subtle body travel, where yogis can inhabit the bodies of recently deceased kings, this chapter reexamines the idea of bodily incarnation, suggesting a fermentation model, a “yogurt” model for selfhood. This model is used to then examine the implications of our contemporary technological push towards AI, artificial intelligence as extending human mortality in thinkers like Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, arguing that our contemporary technological model relies on an untenable, and unexamined Cartesian mind-body split.

  PublisherDOI

• Panentheism, Panpsychism, Theism

  2023-01-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter addresses a key element of Abhinavagupta’s panentheism: the question of how we get sentience, through looking at the possibilities for computer sentience, machine AI, and specifically Nick Bostrom’s discussion of a paperclip apocalypse. Abhinavagupta locates the essence of sentience in the term vimarśa. I suggest Abhinavagupta’s use of the term vimarśa more closely approximates what contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers, such as Anil Seth and John Searle, understand as consciousness, rather than the terms that are ubiquitously used to translate the notion of consciousness from Indian languages to English, like cit, citi, or saṃvid. This chapter argues that Abhinavagupta affords priority to vimarśa precisely because of its links to activity, a capacity to do things in our material reality. Employing a dual-aspect monism, his formulation parses out a key distinction for his panentheism, but also for a contemporary panpsychism and for New Materialism: the idea of consciousness as a fabric of reality in relation to awareness as a first-person perspective. This entails a pervasive subjectivity, even within matter.

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• Abhinavagupta's Panentheism in Dialogue with Contemporary Neuroscience

  Routledge eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Neuroscience
  • Psychology
  • Cognitive science

  This chapter offers a comparative assessment of the 11th-century Hindu philosopher Abhinavagupta’s nondualist Tantric panentheism, the Pratyabhijñā, or Recognition philosophy in relation to a contemporary, currently popular neuroscientific theory addressing the relation between the mind and the body, Integrated Information Theory (IIT 3.0). Drawing on earlier work pointing to the logical similarities IIT 3.0 bears to Abhinavagupta’s 11th-century model of panentheism with regard to the idea of information as something which is both material and mental, this chapter extends this analysis to the question of how it is that things and entities are classified as sentient or not. While much of Indian philosophy engages with the concept of consciousness, often writ in large and abstract terms, as cit, or samvit, this chapter suggests that Abhinavagupta’s articulation of consciousness as vimarśa may be better suited as a concept for determining the status of sentience. This analysis of Abhinavagupta’s panentheism, particularly with the concept of vimarśa, brings to the forefront a crucial and often somewhat overlooked premise underlying IIT 3.0’s ontological framework: the implicit and requisite assumption of subjectivity within materiality.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ellison Banks Findly

  Hartford Financial Services (United States)

  8 shared

• William Cenkner

  University of America

  8 shared

• John Grimes

  6 shared

• Joseph A. Bracken

  Xavier University

  6 shared

• Ramdas Lamb

  University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

  6 shared

• Thomas A. Forsthoefel

  4 shared

• Lise F. Vail

  Montclair State University

  4 shared

• Carol Salomon

  Seattle University

  4 shared

Education

• B.A., English

  Princeton University

• Ph.D.

  University of Pennsylvania

Awards & honors

• Kayden Award (2008)
• American Academy of Religion Book Prize, Excellence in the S…