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avesha

आवेश āveśa

Entering, or being entered: by a deity, by a spirit, or by a state of absorption. Monier-Williams gives four senses in one entry and puts the neutral one first, which is the whole difficulty with the word, since it reaches both a divination rite worked through a child medium and the deepest absorption the Kashmiri non-dualists describe. Christopher Wallis adds a syntactic test, crediting Raffaele Torella: avesha takes an instrumental agent, so one is entered by something, where samavesha takes a locative or genitive, so one is immersed in something. Whether the oracular and the contemplative senses share a history is contested among named scholars rather than settled.

Explained in depth in Avesha: what the tantras did when nothing happened

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