 For Śaṅkara, īśvara’s emanation into the universe not only indicates that the universe is sentient, but also how living beings come to possess phenomenal consciousness and identify themselves as individuals. Even though the entire universe is sentient, individual sentiency is only expressed under the condition of having a mind. He employs the analogy of reflection to explain the relationship of mind and consciousness, and to provisionally wed intrinsic reflexivity with cognitive intentionality. His theory of reflection is also a novel way of addressing the decombination problem in cosmopsychism—the explanatory gap between universal and individual organism consciousness. (See Albahari 2019 on the decombination problem).