Is recognition an event in time or recognition of what was never absent?

{
 "schema_version": 1,
 "artifact_type": "argument_fabric_dossier",
 "question_id": "q:recognition-event-in-time",
 "question": "Is recognition an event in time or recognition of what was never absent?",
 "why_it_matters": "This question cuts to the heart of Trika soteriology and phenomenology. If recognition (pratyabhijñā) is an event in time, liberation is causally conditioned and impermanent. If it is recognition of what was never absent, liberation is the removal of ignorance rather than the production of a new state. The temporality of recognition determines the entire structure of the path.",
 "status": "live_crux",
 "resolution_level": "local_argument",
 "parent_questions": [
  "q:consciousness-fundamental",
  "q:kañcuka-mechanism"
 ],
 "candidate_explanations": [
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:recognition-as-event",
   "tradition_scope": "krama_trika",
   "name": "Recognition as temporal event",
   "best_case": "Recognition is a real cognitive event occurring in time. The bound subject undergoes a transformation through practice, grace, and insight. Recognition is a psychological event with causal antecedents and subsequent effects. The temporality is essential to its meaning.",
   "hard_to_vary_core": [
    "Recognition is described in the Pratyabhijñā texts as occurring after a period of ignorance and practice.",
    "The causes of recognition (grace, teacher, scripture, reasoning) are temporal and contingent.",
    "The experience of recognition has a before and after, implying temporal structure."
   ],
   "current_problems": [
    "If recognition is an event in time, it is impermanent and thus cannot be the ultimate realisation.",
    "The account must explain how a temporal event can reveal an eternal reality without temporalising that reality.",
    "It risks conflating the psychological event of recognition with the ontological condition it reveals."
   ],
   "falsifiers": [
    {
     "type": "phenomenological",
     "condition": "A first-person report of recognition that includes the experience that what was recognised was genuinely new and had not been present prior to the event.",
     "status": "untested"
    }
   ],
   "initial_status": "live"
  },
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:recognition-as-removal-of-veiling",
   "tradition_scope": "pratyabhijna_orthodox",
   "name": "Recognition as removal of ignorance",
   "best_case": "Recognition does not produce something new; it removes the veiling (tirodhāna) that concealed what was always present. The event is epistemic, not ontic. What is recognised was never absent—only ignorance made it seem so. The temporality is in the removal, not the reality.",
   "hard_to_vary_core": [
    "Pratyabhijñā is the re-cognition of one's own nature as Śiva, not the acquisition of a new property.",
    "Ignorance (mala) conceals what is already the case; removal of ignorance does not produce a new ontological state.",
    "The event of recognition has temporal structure, but what it reveals is timeless."
   ],
   "current_problems": [
    "The distinction between epistemic removal and ontic production is difficult to maintain without a substrate that undergoes change.",
    "If recognition removes ignorance, why does ignorance arise at all in a nondual reality?",
    "The account must explain why removal of ignorance appears to have all the marks of a real transformation."
   ],
   "falsifiers": [
    {
     "type": "prasanga",
     "condition": "A reconstruction showing that removal-of-veiling entails either a change in the substrate (contradicting nondualism) or a merely apparent change that makes the soteriological path illusory.",
     "status": "untested"
    }
   ],
   "initial_status": "live"
  },
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:recognition-as-timeless-awareness",
   "tradition_scope": "nanavira_phenomenology",
   "name": "Recognition as timeless structure of awareness",
   "best_case": "Recognition is not an event but the timeless structure of awareness disclosing itself. W