Context

Sūtras 1–3 established the cosmic picture: citi unfolds the universe through her own will, on her own screen, diversified through matched subject-object pairs. Sūtra 4 makes it personal: the individual (cetana) is this same citi in a contracted mode, and therefore contains the entire universe within itself. This is the basis of the practitioner's inquiry — the universe can be known inwardly because it is present inwardly. The sūtra opens the sequence (4–7) that describes the individual conscious being at increasing levels of structural detail.

Primary reading

The word api ('even,' 'also') is the pivot. There is an implied concession: you might think the contracted individual is somehow less than the cosmic display — but even the contracted one embodies the whole universe, just in compressed form. The compound citisaṃkocātmā defines the individual essentially: its very nature (ātmā) is the contraction of citi, not a different substance that citi produced. And saṃkucitaviśvamayaḥ completes the claim — the individual consists of the universe. The teaching turns the practitioner toward the interior: the full cosmological structure of the thirty-six tattvas is present within each conscious being's experience, as structure rather than as concept.

Commentarial layer

Kṣemarāja's commentary grounds the microcosm-macrocosm identity that underlies Trika practice: whatever the individual takes itself to be — body, breath, subtle apparatus — each, examined as a knower, proves to be citi in contracted operation, and each carries the whole within it. The tradition elaborates this identity into a full map of correspondences in which the body is read as cosmos — its central axis as the universal axis, its breath as the universal pulsation (spanda), its faculties as contracted forms of the cosmic powers. The sūtra thus converts cosmology into anatomy: what sūtras 1–3 said of the universe, the practitioner may now verify in the immediate structure of embodied experience.

Common misreadings

Reading saṃkoca as diminishment or inferiority — in Trika, contraction is a mode of freedom, not a failure of consciousness; the individual is Śiva contracting, not a creature fallen from Śiva. Missing the force of -mayaḥ: the individual does not reflect or represent the universe; it is the universe in contracted form, and softening the suffix into metaphor undoes the sūtra's entire claim.