The system takes the twenty-five principles of Samkhya and puts eleven more above them, which is the clearest way to see what it is doing. Samkhya stops at purusha and prakriti, a consciousness and a nature that have nothing to say to each other. Kashmir Shaivism continues upward through the pure levels, Shiva and Shakti at the top as the light of awareness and its own act of noticing itself, then sadashiva, ishvara and shuddhavidya, each a further step in which the I and the this separate a little more.
Between the pure levels and the ordinary world stands maya, which here is not illusion in the Advaita sense but a real power of concealment. Under it operate the five kanchukas, the cloaks, and they are the mechanism by which unlimited awareness becomes a person. Kala limits the power to act, vidya limits knowledge, raga produces the wanting of particular things, kala in its second sense imposes time, and niyati imposes causal and spatial restriction. What is left when all five are on is a limited subject who feels separate.
The tradition speaks of three impurities as well, the sense of being incomplete, the sense that objects are other, and the residue of action, and the three are removed in different ways. None of this describes something that went wrong. The contraction is held to be a free act of the same awareness that is contracted, which is why the tradition can call the whole thing play.