by Yogi Ananda Viraj (Eugene P. Kelly, Jr.)
The fact that despite the discontinuities of daily existence we manage to maintain an enduring sense of personhood has intrigued thinkers of almost all religions and philosophies. The task that we set before ourselves in this brief essay is an examination of self-formation (ahamkara) and its complementary aspects of time, space, body, and movement. These five constituents of phenomenal existence rise and fall together.
The question of selfhood is inseparable from the problem of language (in all its manifestation). Language is intrinsically other oriented or communal. Even in thinking, language is directional. We presume a listener who “hears” our thoughts and/or a thinker who thinks them. Any manifestation of meaningfulness presupposes a dualism. We have set out to examine the nature of this dualism. We have set out to examine the nature of this dualism by way of observation, sticking as close to experience as possible while attempting to avoid any unwarranted explanations or speculations. However, this examination has made use of basic yogic terminology throughout, the reason being that yoga as well as “yogic” language seeks to describe rather than explain. “Yogic language” could be any language which chooses to describe religious life be it Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, etc.
It is hoped that through the descriptions presented here any person serious about understanding the problems of selfhood can gain a foothold for further meditation and observation.
So God created man in his own image…
Genesis I.27
In the beginning this world was atman (Self)
alone in the form of a Person. Looking around, he saw nothing else than himself.
He said first: “I am.”
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad I.4.1
Because of the association (samyoga) of the two the non-conscious appears as if conscious.
Samkya-Karika XX
Self-formation (Ahamkara)
Our inquiry begins not with the question of how selfhood comes into being but more importantly with the fact that it comes into being. In order to enter into such a witnessing we shall start with some observations on thinking. In this case what is meant by thinking is the quiet solitary activity of thinking that is done “in the mind.”
I find myself at my desk thinking of that which I am about to write. Thoughts spontaneously arise that pertain to the subject to be discussed and as if I were present to myself my thinking takes on a dialogical character. I am carrying on a conversation with “myself.” I talk, i.e. think, as if I were listening to myself. The language that arises simply takes it for granted that there is a listener. One realizes from this that language, thought itself, is intrinsically other oriented. I cannot think one thought that is not tacitly or overtly directed to another. In ordinary communication this does not necessarily arise as an occasion for further examination. However, the curious fact that otherness is invariably presumed in my thinking prompts me to watch more closely. Does each thought talk to me, am I talking to myself? We can imagine a condition of no thought (citta-vrtti-nirodhah) but then how would I know if I were in no thought? If there were no re-cognition, i.e. thought, of no-thought could there be me or even “no-thought?” In order for me to be there thought must somehow be present to imply my listening. No thought, no listening. No listening, no me.
In all thinking “I” am there. Thought is directed to its alleged other, me, the hearer. Yet without thought I am not. How could I know I was? It is commonly accepted that for foreground thoughts, thought that I think, to carry meaning there must be the “tacit dimension” of a linguistic background which is somehow present to contextually make sense of the thought. For example, I think, “the lawn needs mowing.” Therefore some unexpressed knowledge of lawns, mowers and judgment as to proper lengths of lawns are implied. This background knowledge does not unfold in serial order; it is present, perhaps by its absence, as a whole, all at once giving significance to the foreground arising. It does not take a linear thought process to realize the lawn needs mowing, we see this at once. We have therefore a play of foreground-background complementarity. We could say that the foreground arises as word imbued with the power of the silent dimension which is its animating force. Religious terms, such as “God,” are in this sense words of power which evoke a vast linguistic, emotional, and felt dimension upon which their significance is dependent. So therefore words are no longer seen as impotent atomic entities like “bits” of information but as messengers heralding vast worlds of meaning. Words are carrying the unsaid. Communication is steeped in silence. Of course to include all of language we must cite gesture and all the other modes of communication as bearing the same basic structure of foreground-background, content-context, of foreground-horizontal play. This sheds light on the awesome task of scriptural interpretation, for from which background do the foreground “statements” of a text gain meaning? This is a task with which many contemporary religionist and philosophers are dealing.
We now take up the problem of identity through change. We have all heard the phrase, “I don’t feel any older now than I did many years ago.” Or, “I feel better now than I did when I was thirty.” Statements such as these reveal a presumed identity that has endured through time, feeling better now than then or feeling a certain sameness throughout time. Even if people convert from one philosophical or religious position to another, a feeling of their continuity of identity pervades their speech. On a microscopic level that same feeling of enduring identity pervades our moment to moment thinking. “I feel better now than I did earlier today,” or “I forgot what I was just about to say,” both imply the presence of a core person, an I, that endures through time. The Christian who converts to Islam most often does not say I am not the person who I was but that they, I, have changed. From our point of view the background has changed, making possible “new” or different foreground appearances. The church down the street is something different, the New Testament is a different book, even marriage, family, and the like, as foreground arisings have become transformed in accordance with the organizing and animating force of the newly adopted and incorporated background. In short, not only have one’s thoughts changed through this conversion but one’s empirical surroundings have been made anew. This newness or provisional rebirth lasts until….
Many people opt for such transformations in their search for satisfactions. Some may adopt two, three, or even more philosophical or religious positions in “their lifetimes.” However, at the root of all transformations, be they foreground or background, there is the ever-present sense of selfhood. As radical as these shifts may be, that sense of self remains the unquestioned stage upon which I narrate the vicissitudes of my biography.
Returning now to “my thoughts to myself” we can observe the feelings of selfhood not only in thought but in the movement of breath. We point to our chest in reflexive self-recognition. “I didn’t do it.” We sit quietly feeling our breath move providing us with authoritative empirical evidence of our physical being as “me.” The apparent changelessness of I-ness (asmita) reinforced by the constancy of breathing appears indubitable, “I am.” However, the strange peculiarity that I need thought in order to be, as Descartes well knew, prompts me to ask if I am or can be without thought. I need the reflexive quality of thought to be. Yet, is this reflexive quality of thought alone enough to be? Thoughts change, and sometimes radically and abruptly. We sit meditation and the phone rings. There occurs a profound disruption of thought association in its normal patterns of operations, and yet we still maintain, on at least a phenomenal level, the conviction of I-ness. “I was meditating now I am answering the phone.” Most of us perceive no disruption of selfhood. Somehow I have remained the same throughout. This continuity of selfhood is what the yogis call asmita or I-am-ness.
Time and Selfhood
We experience ourselves as enduring through time: “I was meditating,” “I am answering the phone,” “I will now return to meditation.” The thoughts and the empirical environment have changed and yet we are supremely confident in I-am-ness. Thoughts have become totally different and yet it is still I who thinks them. But no though, no I. How can the position of selfhood be a constant? If no thought, no I, then how am I so stable throughout radical changes of thought? Am “I” a constant being going from birth to death in what the yogis call samsara, the cycle of existence from birth to death to birth. If the I requires thought to be it cannot be I who endures. And if there is no thought how then can there be enduring? To endure through time there must be that which endures. If the I comes to an end in no thought, I do not endure and yet I feel I do.
There are those who would interpret “eternity” as duration, moment following moment forever. Yogis, however, view eternity as the timeless, the absoluter present, time as the changeless which manifests and devours moments, or even a frozen moment without reference to a past or future. Yogis call the eternal, unchanging vision purusa or Isvara, the Lord. This is an absolute and pure incarnation(pure sattva) (Y.S. III.55). All else that unfolds in and through time is called the manifestations of prakrti or sarga (creation). Yogis say that by association of the unchanging with its incarnation, creation is brought about. This basic background information regarding yogic philosophy is all we will require for an understanding of the yogic vision.
The response of prakrti, or the creative aspect, to the changeless is “I am.” Thought somehow appropriates the changeless and transforms it into change. However, at its root the changing remains inactive. The inactive is absorbed without being negated. The I is the negation-affirmation of the eternal. Without this changelessness beyond thought, beyond self-formation (ahamkara), self and time could not arise. The eternal is the ultimate reference point to which I and time refer for their own arising. The eternal is the ultimate background (adi-purusa) which animates all foreground thoughts (citta-vrttis) and backgrounds (provisional purusas or ksara-purusas, see Bhagvad Gita, XV.16).
The constancy that self-identity absorbs and transforms into self-endurance is an absolute time or sameness which is totally indifferent to biographical events. It merely provides the basis for reading life as biography. Despite the radical conversions of our lives be they from mediation to telephone or from Christianity to Islam this changelessness provides the ultimate root and reference of I-am-ness. God did create us in his own image and likeness. Time, however, often cancels the realization of our rootedness in God, the eternal. God does not endure. God simply is, in the sense of changelessness. God is our reference for self and time. The purusa’s eternity grants us the tacit occasion for identity which prompts the dispersion of eternity into past, present, and future as three distinct even if interrelated moments. The foundation or source of our selfhood is its own cancellation. No-thought is a return to origin in order to realize our unconditional dependence on God, purusa.
Space and Selfhood
One identity has been assumed and time is on the march as history and biography, we/I are/am situated. Without thought as self-reference and time, here and there are not. The breath, so related to thought production, having been given over to purusa in no-thought (nirodha) can no longer provide us with locational reference. The purusa as eternal remains undivided until “I am.” With the arising of I comes here and there, or in acoustic space, higher and lower. The eternal can be and is apparently divided through thought yet it remains the ultimate reference point of temporal as well as spatial divisions. Any here can become a there and any high can become a low and vice versa. The undivided wholeness of the changeless is indifferent to imposed distance and proximity. Location is differentiation of that undifferentiated which, while indifferent to division, provides its basis. “On God there is no East or West….”
The reabsorption of space would be the ending of differentiation. Purusa, or the highest vision, in cancelling out I-am-ness also withdraws space into itself; a here and there or high and low are meaningless. Without the provisional backgrounds’ (ksara-purusa) operations, which give rise to foreground spatial differentiations of far and near via thought, space is dissolved. Space in its prakrtic sense is always an investment brought about by thought. It is not the neutral void of absolute space which is a workable theory at best. Purusa generously gives itself over to all differentiation without losing its integrity.
In spatial relations I am the apparent reference point. It is this conditional reference point which draws to itself “in a flash” the requisites needed for location. This “drawing in” of its requisites is “body-formation.”
Body and Selfhood
From a biological point of view the nervous system is never neutral or indifferent with regard to self-formation (ahamkara). Because of our often being unalert and historically ill- or non-informed, the spatial and temporal differentiations of selfhood are taken as intrinsically real. The world appears to us as unquestionably “out there.” Selfhood, as we have seen, implies temporality and location. In this way it animates the neuro-muscular apprehension of the “world.” We not only think the world to be “at a distance” from us but we actually feel it to be so. We have also seen that with the change of provisional purusas or backgrounds the empirical apprehension of the world can be radically altered. An Australian aboriginal has a very different spatial sense than, say, a Wall Street stockbroker. The backgrounds or ksara-purusa, being different, give rise to varying foreground arisings (see B.G. XV.16). If all I were to know were my aboriginal or my Wall Street world then I would more than likely assume the world to be the way I perceive it and only the way I perceive it. A change of backgrounds would necessarily result in a change of foreground perception and therefore a questioning of an absolute world order. However, for the most part such an intercultural and interdimensional transition is a remote possibility. Therefore most of us do not bring into question our spatial and temporal vision. But the yogin tests everything.
The yogin may practice a form of spiritual-cultural confrontation for the sake of growth but he or she does not stop at that, for that enduring problem of selfhood may appropriate all of these changes and turn them into narrative, rendering them impotent as regards the ultimate vision. “I was a Buddhist but now I am practicing Sufism.” Hence, no tradition, which is a unique form of communicating the immortal to the mortal, is taken to its end which is its source. The beginning and end of all traditions is beyond any form of identification and appropriation. The full realization of tradition circumvents the ugly problem of selfhood grabbing what properly belongs to God (changelessness) and tagging it on to self (“I did this, now I’m doing that”).
It is unquestionable to one who knows history, has mediated profoundly, or has lived in other cultures, that the “world” as empirically perceived is not the same for all. One could say that our nervous system is innocently incarnating backgrounds which make the worlds appear different, and sometimes very different. But how about a full or total incarnation? The body can respond to God. His word can become flesh. When the word is with God he is transcendental. Salvation begins when the word is made flesh, incarnate. The yogis claim, as do the Christians, that the body is the abode or temple of God. In the fullest sense of incarnation (Isvara) the body is God, giving full felt expression to the undivided wholeness of the purusa. It is only the inferior or incomplete incarnations of the provisional purusa which limit the body’s ability to become whole or spiritually healthy.
From another angle we could say that the plurality of provisional background gives rise to a plurality of bodies. Yet, as we have seen, the underlying changelessness can be rendered as either the occasion for the realization of itself or the appropriating of the plurality by the I, neutralizing the potentially beneficial results of body changes. Obviously, it is a matter of directing one’s intelligence (buddhi) either to the One or the selfishness. That is, either one is devoted to God (Isvara-pranidhana) or to self (asmita). The kind of body one realizes always depends upon the kind of purusa being incarnate. It goes without saying that the same holds true not only for the body but for the world as well (see B.G. XI.13).
Knowledge infuses the body with world. The background (fundamental presuppositions or beliefs) that assumes the world to be “out there” will give rise to a perceiver who perceives things “out there.” God, in his role as judge, brings all presuppositions into supreme question. The judgment of God is the only radical antidote to dogmatic assertions about the nature of “the world” as well as “the body.” The undivided radically suspends all differentiations.
The body (prakrti) is fluid in its ability to incarnate the many. It holds within itself a store of possible bodies. It anxiously awaits the moment when it can be released from the confines of sedimentation and breathe new worlds once again. It is attachment to foreground manifestations that sediment the incarnate backgrounds which give rise to them (see B.G. II.62, 63). Once the body is set in ontological motion it is on its way toward total release (moksha) in God (S.K. LXII).
Movement and Selfhood
Once we have grasped the notion of foreground-background reciprocity as regards body-world manifestation we can begin to clarify what it means to move in the yogic sense.
With selfhood firmly entrenched, implying all of its attendant incarnate spatio-temporal beliefs, movement is reduced to an I in a body moving in space through biographical time. I operate on the world for the sake of myself or others. I perceive a world out there that seems to exist independent of me. I can then theorize about the nature of such a world, understand how it works, and use it to my or others’ advantage. In my actions I operate by moving through space and time. I am situated in my body, my body is situated here in space and now in time. The past and future are at a distance from me here, now, as are the objects that make up my surroundings. I, in my body, have to move myself to have dealings with those objects, which, like me, seem to be spatially and temporally located as self existent things. This, in brief, is the empirical view correlative with I-am-ness.
Yogically speaking, this view gives rise to suffering. It ignores the foundation, origin, and end of itself. This ignorance (advidya) takes the I to be the true locus of Self (atman, purusa), temporality as absolute time or eternity, that which breeds sorrow (attachment to foreground) as that which is joyful (atman), and that which is impure or mixed as pure or undivided (Y.S. II.5). This confinement of the body to one form of incarnation stifles the intrinsic drive of prakrti to be productive and yields suffering in so doing. For the most part people are then reduced to a vicious circle of searching for pleasure and avoiding pain in the mistaken belief that liberation can be attained while the body is bound.
God is ever free (Y.S. II.24). So therefore from one point of view, it is not the purusa which requires freedom but prakrti (Y.S. II.20, III.35). As long as the felt notion of selfhood persists, movement in the yogic sense is thwarted. The body remains frustrated. The fullest incarnation is the unconditional release of body. The One cannot be realized except through the incarnation (John 14:6). Yogically speaking, movement is the movement of “body” to ever new and fresh incarnations in the movement toward totality. In terms of the performance of actions, it is the body’s ability to incarnate to the fullest extent possible any purusa (ksara or Isvara), eliminating the divisive posture of selfhood. That which acts, from the yogic vision, is the whole. I and that are not two but one. Self, body, knowledge, action, and world are not thematically distinguished. Yogic attention is such as to grant to action a resoluteness which disallows the duality of fearful hesitancy. I am not there to be concerned about the outcome of my actions; full-bodied attention is there to execute action effectively. Space, time, self, body, and movement act as an integral whole without the anxiety concomitant with selfhood (asmita). Movement therefore is movement of wholes not parts. Attention is not dismembered but undivided. Distraction is division.
Underlying all movement, however, is the unity of God as incarnate. The restrictions of foreground-background complementarity always act to divide wholeness is never, in the ultimate sense, sullied. It still retains its integrity despite the modifications which arise to divide it into phenomena. Once this is realized, through full-bodied participation in the One, the phenomenal arisings of body-worlds are seen to be agentless. Yogis view the cycles of restriction and release to be the by-product of the three gunas. These gunas are configurations of body-mind-world integration or disintegration. Sattva, characterized by lightness and ease, is the configuration felt to be whole and unmarred by selfhood. Rajas, characterized by activity and stimulation, is the felt disposition of selfhood operating on world as an agent for the sake of some benefit or reward. Tamas, characterized by dullness and inertia, is the disposition of selfhood at its most disintegrated and alienated. It is productive of heedlessness and irresponsible indifference. Prakrti’s response to the eternal conforms to any one of these three incarnate attitudes, giving rise to various levels of embodiment. Obviously, it is the yogi’s task to cultivate sattva-guna in order to realize oneness. God or Isvara, is said to abide as absolute sattva untainted by the disintegrating rajas and tamas gunas (V.B. I.24). The movement of these three is the movement to more or less incarnate integration. The ability to witness the guna at work obviates the need to posit agency thereby thwarting the tendency to maintain the authority of confining embodiments. As we saw above, it is the attachment to foreground manifestations which gives rise to them. I therefore am at the effect of the world “out there.” This attachment sediments not only the background (ksara-purusa) but also maintains a certain “level” of body integration (guna).
The movement of the gunas is not the movement of an I from level to level, but the movement of the gunas alone. At the sattvic level selfhood is absent (or integrated) and hence movement cannot be claimed or appropriated by an I. However, rajas and tamas do allow for such a claim, and the continuity “borrowed” from eternity can easily be perverted into biography. It is when the yogi fails to see gunas acting on gunas that selfhood and disintegration arise to generate suffering (See B.G. Chap. XIV-XVIII). Sattva allows for yogic movement as totalistic action; rajas and tamas disperse the whole and reduce movement to an incarnate I that acts on and in an objective world. It is the movement of these three gunas which either allows eternity to live or disperses it as time.
The key to the yogi’s freedom from attachment to the gunas is resoluteness. The undivided attention paid to the task at hand keeps the body and world undivided. The second the yogi wavers in that attention and concern for self arises he or she enters into disintegration and the possibility for the entrance of suffering increases. However, the yogi who has become Isvara and then returns to mortality witnesses prakrti’s play with purusa and cultivates detachment. The self unfolds as an image of God and as just an image. God is the Self of all selves. Prakrti’s dance is seen for what it is, not in the abstract conceptual sense, but, in the yogi’s surrender to the play of gunas. It is simply the way in which these two sides of us are at work. Prakrti makes continuity of self out of the eternity of selflessness. Once the process is seen for what it is and accepted then life can be lived in recognition of both sides of our humanness.
Concluding Remarks
Two birds with fair wings, inseparable companions,
Have found refuge in the same sheltering tree.
One incessantly eats from the fig tree;
The other, not eating, just looks on.
Rg Veda 1.164.20
The yogi’s way of life is full-felt realization of both sides of life, prakrti and purusa. The recognition that Isvara or the Lord is the eternal cornerstone of self and world enables him or her to see life as both involvement and sacrifice. The ability to be whole-heartedly attentive while at the same time detached is a result of acceptance of and surrender to our authentic Self as beyond identity. This surrender renders unnecessary the clinging to any objective sense of self making possible the sacrifice of all accumulated experience in favor of resoluteness and responsible action. Attentiveness is God’s way of being in the world of action, “the inaction in action and the action in inaction.”
Ultimately, we are beyond dualism. The fact that language presupposes it still leaves the eternal unsullied or whole. However it is only with the full realization of oneness or total incarnation that the play of prakrti’s gunas is seen for what it is. Then one is able to abide as Self in the midst of self. The Lord as the source or ground of our self is simply fact. Any phenomenal arising of self and its desires does not necessarily give rise to acting on those needs. The eternal presents us with the opportunity for change to be liberating. Selfhood can rise and fall without becoming Selfhood. Rest in Self can be the occasion for gunas to act on gunas without our feeling compelled to fulfill the dictates of the gunas (B.G. XIV.22-24).
It is the fundamental mistake of avidya or ignorance which lies at the bottom of our human predicament. Language as the structural animator of self, body, and world, is inherently dualistic. However, as we have seen, this dualism is possible only on the basis of the non-dual. Prakrti and purusa are both necessary for human life; neither is sufficient unto itself. We feel that our thoughts are directed toward another and are projected by a thinker other than the thoughts. If there were a thinker, what need would there be for it to think the thoughts; it would have to know them in advance to think them, making thinking unnecessary. If there were a listener, what would the listener do with the thoughts heard? Would it think them? If so, we have the problem of the thinker to contend with a second time. Of course it could be said that the Lord thinks and/or listens to thought, in which case we would have to revise our conception of “thinker” and “listener” a great deal.
The reflection of the eternal, giving rise to what we commonly call consciousness must be seen for what it is. We are made in the image of God; God looks on but never “eats of the fruit.” The Lord’s manner of being is man. We are contingent beings. The strange ability of change to appropriate changelessness and make itself appear as the changeless, giving rise to selfhood, conceals our contingency. At the core, however, the eternal calls for our return. “Our God is a jealous God;” our experience of suffering is the call for return. We can only take so much time away from our Lord; we are called to return and rest in eternity through sleep, meditation, and absorption. This return allows prakrti a respite from her myriad formations; she finds her release from limitation in her embrace of oneness. It is her task to liberate purusa from her own bonds. The provisional purusas have been assuming the role of Self dictating her incarnate forms. It is only by her total embrace of purusa that she and he are freed.
Abbreviations
B.G. Bhagavad Gita
Y.S. Yoga Sutra
V.B. Vyasa-bhasya
S.K. Samkhya Karikas