by Yogi Ananda Viraj (Eugene P, Kelly, Jr.)
We have attempted to provide the reader with a look inside the yogic vision. Our path assumes the yogic posture and progresses by way of comparison and contrast. We move from a discussion of I-am-ness into a realization of pure awareness at the heart of selfhood, at the heart of experience. Yoga holds that all experience is prevaded, at the radical level, by pure consciousness (purusa). It is through a realization of this omnipresence that wisdom is achieved. As silence is at the heart of sound, purusais at the heart of existence.
We view yoga as a language of accession. It is through this yogic chant that our wisdom eye is opened so we may see what the great sages have left us, the vision that is certain and true. We invite you to walk the path of this chant. This brief article is in no way meant to exhaust the critical and spiritual practices discussed herein. In fact, scholars will find much to criticize for our attempts at comparison and contrast are grossly incomplete. Yet, it is our hope that a narrow path has been cleared for those who wish to broaden and explore.
Section I
Our inquiry takes us to an “interior” where we (I) exist. “Thus I have now weighed all considerations enough and more than enough; and must at length conclude that this proposition ‘I am’, ‘I exist’, whenever I utter it or conceive it in my mind, is necessarily true. “1 Descartes felt, as we all do, that we, the I, necessarily exist. A common formulation of his argument is cogito ergo sum,I think, therefore I am. It is not enough for us to simply say “I,” but the “am” (sum)is required.
“In the beginning this world was self (atman)
alone in the form of a person (purusa).
Looking around, he saw nothing else than himself.
He said first: ‘I am.”‘2
This quote from the Brhadaranyaka Upanisadalso affirms, albeit on a “macrocosmic” level, the existence of I, i.e., the “I am.” The yogic tradition adds something to the “I am” characterizing it as a klesa or affliction. There are five such afflictions: avidya(not knowing), asmita (I am-ness), raga(attachment or passion), dvesa(aversion, and abhinivesa(clinging to life). Yogic tradition states that these afflictions are to be overcome by meditation and a return to our original condition (pratiprasava). Curiously however, the yogic tradition advocates a meditation on I-am-ness as a means for overcoming the dissatisfaction brought about by it (See Yoga Sutra I.17.). It states that a concentration or focus on I-am-ness leads to becoming “conscious of the knower as its object.”3 It is the goal of yoga to come to a knowledge “of” the true knower in order to arrive at freedom. In fact it is the union of the knower or seer with the seen that constitutes I-am-ness:
drg-darsana-saktyor eka-atmatsiva asmita.
I-am-ness is when the two powers of seer
and seen [appear] as a single self.Yoga Sutra II.6
The seen comprises all that we are conscious of.* The key phrase is this sutra being eka-atmata or literally, “one-self-ness.” The seer or purusais held to be pure awareness. The seen or prakrti is “being” or objectivity. Therefore, I-am-ness is the union (samyoga)of awareness or consciousness and the non-conscious or what we are conscious of. What has eluded some commentators and scholars who have dealt with this subject is the nature of this union.
*See Tattva chart on page 21A of Moksha Journal 4.1
Section II
Descartes’ inquiry led him to view the “I am” as a conscious being. “What then am I? A conscious being (rescogitans ). What is that? A being that doubts, understands, asserts, denies, is wiling, is unwilling; further, that has sense and imagination.”4 He viewed the I as a conscious agent, that one is aware of. In other words, self-consciousness is my being conscious “of” myself. He “discovered” the I in a reflective act of inference. He “concludes” that “I am.” However, from a yogic point of view the fact that we take I-am-ness as a given in all experience raises further questions. We have a primordial or native awareness that I am. We don’t set about to arrive at it. We simply are it. Yogically speaking we could reformulate the Cartesian view as follows: “If I am, I know I am.” There is not a reflective return to conclude that I am, rather there is a knowing at the heart of my being.
We can draw upon everyday situations as evidence of this by considering those activities that often preclude reflection. The painter who is deeply involved in the act of painting is not conscious “of ‘ him or herself as the painter. There is simply the act of painting. Yet, without the “I am” as reference, painting could not occur. There is a primal or pre-reflective awareness that “I am painting” which does not require a reflective act of “knowing that I am painting.” We don’t have to be conscious of ourselves as agents of action; we are consciousness and being within being conscious of. This is what the yogis mean by the eka-atmataof knower (consciousness) and known (the seen or being).
In Descartes’ view the I am is a “conscious being” through the act of being conscious “of” something, be it an act or object (even itself). In the yogi’s view the I am is not aconscious being, but simply conscious being. That is, it is not a thing discovered or inferred, but, an activity. “…I can judge only about the things I am aware of. I am aware of my own existence; I want to know what is this ‘I’ of which I am aware.”5 The key word here is “this.” The I am is a “something,” a “this.” Whereas in yoga the I am is a “ness,” a substanceless quality. “Darkness” does not signify that something is dark. It simply denotes a quality or state. I-am-ness is likewise not a something but a condition or quality. In Descartes we find a movement from reflection to objectification to ontologization, or better, to substantiation. In yoga we find that self-consciousness “precedes” reflection and is inseparable from being. There is no movement of the thought to arrive at I am. Rather thought is a bifurcation of I am.
Section III
“He was, indeed, as large as a woman and a
man closely embraced. He caused that self to
fall into two pieces.”6
This quotation from the Upanisad concerns the macrocosmic creation. However, yogically speaking, we duplicate that creation microcosmically. The I am “falls” into two pieces in the subject/object dualism. At the level of I-am-ness, knower, knowing and known are unified. The creative process of the “Self” (atman) necessitates a split of knower and known to bring about the cosmos. Likewise, a split of subject and object is required in the act of perception; perception being isomorphic with creation on the microcosmic level. Yet, this split does not entail a destruction of the essential union of consciousness and being (the seen) at the level of I-am-ness. It is a matter of “looking for oneself” in the way Descartes did that engages the bifurcation process. In the search, consciousness and being “seem” to divide. We could call this search “desire.” In the “I want” the I must be separated from the wanted. Knower is divided from known and yet I-am-ness retains its integral union of seer and seen.
To be conscious is to be self-conscious yet, this selfhood is ever undergoing change. As David Hume noted:
“There are some philosophers who imagine
we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self;
that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence;
and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration,
both of its perfect identity and simplicity.”7
Hume goes on to challenge, most effectively, this notion of an unchanging self-hood or I-am-ness.
“It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same thro’ the whole course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist in that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable.”8
Hume goes on to say, “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception….” So for Hume self-consciousness is always a consciousness of Our “impressions” are always changing, therefore the unchanging notion of selfhood is an illusion. Our imaginative acts on an invariable object and “…that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling…”9 Hume goes on to state that “the relation facilitates the transition of the mind from one object to another, and renders its passage as smooth as if it contemplated one continued object “10 This “resemblance” is the reason for our substitution of the notion of identity instead of that of related objects. So selfhood is confusion as to the nature of identity and resemblance; we assume identity as a substitute for resemblance. We disguise variation and substitute notions of soul, self, and substance.
Yogically speaking we do not substitute a self or substance. Asmita or I-am-ness is not substantial. “It” belongs to the side of being or prakrtias well as to consciousness or purusa . Prakrti is ever undergoing modification (parinama, vrtti) and therefore, no substance abides. Asmitais simply a component of experience. Its ostensible substantiality is not the result of resemblance but the result of the timeless or eternal aspect of pure consciousness present in all experience.
When we speak of prakrtias being, we do not hold to a realist position. “Being” here is used in a phenomenological sense as that which apppears. Also, when we speak of consciousness as eternal we are not positing the existence of something that endures but an aspect or constituent of experience. Yoga does not hold to the notion of a “thing” that does not change. However, our experience comprises changelessness. The leap to infer an eternal substance is a pitfall of the atomistic view of words as referential. The language of yoga seeks both to describe experience and to enable a liberating viewpoint. We would be reaching beyond the intention of yoga if we saw the languages of prakrti and purusa as positing substances. In fact prakrti and its evolutes (intellect, I-maker, mind, five senses, five organs of action, five subtle elements, and five “gross” elements) and purusa are termed tattvas, literally “thatnesses.” Thatness is that which appears without regard to its ontological status. For to turn back on pure consciousness to evaluate its “being” is impossible. Awareness can never be the object of experience.
Section IV
“… the Ego is completely empty of essence components,
has no explicatable content, is undescribable in and for itself:
it is pure Ego and nothing more.” 11
Husserl obviously had a different approach than Hume. His pure or transcendental ego could not be excluded from experience. For Hume this positing was as we have noted, a mistake. Husserl says:
“The Ego seems to be there continually, indeed, necessarily, and this continualness is obviously not that of a stupidly persistent mental process, a ‘fixed idea.’ Instead, the Ego belongs to each coming and going mental process; its ‘regard’ is directed ‘through’ each actional cogito to the objective something.” 12
Husserl and Hume both realized the necessity of the I am in each and every experience. However, Husserl takes matters one step further.
“… the pure Ego would, however, seem to be something essentially necessary;
and, as something absolutely identical throughout every actual or possible change in mental processes,
it cannot in any sense be a really inherent part or moment of the mental processes themselves.” 13
Of course Hume would disagree. But we must ask whether the “pure Ego” is separate from mental processes. Does it have “a transcendency of a peculiar kind”? Our yogic answer would be yes and no. On the one hand, we admit to a transcendent “thatness” in all experience. Purusa is characterized as a witness (saksitvam) and a seer (drastrtvam ).14 It is, therefore, present as a “kind” of subjectivity, however, a kind different from the “consciousness of” something. Rather it is a “consciousness in” all experience. As Husserl contends, it is a transcendency “…which is not constituted–a transcendency within immanency.”15 The pure consciousness of yoga is not regarded as an Ego or I-ness component. The subjectivity of the purusa could be termed a “selfless subjectivity” on the grounds that is never “me” but an essential condition for me to be “primordially” aware that I am (See section II).
The pure consciousness of yoga, as we have seen, must be joined (samyoga ) with the seen (prakrti ) in order for “me” to If, as Husserl contends, the pure Ego “has no explicatable content” and is “undescribable,” why call it an Ego? An I is always in relation to a that, as Hume has demonstrated. But from a yogic point of view the purusa is ultimately never touched or sullied by a relation. It is isolated (kevala). A true relation would change it. It is eternally transcendent, only apparently related. In the condition of ignorance (avidya) the purusa takes the form of the fluctuations of the consciousness of ( citta-vrtti ). Yoga Sutra I. 4 states:
Vrtti-sarupyam itaratra
Otherwise it takes the form of the fluctuations.
In the taking the form of fluctuations, “I am” in relation. The trancendent (as well as immanent) nature of pure consciousness is obscured. The I-am-ness appropriates the conscious aspect of experience and appears as the conscious agent.16 I then live the life of the fluctuations ( vrtti ) and suffer their vicissitudes. The security and certainty of eternity eludes me as I am embodied by the languages of pleasure (raga ) and pain ( dvea ) with no hope of escape yet, “through” these fluctuations pure consciousness remains pure. I am “located” by the fluctuations (these being five in number: cognition, misconception or error, imagination, sleep and memory). Whereas the purusa is non-positional or, better, all pervasive. A subject we shall investigate further.
Section V
drasta drsi- matrah suddho’pi pratyaya anupasyah
The seer, which is seeing only, although pure, perceives the presented idea (or contents of consciousness).
Yoga Sutra II.20.
The purusa or pure consciousness is only a seer, never a seen. It “perceives” (anupasyah), not in the conventional sense which includes a division of subject and object, but, as a consciousness or awareness at the heart of all knowledge. It is what makes all perception conscious Purusa pervades all knowledge of the world making it conscious knowledge. It is a necessary condition for “me” (I) to know. The seer is bound to the experienced (prakrti). It does not look on a presentation as an “I know.” It is what makes knowledge, knowledge.
“To be sure, its [Dasein’s] ownmost Being is such that it has an understanding of that
Being, and already maintains itself in each case as if its
Being has been interpreted in some manner.”17
The “understanding” that Heidegger posits and the “seeing” of the purusa are related. The purusa is “always already” conscious within the experienced as knowing. “I” come upon the world as already laid out before me. The world appears at first to be a world that preexists my encounter with it. It is already there. Yet, from a yogic point of view (and Heidegger’s) this world is an interpreted world, a “Humanly” structured world. I encounter entities within the field of this ostensibly “natural” but yogically “human” world “after the fact,” so to speak. At the ulterior level of samyoga (or the union of prakrti and purusa) the world as a whole is imbued with knowing. Yet, even at the level of everyday experience of a subject-object type, that “knowing” which is pure consciousness is operative and can be acknowledged. It is at the root of “I” knowing a “that.”
Sartre tell us:
“…the necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing consciousness to be knowledge of its object, is that it be consciousness of itself as being that knowledge.”18
This “circularity” at the core of experience is due to the ubiquitous nature of pure consciousness. I am conscious of the table, and there is a “consciousness of being so.”19 There is not a consciousness “of” being conscious of the table, but, a consciousness within the consciousness of the table that provides the ground for knowing, for conscious experience. No experience is possible without purusa. In the most general terms we might say that purusa is the “life” of all experience. “The idea can be expressed in these terms: Every conscious existence exists as consciousness of existing.”20 This “consciousness of existing” is “non-cognitive.” In other words, every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of “21 The positional consciousness is a consciousness directed to and exhausted by its object. The non-positional consciousness “is one with the consciousness of which it is consciousness.”22 Yogically, however, we would have to alter Sartre’s wording and say that instead of being “one with” it is unified with, since the language of yoga seeks to maintain the “distinct” or isolated nature of pure consciousness. It is this union (samyoga ) itself which gives rise to I am-ness and therefore to experience in general. I-am-ness is always an I in relation with a that.
Section VI
The very “fact” of experience testifies to its being conscious experience. That “consciousness within experience is ubiquitous” here means not that consciousness is some substance which pervades all things but that all perception is conscious. Consciousness (purusa) does not pervade the world but our experience of the world. This is a distinction which must be made before we can discuss the implications for embodiment. Our tendency to look for consciousness in “the world” is an implicit denial of its omnipresence. For to look for a substantial consciousness is to look away from the union of purusa and prakriti (or world). Pure consciousness abides within and without. To behold the consciousness within is at once to behold it without. Just “where” does experience abide? The language we use (or using us) determines the structure of embodiment.
We saw above that at times consciousness “takes the form of the modifications” of the citta or consciousness of (citta-vrtti). At such times the purusa is obscured and embodiment assumes the dimensions of the modifications. The all-pervasive nature of purusa is enclosed or structured by the linguistic contents of the consciousness of. The yogic way of releasing the body into its fundamental union with pure consciousness is to restrict (nirodha) the operation of the modifications. In such restrictions the body (prakriti) is disclosed as being joined with purusa. The body is made whole or omnipresent (keeping in mind , of course, that the body is the experienced body). At these times the purusa is said to reside in its own form.23 In either case, whether in restriction or in vrtti,the ubiquitous nature of consciousness is unaltered. In the latter case there is no empathic bodily response to In the former, the body becomes all-inclusive.
The release of the body into the wholeness of pure consciousness provides the yogi with the vision that is certainty itself. Purusa is joined to prakriti; there is no distance between them for doubt to enter. All experience is certain of itself. That is, the facticity of experience is itself its being known. Pure consciousness is always at rest within experience. But conventional experience moving from v:tti to vrtti without the acknowledgement of purusa within, finds no rest or certainty and is perpetually in search of same. Yogis say that there are basically two categories of vrtti, the afflicted (klista) and the non-afflicted (aklista). The afflicted carry us away from the· acknowledgement of purusa within experience. The non-afflicted are either mixed or carry us toward insight. The yogi cultivates language that is opposite (pratipaka-bhavana ) in nature to affliction. That is, the yogi, in realizing the empathic structural capabilities of vrtti, cultivates those virtti-s which enable a vision which discloses pure consciousness and hence certainty.
The radical difference between yoga and the phenomenological enterprise is the issue of embodiment. As much as phenomenologists wish to “understand” the dimension wherein consciousness is united with experience, there is little or no appreciation of an embodied or experiential response to this dimension. Their (notion of) embodiment is tied to the domain of the subject-object dualism (the ontic). Their language (vrtti) has imposed a limit on the possible modes of embodiment and liberation. The yogi does not seek understanding alone but also aims at an embodied realization of the ubiquitous nature of consciousness. In the yogi’s attempt to restrict the vritti- s he or she realizes the intimate connection between the structure of embodied feeling and the linguistic determinations (pratyaya) of the vrtti. Every vrtti has bodily consequences. However, even within the vrtti the yogi learns to acknowledge that which is at rest, that timeless or unchanging aspect of experience which is certainty itself.
He who sees the Supreme Lord standing
the same in all beings,
Not perishing when they perish
He sees indeed.Bhagavad Gita XIII, 27
Footnotes:
1. Descartes Philosophical Writings, Eliazbeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Gerch (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1971), p.67.↩
2. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads , 2d ed., trans. Robert Ernest Hume (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p.81.↩
3. The Yoga System of Pataiijali, James Houghton Woods (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977), p.41.↩
4. Descartes Philosophical Writings, cit., p. 70.↩
5. Ibid., pp. 70-71.↩
6. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, op. cit., p.81.↩
7. Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, T.V. Smith and Marjorie Green,eds. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957), p. 217.↩
8. Ibid. p. 218.↩
9. Ibid. p. 220.↩
10. Ibid.↩
11. Edward Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, F. Kersten (The Hague: Matinus Nijhoff, 1982), p.191.↩
12. Ibid. p.132.↩
13. Ibid. p.132.↩
14. Samkhya Karika, 19.↩
15. Husserl, op cit., p.133.↩
16. Samkhya Karika, 20.↩
17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row,1962), P. 15″↩
18. Jean-Paul Satre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel & Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1975), P. 11.↩
19. Ibid. P 11↩
20. Ibid. P 13↩
21. Ibid.↩
23. Ibid. P 14↩
23. Yoga Sutra, 1.3↩