Religious Experience without an Experiencer: The ‘Not I’ in Sāṃkhya and Yoga

Abstract

“Experience” is a category that seems to have developed new meaning in European thought after the Enlightenment when personal inwardness took on the weight of an absent God. The inner self (including, a little later, a sub- or unconscious mind) rose to prominence about 200–300 years ago, around the time of the “Counter-Enlightenment” and Romanticism, and enjoyed a rich and long life in philosophy (including Lebensphilosophie) and religious studies, but began a steep descent under fire around 1970. The critique of “essentialism” (the claim that experience is self-validating and impervious to historical and scientific explanation or challenge) was probably the main point of attack, but there were others. The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, et al.) claimed that authentic experience was difficult or impossible in the modern capitalist era. The question of the reality of the individual self to which experience happens also threatened to undermine the concept. This paper argues that the religious experience characteristic of Sāṃkhya and Yoga, while in some ways paralleling Romanticism and Lebensphilosophies, differs from them in one essential way. Sāṃkhyan/Yogic experience is not something that happens to, or in, an individual person. It does not occur to or for oneself (in the usual sense) but rather puruṣārtha, “for the sake of [artha] an innermost consciousness/self”[puruṣa] which must be distinguished from the “solitude” of “individual men” (the recipient, for William James, of religious experience) which would be called ahaṃkāra, or “ego assertion” in the Indian perspectives. The distinction found in European Lebensphilosophie between two kinds of experience, Erlebnis (a present-focused lived moment) and Erfahrung (a constructed, time-binding thread of life, involving memory and often constituting a story) helps to understand what is happening in Sāṃkhya and Yoga. The concept closest to experience in Sāṃkhya/Yoga is named by the Sanskrit root dṛś-, “seeing,” which is a process actualized through long meditative practice and close philosophical reasoning. The Erfahrung “story” enacted in Sāṃkhya/Yoga practice is a sort of dance-drama in which psychomaterial Nature (prakṛti) reveals to her inner consciousness and possessor (puruṣa) that she “is not, has nothing of her own, and does not have the quality of being an ‘I’” (nāsmi na me nāham). This self exposure as “not I” apophatically reveals puruṣa, and lets him shine for them both, as pure consciousness. Prakṛti’s long quest for puruṣa, seeking him with the finest insight (jñāna), culminates in realization that she is not the seer in this process but the seen, and that her failure has been to assert aham (“I”) rather than realize nāham, “Not I.” Her meditation and insight have led to an experience which was always for an Other, though that was not recognized until the story’s end. Rather like McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” the nature or structure of experience in Sāṃkhya and Yoga is also its content, what religious experience is about in these philosophies and practices. In Western terms, we have religious experience only when we recognize what (all) experience (already) is: the unfolding story of puruṣārtha. Experience deepens the more we see that it is not ours; the recognition of non-I, in fact, is what makes genuine experience possible at all.

1. Introduction

Gerald Larson (1969) insightfully described the Indian philosophical system Sāṃkhya1 as an “eccentric dualism,” its two parts—prakṛti (Nature) and puruṣa (pure consciousness)—mutually cooperative, but also fundamentally “other” (para) to one another (Sāṃkhya Kārikā [SK] 61). Only prakṛti acts, but puruṣa alone provides the consciousness for action and owns it. Made of “strands” (guņas), or deep affective “strivings” (bhāvas), there is only one, universal prakṛti (often associated in mythology with the Great Goddess, Devi) but a multitude of scintillae of consciousness (puruṣas). The body (including sense faculties and objects) and mind of each person are portions of prakṛti’s work or action (root kṛ-) for the sake of the experience or pleasure (bhoga), and simultaneously for the release (mokṣa), of the particular puruṣa around which that body–mind–object complex is organized. The default state of prakṛti’s experience (at least in her human instantiations) is misery or suffering (duḥkha [SK 1]) but her efforts are aimed at overcoming suffering—i.e., gaining positive affect and achieving release (the difference between or unity of these two goals has been a major topic for reflection on Sāṃkhya and I will return to it later). Patañjali’s Yoga is a closely related system of thought which differs somewhat from Sāṃkhya—which focuses on insight, buddhi or jñāna, as the path to happiness and release—by emphasizing deep meditation (dhyāna) leading to enstasy (samādhi)2. As a first approximation, we may say that bhoga corresponds to ordinary experience, especially of the pleasant sort, while mokṣa (and higher states of samādhi) are the realm of religious experience. Further reflection, however, will challenge this simple opposition. In the end, Sāṃkhya and Yoga are complex forms of mystical gnosis in which prakṛti, or the insightful and self-established mind which is her highest form, recognizes that she has been seen (dṛṣta) by puruṣa as wholly empty except for her focus on him (her puruṣārtha), and is so able to shine in his reflected light, for the first time as she truly is.

To write in 2019 on religious experience in Sāṃkhya and Yoga it is unavoidable to ask first how the general topic of “religious experience” should be understood, given the recent controversies over the reality of the phenomenon (Martin and McCutcheon 2014; McDaniel 2018; Jay 2005) which have called into question the very legitimacy of the field of “History of Religions,” a realm of inquiry partially based on the study of religious experiences (and which have, in the process, systematically devaluated its most prominent practitioner, Mircea Eliade, [Jonathan Z. Smith 2004]).3 We must also consider differences in how India and the West understand both religious “experience” and the nature of the person to whom experience occurs. Finally, to give religious experience context both in India and in the West, we must go beyond religion proper, into the broader understanding of experience in culture, especially the higher stages of cultural reflection called philosophy.

To begin with the third question, in the West experience became a central theme following the “Counter-Enlightenment” (Berlin 2000), particularly in 19th- and 20th-century European and American philosophies such as Pragmtism and Lebensphilosophie (Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey, Collingwood, Benjamin, Dewey, Peirce, etc. [Jay 2005]), and later became equally fundamental in religious studies (Schleiermacher, James, Eliade, Otto, van der Leeuw, etc. [Taves 2011, McDaniel 2018]). Dilthey and others had distinguished between Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) which had to do with what is experienced, and Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences), which concerned objective, outer realities, following Descartes’ res cogitans (thinking entities) and res extensa (things taking up space, dimensional entities). The insight—and one could suggest the hope—in what might be called the “experiential turn” in philosophy and religion over a few hundred years was the possibility of sustaining a realm of human value, agency, culture, meaning, and life—in a word, of “experience”—after the “death of God” and beyond the corrosive reach of materialism, and particularly immune, later, to the acid of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Recently (beginning around 1970), the possibility of an independent territory of experience in religion which could be the privileged subject matter of a discipline of religious studies has come under intensive critique and revision as part of the general “linguistic turn” in the humanities and the ascendency of postmodernism (J.Z. Smith, Sharf, Proudfoot, McCutcheon, etc. [Taves 2011]), partly because it seemed to imply “essentialism,” positing an unexamined category of “religious experience” as a sui generis reality immune to criticism and walled off from history and the social (and other) sciences. Besides essentialism, the Western view of religion as experience also was vulnerable to the charge that it saw religion as individualist, the momentary “self authenticating experience of the individual” (ibid, p. 5). This implied removing religious experience from history, politics, class, and power relations. William James defined religious experience in this way as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.” (James [1902] 1985, p. 34). Momentary, sometimes mystical flashes of feeling or knowing come upon men (sic) “in their solitude.” Religion was seen as “numinous” (Otto) and sublime because it shook the security of a putatively stable individual with “sudden, discrete” (Taves 2011, p. 5) moments of something radically Other (“revelations, visions, dramatic conversion experiences” [ibid]).

To locate a category of “religious experience” in Hinduism, and specifically Sāṃkhya and Yoga, requires inquiry into how “experience” in general is understood there. Sāṃkhya and Yoga have a number of terms that overlap with Western “experience.” Bhoga names either enjoyable experience or experience generally, but most often with an implication of immediate perception with positive or negative hedonic valence. It does not generally name a religious experience, though I will try to show that Sāṃkhya does integrate bhoga into religious experience. At an explicitly religious level, that of mokṣa, spiritual release or enlightenment, the closest Sanskrit parallel to experience is the concept of “seeing” (dṛś-), and I will explore religious experience in Sāṃkhya and Yoga through this perspective. Although seeing in its usual, perceptual sense would seem to describe the immediate, sensory side of experience, daṛśana4 is conceived quite differently in Hinduism as a higher or deeper sort of insight/seeing, the product of long training (philosophical study and meditation: abhyāsa, dhyāna). An unquestioned, perception-like understanding of experience (the “self authenticating” [Taves 2011] perceptions of “individual men in their solitude” [W. James] or (more broadly) the “naked, primitive, self evident experience of the Enlightenment” [Benjamin [1918] 2004]) might fit bhoga in its usual sense, but does not cover the semantic range of dṛś-. A distinction present in German, and important to a number of German thinkers, may help to see what is missing. Erlebnis (the kind of present-focused lived moment that the above citations describe) is distinguished from experience as Erfahrung (a constructed, time-binding thread of life, involving memory and often constituting a story). We will find that Sāṃkhya/Yoga experience is generally closer to Erfahrung than to the self-validating Erlebnis sort of experience. Darśana (seeing) is something constructed or worked out in practice (abhyāsa) although paradoxically it is also revealed, in the end, to be self-evidently visible—reflected by a seeing Other who shares it with one’s (lower) “self.” The Erlebnis/Erfahrung distinction, however, while useful, is not enough. Sāṃkhya/Yoga darśana finds the putative seer to be, in fact, seen, (the apparent experiencer is actually experienced) and aims to develop in the practitioner the insight (jñāna) and meditative focus (dhyāna) to realize this. Specifically, Sāṃkhya and Yoga ask us to realize personally, and integrate into life, a principle called puruṣārtha, “for the sake of consciousness” (Sāṃkhya Kārikā 69). Briefly, this concept—which I believe to be the central idea of Sāṃkhya and Yoga—asserts that all the action of sentient beings (and everything that happens in the universe is action—karma) is done “in order to” (artha) give puruṣa pleasure or experience (bhoga) and release (mokṣa) from the suffering of bondage to the struggle for satisfaction of desire (autsukya, Sāṃkhya Kārikā [SK] 58). Actions are done by the body and mind so as to give consciousness these two kinds of experience: pleasure of the eye (and other senses) and enlightenment through seeing. It is the latter that is closest to what is generally understood as “religious experience,” but we will find that the eye’s pleasure also becomes religious when understood rightly.

2. Western Heuristics and the Indian Understanding of Self

Several Western ways of understanding experience will be of help in this enquiry: among them, Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian analytical psychology, Heinz Kohut’s self psychology, and Walter Benjamin’s attempts to root experience in “aura” and the “dialectical image.” The fluidity and permeability of the Indian self explored by Frederick Smith (2006), Alan Roland (1989), and Prakash Desai and myself (Collins and Desai 1999) also help to understand a sort of experience that is not based in an individual’s momentary life (Erlebnis) or even solely in his constructed story (Erfahrung). First, in Freud, we find in ordinary pleasure (satisfaction of the drives) the key to understanding the deep and final release he calls the death instinct or nirvana principle (thanatos). I suggest that Freud’s drive reduction is like Sāṃkhyan bhoga (specifically what is called the latter’s autsukya quality at SK 58) and that Freudian thanatos is akin to the release (mokṣa) that is termed ānanda in the Upaniṣads and elsewhere, and which in Sāṃkhya and Yoga is associated with complete satisfaction and wholeness (kaivalya). Experience (darśana, seeing), is the doorway to mokṣa. While integral and in a way unified, darśana is also complex. To summarize what will take some effort to explicate, the Sāṃkhya Kārika asserts that prakṛti, or the jnāña bhāva or sattvic buddhi (both essentially refer to discriminating insight) that is her true or highest part, realizes that “I am seen as ‘nāham’, not I”, by and for the sake of puruṣa who, she realizes, simultaneously recognizes that “I have seen her” (prakṛti). Even a cursory glance shows that “religious experience” like this cannot be only a unique, momentary flash of insight into the cognitive/affective/volitional apparatus of an individual person, who is only a construct made of elements of prakṛti (i.e., it cannot be just a satisfaction of drives or reduction of duḥkha), because darśana sees across the division between the two principles, prakṛti and puruṣa, that are wholly “other” (para) to each other. Darśana bridges between the halves of Larson’s “eccentric dualism,” a psychomaterial part or aspect and a part that is pure consciousness. Religious experience involves a subtle and hard-to-comprehend relationship connecting them. To anticipate once again, the nature or structure of experience in Sāṃkhya and Yoga (prakṛti’s puruṣa orientation) is also, in the end, its fundamental content;5 it is what religious experience is about in these philosophies. In Western terms, we have religious experience when we recognize (see) what (all) experience (already) is.6

3. The Self as Composite

Psychoanalysis since Lacan in 1936, but most significantly in Winnicott ([1971] 2005) and Kohut (1977), has recognized that the sense of self is not entirely a primordial or sui generis fact in the personality, or at least that it is not a singular one. Alan Roland (1989) showed that what he called a “familial self” or “self-we regard” is more fundamental in Indian (and to some extent Japanese) psychology than is an individual “I.” Winnicott and Kohut, to some degree following Lacan, found that Roland’s insight does not apply exclusively to foreign societies and ethnicities but also, if we go deep enough, to Western European and American personality. As Winnicott showed, the Teddy Bear is part of the child who plays with it—part of his family, part of his society and world, and part of his psychodynamics. Kohut named the inner images of aspects of the world that complete us “self objects,” which he defined as parts of the outer world that we treat as if they were aspects of ourselves over which we have the same sort of control and ownership as we do over parts of our own bodies and minds (Kohut 1977). In Bengali fieldwork, Inden and Nicholas (1973) discovered the concept of the kartā, the “seed person” within a family, village, larger land area, or region (i.e., a sort of bigger or smaller king) whose family members (wives, sons, servants, etc.) are part of him and are better felt as aspects of his life rather than as independent beings. Similarly, in Vedic thought, “when the father dies, he transfers his vital breaths (prāṇas) into the son and gives him the sacred knowledge. . . .” (Collins and Desai 1999, p. 379). In this way he “extends himself through offspring” (taneyebhiḥ tanute, ibid, p. 378). Smith’s extensive analysis of the possession phenomenon in India (which can be either negative/destructive or positive/enhancing) finds that possession is more possible because the boundaries of the persons who are to possess and to be possessed are relatively permeable and not as sharp as they are in the Western individual. (Smith 2006). The relatively fluid inner workings of the personality of concern to Sāṃkhya are continuous with its outward permeability or “dividuality” (Marriott 1976). (I am proposing, in other words, that the flowing of cause into effect—satkārya—within a person makes possible the flowing of one person into another—praveśa.)

4. Experience (Erfahrung) in Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin, following Krakauer and many Lebensphilosophie predecessors, sought a way to true experience (Erfahrung, rather than Erlebnis) in modernity. “Benjamin never abandoned his efforts to reconceptualize the conditions of possibility for experience in modernity. In an unpublished note of 1929, he writes that ‘the word [experience, Erfahrung] has now become a fundamental term in many of my projects.’” (Hanssen 2012).

The concept of experience (Erfahrung) . . . [is emphatically elaborated] in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno. . . . Benjamin, theorizing the conditions of possibility of Erfahrung in modernity, had linked its historic decline with the proliferation of Erlebnis (immediate but isolated experience) under the conditions of industrial capitalism; in this context, Erfahrung crucially came to entail the capacity of memory—individual and collective, involuntary as well as cognitive—and the ability to imagine a different future.

(Hanssen 2012, p. xiv)

One of Benjamin’s central concepts is that of the “dialectical image,” an image connecting past and present that can make genuine Erfahrung experience possible in modernity.

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, the image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: it is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.

(Benjamin 2002).7

Benjamin’s complex intellectual development—paradoxically both messianic and materialist—from his twenties until his early death at 48 repeatedly returned to an essentially mystical sense of recognition of similarity between two moments that ignite when they come together. The image created lives between (forms a bond—in Sanskrit a bandhu—linking) past and present, like prakṛti’s life devoted to puruṣārtha, the giving of pleasure and release to puruṣa. Benjamin’s understanding of how the dialectical image makes (mystical) experience possible is analogous to the experience shared between puruṣa and prakrti in mokṣa. The image does not live either in the past (for Benjamin, 19th-century Paris) nor the present (Weimar and post-Weimar Germany), just as kaivalya—the experience of release into pure consciousness (citiśakti)—does not consist of either puruṣa alone or of the dissolution of the fluctuations (vṛtti) of prakṛti, (citta-vṛtti-nirodha YS 2), but rather of both as it were together, “constellated” but not touching, because at the moment of the experience prakrti “is not” (nāsmi) and purusa’s vision of her has been completed; it is not something that happens only in a moment (like Erlebnis experience) but rather “has” been done (as it were in the perfect tense: “I have been seen;” drstāham, is a past-perfect participle). At the complex moment of “being seen” (dṛṣṭāham), the eternal fact of puruṣārtha as the essence of the one seen (prakṛti) shines forth.

5. Puruṣārtha: The Two Aims of Action in Sāṃkhya and Yoga

As we have seen, the ultimate purpose of the psycho-cosmology called Sāṃkhya, and the meditative practices and theory of higher states of consciousness named Yoga, is to liberate the self (puruṣa), which is posited to be pure, objectless consciousness, from the suffering (duḥkha) that forms the basic or “default” state of existence in the world. Along the way, however, Sāṃkhya reveals an extraordinarily rich perspective on virtually every aspect of life, maintaining a paradoxical but consistent balance between the aims of release from and fulfillment of the psychomaterial qualities and strivings. Sāṃkhya proceeds by analyzing natural (principally human) being, finding at the basis of action—strikingly like Freudian psychoanalysis—an implicit urge to satisfy desires, which it understands to mean bringing them to a close8; it aims to show that fulfillment of desire for enjoyment (bhoga) is similar, or even equivalent, to releasing consciousness from its apparent imprisonment in material experience (mokṣa, kaivalya) (SK 58). Yoga lays out a moral-ascetic and meditative practice that it claims will move the human mind–body entity in the direction of a less-fragmented, ignorant, overly active, and unfree state (all aspects of suffering, duḥkha), towards a new way of being in which the person is able to follow and realize the argument of Sāṃkhya’s ontological analysis (jñāna). Religion, for Yoga, is meditation in service of a salvific insight or gnosis. Culture, which cannot be separated from religion, properly (though not commonly) enacts and celebrates this insight (Collins 1991, 2006). Sāṃkhya/Yoga are therefore fundamentally ways of understanding and living intelligently in the world. While commentators on Sāṃkhya/Yoga9 from Buddhist and other Hindu perspectives (referring to its emphasis on suffering [duḥkha], etc.), and many Western interpreters view it as ascetic and life-denying, a worldlier, life-affirming view of Yoga10 (at least) has been recognized in recent years (Chapple 2003; Whicher 2003). Lloyd Pflueger, who is partially aligned with this trend, sees Yoga, along with Sāṃkhya, as walking the razor’s edge between a desired release (final insight into the radical difference between puruṣa and prakṛti; i.e., jñāna) and an inexorable reality: that one can approach the goal of release asymptotically but never fully reach it. The never-quite-achieved jñāna or bhoga is “glorified” by the meditative practice of yoga and by performance of the other arts and practices of life that can be viewed as lower or less-conscious forms of Yoga. “The real work is the work of treading the path to liberation. In an unexpected sense, the path can be seen as a goal in itself.” (Pflueger 2003, p. 79). In a way, Yoga is a Bildung, a practice of spiritual and cultural education. As such, Yogic (and Sankhyan) experience is gradual, growing through the slow diminution of “afflictions” (kleśas) and ignorance of the true nature of experience itself (ajñāna). The practice of Sāṃkhya and Yoga is like Benjamin’s dialectic, a wearing away without end of kleśas. Mokṣa is, as Benjamin put it, “dialectics at a standstill,” or perhaps we could go a little farther and say it is dialectics resolved into its essence.

6. The World of the Self

I will attempt to describe the person and his world as understood by Sāṃkhya/Yoga, emphasizing that the word “his” is not intended to name persons in general; this is a gendered system concerned primarily with the male self, though one caught in an ineluctable relationship with a female environment. In Sāṃkhya’s “eccentric dualism,” one of the two fundamental principles, prakṛti, represents almost everything and the other, puruṣa, almost nothing. Prakṛti is psychomaterial substance of which body and mind both consist, the two differing only in subtlety or degree of density. Everything “from Brahma to a blade of grass” (SK 54) consists of prakṛti, which is always implicitly personified and explicitly or implicitly female. Puruṣa, literally a male person, is in Sāṃkhya the name of bare awareness, or perhaps better of an instance of bare awareness, a pure consciousness free from intentionality (in the sense of being “about” something, specifically, about prakṛti). This is a fundamental fact for Sāmkhya/Yoga that explains its “eccentricity”: prakṛti is about puruṣa but puruṣa is not about prakṛti.11 In her higher or earlier, undifferentiated state, prakṛti is called avyakta, mūlaprakṛti, and pradhāna.12 She evolves through a process called pravṛtti (development) or pariṇāma (devolution), falling into successively lower states of being in an emanational (d)evolutionary course in which the effect is always implicit in its earlier states or cause (satkārya). This is very similar to Buddhist “conditioned origination” (pratītyasamutpada), and also like the devolution of the world process imagined in the later Hindu succession of “ages” (yugas) leading from the perfect past (kṛta yuga, the Golden Age) to the demonic present (kali yuga). In another way, however, prakṛti is inherently teleological, acting for the sake of puruṣa (puruṣārtha = puruṣa + artha). I emphasize the word “act” (Sanskrit root kṛ-), for prakṛti is never impelled by “efficient” (in Aristotle’s sense) or purely mechanical causation. Whatever happens in the world is always an action, something done, never unmotivated or random movement, always behavior infused by what we could call character, the sediment or residue of past acts (karma, vāsana, saṁskāra, etc.) that partially or mainly motivates new action.

Prakṛti acts, yet, paradoxically, is not an actor, for she does not own what she does. As noted above, there are two sides of puruṣārtha, the action of prakṛti for puruṣa’s sake: first, there is the desire or impulsion to give puruṣa enjoyment, which is understood, much as with Freud, as the cessation of a desire. Second, there is the desire to liberate puruṣa from bondage in the “threefold suffering” (duḥkhatraya, SK 1) of the human condition, a goal that in psychoanalytic terms corresponds to Freud’s “death instinct” (thanatos) or “Nirvana principle.”13 The Sāṃkhya Kārikā claims that these two, apparently very different, aims are intrinsically similar or even identical.

As (in the world) (a man) engages in actions for the sake of the cessation of a desire; so also does the prakṛti function for the sake of the release of the puruṣa.

(SK 58, Larson’s translation [Larson 1969, p. 273].14

Suffering, the distance from happiness named by the word “desire”(audsukya, from ud + suka, literally “away from pleasure”), is found by both Sāṃkhya and Yoga to arise from a certain kind of selfhood, called ahaṁkāra in Sāṃkhya and asmitā in Yoga. This sort of self asserts itself (ahaṁkāra) and its “I am-ness” (asmitā) in a way that can and often does lead in the direction of the demonic. One of the clearest classical examples of this is the career of the demon Rāvaṇa in the epic texts. Grandson of the god Brahmā, Rāvaṇa refuses to accept his place in the proper order (dharma) of the world, and inflates his ego (ahaṃkāra) through ascetic practices, aiming to become lord of the whole cosmos. This leads him to cause maximum suffering to himself and others. But Rāvaṇa, far from being unique, is best understood as an “ideal type” (in Weber’s sense) for the world of action (karmas) that he wants to rule. His great enemy (and Lord), Rāma, can be seen similarly, as an antitype to Rāvaṇa, overcoming suffering and the cravings of egoism through insight (sattvic buddhi, prajñā) that realizes the fundamental difference between our unrolling karmic process (pariṇāma, pravṛtti) and the principle of pure consciousness (puruṣa) that witnesses prakṛti’s evolution. Suffering is thus correlated with ignorance (and demons are typically revealed as witless fools),15 insight with release from ego.

7. “I Have Been Seen”: Darshan in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā and the Yoga Sutra

While Yoga and philosophical Sāṃkhya are not generally understood as artistic or cultural performances, the texts suggest that this may be a good way of understanding what they are. Indeed, the anthropologist McKim Marriott (1989) has found that much of Indian culture and society can be seen as expressions or embodiments of the three Sāṃkhyan guṇas.16 We will address the trope of Nature (prakŗti) imagined as a female dancer (nartakī) performing for the eyes of an implicitly royal witness, consciousness (puruṣa). Correct thinking (Sāṃkhya) and deep meditation (Yoga) are compared to a dance performed by an unsurpassably refined performer (sukumārataram na kiṁcid asti, SK 61) whose (mental and physical) movements enact a sort of apophatic theology, negating herself more and more until, at a moment of supreme poise, she recognizes her own emptiness and thereby opens herself to be seen by the unobstructed eye of consciousness: “I am not, I own nothing, there is no I in me” (nāsmi na me nāham, SK 64). This “not I” realization is at the same time a recognition of being seen as fully self-negating, which permits her to pass into a state of empty, but complete, fulfillment in which she need not continue to perform for puruṣa (SK 61) but only to recognize, through his eyes reflecting hers seeing his, that all is “pure essential knowledge” (viśuddham kevalam jñānam, SK 64).

Puruṣārtha means that all worldly action is already a dance choreographed around giving enjoyment and release to puruṣa. It is only so that the dance can reach a satisfactory fulfillment, can finally end, that correct thinking (Sāṃkhya) and meditation (Yoga) need be added to the performance. Yoga and Sāṃkhyan philosophy are refinements, implicit from the beginning in the principle of puruṣārtha, but nevertheless requiring careful practice of jñāna bhāva, the mental faculty or “fundamental striving” (as Gerald Larson translates bhāva) of “insight.” All experience is religious experience when properly understood (with the jñāna bhāva).

In fact, the desire to cultivate jñāna is suggested in verse 1 of the Sāṁkhya Kārikā, and that text ends with insights that only pure jñāna can reach. Already the first verse tells us that the desire for jñāna (i.e., jijñāsa) is the basis for the quest for a “singular” (aikānta) and “eternal” (atyanta) reality beyond the “threefold suffering” (duḥkhatraya) of ordinary life. Near the end of the SK (verse 68), the prakṛtic person has become focused on pure jñāna, after turning away from the other seven bhāvas (mastery, attachment, etc.). This jñāna shows kaivalya (singular and essential being), which is characterized in the same words we found used aspirationally in verse 1, aikāntika and atyantika. The SK ends in the achievement of what it sought in the beginning.17

Sāṃkhya and Yoga are forms of cultivation, higher sorts of “Bildung,” culture. They are ways of self-development, of making life a practice of the art of living insight (and so of “religious experience”), moving from the yearning for jñāna to the fullness of jñāna itself. Both Sāṃkhya and Yoga are aware that their insights and practices can never quite reach, in all its fullness, what they aim for. Imagination and metaphor are the only way to get a sense of the goal, called kaivalya (oneness or integrity), and the practitioner of Yoga or thinker of Sāṃkhya enacts a trope, an intricate and subtle way of imagining satisfaction and release (bhoga and mokṣa). Perhaps the two best metaphors are those of the dancer performing before a spectator (SK 59) and the chanting of the syllable OM (YS 1.28). More than metaphors, both are better understood as symbols, images that evoke something ineffable, allow communication between the sensible or intelligible and a transcendent reality. The communion between the symbols of dancer and OM, and their ultimate referent, the fact of puruṣārtha, is similar to “darshan” in later Hinduism,18 the two-way reflective gaze between human and divine (Eck 1998, Babb 1981, 1984; Elison 2014).

Seeing and being seen are the principal images the SK uses to describe the process by which prakṛti gives experience (suffering or pleasure) to puruṣa and also releases him. It is in seeing prakṛti in her different states that puruṣa seems to experience pain and enjoyment, and it is in seeing her at the moment of her complete recognition of selflessness that puruṣa approaches release (in her eye). This recognition of being seen allows prakṛti to stop her frantic search for the quenching of desire (autsukya nivṛtti SK 58) that has motivated her action previously. In letting go, she realizes that she lacks all selfhood, agency, and ownership. Standing rapt before the mirror of puruṣa, prakṛti becomes empty and shows puruṣa her realization that she shines as a perfect zero in his unstained eye. He no longer reflects pleasurable or painful action from her back to her cognitive faculties (only to receive it again from her in the unsatisfying mirror play that is the ordinary prakṛtic mentality). Puruṣa and prakṛti, through the latter’s realization of nāsmi (“not I”), spiral towards a play of intervision (darshan) that explodes in a taste of bhoga when each faces their essential nature: integrity (kaivalya) in seeing (for puruṣa) and integrity in being seen (for prakṛti); dṛṣṭāham (“I am seen”) and dṛṣṭā māyā (“I have seen her”). The two sides of kaivalya are also evoked at YS 4.34 where prakṛti’s kaivalya is characterized by the emptying of the guṇas of their urgency to be seen by puruṣa, and puruṣa’s kaivalya is described as svarūpa-pratiṣṭha citiśakti, the “power of consciousness established in its own nature.”19

Tropes of seeing are also central in the Yoga Sūtra. Prakṛti is referred to as the realm of the “seen” (dṛśya) and the two arthas of bhoga (experience, enjoyment) and apavarga (release) are referred to prakṛti in her form as “seen,” dṛśya (YS 2.18). Spiritual progress is understood as improved “seeing” (darśana) and removal of “non-seeing” (adarśana). YS 2.26 refers to the purified mind as like a dust-free mirror reflecting clearly the light of puruṣa. Samādhis (meditative ecstasies) are named by their quality of “insight” or even transcendence of insight (jña, i.e., samprajñāta and asamprajñāta). Puruṣa is characterized as the “Seer” (dṛśi).

Let us pursue our metaphor of the dancer (nartakī, SK 59) whose beautiful steps and grace allow her to express her real nature, and, as it were, to tell the story of herself and her “spectator” (prekṣa) from both their points of view. The image of prakṛti, as she moves towards realization for puruṣa, which she receives back from him, shows us the Sāṃkhyan practitioner as performing artist. I believe the same is true in the Yoga Sūtra (1.27), where utterance of the praṇava, the syllable OM, symbolizes the ineffable in a more continuous way20 that allows prakṛti in her kaivalya state to become a kind of puruṣa (puruṣa-viśeṣa, a term used to describe Iśvara, the Lord of yoga [YS 1.24 ]).21 The circular motion implied in darshan (seeing her seeing me seeing her. . . ) is held by OM in a single, integral symbol that binds time in a realized whole. The artist lives or enacts the “secret” (guhya, SK 69) and enigmatic relationship between puruṣa and prakṛti in a unified image, identified in the YS as the Lord of yoga, Iśvara, the personification of OM.

The syllable OM (a-u-m) expresses at once the state of suffering or ignorance (a), yogic or philosophical practice (u) and recognition of nāham = “not I” (m). As an integral whole, OM represents the source of universal wisdom (sarvajña). The practice of OM and its meaning are one experience (taj japas tad artha-bhāvanam [YS 1.28], “reciting OM is to experience its meaning”). There is no separation between word and meaning, no seeking after something unattained, a puruṣārtha located in the future. Puruṣārtha is still the central idea, but now becomes something timelessly found rather than a goal to be sought. We are perhaps returning in the direction of a redeemed Erlebnis. There is a fulfillment in the practice of OM, not a dead or rigid stasis but a nimble and flexible state of readiness-cum-attainment, perhaps expressed in the YS by the highest meditative state called dharma-megha-samādhi or “raincloud of dharma” integrity. At YS 4.34, the final verse of the text, the fulfillment of puruṣārtha is described as pratiprasāva, a turning around or back of the guṇas, the exact opposite of the turnings (forward into greater suffering) of the mind (cittavṛtti) that yoga is declared in YS 2 to stop.

The dance between puruṣa and prakṛti is thus the dance of the Lord of Yoga, whom we might imagine as Śiva taṇḍava, dancing upon a remorseful, but now enlightened, demon of Forgetfulness (Apasmara) representing the unenlightened state of prakṛti. This is the life of spiritual art, which we receive in the darshan of the god or goddess, in a relationship that reveals to us the union of suffering and release.

To illustrate this paradoxical vision of seeing and seen as a single fact, we will detour to the reflections of the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung during his mystical months of 1913–1914, most adequately expressed in the short text from 1916, “Seven Sermons to the Dead.” (Jung 2009). The context is Jung’s visionary guru, the imaginal figure “Philemon,” teaching a group of Christian “dead” a truth that they did not find in their pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Jerusalem (essentially this truth is the necessity to expand God to include evil as well as good). At the same time, the figure of Jung himself within the story queries Philemon about the truth of what he says, asking whether what “Jung,” and the dead, see through Philemon’s teachings is really true. “Jung” (the imaginal figure) asks, “are you certain that things really are as you say?” Philemon replies, “I am certain these things are as I say. . . . my knowledge is precisely these things themselves.” (Red Book, p. 515). Forty years later, in a television interview, Jung was asked whether he believed in God. He answered, famously, “I don’t need to believe, I know.” Philemon’s (and Jung’s) teachings—as we see also in Sāṃkhya/Yoga—cannot be understood but can be (at least partially) known in performance, practice, sādhana, life—symbolically. As Jung quotes Philemon, “This God is to be known but not understood.” (ibid 522). Knowledge, for Jung and Samkhya/Yoga, is not separate from being. What we know (experience, our Erfahrung) is what we are (and already were, at least virtually).

Sāṃkhya and Yoga teach what the thinkers and meditators experience in their practice, the fact of two complementary I-positions (dṛṣṭāsmi—the “I” of prakṛti in Sāṃkhya, corresponding to dṛśya in Yoga; and dṛṣṭā māyā—the “I” of puruṣa in Sāṃkhya, in Yoga called dṛśi) that approach oneness in being performed together. Seeking to give puruṣa enjoyment means to give him the experience of one’s prakṛtic self. It is the quality of this self that determines whether puruṣa’s experience is one of suffering (duḥkha) or pleasant repose (avasthāna svastha).22 Yet. in truth, it is always prakṛti who experiences puruṣa’s experience for him.23 Puruṣa is imagined as a necessary “existent” (the term is from Stephen Collins’ [Collins 2010] discussion of Buddhist nirvana), the observer who reflects back prakṛti’s affliction (suffering) or takes and passes back her “not-I” realization in a darshan that dances indefinitely closer to oneness (jñāna, SK 54). The ineffable is performed in prakṛti’s dance of apophasis: nāsmi na me nāham. Do Sāṃkhya and Yoga “believe” what they say? We might answer, with Jung, that they do not need to believe, because they are what they experience. Nāsmi is not a factual assertion; it is a mystical realization or apotheosis.

8. Darshan in Contemporary Hinduism

Lawrence A. Babb (1981, 1984) and Diana Eck (1998) some years ago studied the role of darshan in a number of Indian religious groups including the Radhasoami sects, the Brahma Kumaris, the modern saint Satya Sai Baba, and the film Jai Santoshi Ma and its religious aftermath. William Ellison (2014, 2018) later investigated darshan in the street shrines focused on the other (Shirdi) Sai Baba in Bombay, while Patrick McCartney (2018) looked at darshan-related phenomena in the Shanti Mandir, a very recent and still active offshoot of the “meditation revolution” instigated by Swami Muktananda and his guru Swami Nityananda (senior). Ellison, citing Katherine Ewing (1997), makes use of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories to explain darshan, with the fundamental idea being Lacan’s seminal concept from 1936, the “mirror stage” and the subsequent creation and transformation of the image the child has of itself. Lacan’s basic thought is that the self of the baby is given to her by how the mother (or other caregivers) see her. The world in which the growing child will subsequently live, the so-called “symbolic order” of constraint and unfreedom, is close to Heidegger’s “calculative” and “inauthentic” realm of fallen, and “thrown,” dasein, and perhaps even Max Weber’s “iron cage” of industrial life or Adorno’s view of culture as indoctrination and anesthesia. It is also close to Sāṁkhyan ahamkāra and Yogic asmitā. Although Ewing and Ellison disagree with Lacan’s extreme cultural pessimism, they find value in his insight that the object of darshan (say a lithographic image of Sai Baba in a Bombay street shrine) reaches out to the passerby and visually lays hold of his consciousness; i.e., it “sees” him and causes him to look back.24 Child research has consistently found that the reciprocal looking and smiling responses of mother and child are fundamental to the child’s growing ability to regulate emotions and of the mother’s to educate her child into the realities of living. (Infants who are later diagnosed with Autism show reduced sensitivity to direct gaze by the parent). Psychoanalytic self psychology (especially Winnicott and Kohut) trace the development of the self to the child’s ambition to be seen as valuable by the mother and the mother’s willingness to allow the child to merge with her idealized, much more powerful, adult identity. The child is constituted as a self by being perceived as one. The nature of that self can be one of suffering and disregulation or freedom and creative life.25

A mystery lies at the heart of this self recognized by the mother in the baby, and it is one that Indian thought has worked to understand, and locate within the ritual structure of worship. As Babb points out, darshan is reciprocal between worshipper and god, with visual and other kinds of substance flowing both ways. But in this exchange, the god is clearly the more important source, and the power behind the image is ultimately where the energy of darshan originates. A good way to see this is to consider not one image but a whole “mountainside” of them, i.e., the images carved into the outer surface of a Hindu temple, which is considered to represent a cosmos consisting of a mountain range with many terraces (foothills) occupied by celestial beings (Eck 1998, p. 61). All this rich variety of life and cosmos comes from deep within the mountain-temple, from a cave in its heart called the garbhagrha or “womb chamber” (ibid, p. 63). In the same way, every individual image on and in the temple can be seen as a projection into our everyday world of an “aniconic” (Eck) divine force that takes shape as it solidifies via the complex rules governing its construction by the artisan (shilpin) who makes it according to traditional formulas.

Many Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain images express a similar visual logic.26 For example, the eyes of the three-faced image of Sadaśiva at Elephanta are closed. The pilgrim, or modern-day tourist, arrives in front of the statue after crossing the water, climbing up a hill to the entry of the rock temple in which the image rests, and passing through a series of doors (Berkson 1983). They are there to see the god, and are rewarded with a trimurti expressive of three moods of the deity erupting into space from the living stone within which is supposed to live a fourth image still encased in rock. The god has projected these images outward, like the forms on the surface of a temple, from a secret inner space, the guhya level of the image, which is implied to be buried deep in the stone. We take darshan of the image, not in this case by gazing into his eyes, but rather, we might say, by seeing the image he projects with his eyes.

A series of verses in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā (SK 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69) lays out how puruṣa and prakṛti are united in enjoyment and how they mirror the state of enlightenment that follows complete satisfaction or insight. Let us return once again to the image of a female dancer (nartakī), the unsurpassably maidenly creature (sukumārataram na kiṁcid asti, SK 61). The bhoga aspect of puruṣārtha is expressed through seeing, very much like the later idea of darshan discussed above. In SK 61 and 66, prakṛti announces that “I have been seen” (drāṣtāsmi, dṛṣtāham) and in SK 66 puruṣa states the correlative, “I have seen [her]” (dṛṣtā māyā). This recognition ends the work of prakṛti for puruṣa’s sake, leading to enlightenment/release, which likewise is viewed from both points of view. Prakṛti utters (SK 64) her great apophatic realization of non-being or non-self: nāsmi na me nāham, “I am not, nothing belongs to me, and there is no “I” [in me].” This is apophatic mysticism because prakṛti’s non-self-recognition is puruṣa’s moment of full, unafflicted selfhood. Puruṣa’s vision of the not-I prakṛti, in the next verse (65), is the view from kaivalya: prakṛtim paśyati puruṣaḥ . . . avasthitaḥ svasthaḥ, “Puruṣa gazes upon [the nay-saying] prakṛti while comfortably established in his own place.” Enjoyment, seeing something utterly beautiful transpire before his eyes, i.e., prakṛti’s completion of all action and recognition of having no selfhood or possession, leads immediately to release from struggle against suffering. Seeing and being seen are equivalent to enjoying and being enjoyed. Full enjoyment is the end of the seeking of enjoyment and leads at once to the “superior kind of death” that S. Collins ascribes to nirvana (and Freud to thanatos) and that we find also in Sāṁkhya in the idea of kaivalya. The darshan of puruṣa and prakṛti is a mystical realization that both fulfills and transcends their absolute otherness.

9. Darshan and Intentionality

Prakṛti’s life trajectory in Sāṁkhya/Yoga is quite strange: while her nature is to act “for the sake of puruṣa,” the text further specifies that this purpose includes to be seen by puruṣa as “not I.” It would appear that prakṛti exists in order to reveal her non-being, she sees in order to reveal that she does not see, or sees for puruṣa rather than for herself. Perhaps her life could be viewed as the enactment of a sort of close reading of intentionality, getting at and overcoming the “consciousness of” things that is fundamental to ahaṃāric existence. What for Brentano and much of European philosophy is the basic condition of the working mind—consciousness of—is split by Sāṁkhya and Yoga into two sides, one of consciousness: i.e., puruṣa, and one of of (sic!): i.e., prakṛti. The practice of close reading the mind to make this split real is both philosophy (Sāṁkhya) and meditation (Yoga). What it leads to is a transformation of the mind (buddhi, or the mental system of buddhi-manas-ahamkāra = antaḥkāraṇa of which it is the key element). The key to suffering is the conflation of the two sides of experience, so that something seen (something that consciousness is of) proclaims, in the act of ahamkāra (understood, as van Buitenen said in 1957 (Van Buitenen 1957), as “utterance of the word ‘I’”), that it is the seer. A limited darshan, the whole functioning of prakṛti has sought bhoga but obtained duḥkha because it substituted ahamkāra for nāhamkāra (saying “I am,” aham, rather than nāham, “not I”). Ahamkāra-infused buddhi says (to puruṣa) “I act for myself” and so actions (karmas), point downward into the world of suffering, i.e., lose their puruṣa focus. It is this that leads to the closed but still unfolding pariṇāma or nivṛtti existence that is named “3-fold suffering” (duḥkhatraya) in SK 1. Locked in the “of” and unconscious of consciousness (the drśi of darśana), buddhi nevertheless aims unknowingly at serving puruṣa-consciousness. As SK 58 says, in ordinary life we act for the sake of quenching unfulfilled cravings. In Sanskrit, the implication of this is sharper: pravṛtti is for the sake of nivṛtti, action aims to transcend action. The second half of verse 58 tells us that this really means that already, in our “normal” suffering existence, we are seeking nothing different from what prakṛti was doing primordially, before ahamkāra (i.e., in her avyakta state): acting for the sake of the liberation of consciousness (puruṣasya vimokṣārtham).

Sāṃkhya and Yoga, then, move from darshan to darshan, from a lower to a higher form of vision, where the seer in the first darshan is revealed, in the second, to be the seen and, in service to the real seer (or to the seer-ness, sākṣitva, of the seer), negates herself and opens the world both for consciousness and for herself.27 This mystical opening, which the word mokṣa names, precisely, as “release,” changes both life and death.

10. Intentionality and Experience

Religious experience as analyzed in Western terms, both the Erlebnis and the Erfahrung types, is intentional. It is about something, a moment in the case of Erlebnis, and bound time (or a story) in the case of Erfahrung. In Sāṃkhya and Yoga, a similar distinction is drawn between “afflicted” (kḷṣṭa) or ordinary seeing, where the psychomental apparatus (the liṅgaśarīra—the Indian parallel to the Western individual) sees (and hears, etc.), but also integrates, sensory data, memories, etc.; and akḷṣṭa experience which is characterized (in Yoga) as samādhi of various types, which approach, or completely are, unintentional, not about something. In these states, the prakrtic entity or person (liṅga) is consciously recognized as being seen (dṛṣṭa) rather than seeing (dṛśi, etc.). Prakṛti, or her highest evolute, buddhi, becomes enlightened, attains mokṣa, for the sake of puruṣa. Conversely, it is the recognition of being “for the sake of puruṣa” (puruṣārtha) that brings mokṣa. Religious experience is experience for another (parārtha, SK 17), the other that is one’s true self which can only be realized apophatically, in the negation of the lower self: in fully realizing, as SK 64 tells us, to repeat once more, that “I am not, I have nothing, and there is no ‘I’ in me.” (Nāham na me nāsmi). In realizing the I-lessness of ordinary experience (bhoga), religious experience (darśana) begins. To be not-I is to be seen (dṛṣta) as such, and to realize that one has been seen wholly and finally (aikantika, atyantika).

In conclusion, Sāṃkhya and Yoga embody—and hold out as a possibility for the practitioner—a complex, endlessly evolving mystical experience that is best understood in its own language as darśana, the slowly explosive self-recognition within prakṛti of being seen by a puruṣa who—she knows, in the moment she finally knows herself—sees her.