Religious Experience without an Experiencer : The ‘ Not I ’ in Sām . khya and Yoga

“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 subor 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 Sām. khya and Yoga, while in some ways paralleling Romanticism and Lebensphilosophies, differs from them in one essential way. Sām. khyan/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 purus. ārtha, “for the sake of [artha] an innermost consciousness/self”[purus.a] which must be distinguished from the “solitude” of “individual men” (the recipient, for William James, of religious experience) which would be called aham. kāra, 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 Sām. khya and Yoga. The concept closest to experience in Sām. khya/Yoga is named by the Sanskrit root dr. ś-, “seeing,” which is a process actualized through long meditative practice and close philosophical reasoning. The Erfahrung “story” enacted in Sām. khya/Yoga practice is a sort of dance-drama in which psychomaterial Nature (prakr. ti) reveals to her inner consciousness and possessor (purus.a) 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 purus.a, and lets him shine for them both, as pure consciousness. Prakr. ti’s long quest for purus.a, 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 Sām. khya 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 purus. ārtha. 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.


Introduction
Gerald Larson (1969) insightfully described the Indian philosophical system Sām .khya 1 as an "eccentric dualism," its two parts-prakr .ti (Nature) and purus .a (pure consciousness)-mutually cooperative, but also fundamentally "other" (para) to one another (Sām .khya Kārikā [SK] 61).Only prakr .ti acts, but purus .a alone provides the consciousness for action and owns it.Made of "strands" (gun , as), or deep affective "strivings" (bhāvas), there is only one, universal prakr .ti (often associated in mythology with the Great Goddess, Devi) but a multitude of scintillae of consciousness (purus .as).The body (including sense faculties and objects) and mind of each person are portions of prakr .ti's work or action (root kr .-) for the sake of the experience or pleasure (bhoga), and simultaneously for the release (moks .a), of the particular purus .a around which that body-mind-object complex is organized.The default state of prakr .ti's experience (at least in her human instantiations) is misery or suffering (duh .kha [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 Sām .khya and I will return to it later).Patañjali's Yoga is a closely related system of thought which differs somewhat from Sām .khya-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 moks .a (and higher states of samādhi) are the realm of religious experience.Further reflection, however, will challenge this simple opposition.In the end, Sām .khya and Yoga are complex forms of mystical gnosis in which prakr .ti, or the insightful and self-established mind which is her highest form, recognizes that she has been seen (dr .s .ta) by purus .a as wholly empty except for her focus on him (her purus .ārtha), 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 Sām .khya 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]). 3We 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 1 I will be discussing the Sām .khya Kārika of Īśvarakr .s .n .a, which is generally considered the primary source for the doctrine.Secondary sources besides Larson (1969) include Johnston (1937), Burley (2012), andLarson (2018).For the Patanjali Yoga Sutras, I have primarily used Bryant (2009), White (2014), andHauer (1958).
2 "Enstasy" is a term used by Mircea Eliade (2009) to describe yogic experience but was not original with him; it may have been borrowed from Olivier Lacombe (1937).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(James [ ] 1985, p. 34), 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 Sām .khya and Yoga, requires inquiry into how "experience" in general is understood there.Sām .khya 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 Sām .khya does integrate bhoga into religious experience.At an explicitly religious level, that of moks .a, spiritual release or enlightenment, the closest Sanskrit parallel to experience is the concept of "seeing" (dr .ś-), and I will explore religious experience in Sām .khya and Yoga through this perspective.Although seeing in its usual, perceptual sense would seem to describe the immediate, sensory side of experience, dar .śana 4 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 dr .ś-.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 Sām .khya/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.Sām .khya/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, Sām .khya and Yoga ask us to realize personally, and integrate into life, a principle called purus .ārtha, "for the sake of consciousness" (Sām .khya Kārikā 69).Briefly, this concept-which I believe to be the central idea of Sām .khya and Yoga-asserts that all the action of sentient beings (and everything that happens in the universe is action-karma) is done "in 4 The term darśana ("seeing") is used in both the Sām .khya Kārikā and Yoga S ūtra as are many other words made from the root dr .ś-.I use darśana here because it is the Sanskrit term for darshan, the usual spelling in anthropological and religious studies works for a related concept in contemporary Hinduism that will be discussed later.(Eck 1998, etc.) order to" (artha) give purus .a pleasure or experience (bhoga) and release (moks .a) from the suffering of bondage to the struggle for satisfaction of desire (autsukya, Sām .khya 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.

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 Sām .khyan bhoga (specifically what is called the latter's autsukya quality at SK 58) and that Freudian thanatos is akin to the release (moks .a) that is termed ānanda in the Upanis .ads and elsewhere, and which in Sām .khya and Yoga is associated with complete satisfaction and wholeness (kaivalya).Experience (darśana, seeing), is the doorway to moks .a.While integral and in a way unified, darśana is also complex.To summarize what will take some effort to explicate, the Sām .khya Kārika asserts that prakr .ti, 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 purus .a who, she realizes, simultaneously recognizes that "I have seen her" (prakr .ti).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 prakr .ti (i.e., it cannot be just a satisfaction of drives or reduction of duh .kha), because darśana sees across the division between the two principles, prakr .ti and purus .a, 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 Sām .khya and Yoga (prakr .ti's purus .a 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

The Self as Composite
Psychoanalysis since Lacan in 1936, but most significantly in Winnicott (Winnicott [1971(Winnicott [ ] 1971(Winnicott [ /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 5 We may be reminded here of Marshall McLuhan's observation that "the medium is the message."6The ultimate experience for a person (prakr .tic construction, li ṅga) endowed with purus .ārtha is precisely to realize that purus .ārtha is his own inmost nature.
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 (prān .as) into the son and gives him the sacred knowledge. . .." (Collins and Desai 1999, p. 379).In this way he "extends himself through offspring" (taneyebhih .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 Sām .khya 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.)

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.'"(Hansen 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.(Hansen 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). 7enjamin'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 prakr .ti's life devoted to purus .ārtha, the giving of pleasure and release to purus .a. Benjamin's understanding of how the dialectical image makes (mystical) experience possible is analogous to the experience shared between purus .a and prakrti in moks .a.The image does not live either in the past (for Benjamin, nor the present (Weimar and post-Weimar Germany), just as kaivalya-the experience of release into pure consciousness (citiśakti)-does not consist of either purus .a alone or of the dissolution of the fluctuations (vr .tti) of prakr .ti, (citta-vr .tti-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" (dr .s .t . āham), the eternal fact of purus .ārtha as the essence of the one seen (prakr .ti) shines forth.

Purus . ārtha: The Two Aims of Action in S ām . khya and Yoga
As we have seen, the ultimate purpose of the psycho-cosmology called Sām .khya, and the meditative practices and theory of higher states of consciousness named Yoga, is to liberate the self (purus .a), which is posited to be pure, objectless consciousness, from the suffering (duh .kha) that forms the basic or "default" state of existence in the world.Along the way, however, Sām .khya 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.Sām .khya 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 close 8 ; 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 (moks .a, 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, duh .kha), towards a new way of being in which the person is able to follow and realize the argument of Sām .khya'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(Collins , 2006)).Sām .khya/Yoga are therefore fundamentally ways of understanding and living intelligently in the world.While commentators on Sām .khya/Yoga 9 from Buddhist and other Hindu perspectives (referring to its emphasis on suffering [duh .kha], etc.), and many Western interpreters view it as ascetic and life-denying, a worldlier, life-affirming view of Yoga 10 (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 Sām .khya, as walking the razor's edge between a desired release (final insight into the radical difference between purus .a and prakr .ti; 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 Sām .khya and Yoga is like Benjamin's dialectic, a wearing away without end of kleśas.Moks .a 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.

8
Clearly expressed in SK 2, yogaś cittavr .tti nirodhah ., "yoga is the suppression of the twists and turns of the mind."

9
The extent to which Sām .khya and Yoga form parts of what is essentially one perspective is disputed.Larson (1969Larson ( , 2018)), Burley (2012), andPflueger (2003) are among those who have argued that Patañjali's Yogas ūtra belongs to a school or subschool of Sām .khya.Others have tried to show that Yoga is different from Sām .khya in important ways.This paper assumes that Larson and Pflueger are basically correct, at least in their conclusion that Patāñjali's Yoga agrees with the fundamental theses of the Sām .khya Kārika, that prakr .ti acts solely for the sake of pleasing and releasing purus .a, and that her increasing knowledge of her difference from purus .a paradoxically moves her closer to him and is salvific for her as well. 10In order to view Yoga as a way of life in the world, Whicher and Chapple separate it from Sām .khya more than I find justified.

The World of the Self
I will attempt to describe the person and his world as understood by Sām .khya/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 Sām .khya's "eccentric dualism," one of the two fundamental principles, prakr .ti, represents almost everything and the other, purus .a, almost nothing.Prakr .ti 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 prakr .ti, which is always implicitly personified and explicitly or implicitly female.Purus .a, literally a male person, is in Sām .khya 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 prakr .ti).This is a fundamental fact for Sāmkhya/Yoga that explains its "eccentricity": prakr .ti is about purus .a but purus .a is not about prakr .ti.11In her higher or earlier, undifferentiated state, prakr .ti is called avyakta, m ūlaprakr .ti, and pradhāna.12She evolves through a process called pravr .tti (development) or parin .āma (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 (kr .ta yuga, the Golden Age) to the demonic present (kali yuga).In another way, however, prakr .ti is inherently teleological, acting for the sake of purus .a (purus .ārtha = purus .a + artha).I emphasize the word "act" (Sanskrit root kr .-), for prakr .ti 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, sa ṁskāra, etc.) that partially or mainly motivates new action.
Prakr .ti acts, yet, paradoxically, is not an actor, for she does not own what she does.As noted above, there are two sides of purus .ārtha, the action of prakr .ti for purus .a's sake: first, there is the desire or impulsion to give purus .a enjoyment, which is understood, much as with Freud, as the cessation of a desire.Second, there is the desire to liberate purus .a from bondage in the "threefold suffering" (duh .khatraya, SK 1) of the human condition, a goal that in psychoanalytic terms corresponds to Freud's "death instinct" (thanatos) or "Nirvana principle." 13The Sām .khya 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 prakr .ti function for the sake of the release of the purus .a. (SK 58, Larson's translation [Larson 1969, p. 273]. 14uffering, the distance from happiness named by the word "desire"(audsukya, from ud + suka, literally "away from pleasure"), is found by both Sām .khya and Yoga to arise from a certain kind of selfhood, called aha ṁkāra in Sām .khya and asmitā in Yoga.This sort of self asserts itself (aha ṁkāra) 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 Rāvan .a in the epic texts.Grandson of the god Brahmā, Rāvan .a refuses to accept his place in the proper order (dharma) of the world, and inflates his ego (aham .kāra) through ascetic practices, aiming to become lord of the whole cosmos.This leads him to cause maximum suffering to himself and others.But Rāvan .a, 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 Rāvan .a, overcoming suffering and the cravings of egoism through insight (sattvic buddhi, prajñā) that realizes the fundamental difference between our unrolling karmic process (parin .āma, pravr .tti) and the principle of pure consciousness (purus .a) that witnesses prakr .ti's evolution.Suffering is thus correlated with ignorance (and demons are typically revealed as witless fools),15 insight with release from ego.

"I Have Been
Seen": Darshan in the Sām .khya Kārikā and the Yoga Sutra While Yoga and philosophical Sām .khya 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 Sām .khyan gun .as. 16 We will address the trope of Nature (prakr , ti) imagined as a female dancer (nartakī) performing for the eyes of an implicitly royal witness, consciousness (purus .a). Correct thinking (Sām .khya) and deep meditation (Yoga) are compared to a dance performed by an unsurpassably refined performer (sukumārataram na ki ṁcid 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 purus .a (SK 61) but only to recognize, through his eyes reflecting hers seeing his, that all is "pure essential knowledge" (viśuddham kevalam jñānam, SK 64).
Purus .ārtha means that all worldly action is already a dance choreographed around giving enjoyment and release to purus .a.It is only so that the dance can reach a satisfactory fulfillment, can finally end, that correct thinking (Sām .khya) and meditation (Yoga) need be added to the performance.Yoga and Sām .khyan philosophy are refinements, implicit from the beginning in the principle of purus .ārtha, 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 Sā ṁkhya 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" (duh .khatraya) of ordinary life.Near the end of the SK (verse 68), the prakr .tic 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. 17ām .khya 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 Sām .khya 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 Sām .khya enacts a trope, an intricate and subtle way of imagining satisfaction and release (bhoga and moks .a).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 purus .ārtha, 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 prakr .ti gives experience (suffering or pleasure) to purus .a and also releases him.It is in seeing prakr .ti in her different states that purus .a seems to experience pain and enjoyment, and it is in seeing her at the moment of her complete recognition of selflessness that purus .a approaches release (in her eye).This recognition of being seen allows prakr .ti to stop her frantic search for the quenching of desire (autsukya nivr .tti 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 purus .a, prakr .ti becomes empty and shows purus .a 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 prakr .tic mentality).Purus .a and prakr .ti, 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 purus .a) and integrity in being seen (for prakr .ti); dr .s .t . āham ("I am seen") and dr .s .t .ā māyā ("I have seen her").The two sides of kaivalya are also evoked at YS 4.34 where prakr .ti's kaivalya is characterized by the emptying of the gun .as of their urgency to be seen by purus .a, and purus .a's kaivalya is described as svar ūpa-pratis .t . ha citiśakti, the "power of consciousness established in its own nature." 19Tropes of seeing are also central in the Yoga S ūtra.Prakr .ti is referred to as the realm of the "seen" (dr .śya) and the two arthas of bhoga (experience, enjoyment) and apavarga (release) are referred to prakr .ti in her form as "seen," dr .śya (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 purus .a. Samādhis (meditative ecstasies) are named by their quality of "insight" or even transcendence of insight (jña, i.e., samprajñāta and asamprajñāta).Purus .a is characterized as the "Seer" (dr .śi).
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" (preks .a) from both their points of view.The image of prakr .ti, as she moves towards realization for purus .a, which she receives back from him, shows us the Sām .khyan practitioner as performing artist.I believe the same is true in the Yoga S ūtra (1.27), where utterance of the pran .ava, the syllable OM, symbolizes the ineffable in a more continuous way 20 that allows prakr .ti in her kaivalya state to become a kind of purus .a (purus .a-viśes .a, a term used to describe Iśvara, the Lord of yoga [YS 1.24 ]). 21The 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 purus .a and prakr .ti in a unified image, identified in the YS as the Lord of yoga, Iśvara, the personification of OM. 18 And Buddhism and Jainism. 19The same two-sided vision of spiritual realization is suggested in the first two verses of the Yoga S ūtra: "Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of thought and emotion."[1].Then the seer (the conscious being, purus .a) rests in its own form."[2] (Phillips 2009, p. 207). 20OM's omnipresence, its ability to bind time, is why chanting it immediately invokes its deep sense of the Lord (Iśvara) and makes it (whenever it is uttered) the teacher of the ancients (YS 1.26-1.28). 21The idea of purus .a viśes .a, which could be construed either as a "specific purus .a" or as a "likeness or sort of purus .a" (along the lines of the use of the same word in Rāmānuja's viśis .t .ādvaita, "qualified, or a sort of, non-dualism") anticipates the goal of prakr .ti's (as opposed to purus .a's) kaivalya.YS 4.34.
from Stephen Collins' [Collins 2010] discussion of Buddhist nirvana), the observer who reflects back prakr .ti'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 prakr .ti's dance of apophasis: nāsmi na me nāham.Do Sām .khya 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.

Darshan in Contemporary Hinduism
Lawrence A. Babb (1981Babb ( , 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 (2014Ellison ( , 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 Katherine (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 Sā ṁkhyan 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. 24Child 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 24 "Shrines, in the prescribed telling, are the concrete manifestation of a divine agency that is heeded by human subjects.
Immanent divinity can reveal itself at some places in the form of a symptom, a material clue like a swelling in the ground or a whorl in a tree that triggers recognition in the right person.This is the logic of the svayambhu, or 'self-manifested,' icon, which anchors the origin stories of many of the famous sites of Brahminical Hinduism.At other sites, God-in one of His or Her myriad forms-may appear to the right person through the medium of a dream."(Elison 2018, p. 64). 25 Unfreedom for Lacan, authentic selfhood and creativity for Winnicott and Kohut.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. 26For 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 et al. 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 Sām .khya Kārikā (SK 58,59,61,64,65,66,68,69) lays out how purus .a and prakr .ti 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 ki ṁcid asti, SK 61).The bhoga aspect of purus .ārtha is expressed through seeing, very much like the later idea of darshan discussed above.In SK 61 and 66, prakr .ti announces that "I have been seen" (drās .tāsmi, dr .s .tāham) and in SK 66 purus .a states the correlative, "I have seen [her]" (dr .s .tā māyā).This recognition ends the work of prakr .ti for purus .a's sake, leading to enlightenment/release, which likewise is viewed from both points of view.Prakr .ti 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 prakr .ti's non-self-recognition is purus .a's moment of full, unafflicted selfhood.Purus .a's vision of the not-I prakr .ti, in the next verse (65), is the view from kaivalya: prakr .tim paśyati purus .ah . . . .avasthitah .svasthah ., "Purus .a gazes upon [the nay-saying] prakr .ti while comfortably established in his own place."Enjoyment, seeing something utterly beautiful transpire before his eyes, i.e., prakr .ti'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 Sā ṁkhya in the idea of kaivalya.The darshan of purus .a and prakr .ti is a mystical realization that both fulfills and transcends their absolute otherness.

Darshan and Intentionality
Prakr .ti's life trajectory in Sā ṁkhya/Yoga is quite strange: while her nature is to act "for the sake of purus .a," the text further specifies that this purpose includes to be seen by purus .a as "not I." It would appear that prakr .ti exists in order to reveal her non-being, she sees in order to reveal that she does not see, or sees for purus .a 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 aham .āric existence.What for Brentano and much of European philosophy is the basic condition of the working mind-consciousness of-is split by Sā ṁkhya and Yoga into two sides, one of consciousness: i.e., purus .a, and one of of (sic!): i.e., prakr .ti.The practice of close reading the mind to make this split real is both philosophy (Sā ṁkhya) and meditation (Yoga).What it leads to is a transformation of the mind (buddhi, or the mental system of buddhi-manas-ahamkāra = antah .kāran .a 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