The Yogic View of Consciousness: Introduction

https://dondeg.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/the-yogic-view-of-consciousness-introduction/

This is the Introduction to the book The Yogic View of Consciousness, by Donald J. DeGracia, Ph.D.

Contents for The Yogic View of Consciousness:

Introducing the IntroductionOver the centuries, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali have served as a kind of crystal ball that people look into and project their hopes, dreams, and metaphysics of reality. This is not to say that the Yoga Sutras contains no objective content. It teaches how to do yoga after all, and is grounded in an ancient Indian philosophy called Samkhya.

But the objective content is elusive from our modern secular standpoint. The further in time the Yoga Sutras has extended from its origins, the more porous and diffuse its meaning has become. Nowadays, one can read almost anything into the Yoga Sutras. It can’t be helped. One can reach only as high as one’s arm extends. Similarly, one can comprehend only to the extent one’s mind can stretch.

What is this book about?

The Yogic View of Consciousness began as an idea for a book that was to be entitled “Atom” based on the premise that the Greek word “atom” was related to the Indian word “atman”. Both are indivisible things that are thought to describe the basic “stuff” out of which the world is made. An atom, which today is called a “quantum”, is the materialist’s basic unit of the world. An atman is a quantum of consciousness, and is the basic unit of the world to a Hindu. I thought they might be related and suggest a metaphysics whereby the world was constructed of units of consciousness. However, I spoke with an expert in Greek and Indian languages, Nicholas Kazanas, and he assured me that the words are etymologically unrelated. Therefore, the title “Atom” got trashed. But the idea that the world is made of units of consciousness did not, and what was to be “Atom” is now the book you hold called The Yogic View of Consciousness.

The book began as a blog post (which is now Chapter 1) that was to provide a go-to reference for an email discussion group on consciousness studies in which I participate. Once the first chapter was written, it occurred to me to summarize the ideas in the form of the model described in Chapter 2, captured by the simple graphic below. This in turn led to Chapter 3, which discusses the implications of this model against other views of consciousness. This is where I had intended to stop writing. Therefore, the first three chapters are almost stand-alone. They can be taken as a broad overview and summary of the remainder of the book.

Figure 1: The meaning of this book.

However, once I had the model shown in Figure 1, I decided, what the heck, why not fill in more detail? Hence the remainder of the book steps through and describes each part of this picture. The flow of the book is as follows:

Chapters 1 – 3: Summary of the yogic view of consciousness and its implications.

Chapters 4 – 7: Describe various views of the Absolute, depicted by the projector (“the world”) in the image above.

Chapter 8: A segue chapter from the Absolute to the Relative brings mathematics into the discussion.

Chapters 9 – 18: An extended discussion of the bindu, which is the link between the Absolute and the Relative. The subtext here, which eventually becomes explicit, is the ancient question of the One and the Many.

Chapters 19 – 22: Describes the “cave of consciousness”, a reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave, which is a way to understand the mind in its totality. The main focus is on memory, what yoga calls samskaras.

Chapters 23 – 32: Translating the model into first-person experience. Yoga, like basketball, is a real activity people do. We may theorize all we wish about yoga and basketball. However, yoga and basketball only come to life when we do them.

The Yoga Sutras

On one level, the Yogic View of Consciousness is another commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras… sort of. Technically perhaps it is not a commentary because I do not discuss each aphorism, nor do I attempt to explain things in the order Patanjali did in the Yoga Sutras. The book is a commentary insofar as the Yoga Sutras are the basis and genesis of the model in Figure 1, which is meant to encapsulate the theory of mind embodied in the Yoga Sutras.

What are the Yoga Sutras? They are a collection of 196 aphorisms that teach yoga. They are considered by most to be the first and last word on what is called Raja or Ashtanga yoga. However, the Yoga Sutras are extraordinarily cryptic and abstract not only in their meaning but in their origins as well.

Brief History of the Yoga Sutras

The history of India is spotty for a number of reasons. Ancient Indians did not try to record their history, as did, say, the ancient Greeks (hello! Herodotus). Further, when British imperialism enslaved India, several European scholars developed rather Eurocentric ideas about Indian history (Max Müller is perhaps the best known name in this regard). Many of these ideas have been brought into question by a number of recent discoveries, not the least being the discovery of Harappan civilization that peaked circa 2500 BC and has roots going back perhaps to 6000 BC. There is thus legitimate and substantial uncertainty establishing dates, times, and places for events in Indian history.

This does not mean nothing is known about Indian history. There is a lot known. The Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions date back at least 2500 years. During this time an immense literature of religio-philosophical thought was produced. This includes the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, and Tantras, as well as large literatures surrounding the various forms of Buddhism. But because of the historical uncertainties, all of this floats in a historical vacuum, decontextualized, as it were, from the grounding in everyday life that knowledge of history provides.

The short of it is: we don’t know when the Yoga Sutras were collected in their present form. We don’t even know if Patanjali was a historical person. The details of the origins of the Yoga Sutras are uncertain. Nor is it clear if and how they were altered over the centuries. What we do know is that the extremely rich backdrop of Brahmanical and Buddhist thought provides the context of the Yoga Sutras and it is to be seen as part of these greater cultural movements. The methods in the Yoga Sutras are given in the context of a branch of Indian philosophy called Samkhya, attributed to the sage Kapila. This book focuses much on unfolding the meaning of Samkhya concepts like gunas, Prakriti, and so forth.

In this regard, I am guided and inspired by the following passage from Heinrich Zimmer’s Philosophies of India:

I take the position in this work that the West still does not fully appreciate the meaning of the concepts, and associated experiences, expounded in the Yoga Sutras. Even if we did understand in every aspect the secular history of the Yoga Sutras and related materials, we are still faced with the task of deciphering their meaning.

Commentaries on the Yoga Sutras

The Yoga Sutras are terse and cryptic. The sutra style is like the genetic code. Both can be thought of as extreme forms of information compression that, when decompressed, reveal the information in its fullness. In the case of the genetic code, this reveals an organism. For the Yoga Sutras, the decompression method used over the centuries is a variety of commentaries that explain the meaning of each aphorism and how they are sutured together to unfold the logic and methods of yoga.

An excellent introduction to Yoga Sutras commentaries by Edwin Bryant is found at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The present work relies heavily on one particular commentary of the Yoga Sutras published in 1961 by I.K. Taimni called The Science of Yoga. Why this particular commentary is made clear below.

Academia and Yoga

When one looks presently at the intellectual landscape of academia, our hallowed (or hated, depending on one’s outlook) universities, one sees an obvious dichotomy.

On one hand, you have the sciences (physics, math, biology, cognitive sciences, etc.), where the practitioners are extremely specialized in very narrow fields of inquiry. Their extremely narrow focus causes their thinking to contain huge blind spots and holes. This, however, does not stop them from making pronouncements on topics they know little about, such as philosophy and religion. Perhaps the central feature that characterizes how they think is that they naively accept their ideas at face value. That is to say, these people actually believe the stuff they say amongst themselves. They are so ignorant of the history of thought in the world that they actually believe in “objectivity”, and they have, mostly unconsciously, made it their religion. This way of thinking has sunk to some real absurdities, giving rise to social phenomena like “global warming” (that was “global cooling” and is now morphing into “climate change”), or hostile attitudes between evolution and religion, and so on. Later in the book I will discuss scientism, the attempt to make scientific ideas into something akin to religion, which is a consequence of the intellectual naivety of the last generations of scientists. Elsewhere, I coined the term “philosophical pygmies” to characterize these people, and I will continue to refer to them as such throughout the present work.

On the other hand, you have non-scientific Humanities (i.e. history, philosophy, linguistics, religious studies, humanities, social sciences, etc.) where the practitioner’s take what I will call a “meta stance”, meaning that they seek to stand outside of or above (“meta”) what they are studying. This type of academic tends to be constantly skeptical, take positions that are always tentative, and never comes to any definite conclusions. This approach is laudable for exercising a necessary intellectual caution. On the other hand, if we are too cautious, we never accomplish anything. Studying their thinking reminds me of sliding around on an oily surface, or listening to a politician speak. These are the people who have given us “social relativity”, “multiculturalism”, “post-modernism” and similar viewpoints that have garnered so much love and affection amongst the population as a whole.

Portrayed in this fashion, the dichotomy is clearly a caricature. But it is meant to capture a serious phenomenon recognized decades ago by C.P. Snow in what he called the “two cultures”. By this he meant the divorce of the sciences from the humanities. Over the decades, the differences between the “two cultures” has amplified in toxic ways I won’t go into here.

It is the non-scientific group, the Humanities, who have monopolized the academic study of Indian thought. This is certainly not an intentional conspiracy to keep Indian ideas out of the sciences. Except in very rare instances, the science-side has simply seen no relevance in the Indian ideas for our scientific understanding of the world.

I.K. Taimni

This is where Taimni comes in. He was not a traditional academic with respect to Indic studies. One is hard-pressed to find reference to his work in the academic yoga literature. Taimni was a chemistry professor in India circa the mid-20th century. He was also a theosophist. He wrote several translations and interpretations of important Hindu works including the Yoga Sutras, the Shiva Sutras and the Pratyabhijna Hridayam, the latter two works being part of the tradition of Kashmiri Shaivism.

Taimni did something fairly unique in the literature of the Yoga Sutras. He put a scientific slant on interpreting them. He often used examples of known physical processes as a way to explain the meaning of a given aphorism, or concept behind an aphorism, or method described in the Yoga Sutras.

What this book is about, in large measure, is continuing what Taimni started. I take many of his ideas and expand on them. I discuss how current scientific understanding does or does not gel with what is discussed in the Yoga Sutras.

Why? What’s the point? Isn’t our modern science good enough as it is? Why does it need help from something as esoteric as a (possibly) 2000 year old yoga text?

Straddling Both Sides

Well, the book spends a lot of time answering this question. The reason for describing the “two cultures” above is to provide a framework for understanding the approach I use here. On one hand, like a scientist, I take the yogic ideas at face value and believe they provide a serious and objective description of reality. Just as we take, say, Einstein’s General Relativity as a description of reality. On the other hand, I am also using the “meta stance” of the humanities, mainly to point out the limitations of our present scientific picture and exactly why it needs help from something like the Yoga Sutras. I flit in and out of the two mind-sets drawing on their strengths while pointing out the weakness of both.

With regard to the science side it occurs to me to say the following: Science grew out of philosophy but science has not outgrown the need for philosophy. However, because of the split of the “two cultures”, scientists are generally disdainful of philosophy. They are arrogant and proud, but their arrogance and pride simply masks their naivety and ignorance. They are ignorant of social and psychological realities that play them like chumps. It has really gotten out of hand. One manifestation of this is how the sciences are turning in on themselves in a hostile manner, as for example, in the debates about the relevance of String Theory, or again, in the “climate change” arena. Science as it has been known in the West is in a state of degeneration, in large measure because it has rejected its humanistic roots and turned into something resembling religion more than classical science. It rejected philosophical thought and is now paying the price for doing so.

On the other hand, the slippery, non-scientific Humanities endlessly go round and round in mental circles and thus go nowhere. By being divorced from the hardcore technical material that makes up the sciences, they have become unanchored from the modern world. Their stance contains not a small trace of alienation from the modern world precisely because they don’t understand how the world works as discovered by our modern sciences. They are forced into the “modern classroom” but have no idea how transistors, the Internet, or LCD screens work, let alone how science itself works. They have no idea how relevant their ideas are for controversies in math and physics, if they even know of such controversies. Some amongst this species of academic sees through the social order, and sometimes even their own minds, but they are powerless to act. The Humanities have become dissociated and disenfranchised from the heart of the action, and their bitterness at this fact is more or less obvious in everything they do.

Finally, on whichever side of the divide one falls, there is one factor that makes either side ill-equipped to deal with larger issues. Academics, as real living people, have their own agendas that supersede what is being studied. I won’t dwell on the pressures placed on academics, other than to say I am subject to them myself so know them first-hand. The Humanists at least formally recognize these factors in all their post-modern blather that, for all its faults, is smart enough to recognize that we live in a society. But in spite of being aware of it, they are still forced to conform to it. On the other hand, the scientists are like rats in a cage, which they sense only in the most indirect of fashions because they are not intellectually equipped to even formulate their place in the social order. This expresses itself in the increasingly mediocre (and in many cases, outright wrong) output in all fields of science.

So here I criticize both sides and also draw on the best of what both sides have to offer. I focus this through the Yoga Sutras because it talks about phenomenon of relevance to the intellectual content of both sides.

Thus, perhaps the main use to which the Yoga Sutras is put in this work is to look into it as a crystal ball for answers to help re-unify an intellectual world that is currently in a state of schizophrenia. There is more going on than just this, but the remainder is apparent reading the text. Here in the introduction, I point out the “two cultures” problem because it flows as a subtext through the entire book.

Tone and Style

Given my critique of both sides of the two-culture divide, it is simply silly to conform to the limitations each side has placed in communicating their particular brands of information. There is a goofy affectation and pretense of appearing sophisticated and intellectual in academic communication. There is none of that here. When discussing the Yoga Sutras the intellect gets put in its rightful place as a mere tool, no more no less. We don’t glorify hammers and saws so why should we glorify the intellect? The intellect has limits and these are brought to the fore in the present work. So, while this work is intellectual, it is also brash, sarcastic, humorous, humble, or whatever else is needed to convey meaning effectively. What I try to achieve is to be as straight forward as possible, even if it might offend the sensibilities of those who place style over substance. My response to that is: oh just grow up.

Business Stuff

Like some of my previous eBooks, The Yogic View of Consciousness was born as a series of posts on my blog PlaneTalk (https://dondeg.wordpress.com/) which have been collected as this book and is being released for free into the internet wilds.

The digital PDF is intended to be the main version. It has live links to a variety of supplemental information, and the Reader is encouraged to take advantage of these to get additional information. In the Age of the Internet, the conveyance of information is different. In ancient times (before 1998) we had to use citations. Now, the internet allows the live linking of information in ways impossible in the past. Thus, not only do I link to other web pages, but to entire books, to videos on YouTube, and even to songs whose lyrics add additional overtones to whatever I might be discussing.

There are also print-on-demand versions available for people who like to hold real physical books when reading. These cost a nominal fee for the service of converting the PDF to a book. For those who choose to get a physical book, the internet links are obviously unavailable. Nonetheless, the book has been designed to be stand-alone enough that one can read the text without the links and still fully get the intended meaning.

There are five “official” versions of the Yogic View of Consciousness being released:

[1] PDF file. This is the main version intended for wider distribution.

[2] The series of blog posts on PlaneTalk. You are currently reading this. Use the table of contents above to navigate.

[3] Lulu.com standard quality (SQ) version. $39.99. Lulu “standard format” color printing option is substantially cheaper than the high-quality color printing. This is a really nice version. It’s nice to hold and the color images come out surprisingly well.

[4] EPUB version. $8.99. For tablets, Kindles, etc.

[5] Lulu.com high quality (HQ) version. $149.99. This is an expensive, high quality print option. The pictures are gorgeous though. Compared to my ~100 page books at $39.99, the pricing is proportional and reflects the fact that Yogic View of Consciousness is almost 400 pages.

Please go to http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/dondeg if you wish to purchase any of my books, which are available on your left to download as free PDFs.

Finally, as with all my publicly-available writings, I encourage you, the Reader, to get in touch and voice your thoughts and opinions about what I have written. As I like to say, fight, flatter, agree, or disagree as you wish. Again, this is the Age of Internet. We no longer need to sit by as passive absorbers of information, but can participate in two-way communication with media creators. Therefore, I encourage Readers to contact me by email, or post comments on PlaneTalk. Each chapter has its own comment section on my blog where you can post your thoughts. The comments that have accumulated since posting the Yogic View of Consciousness provide an interesting on-going discussion that supplements the text, and you are invited to join in.

Yoga has become an integral part of the Western way of life. The assimilation is by no means complete. I hope my small contribution can add something to the ongoing assimilation of yoga into Western culture, to the ongoing rediscovery of the depth of ancient thought, and to the ongoing fusion of Eastern and Western cultures.

Don DeGracia

Detroit, MI

Oct. 2015

I expand on the yogic theory of consciousness. First I express it as a simple model, then I explain the features of this model in more detail.

Contents for The Yogic View of Consciousness:

Ok, this is a long post. I considered breaking it into multiple parts but decided to leave it as one long piece. The Reader can take it in chunks as they wish.

If you haven’t read Part 1 first, I suggest you do so.

Recap

We begin by summarizing the yogic view of consciousness using a metaphor of a movie projection. The text is meant to be read in conjunction with viewing Figure 1. We start with this simple picture and flesh it in as we proceed.

You can imagine your immediate awareness as the inside surface of a balloon. The balloon as a whole is your mind (the cave of consciousness). The world that seems to be outside of you actually originates from a “hole”, the bindu, which exists at the deepest level of your mind. The real world (Kant’s transcendental) projects through the bindu into the mind. What is projected into the mind is the “light” of consciousness. In the mind, the light of consciousness is distorted, reflected, refracted, and so on, by the many structures in the mind. The distorted light of consciousness gets projected on the inner surface of the balloon and generates conscious experience there, or what van der Leeuw called “the world-image”. The world-image is your immediate moment-by-moment awareness.

Figure 1: A Movie Projection metaphor to capture the essential features of the Yogic view of consciousness.

When your awareness is directed to the screen, this is paranga cetana, outwardly directed consciousness, which is the normal state of most people. When you reverse the flow of the light of consciousness away from the screen and back towards the bindu, this is pratyak cetana, inwardly directed consciousness. Pratyak cetana occurs naturally when transitioning between states of consciousness, but it can be perfected and voluntarily controlled by the methods of Patanjali’s yoga. (I previously discussed a bit about pratyak and paranga cetana here).

This picture of the yogic view of consciousness is the yoga-enhanced version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The things we are aware of are “shadows” projected on a screen that is our immediate awareness. We have no direct awareness of the extent of the Cave, or of what lies in its depths, or of the bindu, or of the real world that does the projecting. They are the hidden foundations of our direct, immediate conscious experience.

Let’s step through all this in more detail.

The Real World

What is the nature of the world?

Here in the West, the plethora of philosophies and theories seek to explain the nature of the world in terms of one of, or some combination of, the shadows on the cave wall.

If the shadows involve the seemingly external world that we appear to be embedded in, we call the corresponding views materialism or physicalism. If the shadows involve the mind, thought, or awareness, we call the corresponding philosophies idealism, panpsychism, or some variant thereof. If the shadows involve both the world and the mind, we call it dualism.

There is a third type of theory that claims that nothing is explainable ultimately. Examples would be the variations of existentialism. Theories that explain the world as unexplainable are not really explanations. However, they do have the advantage of admitting to the futility of finding ultimate meaning in the shadows and that is their value.

But in terms of views that claim a positive something-or-another is at the root of things, we are left with the materialistic and idealistic views. In general, these are considered to be opposites.

Let me make this perfectly clear: materialistic and idealistic views are NOT opposite.

They are just two extremes of attempting to explain the nature of the world on the basis of the shadows on the cave wall. They are the same. Any distinctions between them are completely arbitrary because all they do is seek to explain reality in terms of the shadows that play out on the screens of our conscious minds.

What is the nature of the world from the yogic view? According to the yogic theory, your very consciousness, the “light” of your awareness is Brahman; it is the real world. Not any particular shadow: not this perception, not that thought, not this intuition, or that observation, or this deduction, etc. No. The only fact that matters is that you are aware of anything at all.

Your awareness IS Brahman. IT is the nature of reality. Brahman is like light, but instead of illuminating, it gives BEING. Everything else is but the play of shadows within this being.

Get To The Point

Reality, Brahman, consciousness, projects into the cave of consciousness through the bindu.

What the heck is a bindu?

To those not familiar with Hinduism and yoga, the idea of the bindu is completely alien. The bindu is not a theory or a mere idea. It is a reality experienced in advanced yoga practices (again, see SwamiJ’s article; I give a brief discussion here).

The bindu derives from the fact of samadhi, which is the extreme single-pointedness of the mind. The Yoga Sutras never explicitly mention the bindu. It is centuries later in Kashmiri Shaivism, where the idea is codified. Aphorism 3-15 of Vasugupta’s Shiva Sutras mentions the bindu:

Bija means “seed”. In this context it means “the seed from which the universe grows”. Avadhanam means “pay devoted attention to” or “remain one pointedly fixated on”. As with all aphorisms, this statement contains multiple layers of meaning related to its place in the “thread” of the Shiva Sutras (suture).

Aphorism 3-15 is generally interpreted as an instruction to focus with samadhi-consciousness on the source (seed) of the universe. For example, Bhaskara’s translation is: “Constant attention to the seed”. Swami Lakshmanjoo translates it: “Maintain breakless awareness of that supreme energy which is the seed of the universe.”

A Western mind favorably disposed towards these ideas is likely to interpret this “seed” as referring to some externalized agent, like God, or some other power that created the world. But in yoga, everything takes place deep in the consciousness of the yogi. Thus the aphorism can be interpreted as an instruction to the yogi to seek out the source of his universe, the bindu, which is the source of the yogi’s individualized consciousness. This is the interpretation Taimni gives:

Thus the bindu is that which links the individual to the universal. The procedure to find the bindu was outlined in the quote by van der Leeuw at the end of Part 1. He described nirbija samadhi. The bindu can only be found in nirbija samadhi.

This is why everyone from Kant through Fitche, Hegel, and Weyl could not find an escape hatch out of the individual mind. Instead, they found various compromises to cope with the shadows. People like Nietzsche, Sartre, and their ilk threw in the towel and quit trying, which was the right thing to do. It is better to be neither right nor wrong rather than just half right, and therefore half wrong.

However, when we consider Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, one wonders if he learned something of the bindu from ancient India.

We Are Still Cave MenSpeaking of Plato, let’s now consider what the cave is. It is, broadly speaking, the mind. But when I say “broadly” I do mean broadly! We have to tackle the cave in two sections. This section discusses the cave in general. The next section will talk about what we find inside the cave.

It is good that the West knows there is more to the mind than what is available to immediate perception and direct introspection. However, the Western ideas are confused, controversial, and there are diverse viewpoints. Most of them focus on the contents of the cave so they are discussed in the next section.

Eastern thought also has a variety of approaches to the unconscious aspects of the mind. Compared to the West these tend to be more systematic and comprehensive. Patanjali’s system is a masterwork of the human intellect, for example.

Further, unlike Western views, the scope of Eastern thinking allows it to speak to the genesis of minds. This is expressed in a number of illustrative metaphors. The dew drop and the shining sea, the fire and the spark, acorns and oaks, and stuff like that. What these ideas mean to convey is exactly what was said above: our individualized consciousness is made directly of the same “stuff” as the Universal Consciousness (e.g. Brahman, Shiva, etc.).

There are many such descriptions, but we turn specifically to Kashmiri Shaivism (KS), which, in my estimation, is one of the most advanced and mature expressions of such ideas. A very complex hierarchy of processes is given in KS to account for the formation of individual minds.

In KS these processes are encapsulated in the general idea of a constriction of the Universal Consciousness into the individual consciousness. The property of constriction is expressed clearly in aphorism 4 of the Pratyabhijna Hridayam of Ksemaraja:

According to Taimni this breaks down as:

citi – the ultimate reality in its aspect of cit (mind, e.g. Sat Chit Ananda: Being Mind Bliss)

samkoca – contraction, constriction, centralization

atma – the individual Self, Monad

cetanah – pure consciousness (I have used the synonym drisimatrah in past writings)

api – though, even if

sankucita – in a contracted form

visva – universe

maya – full of

Here are two different translations:

What is being described here is a process of the Universal Consciousness constricting to form individualized minds. But what is constricted, and what is the process of constriction?

IK Taimni gives an intelligent discussion in Man, God and The Universe, which I briefly summarize. Metaphors like the spark from the fire, or a ray from the Sun fail to convey that what is constricted remains connected to the whole. The idea of a plant and its seeds describes how the smaller copy has the potential to be the same as the original, but again fails to convey the idea of a persistent connection.

A more modern metaphor to conceptualize the constriction process is to use fractal geometry and say the constricted form is a self-similar replica of the larger form. Then, the smaller remains an indelible part of the whole. In addition, the smaller contains within it infinite copies, as does the whole.

However, what all such metaphors lack is the recognition that, in some sense, the constricted form is illusory; that it is a projection akin to a virtual imagine inside a mirror. We come back to this below when we discuss the screen.

In summary, this constricted form is the Cave of Consciousness. It is the mind. And it is a deep and complicated cave that we now discuss.

Peeking Timidly Under the Surface

In the West, the ideas of the subconscious and unconscious minds have varying degrees of acceptance. At one end are uncontroversial “hard science” facts, and at the other end are ideas that provide the content to the mainstream’s idea of the looney bin.

It’s clear that the brain does things that never enter consciousness, like maintain balance and posture, keep heart rate and blood sugar constant, and other things considered reflexes. We know too of instincts: bundles of reflexes that can be modified by learning and experience, which we share with the animals. This level is pretty uncontroversial as this stuff goes.

When we get into the cognitive or mental unconscious, it gets fuzzier. It is certain that memories are stored in our brains that we are not conscious of all the time, but that we can access if we think about it (like imagine your Mom’s face), or if there are suitable cues. Perhaps the most important of these most-of-the-time-unconscious memory banks is language, which serves such a great role conditioning our moment-to-moment awareness.

But then it gets weirder. We can talk about unconscious “complexes” in a Freudian sense or the Collective Unconscious in a Jungian sense. At this point the physicists and neuroscientists get up and leave the room giggling. But psychologists and psychiatrists and other professions who worked regularly with people with “psychological issues” find these ideas operationally useful. So, at minimum, something is going on, otherwise there would be no value at all to such ideas.

After this, it just gets plain weird. There are people like Maslow talking about peak experiences, and Terence McKenna describing DMT hallucinations that talk back to him, and Stephen LaBerge flitting around in the world of lucid dreams. There is some idiot out there who tells people to “DO_OBE“. From the view of mainstream science, this stuff is the fringe and is tolerated because it is ignored.

On a broader historical level, I’ve discussed the two-level view that has dominated in the West about how the mind and consciousness relate to the link between man and God. This is the kind of stuff found in Nicholas of Cusa, Saint Augustine, or Leibniz. However, after Nietzsche, the only major player who kept up with this kind of nonsense was Hermann Weyl.

[Side bar: I really wish Weyl’s Open World essay was available online; people need to read it. For those who don’t know, the first sentence is: “A mathematician steps before you, speaks about metaphysics, and does not hesitate to use the name of God.” The second sentence makes my point: “This is an unusual practice nowadays.” That was in 1932.]

Serious considerations that God has anything to do with the mind have long gone out of fashion in the West. People who talk about such things today are relegated to religious studies, humanities, and other such pens and stables that serve as “safe zones” for what is considered frivolous discourse in other quarters (hello, science, I’m talking to you!).

The above is a sketch of the broad landscape of ideas the West has about what the mind looks like underneath the surface of our immediate and direct awareness. It’s very sad to say that this is what Plato’s Cave has turned into over 2000 years of Western intellectual evolution. It is certainly a fine example of degenerate evolution.

Boldly Going Where No Occidental Man Has Gone Before

The East has major ideas common to the various schemes of the mind’s structure that I list here. I use the Hindu terms just because I know them well, but equivalent terms exist in the various schools of Buddhism, Taoism, and so on.

A list of elements of the mind in Eastern psychologies:

These ideas represent the structure of the cave of consciousness according to various Eastern schemes. The above list can be considered a description of the anatomy of the surface mind.

But it doesn’t stop here. In addition, there is a very rich understanding of altered states of consciousness. In the West, these ideas have been imported as things like Theosophy’s concept of the Planes of Nature and similar such schemes.

A typical Westerner who knows about and, for whatever reasons, accepts the idea of the Planes of Nature will tend to apply a Western gloss to the concept. They will imagine a very grand cosmology that expands the notion of the “real world” to go beyond the physical and encompass the nonphysical worlds. They will interpret the idea of the planes to mean that there are hidden subtler worlds in which we are embedded, in the same way that people accept that we are embedded in an external physical world that is outside of us.

However, this is a Western mistake. The planes are not outside of us. They are inside of our mind. The Planes make up the substructures of the mind. They are the depths of the cave of consciousness.

The Cave Is A Layer Cake

There are many schemes of the Planes to choose from. Each has merits and they all map to each other anyway. Since I am focusing mainly on Patanjali’s yoga, I will use the 4-fold breakdown of the inner worlds described in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (that I used in Part 9 of What Is Science?).

To remind the Reader, I repeat the table from there (I found this nice web page too).

These are layers or strata in the cave of consciousness. The surface mind is vitarka and it perceives gunas in the visesa state. Vitarka grows out of the deeper strata. When we dream, vitarka fades into the background and the screen of our consciousness becomes vicara and we perceive the avisesa state of the gunas. This is as far as the typical Western person descends into the cave when they have a physical body.

Thus, there is not a straight projection from the bindu to the vitarka surface mind. Instead, the light of consciousness is filtered through these layers after entering at the bindu. It is a highly filtered and conditioned light of consciousness that eventually illuminates the screen of vitarka, or what we call “normal” waking consciousness.

Therefore we can update our graphic to include the four phases of the gunas as screens, or sieves, through which the light of consciousness is filtered.

The dividing of the light rays are my feeble attempt to illustrate how the pure light of consciousness gets filtered, or conditioned, as it ascends up through the Cave of Consciousness, eventually forming our normal waking mind (vitarka) of the physical (visesa) world.

Thus, what are shadows projected on the cave wall in Plato’s Allegory are actually the complex patterns that consciousness takes after being filtered and conditioned by the four layers of the cave of consciousness.

I am only pointing out the general structure of the Cave. I’m not going into any detail about the qualitative content of the four layers of the mind. I did this to some extent in Part 9 of What is Science? and won’t repeat myself here.

Instead, let’s now turn our attention to the screen idea.

The Screen

The light of consciousness “registers” on the screen. The screen in the metaphor is meant to represent our moment-by-moment immediate awareness. It is the “surface” on which the shadows are projected.

It is a strange “screen”. Instead of just showing images, it also “shows” smells and tastes, the various forms of touch (somatosensation), sounds, emotions, thoughts, memories, and all kinds of weird little freak things that only pop up occasionally and without any obvious logic such as inspiration, insight, psychic experiences, and so on.

Understanding that the screen = immediate consciousness is a major key to understanding the yogic view of consciousness. The things mentioned in the previous paragraph are what make up your perceptions of the world, your body, and your conscious mind. It is exactly these perceptions that lead you to conclude that “you” are embedded in the “real world” that exists “out there”. It is what appears on this screen that serves as the substrate for all the plethora of philosophical meanderings in the West.

To repeat, this way of perceiving, meaning being aware of the screen, is called paranga cetana, outwardly directed consciousness. Recall Taimni’s ideas about mirrors in Part 1. It is asserted in yoga that all of these conscious experiences are “virtual images” analogous in status to the virtual image inside a mirror. They appear to be outside of “you”. Recall again Allan Watts’ statement:

He is describing paranga cetana in its bare-naked essence.

According to the yogic view, the light of consciousness projects itself in such a way to generate these virtual perceptions of a world that is seemingly outside of “you”, the you who is peering out from a center (the bindu) that you cannot see. Without the methods of yoga, this is the best one can do to make sense of the cave of shadows within which we are trapped.

A screen? Seriously? Where does this strange idea come from?

Her Screen (or Girls Love to Look at Themselves in the Mirror)

The idea of projection onto a screen is central to the yogic idea of consciousness. The idea is extremely abstract. It is described in aphorism 2 of the Pratyabhijna Hridayam of Ksemaraja:

This statement describes the creation of manifestation as the projection of consciousness onto a screen also made of consciousness. The Shiva-Shakti Tattva (discussed in Part 10 of What Is Science?) is implied in this aphorism. Recall the Shiva-Shakti Tattva is the primal differentiation at the root of manifestation. Brahman splits into passive awareness (Shiva) and active power (Shakti). The Shiva-Shakti Tattva is the first step in the constriction of consciousness that leads eventually to our individual minds.

It is bizarre that this process is described in terms of projecting onto a screen. How can we even get our head around this idea?

An important clue is found in Krishnananda’s idea that the seemingly external world is due to a “twist” or “kink” (granthi, knot, in Sanskrit) in consciousness:

Let me reword this in the terms I am using in this essay (single quote for paraphrase):

Consciousness gets “knotted up” and the result is the generation, or projection, of virtual images on a screen made of consciousness where the images are formed such that we take them as reality. But how does this work?

Maya

Kashmiri Shaivism (KS) provides a rich description of how this entire process works in its scheme of 36 Tattvas. I am not going to explain that here. People can read up on it as they wish. It is my interest to determine to what extent our modern sciences can be mapped to what is described in KS. This approach is not original with me. My main influence is I.K. Taimni who does this throughout his writings, especially in Man, God and the Universe. Dr. Maria Syldona has also done interesting work along these lines too.

There is what might be considered a major bifurcation point in KS’s 36 Tattvas and that is the Māyā Tattva. To quote from the Wikipedia page:

In Experience, I equated maya with the generation of potential infinities, referred to as “the illusion of multiplicity” in the quote above. One way to generate such an illusion is to hold two plane mirrors up against each other. As we all know this generates a seeming infinity of reflections. But the virtual images are not reality, which is why we call them “virtual”. Yes, they reflect something that is real, but the virtual images are themselves not real.

We can learn about maya by studying mirrors.

In some analogous sense, the images—the qualia—that make up the contents of our immediate direct awareness are like the virtual images. They seem to be there. But according to the yogic view, they are just virtual images that are so filtered, conditioned and compounded, that we are completely ignorant about the real thing that is being reflected.

But maya is not simply infinite virtual reflections within reflections. It also has the weird property of seeming to have two sides, but only having one, like a Möbius strip. It seems both subjective and objective. Sometimes it is “on”, sometimes “off”. All the dualisms embodied in the Ying/Yang symbol, which, in my opinion, are most perfectly captured in the notion of a Möbius strip.

Maya is also associated with a strange kind of apparent motion. Allan Watt’s half-jokingly called this movement the “ennie-weenies”. It is a spinning motion that folds back on itself in a fashion that cannot be adequately captured with words, like it is operating in a space of more than three dimensions. It appears to have the property of never completing itself and Watts’s refers to it as a dog chasing its tail. In this sense the weird spinning movement seems to be the motion analog of the infinity of reflections in the mirror. In the mirror case you will never see all infinity of reflections. In the movement case, it never catches itself.

So three ideas seem relevant to getting at least some handle on maya in our modern terms:

There is some process occurring in consciousness by which it folds back onto itself and has the three properties listed above. This seems to be intimately related to the idea of the “screen” of consciousness, and also the process of paranga cetana, or the directing of consciousness towards these virtual images and believing that they are real.

As we proceed, it will be apparent that this conception of maya is linked to the Western classical problem of The One and The Many. How does diversity arise from unity? In subsequent chapters, we’ll address this from several angles, both Eastern and Western. To foreshadow, we will consider the generative power of counting (Chapter 14), the spectra generated by quantum mechanics (Chapters 16 & 17), Leibniz’ monads (Chapter 18), and modern views of networks, information, and memory (Chapters 18-22) to get a modern handle on the ancient Hindu idea of maya.

Summary

The yogic theory of consciousness is radically different than any Western view. First, it does not try to explain consciousness as caused by anything with which we are consciously aware. Consciousness is taken as the basic fact. We call this an “axiom” in the West. Further, none of this is airy-fairy intellectual armchair philosopher stuff, but derives from the experiences of advanced yogis who have left descriptions of what they have found in the depths of the cave of consciousness, as well as a variety of Western, non-yogic sources (the subjects of Chapters 24-31).

The yogic view starts from our normal conscious awareness. But instead of paying attention to the objects of perception, the shadows on the cave wall, the yogis went inward and downward, underneath surface consciousness. There they discovered the cave of consciousness and its various strata. At the very bottom, they discovered the bindu, the point where Reality projects itself into the mind, the cave. They figured out how to penetrate the bindu and see what was on the other side. There they discovered that consciousness is the primal reality of all things.

This is why in yoga, all real knowledge is self-knowledge: it is the discovery of what is under the surface of the conscious mind. Krishnananda said it beautifully:

That is the status of shadow knowledge: it is like dirt and will wash away with soap. It will not help us.

In Part 3, we will discuss some of the implications of the yogic view of consciousness.

Here I discuss some obvious implications of the yogic view of consciousness.

Contents for The Yogic View of Consciousness:

Precedent

Feyerabend’s book Against Method used Galileo as a focal point to study the era when Europeans began to understand that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Today, the Earth revolving around the Sun is so taken for granted that we can barely imagine how people could have believed otherwise. We are prone to think “ha-ha, how stupid those people were to think the Earth was the center of the universe…what a bunch of dummies”.

But they weren’t dummies. They were a product of their times. It takes knowledge of history and imagination to envision life in the 1600s. It takes insight to understand the radical shift in viewpoint that Galileo and his followers enacted. Feyerabend transports the Reader back to Galileo’s time, and illustrates why people believed other than what we believe today. He demonstrates the amazing uphill battle Galileo and his contemporaries (Kepler, Bruno, et al) fought against the mainstream conventional wisdom of that time.

There are parallels with the shift in world view in Galileo’s era and the shift in world view implied by the yogic view of consciousness. History repeats itself…again.

Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 summarized the yogic view of consciousness. The yogic view of consciousness claims that the external world is not external at all. It is internal. What we call the “world”, “external reality”, “objectivity” exists at the very center of the mind—of my mind, of your mind, and at the center of each thing’s mind.

Galileo undertook an uphill battle to convince a bunch of 17th century know-it-alls that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Imagine the uphill battle of trying to convince a bunch of 21st century know-it-alls that the world that seems to be external to our minds and awareness is in fact at the very center of our minds and awareness.

This then is the first great implication of the yogic view of consciousness: from the Western point of view, it is the biggest possible intellectual revolution one can imagine. It flies in the face of the seemingly overwhelmingly obvious fact that the world is outside of us.

Bad Evidence

The conventional hagiography of Galileo is that he convinced the world of his view by hard evidence: his telescope observations, his mathematical theory of acceleration, and so on. Feyerabend shows this conventional view is an oversimplified caricature that serves more as propaganda for modern science than as an accurate portrayal of historical facts.

For example, Feyerabend quotes descriptions where Galileo had telescope viewing parties to convince respected contemporaries of his observations. However, those events never went as desired. The guests did not see the heavens that Galileo claimed to see in his telescope. Further, there were contradictions in his story, and holes (“lacunae”, remember?). There were a number of what we would today call “technical issues” that were not at all in place, such as how ground glass lenses work.

If Galileo’s evidence was so bad, how did it stick and persist? A major factor at work was the “zeitgeist”; the spirit of the Age. There was an overall dissatisfaction with conventional wisdom, with the ruling powers, with the authority of the Catholic Church. There was the rise of secular city states. The fallout of the Renaissance was having wide-spread effects throughout European culture, and Galileo was but one example of that effect. His new science was part of a bundle of cultural change. This is one reason why all his “bad” evidence survived in the face of the intelligent rebuttals from the know-it-alls of the time: people were just sick of the know-it-alls and were ready for something different.

But it was not just cultural construction. There was truth underlying what Galileo and others like him described. These truths slowly emerged over the next centuries and here we are today. It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun. It is true that the Heavens are made of the same stuff as the Earth. It is true that things fall with equal accelerations. It is true that math can describe the dynamics of nature, and so on.

Again, we can parallel the circumstances in Galileo’s era to today when we attempt to understand the evidence of the yogic view of consciousness.

Bad Evidence for Yoga

Just as Galileo could hand someone a telescope and say “look and see for yourself”, today I can hand you the methods of yoga and say “learn it and see for yourself”. This book culminates in a discussion of the yoga methods. The situation is similar to Galileo’s telescope, but the details differ in important ways.

First, the know-it-alls in Galileo’s day had it all figured out already, and had ready-made explanations as to why his new view was wrong and why the conventional view was correct. It is quite the same with yoga and the know-it-alls today. “Oh”, says the neuroscientist or psychiatrist, “it is not a perception of an ‘inner realm’ it is but a hallucination generated by your brain” (and the psychiatrist sells you some pills). Never mind the fact that there is no explanation at all of how the brain actually makes our subjective experience.

Or the physicists will say: “the external world exists: look how I can study and manipulate it”. Never mind the inherent limits of control set by quantum mechanics, relativity, chaotic dynamical systems, and even classical thermodynamics. Who really controls who? Never mind that these are all just perceptions and thoughts in the physicist’s mind and, like the neuroscientist, there is not even a germ of an idea, let alone a functional working definition, of how mind and perception link to the external world.

Never mind that you have post-modernists pointing out the social power relationships of science, of which these are examples.

We are told again and again: “Don’t look at the little man behind the curtain”. Just let yourself be hypnotized and engulfed by the obfuscation: the mathematics, the complex technology, and the overwhelming vocabularies belonging to the initiates. Just relax, do what you’re told, and everything will be alright. And If not…here, take this pill.

Let the people who know only of the shadows tell us how it really is. Yeah, right, and I have a bridge to sell you too.

There is indeed evidence today for the yogic view of consciousness just as there was evidence for the heliocentric world view in Galileo’s era. However, this evidence is hard to come by because people have to do more than just learn a couple ideas out of a book and study some pattern of phenomena in their sensory experience in a lab class.

Secondly, in Galileo’s time, people were struggling to invent the new world view, the new vocabulary, and the new “supplemental disciplines” (as Feyerabend called them, such as optics to explain how telescopes work). Everything was rough around the edges, incomplete, tentative.

Unlike science in Galileo’s day, things are not rough around the edges with yoga. It is a full, complete, and well-described discipline, with thousands of years to back it up. A Western person today has to study completely alien ideas (samadhi, avidya, maya, vicara, sabda, artha, jnana, and so on: Hinduism in general) that are abstract beyond today’s literal-minded barbarism, and fly in the face of many preconceived notions. Many will not even try to climb this learning curve.

Third, there are the methods. To actually execute the methods, a person has to practice forms of mental discipline that make learning Gödel’s theorem, or being a worker bee at the Large Hadron Collider, or sequencing a genome, or playing a Chopin sonata, seem easy in comparison.

Today’s uphill battle is correspondingly steeper compared to Galileo’s because the accessibility to the evidence is correspondingly more difficult… but not impossible. And that is the key.

You can read DO_OBE and learn basic pratyahara, or go study asana and pranayama techniques. Nothing is stopping anybody from learning the basics of yoga except the biases in their mind, and the attitude that one already has it all figured out. Or because they are so stupid and ill-informed that they think yoga is just doing stretching exercises on a blue mat.

The Current Zeitgeist

Similar to Galileo’s time, the zeitgeist is becoming ripe for the transformation implied in the yogic view of consciousness.

Over the past centuries in Western Civilization, science replaced the Medieval Catholic Church as the self-appointed authority on the absolute truth of reality. And people are getting sick of it. At least the Church had an outward veneer of glory, self-respect, and the mystique and austere glory of God to back it up. At least, on the surface, they preached morals and good will (even though they didn’t practice what they preached, which was part of why people got sick of them).

Today, we have a bunch of cutesy weirdoes representing scientism: kids in tee shirts with half naked women on them; undersexed pop-culture, comic book geeks that got PhDs and treat Stan Lee as if he was Plato; nasty hate-filled old men like Dawkins who spew forth repressed fears from the depths of his rank mind.

Good going, you geniuses. That’s the way to convince people of your greatness and glory.

People know and sense bullshit when they see it. The word “scientism” expresses this bullshit so that one does not need to swear. How do they say it? The gig is up. People see through the BS. The emperor is not wearing any clothes.

This is Not Your Grandmother’s Solipsism

Where did the Emperor get such a beautiful suit? I would submit that the intellectual world in the West, for all practical purposes, went schizophrenic after Kant. The schism was between science and philosophy.

Everything seemed so simple up till then: The Church was stupid and hypocritical. The Greeks were cool, they got the ball rolling, but they made some mistakes; nothing that couldn’t be corrected. The mind of man perceived the world and could use reason to understand the truths of Nature’s laws (or the truth of God’s laws, because Nature and God were pretty much the same thing back then).

Then Hume comes along, kicking up a storm of doubt about reason and perception. Later he was topped off by Kant, who isolated about as precisely as can be done (without the insights of yoga) the ambiguities between the mind, perception, and the objects of perception.

To briefly summarize what I discussed elsewhere: Kant marked the formal split between science and philosophy. Science was all like: “Screw you guys, your dumb ideas aren’t helping us.” Philosophy cried itself to sleep in its pillow and never got over the divorce, and has been mad as a hatter ever since.

In spite of my flippant tone, the main point is deadly serious. Science adopted a naive realism about the link between the mind and perception and has maintained that stance ever since. There is nothing special about quantum mechanics or relativity in this regard. People still believe the double slit results or gravitational lensing are real things happening outside of their minds. And because they are philosophical pygmies, they love the feeling of confusion generated by the modern theories; it is their equivalent of marijuana.

Kant rediscovered Plato’s shadow-world of phenomena, and the outside of the cave, the noumena. But it was all just ideas—and difficult and imponderable ones at that. Even though other philosophers decoded Kant, it was too late. Science had already gone its merry way and was busy making railroads, steam engines, photography, telegraphs, and electric lights…and even figuring out that physicians should wash their hands between treating patients…geniuses.

Anti-Psychotic Medication

As strange and abstract and alien as the yogic view of consciousness sounds on first hearing, it solves all of these problems in one fell swoop.

The realists (e.g. scientists) are not wrong in a fundamental sense. There is a true objective world. We can understand it, at least to some extent. It’s just that materialists have been extraordinarily confused on this front, seeing as they have had their face in the shadows for the past several centuries. But even the shadows reflect truth, no matter how distorted and imperfectly. Science has tapped into methods to extract little bits of truth from the shadows. But they are always only little bits, here and there, disconnected. Scientism is just wrong because all the little bits don’t fit together. Those who force-fit the disconnected bits together into silly pseudo-religious conglomerations are not really the brightest light bulbs on the Christmas tree.

Kant and the idealists were not wrong either. We are trapped in our mind, trapped in the cave of consciousness. But the light that fills that cave is itself the living truth. And there is an escape hatch, an opening to the cave (the bindu) that allows the light of living truth to fill the mind and cast the shadows on the cave wall, the screen of our awareness.

I repeat: materialism and idealism are not opposites. They are one and the same. They are each preoccupations with different variations and subsets of the shadows. Both are right in their main intuitions, but both are fundamentally wrong for justifying their beliefs based on the shadows. Both sides have built their houses on quicksand. Again, when all is said and done, the existentialists were the smart ones of the bunch for recusing themselves from the whole matter.

The yogic view of consciousness brings all this together in a coherent framework. The existentialists are right for not trying to find ultimate meaning in the shadows, because ultimate meaning is only found on the other side of the bindu, outside of the individual mind.

The materialists are right: there is an objective world. However, it is buried in the innermost recesses and depths of each person’s mind, on the other side of the bindu. The Absolute is the objective world. It is not the shadows, not the immediate consciousness of phenomena which have numbed the judgement of the naïve materialists and realists for the past several centuries.

The idealists are correct: all phenomena is only our mind. They see the screen for what it is: our perceptions, our thoughts, our minds: the shifting tides of phenomena etching shadows in consciousness. The real world is inaccessible when one stares only at the shadows; when one is completely ignorant of the vast depths of the mind, of the bindu hidden therein, and the real world hidden in the bindu. The Western idealists simply did not mine deep enough into the mind to unlock its secrets.

Even at just an intellectual level, the yogic view of consciousness provides a type of anti-psychotic medication for the schizophrenia of the modern Western intellect. The question is: will it take this medicine? Will it try to get better?

The comparison with schizophrenia is apt. The schizophrenic does not even know she is sick. What need has she to take medicine? The voices in her head reassure her that everything is fine, while at the same time, the other voices in her head warn her of how the world seeks to violently rip her soul from her body.

Go to Part 4