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SANKHYA AND YOGA (nirodha): in consequence of a kind of optical readjustment, a realization can be attained of the reinoteness of the life-monad from all that appears to be entering into it and giving it color; for though matter and its activities (prakịti and the gunas) are real, the involvement of the life-monad (puruṣa) in them is illusory, like the presence of a man within the frame and matter of a mirror. The puruṣa is separated from the shifting play of the guņas by a gulf of heterogeneity not to be bridged, even though the purușa and the guņas are equally real. This is a theory substantially at variance with the nondualism of the Vedāntic view.?!
Yoga can be defined as a disciplinc designed to yield au experience of the sovereign aloosness and isolation of the suprapersonal nucleus of our being, by stilling the spontaneous activities of matter, which, in the form of the bodily and psychic shell, normally overlie the life-monad. Yoga is founded on, and demonstrates, a doctrine of psychological functionalism. It creates and then transcends and dissolvcs various planes, or worlds, of experience, and thus makes known the relativity of all states of reality; for when the inner world is seen to be but a function of the inner psychic organs, then the outer, visible and tangible universe can be understood, by analogy, to be but the consequence of an operation outward of the energies of the outer organs. By permitting energies to flow through those organs, and by then withdrawing the same energies to inner sphicres, no less immediate and “real,” the external world is experienced as something that can be contacted at will, and therewith built up, or cut off by yogic effort, and therewith dissolved. All depends on whether one's sense-faculties are addressed to, or withdrawn from, their usual “planes of projection" (āyatana).
A sovereign independence from all the pairs of opposites (dvandva) that assail and seduce man from without is prerequisite to the control and experience of this functionalism. Only by an accomplished yogī, in perfect control of the microcosm of him
41 Cf. infra, pp. 409ff.
316
| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |