The End of Practise
What’s the goal of practise? “To follow the path, of course.” But to where exactly? Self-knowledge? Enlightenment? The end of suffering? And no guarantee that it doesn’t all end in sweat and tears anyway? The injunction to practise, practise, practise to reach the goal is hardly a convincing one… Perhaps it’s time to end it once and for all.
Ah, the yogic path. We shudder to think of it. Or at least I do. I tend to picture a plethora of terrifying prospects: an impassable mountain range with insurmountable peaks, or countless lifetimes of nearly undifferentiated suffering with billions of metaphorical fingers burnt, or a relentless and unforgiving search through galaxies and microscopes for some handle on what the actual hell is going on. And then I ask myself: how on earth does a yoga mat, a cushion, or nose-breathing help matters? It’s tempting to give up – in fact, you should. And here’s why.
The earliest systematic record of Indian philosophy, the Samkhya school, offers us the first glimmer of a solution through the act of giving up the search – which in a sense is a kind of giving-up of goal-oriented practise. It posits the notion of dualism, i.e. an irreducible metaphysical distinction between what ‘is’, and what ‘knows’. The ‘is-ness’ it calls Nature, or prakrti, and the ‘knowing-ness’ it calls purusa. But here, as Westerners, our Cartesian heritage often starts to confuse matters.
According to Samkhya, Nature does not simply mean ‘what’s out there’, but it also represents potential, or un-manifested reality. For example, it would include the potential for the creation of cheese from milk before the invention of cheese itself. So far, so creamy. And unlike Descartes, who proposed a reality based on ‘stuff out there’ versus ‘mind’, Samkhya lumps ‘mind’ in together with Nature… What’s left then, you might ask? And a Samkhya philosopher would answer: that’s entirely the point.
Samkhya states that mind, like matter, is something that can be known: we aren’t aware as our thoughts, but rather of our thoughts. Like the carousel of life outside of the body, the mind is yet another thing we watch. We are not our minds. What can be so frustrating about a metaphysical or spiritual journey is that as long as there is a search for the self amongst objects (be they ‘out there’ or ‘in the mind’), the subject — what we really are — remains obscured.
The trick, if you can call it that, is in recognising that both matter and mind are continually changing, and only the perceiving awareness remains unchanged. This, according to Samkhya, is ‘the Self’, or purusa, also variously referred to as ‘the Witness’, pure awareness, or intransitive consciousness. Here we reach a significant juncture over what, exactly, to make of this. Does this unchanging ‘knowingness’ imply there is an eternal, unchanging knower, somehow beyond the unfolding of the universe? The Samkhya school answers with a resounding, ‘Yes!’, stating that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary (unlike the mortality of the body, or the destructibility of the mind, which are both pretty evident), the knowing Self is immortal and universal. It is the separate and irreducible (metaphysical) ground from which everything else springs, whilst itself always remaining unchanged.
The Buddhists had a field day with this. Whilst agreeing that everything – matter, thoughts, concepts, and the ‘potential’ form of all of these – spring into view and become known, they argue that this is hardly a basis for such a grandiose assumption that there is a ‘knower’ or ‘self’ behind it all. “In fact,” they retort, with a wry smile and a wagging finger, “you should try to look for it!” “Oho, you empty Buddhist vessel excuse for a philosopher,” the Samkhyans reply again, “why don’t you — if I’m allowed to call “you” that — read about the ten blind men crossing the river, and count yourself lucky you haven’t drowned in your own sea of selfless ignorance.”
So much for summarising centuries of refined philosophical debate. Suffice to say that there is a reflection to be drawn here about how we practise our yoga. Whether according to the Samkhya school or Buddhism, the journey to (s/S)elf-awareness cannot be a case of rifling through ‘things’ in the world, nor can it be in feeling the body, or observing the mind. This is because the thing we are looking for is the thing we are looking with, and, in fact, it is the very thing that we are: awareness.
All sorts of metaphysical claims can and have been made with this. But what unites us all is our relentless sense of our own subjectivity; what we do with it, how we deal with it, or orient ourselves towards it, these are the mere consequences of subjectivity that appear to divide us. Non-dual schools argue that there is no separation between consciousness and its contents; to paraphrase the eloquent phrase of Sam Harris, the universe simply articulates the boundless space of open awareness, within which it is constantly emerging. Dualistic schools, like Samkhya, separate reality (or Nature, prakrti) and consciousness, for reasons I’ll discuss in a later article.
Wherever you stand, sit, or run around with respect to this conundrum (perhaps, like me, you do all three), it’s sometimes useful remind ourselves that most of what we go around, and around, and around doing all day can’t possibly bring us any closer to what we are. To get closer to that, we have to get comfortable with dropping things. Dropping activities, dropping thoughts, dropping feelings, and — yep, the yoga teacher is actually going to say it! — dropping practise. At least in the conventional sense, I hasten to add. There is no dress rehearsal, so practise can’t be a trial run for some future point.
If we really take the significance of this to heart, it means have to start the furiously frustrating, painfully paradoxical process of looking for what’s looking, not just on the yoga mat or on the cushion, but in anything and everything we do. Gulp.
The yogic path might not be out there, to be struggled for and found, after all. It could just be a twinkling in the ‘I’ witnessing the performance of those myriad activities, the collection of which we name as our identity. If we practise living our lives with awareness above all else, with any luck, we might get a wink back.
For a short, cogent video on this topic, check out this interview of Rupert Spira.