Yoga and Modern Thought-1

According to Yoga, “Mind” is better understood as being comprised of two different aspects: “Manas” and “Buddhi”. Manas refers to thoughts, memories, desires, aversions... in other words, the everyday mind that we are constantly aware of. Buddhi refers to the transcendent aspect of mind... transcendent to time and space; that is, transcendent to the usual sense of “I-ness” glued to the space-time bound body. Carl Jung moved near this approach when he posited the “Unconscious” with its individual and collective aspects. However, there are significant differences between the notions “Buddhi” and Jung’s “Unconscious”.

Is there a transcendent aspect to us? Yoga answers in the affirmative and through its methods leads one to direct experience of this. Its approach is not through intellectual insight, but via a direct experience of this aspect of mind, this aspect of ourselves. It is possible though to arrive via the intellect at the plausibility, and to some, the conclusion of the reality of the transcendent. This is the course of science and philosophy. However, even an intellectual certainty in this regard does not mean a conscious participation with the transcendent. One can circumscribe it, describe it, designate it, pronounce its truth yet cannot become transformed so as to radically include the transcendent within one’s experience of “I-ness”. The path of Yoga is transformative, not just informative. Rare individuals achieve a high degree of both participatory transformation and intellectual understanding, and these persons have provided the best maps for the journey of self-realization or enlightenment. The excelled scientist-philosopher-mystic is considered the highest achievement in every culture.

In the modern era, science has limited itself to the study of matter and tends to trivialize the study of consciousness which the Yogin has pursued within the laboratory of his own mind. However, even the study of matter, now that it has gone far enough, is leading science to consider the possibility that consciousness plays a role in the creation of material reality. If mind plays a definite role in the creation of material reality then its primacy, as the Yogin points out, is once again coming to be recognized. And once recognized, it causes a fundament shift in our understanding of self and world. In such an understanding, Yoga is an eminently practical mainstream discipline.


From research at Princeton University, Engineering:

"In these experiments human operators attempt to influence the behavior of a variety of... devices to conform to pre-stated intentions, without recourse to any known physical processes. In unattended calibrations these sophisticated machines all produce strictly random outputs, yet the experimental results display increases in information content that can only be attributed to the influence of the consciousness of the human operator." "These anomalies can be demonstrated with the operators located up to thousands of miles from the laboratory, exerting their efforts hours before or after the actual operation of the devices."

“The lack of explicit space and time dependence clearly indicate that no direct application or minor alteration of existing physical or psychological frameworks will suffice. Rather, nothing less than a generously expanded scientific model of reality, one that allows consciousness a proactive role in the establishment of its experience of the physical world, will be required.”

"Theoretical requisites for (a realistic model of how things are) include... a cogent representation of the merging of mental and material dimensions into indistinguishability at their deepest levels."

"... clear evidence of an active role of consciousness in the establishment of reality (and not merely an “objective” looking onto reality) holds sweeping implications for our view of ourselves, our relationship to others, and to the cosmos in which we exist.”


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