na tat svābhāsam dṛṣyatvāt (IV.19)
Mind is not self-luminous, being an object
(translated by Swåmi Vivekānanda in Popsi Narasimhan)
“You can’t see the seer who does the seeing; you can’t hear the hearer who does the hearing; you can’t think of the thinker who does the thinking; and you can’t perceive the perceiver who does the perceiving. The self within all is this self of yours. All else besides this is grief!” (Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad 3.4.2 in Olivelle p. 39)
Conundrums
I know myself to be a being with consciousness, and my life is meaningful to me because of this fundamental fact about my existence. Without it, I would not be me. Because I am conscious, I am a creature capable of all that follows—I can feel pain, hunger, hatred, compassion, love, and happiness. I can dream, imagine, remember my past and anticipate my future, and I have a sense of myself as existing through time. I can see colors, taste the fruits of the earth, gaze out at the starry heavens and feel in awe of them. I am not alone in this, since I believe that consciousness occurs not only among most, perhaps all other human beings, but that it is also widespread in other non-human animals. There may be other creatures too, elsewhere on other planets in other galaxies or in other supernatural realms—unimaginable to us—who are also conscious of their worlds, but we have yet to encounter such beings.
Like me, philosophers have long viewed consciousness as the ground of our existence, the essence of our being. French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) famously salvaged one certainty from a world he had destroyed through his philosophical doubt with his utterance, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes used the term ‘think’ to include every form of conscious experience, and so in essence, was declaring that his existence was guaranteed by his ability to be conscious. Under very different circumstances and for different reasons, Patañjali too equated his real existence with a pure, unbounded consciousness at the heart of his being.
Consciousness is an intrinsically distinct phenomenon. The existence of consciousness adds a radically new dimension to the nature of the cosmos. It is not just another existing phenomenon alongside all other existing phenomena, one more thing to add to the list of existing things, like adding an extra item onto a shopping list. The addition of consciousness to the cosmos is not like discovering another galaxy, but more like discovering that there is a new dimension beyond space and time. It introduces a radically new domain to the cosmos, namely, that the cosmos is witnessed, that in addition to the objective world of space and time there are also subjective spaces, each one a distinct world unto itself.
For many centuries after his lifetime, western views of consciousness were shaped by Descartes who, like Patañjali, believed that consciousness was not a product of the material world. Contemporary philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists, however, have largely rejected dualism and have embraced naturalism, the idea that all existent phenomena are compatible with and can ultimately be explained within the framework of the natural sciences. In this view, consciousness itself is a perfectly natural phenomenon, no different from any other naturally occurring thing. The upshot of these beliefs is that philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists seek to explain consciousness in terms of natural, material processes using the methodologies and conceptual frameworks of the natural sciences. Their approach is premised on the belief that consciousness can be known in the same way as all other things in the world, that understanding consciousness does not require any sort of paradigm shift in our thinking. For most of the twentieth century, and to this day, philosophers and scientists alike have pursued this path, but so far with little success.
For most of my working life as a philosopher of mind, consciousness has been viewed as a really perplexing problem, what contemporary philosopher David Chalmers has called “the hard problem.” It is at the heart of the so-called mind-body problem, the problem of understanding the relationship between consciousness and the material world. It’s not the sort of problem that keeps me awake at night or causes me to suffer, but nevertheless, it gnaws away at me, signaling that there is a deep mystery at the heart of human existence.
Solving the problem of consciousness is the holy grail for philosophers and neuroscientists alike, and until we do, it means that there are some big holes in our self-knowledge. I would dearly love to live long enough to see how the problem of consciousness is finally resolved, but as I approach my seventieth year and view what little progress has been made in my lifetime, I doubt that I will. This pessimism is reflected in the following passage from contemporary philosopher Alva Noë:
“After decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: we don’t have a clue.”
Out Of Our Heads xi
Such pessimism may come as a surprise to some of you since we live in the age of neuroscience. It seems like not a day goes by without the news bringing us stories of how neuroscience can explain everything in our lives, from falling in love to why meditation works. Although great advances have been made in understanding how the material processes in an embodied brain perform specific tasks such as processing visual information from the eyes, there has been little progress in addressing the hard problem: why it is that any of our physical states are conscious at all. It seems that we cannot get beyond fine-grained correlations between subjective experiences and corresponding material states of the brain. And, as any philosopher will attest, correlations are not explanations.
On closer examination, we see that what neuroscientists offer us are accounts of the material mechanisms underpinning falling in love, meditating etc. Their accounts tend to deal with nothing beyond the nuts and bolts of neural processes, giving us little insight into the nature of consciousness itself. Knowing that certain brain states give rise to or are correlated with certain conscious states doesn’t tell us the why or the how.
All of the different theories struggle for the same reason, that material explanations of consciousness are, by their nature, reductionist—that is, they attempt to package subjective conscious experiences within the framework of objective material processes. Something essential about the nature of subjective experience, however, gets lost in translation. How to capture the feeling of pain, or the taste of a banana, or the redness of an apple in descriptions of neural processes? Consciousness seems to be irreducibly subjective in nature and hence has proved particularly resistant to the objective approaches of the natural sciences. As Leibniz famously said, even if you could enlarge a brain and walk around its microscopic structures, you wouldn’t be able to see its thoughts and ideas. Or, as the ancient Upaniṣadic sages declared, you cannot turn the subject into an object, you can’t see the seer of seeing.
Subject and objects
Patañjali succinctly captures this idea in IV.19, which speaks to the fundamental divide between the subjective and the objective, between the Seer and the seen. Because the mind can be objectified, can be seen, it does not qualify as the Seer.
Patañjali has already introduced us to a dualism of Seer and seen, informing us in II.17 that suffering is caused by the encounter between the Seer and the seen, between the subjective and the objective, between consciousness and matter. The term saṁyoga connotes not just an encounter, but an encounter that creates confusion, in this case an existential confusion that is responsible for human suffering,
Commentators since the time of Vyāsa, the first commentator, have been quick to equate the divide between the Seer and the seen with the metaphysical categories of consciousness (puruṣa) and non-sentient matter (prakṛti). Patañjail believes that our minds and their contents are all products of matter in motion, falling within the purview of prakṛti; it is only consciousness itself that falls outside of the natural world. The cosmic dualism of puruṣa and prakrti is iterated in each human being, giving us a dual nature. In equating the puruṣa/prakṛti distinction with the distinction between the Seer (draṣṭṛ) and the seen (dṛṣya), Patañjali is indicating how we might experience this distinction in ourselves. Patañjali is teaching us here that if we want to understand the distinction between puruṣa and prakṛti, that we should direct our attention inwards to our own field of experience. Let us follow his guidance.
Take simple everyday statements such as, “I see an apple” or “I hear music playing.” Such simple English sentences reflect a distinction between an object and a subject which seems to line up rather well with the distinction between the Seer and the seen. Things like apples and music are the seen and, in each case, the ‘I’ is the seer.
In the examples above, there seems to be little danger that I will confuse my essential nature with the seen. When I see the apple, I do not equate myself with it or become confused about the boundary between my existence and that of the apple, even though the apple is “showing up” in my consciousness. The distinction between the Seer and the seen, however, is one that continues to operate as we move away from the world of external objects to our own inner worlds. Think of expressions such as “I’m hungry,” “I’m happy,” “I’m sad,” or “I have a headache.” Having a bad headache can be all-consuming and it is all too easy to be completely subsumed by such experiences. As Patañjali notes in I.4, we have a strong tendency to identify ourselves with our experiences (cittavṛtti sārūpyam), losing any sense of the Seer as an entity distinct from the content of experience. Yet I can step back and view my headache as an object that is separate from that which observes the headache. Although more intimately interwoven into my existence, the headache, like the apple, is separable from the observer of the headache.
Note that our language persuades us that though the seen can change from moment to moment, the Seer is the constant in someone’s life. The “I” that hears the music is the same “I” as the “I” that sees the apple. Or is it? We have a tendency to conflate the ego-self with the Seer. The Seer is the unchanging backdrop of experience, but it is different from the ego-self. The “I” that is the ego can itself be objectified and observed by the Seer, and hence is not the Seer. This process of stepping back from ourselves does not lead to an infinite regress, however, since it terminates in that which does not need to be objectified to be seen, the Seer itself. Since the mind, the intellect, and the ego can all be objectified under the gaze of the Seer, they are distinct from the Seer. It is the light of the Seer that makes our minds known to us.
Luminosity
Indian philosophers commonly used the metaphor of light (prakāśa) or luminosity (prakāśatā) as a way of describing consciousness. The ground of this metaphor compares consciousness to the revealing power of natural light or the light of a fire that allows objects to be seen. Only consciousness, however, is self-luminous (svābhāsa), insofar it is not dependent on any outside source for its luminosity. It might seem that fire shares this quality, having the power not only to reveal itself but also objects nearby. Yet, in such a case, the commentators point out that the revealing power of the flames is ultimately dependent on the presence of a perceiver. The power of the flames to light up a room requires the ultimate light of a conscious being to perceive those objects. The light of consciousness is the ultimate source of “light” in the cosmos and is not dependent on anything else for its luminosity. In the absence of a Seer, the whole cosmos, including our own minds, falls into the darkness of the unseen.
Concluding thoughts
From their earliest speculations, Indian philosophers singled out consciousness as exceptional, being seen as the fundamental principle of both the cosmos and the human individual. It was implicated in human suffering, yet at the same time, its exploration was seen as key to finding freedom from suffering. Consciousness was understood to be the fundamental light of the cosmos, standing as witness (sākṣin) to the unfolding drama of creation. Today, although many researchers and philosophers have adopted a materialist stance in relation to consciousness, its nature remains a mystery to us. Patañjali understood consciousness to be irreducibly subjective in nature, in part explaining why it has been so difficult for us to comprehend it through scientific methodologies. It is ironic that given its role in illuminating the world for us, its own nature remains so tantalizingly out of our grasp.
Joy Laine taught philosophy at Macalester College for over thirty years and teaches Iyengar Yoga around the Twin Cities.
Selected Resources
Edwin Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. North Point Press, 2009.
Swāmi Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali. SUNY, 1963.
Patrick Olivelle, Upaniṣads. OUP, 1996.
Popsi Narasimhan, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, A Collection of Translations. 2018.
