Samkhya and the Classical Yoga

Samkhya and the Classical Yoga of the Yoga Sutras are dualistic philosophies. Very few yoga teachers today realize this. In the West, dualism has been entrenched in our religions for over three thousand years with God is being separate from creation. In the Samkhya tradition there is purusha and there is prakriti. Purusha is the soul, the Self, pure consciousness, and the only source of consciousness. Prakriti is that which is created. Unlike in the Western religions, purusha did not create prakriti, but purusha is responsible for prakriti becoming animated, alive. Samkhya philosophy holds that there are countless individual purusha, each one infinite, eternal, omniscient, unchanging, and unchangeable. There is no single purusha that sits hierarchically above any others, neither is there is no creator God. Since purusha is pure consciousness, it follows that prakriti is unconscious. Prakriti is everything that is changing. Prakriti is not just the physical aspects of the universe that we can sense; it is our very senses themselves - our thoughts, memories, desires, and even our intelligence. Consciousness resides only in purusha, or more properly, as purusha.

Purusha, pure and distant, is beyond subject and object. One cannot understand purusha, for that would make it an object. Purusha cannot know or understand anything either, for that would make purusha a subject. Purusha simply just is. But, because of the presence of prakriti, purusha gets attracted to nature and becomes involved with it

The Three Gunas

Underpinning prakriti are three strings called "gunas." These three strings combine in many ways to form the ropes of existence. The three gunas are tamas, rajas, and sattva. Tamas is passivity, inertia, heaviness, and dullness of existence. Tamas has been described as the cause of hunger, thirst, grief, fear, and confusion. Rajas is the opposite; it is activity, excitement, and passion. Rajas is the cause of lust, greed, and all desires - good and bad. These three gunas combine the way electrons, protons, and neutrons combine to form all matter in our universe. However, the gunas are more pervasive; not just our physical bodies, not just the earth and everything on it, but all of our thoughts, our personalities, our experiences, and our desires are manifestations of the gunas at play. Despite the numerous and complex ways in which the gunas can combine, they are still unconscious. Everything we see is "just the gunas acting on the gunas," and nothing more.