The Objective of Yoga:
A Yogi’s Guide to the Quest for Immortality
The Desire for Invulnerability and the Yoga of Self-Awareness
Written By: Balraj Persaud
What is the Objective of Yoga?
A Summary of Yoga Philosophy and Practice in 500 Words
We find ourselves already living with a recurring sense that things have not yet fully “worked out” for us—that we are not yet secure, substantial, or settled enough—and we interpret this disquiet as something that could be eliminated. Whether this lack shows up as anxiousness/urgency, heaviness/flatness, numbness, shame, envy, aimless yearning, emptiness/joylessness, alienation from oneself—the sense is some version of, “something is missing/wrong [in me or in my life]” and “...only once I’ve eliminated this gnawing unsatisfactoriness/unease/lack, will I finally be ‘at peace’, never compelled to strive for anything ever again”.
We assume that our sense of feeling incomplete will permanently disappear once we’ve obtained whatever we think will secure us against any sense of lack, whatever we think will give us permanent emotional, psychological, material, and/or social security—and finally make us good/strong/worthy enough to be beyond rejection, blame, or loss. Adding “weight” to our individual self/image/life (e.g., financial freedom, bulletproof mental health, love, fame or recognition, enlightenment/transcendence, perfect understanding, etc.), or shedding the weight of our perceived defects or inner burdens (e.g., inadequacies, incompetence, guilt, negative emotions, trauma, sins, ignorance, confusion, ego, bias, attachments, etc.), will, we think, give us self-existence, will make us invulnerable to unpredictable sources of discomfort; weighty enough to never be erased/attacked, but light enough to never be burdened, constrained, or haunted—by oneself, by one’s situation. Whereas one is predominantly experienced as desire and the other as disgust/fear, both are attempts at no longer being subject to being exposed, dependent, insufficient.
Free of the constraints that expose our contingency—free of the conditions that reveal our dependence—we will, we think, become fully self-contained, in control of ourselves. Then, we think, once we’ve stabilized and/or purified our self, once we’ve made ourselves unassailable—once our circumstances (finally) respond/submit to our will, once we’ve eliminated whatever makes us feel at risk of falling apart, once we (finally) feel that our existence no longer needs to be secured, defended, or explained—we will (finally) be “at peace”, “whole” or “complete”, fully resolved, “in control”, self-existent and impervious to our vulnerabilities, insulated from loss, released from the burden of having to secure ourselves again and again: never again made to feel incomplete—never again made to feel small or invisible, ashamed or unworthy, guilty or defective, exposed or dependent, anxious or unsafe. This quest—for invulnerability—is ultimately about an attempt to eradicate the underlying exposure of being a self that cannot secure itself once and for all.
But this desire to find permanent security actually reinforces the basic sense of incompleteness that we’re trying to eliminate—just as a stronger desire for money, fame, or status produces a stronger awareness of lack, obscurity, or powerlessness. In other words, striving for permanent freedom from our personal suffering—from our dependence, our contingency and relationality—might be the very thing keeping us from our deepest fulfillment. Yoga is not the destruction of the anxiety of inadequacy; yoga is not the destruction of vulnerability. Yoga is what remains once we’ve abandoned striving for whatever we think will destroy our vulnerabilities once and for all.
Then, as we become more settled in ourselves—the practices of yoga just are variations of no longer fleeing yourself—we become aware of the myriad ways in which our awareness is determined. In yoga, you realize your freedom as you become aware of the ways in which you are determined. In other words, as we become less habitually and unthinkingly compelled by craving/aversion—by needing the world to be a certain way—we become aware of the non-optional dimensions of experiencing: the true dimensions of “transcendence”. We become aware that we each are irrevocably embedded in structures of dependence that precede and exceed us, structures that will never allow us to self-exist. We become aware of our “entire” self—we cultivate self-awareness. And in yoga, self-awareness is self-transcendence.
But this desire to find permanent security actually reinforces the basic sense of incompleteness that we’re trying to eliminate. In other words, striving for permanent freedom from personal suffering might be the very thing keeping us from the sense of “fulfillment” that yoga is intended to help us realize.
Introduction: How to Study Yoga
What is the object of the study of yoga? What are we actually studying?
The first and most important part of studying yoga is understanding what you’re studying. If you don’t understand what you’re studying, you are unlikely to understand yoga philosophy/practice. In turn, your personal practice becomes more liable to reinforcing the very suffering you were attempting to subvert with your practice. In our approach to yoga, ‘yoga’ is taught as a direct phenomenological inquiry into the structure of experience itself.
Yoga is the study of experience itself, the very thing that is always already happening, the very thing outside of which you could never position yourself, the very thing that doesn’t conform to your will, the very thing that contains all other things—which is the basis for all of your thinking, perceiving, behaving, feeling, your knowing, your identity, your will—the very horizons of your awareness (and its intervening space).
In other words, the object of the study of yoga is not some other time or place outside of the single tissue of experience. Or, if it is some other place/time, it is some “other” place/time within the single experiencing that you are always already having. The object of the study of yoga just is this, the single happening of experience, in/as which you happen to find yourself. A most basic description of our starting point is something like there is experiencing, or awareness just is happening or even appearing is happening, and this appearing is not subject to my will.
And so the yogin must turn to the very object of the teachings of yoga—experience itself—in order to understand what these teachings mean. The meaning of the words in these teachings are not reducible to the words themselves; instead, the words are indicating (something within/about) the very experience that you are always already having. The teachings of yoga endeavour to instantiate [something about] experiencing itself. And these teachings are endeavours in which you must participate in order to clearly see what they are trying to get you to see. As such, they require a different kind of paying attention.
To treat the teachings of yoga as a storehouse of facts or reasons, arguments or concepts, rules or practices (the memorization or ritual enactment of which will necessarily produce “enlightenment”) is misguided at best and, at worst, reproduces the very suffering from which you are seeking freedom. As endeavours, these teachings are attempts to re-animate the living sense of direct encounters with experiencing itself. The yogin must turn to very object of these teachings—experience itself—in order to understand their meaning, asking, “how is this a description of the very experience I am always already having? How is this a description of the structure of my ‘subjective’ experience?” (Just the same, when these texts often make reference to historical figures/concepts/texts, one must turn to precisely these figures/concepts/texts in order to understand their role in the description at hand.)
The teachings of yoga often contain practices which function as preconditions for direct apprehension of their lessons about the nature of experience. The practices of yoga are not instructions for arriving at some other place outside of (or prior to) experience but are rather aimed at quieting automatic (pre-reflective) pre-occupation in order to allow for contact with the “depths” of experiencing itself (which are very much within the very singular experience you are already having—and all that it contains: other people, space, desire, thoughts, time, embodiment, things/objectivity, memory, language, freedom, etc.).
To do this—to describe the form of experience as it actually is, independent of our personal pre-occupation—these teachings often deployed new concepts and conceptual frameworks to express the unique nature of their contact with experience (e.g, prakṛti, guṇa, karma, advaita, ātman, ahaṃkāra, bhakti, vairāgya, yoga, etc.). It is because their guide was experience itself that they allowed experience itself to guide how they presented it. In other words, they allowed the form of their expression to conform to their direct experiencing; they let experience say itself. Each philosophical/contemplative/spiritual tradition deployed language in unfamiliar ways, inaugurating new ways of understanding—and demanding new ways of paying attention to—experience itself.
This unfamiliar deployment of language produced what is perhaps better described as a ‘poetics’ rather than as a ‘logic’ or ‘science’, something like a poetics of freedom: to know or to directly see the nature/way of yoga—to know the yoga of yoga or the yoga of the Absolute/Self—is an experience of affective insight, an insight that discloses itself in and as flesh—the flesh of the world.
To treat the teachings of yoga philosophy as a storehouse of facts or reasons, arguments or concepts, rules or practices (the memorization or ritual enactment of which will necessarily produce “enlightenment”) is misguided at best and, at worst, reproduces the very suffering from which you are seeking freedom.
Part I | The Problem That Yoga Solves:
Suffering & The Paradox of Desire
What is the Functional Purpose or Aim of Yoga? What Problem Does Yoga Solve?
Your (individual, independent) self craves a sense of wholeness/completeness/purity that would permanently eliminate its inner sense of lack, so it can (finally) be “at peace”, never compelled to strive for anything ever again. The separate self wants to rid itself of the feeling that it is incomplete. It is always searching for ground—something stable and permanent—upon which it can secure itself (e.g., money, status, fame—recognition), or trying to rid itself of what feels unstable, foreign, or impure/toxic (e.g., inadequacy, guilt, fear, morally unworthy) in order to self-exist, to free itself of the discomfort of its dependence and contingency. Both are attempts to become wholly self-sufficient and impervious to any and all sense of insecurity/anxiety—to whatever in oneself feels unsteady, unresolved, or at risk of falling apart. The self wants to be its own ground—and it wants to be groundless. Either way, it wants control of the forces—internal and external—that determine it. In short, it wants something it could never achieve.
The self seeks to resolve or complete itself by accumulating what will give its own individual existence more weight, earn it more recognition, allow it to feel more real and less incomplete/lacking and impossible to erase (e.g., money, fame, love, enlightenment, etc.). Or it seeks to resolve or complete itself by shedding whatever in it feels wrong, fragmented, or impure, seeking release from whatever weighs it down and exposes its contingency (e.g., trauma, negative emotion/impulses, bodily limitation, fragmentation, whatever feels foreign and wrong, unstable, whatever causes doubt—whatever leads it to undermine itself, etc.).
There is a noticeable weight to the presence of a billionaire or an A-list celebrity; attention tends to gravitate towards them. It is this sense of weight (or real-ness) that the self pursues under the assumption that this increased weight will (permanently) eliminate its sense of emptiness. There is also a noticeable freedom in those moments when what typically haunts us can’t seem to find us—when there is nothing left in us that resists itself, contradicts itself, undermines itself. What remains is a self that feels whole, seamless, and beyond doubt. Either way, what is sought is invulnerability—freedom from the constraints that challenge our self-sufficiency—beyond the realness that accompanies friction, that accompanies pushing back against what resists us.
Of course, we can never be our own ground—and we can never be groundless. Our continued (inescapable) reliance on circumstances that precede us and exceed us means that our pursuit of invulnerability—no matter how successful—will never satisfy the separate self. Our existence depends on the very things that we seek to transcend (embodiment, memory, emotion, desire, relationships, etc., and the inevitable horizon of aging, loss, and death). It is irrevocably relational, contingent, and shaped by forces beyond our control. We are not—and could never be—fully in possession of ourselves.
We want to achieve a sense of ourselves that no longer dependent on anything beyond itself. But we rely on what is least subject to our will: the will of others (either on their direct recognition or their recognition inscribed in symbols like money). In fact, the self relies precisely on the opinions of others in order to no longer care about the opinions of others. Or we count on getting rid of whatever in them feels contradictory, impure, or wrong, hoping that what remains will be whole, seamless, and beyond question.
But we feel compelled to matter. And we feel impelled to address being haunted by disturbing impulses, desires, or flaws. This isn’t something we ‘learn’. Nor is it something we can ‘turn off’.
What the self finds most troubling is that its reality—i.e., the extent to which it ‘matters’ and is haunted by its own inner life—depends on forces beyond its immediate control. To ‘matter’ in the real world means mattering to other people, and this means that the extent to which the self ‘matters’ depends on others and not on itself. Likewise, our inner life seems to have a life of its own. In this sense, we could never be ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘self-existing’. We cannot control who/what others choose to recognize. Similarly, we cannot fully control its own inner life. Our experience of our own sense of self rests on something we don’t—and could never—possess.
And so the self attempts to attain what it has learned will add some weight/reality to its own existence (e.g., fame, money, status, power, etc.). The self, in other words, uses these things to command others to acknowledge the weight of its existence. And the more it feels compelled to ‘matter’—that is, the more it needs the recognition of others—the more others become a tool for or a threat to its own mattering. Or it attempts to subtract whatever gnaws at it—whatever feels unworthy, shameful, terrifying, painful, intolerable, etc.—and the more it feels impelled to control its inner life, the more its inner life controls its thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving.
But the self cannot solve this problem by acquiring things that demand recognition because no amount of recognition will be enough to solve the problem. Nor can it solve the problem by eliminating what feels unworthy within itself because no amount of purging will be enough to solve the problem. The self’s anxiety of inner lack is not caused by inner lack itself, but rather by the self’s craving for self-existence, by its craving to be self-existing—to be something/someone that doesn’t depend on forces beyond its control, including others and their will, or including its own uncomfortable inner life—by its refusal to tolerate its own (permanent and non-optional) lack of self-existence.
Instead of being able to sit with this inescapable dis-ease, it runs from itself as it looks to make itself matter more or less damaged, to become ‘more real’ and/or free from the instability of its own inner life. As a result of this running from itself, it continues to deal with the suffering that accompanies its continued failure at filling itself up in/through the world and/or at becoming pure, whole, and beyond contradiction. It becomes overprotective of itself, avoiding whatever reminds it of its vulnerabilities—people, places, situations, feelings, thoughts. It, in other words, becomes mired in self-preoccupation, trying to solidify its own ground, to accumulate a sense of wholeness for itself in order to eliminate the precariousness of its own existence.
The self’s craving to be more substantial and seamless only reinforces its lack; it can never achieve the substantiality and seamlessness it desires. The craving reinforces its sense of separateness and fragmentation. This separate self inherits and develops a range of habits to manage the discomfort of being incomplete. The relentless feeling of vulnerability motivates particular ways—self-interested ways—of being in the world, ways that keep us ‘stuck’ in identities/situations/habits that produce and re-produce suffering.
The self’s anxiety of inner lack is not caused by inner lack itself, but rather by the self’s craving for self-existence, by its craving to be self-existing—to be something/someone that doesn’t depend on forces beyond its control, including others and their will—by its refusal to tolerate its own (permanent and non-optional) lack of self-existence.
Part II | The Method of Yoga
The Philosophy & Practice of Self-Awareness
What “Solution” Does Yoga Offer to Suffering? What is the Essence of Yoga Practice?
The practices of yoga are just variations of no longer fleeing yourself.
The purpose of yoga practice is, strictly speaking, not to produce anything—such as more relaxation or more “consciousness”—nor is it to destroy anything—such as painful emotions, unwanted thoughts, even suffering and even desire: the experience of desire is not really optional, and if I find myself compelled to get rid of my desire, this desire (to get rid of desire) only confirms the very thing I am trying to subvert.
Furthermore, if I try to get rid of my desire (or my shame or my lack of status), I remain ensnared in the dualism of desire/desirelessness and, as a result, I become hypersensitive to my desires (or shame or lack of status) and hypercritical of myself for having them. In other words, I become further entrenched in the trap of running from myself towards something that I think will grant permanent security to my identity, further entrenched in self-obsession. I become further entrenched in trying to self-elevate in order to deal with the pain of inadequacy/insecurity, defining reality in terms of my own needs, seeing the world in terms of its relevance/irrelevance for my own projects (including my primary project of eliminating my inner lack). Engaged in this impossible task (and treating both others and the world instrumentally), I suffer; I neither live nor feel well. In yoga, the cultivation of inner stability is simultaneously the cultivation a kind of selflessness.
In practice, ‘no longer fleeing yourself’ simply means sitting with your inner life rather than becoming consumed by it—rather than reinforcing the habits you have inherited and developed in order to cling to whatever produces self-existence and to avoid your anxieties, and to cling to and avoid the people and situations that produce self-existence and anxiety. We cultivate the capacity to remain with discomfort so that our lives aren't fully determined by habitually and unthinkingly avoiding it. To remain with discomfort requires becoming directly aware of it before becoming possessed by it. This means being able to sit with your unwanted thoughts, difficult emotions, and the (dizzying) anxiety of your freedom.
When we are unable to sit with our anxieties, our lives can become narrower and narrower (as the list of things/people/situations that we feel compelled to—and instinctively—avoid, grows). When we are unable to sit with our anxieties, our bodies become more and more rigid, if only because there are more and more reasons for the body to become tense. And when we are unable to sit with our anxieties, we become more and more frustrated (as our avoidance habits produce and re-produce self-sabotaging behaviours). Feelings of isolation and meaninglessness become more commonplace, and this intensifies our desires/frustrations around acquiring whatever ‘next’ thing we think will “finally” make us feel “complete”—so that we no longer have to run from the anxiety of inadequacy, from the feeling that “there’s something wrong with me”.
No longer fleeing your anxiety is ultimately no longer fleeing the anxiety of inadequacy, fleeing from the feeling that “there’s something wrong with me”, from the need to fill the/our ‘emptiness’ with stuff (because the silence is simply too loud), to fill up our sense of sense of self with what we think will make it more weighty/“real” (and which—we think—will necessarily command the recognition of others). Following our impulse to make ourselves more worthy of recognition—i.e., to fix an inherent sense of inner lack—just further solidifies (what is commonly referred to as) the “ego”.
But no longer fleeing yourself is not “avoidance hunting”, as if we were looking to seek and destroy all forms of avoidance—which would amount to yet another way of reinforcing the problem we are attempting to subvert; turning avoidance into an enemy is likely to create a another compulsive project of self-improvement. In fact, not all avoidance is unskillful—sometimes stepping away is an act of discernment rather than denial. The problem is not avoidance itself, per se, but is rather the instinctive (unexamined, conditioned) fleeing that undermines our attempts to address our suffering: cultivating the capacity to become aware of avoidance (before becoming consumed by it) gives us choice—instead of reacting with instinctual avoidance or impulsive confrontation, even if we ultimately decide that avoidance is appropriate. We are not forcefully eliminating avoidance but rather intervening—intervening by noticing—in instinctive patterns of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and acting.
As the ego becomes more transparent, we are able to see—on a personal level—the various manifestations of our grasping for permanent ego security. In other words, we are able to see how the manifestations of my grasping is affecting me and my life. At the same time, however, we are able to see the nature of the ego’s “emptiness” (the very thing we were attempting to avoid): the ego doesn’t self-exist but instead remains irrevocably subject to physiological and social forces and could never be anything like “self-sufficient”.
And so the specifics of your path in yoga—i.e., the specific way you practice yoga (e.g., postures, breath control, basic meditation such as mantra meditation or mindfulness practices, etc.)—doesn’t matter as much as the commitment to cultivating the capacity to simply noticing and sitting with your inner life (including your desires/impulses) rather than trying to fix/eliminate (or even “transcend”) them. This is simple, but not easy—if only because the ego is quite capable of trying to fix or eliminate ourselves in indirect ways. In a yoga practice, it is this impulse—to fix/eliminate or be somewhere or something else—that must remain on your radar (while, of course, not trying to fix/eliminate it).
We might call yoga a “practice” because striving to achieve some outcome would only reinforce the problem that yoga was intended to solve, and striving for enlightenment is no different if we are striving to rid ourselves of our sense of inner lack. In fact, the pursuit of yoga (as a result/outcome) as the pursuit of invulnerability/perfection (including in the guise of becoming enlightened, of acquiring one/more of yoga’s benefits, and/or some version of acquiring more “consciousness” or even “prāṇa/breath/life”) can lead us to weaponize our practice (against ourselves).
We might also call yoga a “practice” because there is no “end” to it. You—the person reading this right now—are (and will always be) simultaneously (1) a historical-material being required to live out the (endless flow of) needs of your (changing) determinate situation (that are not subject to your will) and (2) an awareness/consciousness that is not reducible to your materiality. In this context, practicing yoga—as the practice of noticing how your awareness is always already pre-wrapped-up—is in-disposable, not in the sense that you need it, but in the sense that you could never dispose of it even if you tried.
But this is only the “beginning” of yoga practice. Inner stability will divest your experience of self-interest and your memory/habit (or karma), and will create the conditions for the realizations that are, ultimately, the purpose of yoga practice. In fact, almost everything we associate with yoga practice—such as dhyāna [meditation], prāṇāyāma [breath control], yogāsana [postures], etc.—are actually somewhat preparatory.
No Longer Fleeing Yourself:
“Freedom” in the Practice and Philosophy of Yoga
Throughout the history of yoga, the word “yoga” has referred to both a practice and a process—as in, “I practice yoga”—and as an outcome or result—as in, “I have realized/achieved yoga”. Either way, the goal was relief from “suffering”, which was often equated with realizing the “truth” about experience.
Relief from suffering required discerning the ways in which our attention was always already pre-occupied—how our awareness is subject to a materiality that is neither optional nor subject to our will. (We are unable to discern—and thus yoked to—our attention from the unending flow of inner/outer appearances.) In this discernment, our attention would no longer be possessed; we could no longer be yoked to particular habits of thinking, feeling, behaving, perceiving, etc.—particularly those motivated by the desire to self-exist, to make ourselves more “real”, to have our individual existence carry more weight in the world, to matter more (by trying to do more, be more, and/or have more... including “consciousness” or “enlightenment” or “prāṇa/breath/life”).
No longer fleeing ourselves, we are able to see how our awareness is often pre-determined by our cravings/aversions. As we begin to see the various ways in which we are determined—biologically, culturally, historically—we are able to recognize our freedom: there is something about “you” (as awareness, the “you” reading these words right now) that isn’t reducible to any of the things that determine it—society, culture, language, body, etc., and that could do something other than unthinkingly embody its hitherto habitual self. It is in bearing witness to the ways in which we are determined that we realize the part of ourselves that is essentially undefined. And this freedom, to the ego, is anxiety-producing, because being undefined or un-“real” or even “weightless” is precisely what it was attempting to avoid in the first place. The ego wants to be more substantial. And so, in this sense, anxiety cannot be disposed of because you will always be—essentially and irrevocably—a freedom.
But this freedom is always embedded. Indeed, there is something about “you”—as awareness, the awareness reading these words right now—that isn’t reducible to its determining factors, however “you”—the functioning member of society capable of reading and understanding these words—are precisely a product of determining factors. You—the functioning member of society—are the product of your pre-personal and personal impulses/inclinations being translated into the terms of some specific, personal bodily-familial-social-historical-linguistic context.
And so relief from the anxiety of your freedom just requires developing the capacity to sit with your anxiety (i.e., with your freedom, with yourself-as-subject). But because this freedom is always embedded in some determinate context, this requires developing the capacity to sit with the terms of your situation (i.e., with your determinacies, your particularities, with yourself-as-subject-to). Our impulse towards becoming independently in-finite prohibits the reconciliation of our particularities or determinacies with the demands of wholeness in a way that re-produces suffering. Reconciliation that minimizes suffering requires ego transparency, and ego transparency requires disposing of our inherent impulse to evade our particularities (in order to self-elevate, to seek (permanent) ego security, to become more substantial, to self [v.]) by sitting with it, by no longer fleeing it, by no longer fleeing yourself.
The process of becoming at home with ourselves releases us from the grip of our self-interested motivations. Our experience of the world (including others) becomes less centred around “me” and my personal will. And my motivations are transformed: forms of greed and aversion become less intense—I become more open and generous (often without even knowing it). And as I become less wrapped up in and by myself, I am less hindered by my deluded sense of the world (based on my self-importance), and I become more comfortable opening up to being actualized by the world’s possibilities rather than defending ourselves from a world that seems alien and impenetrable. Instead of keeping myself walled-off in contracted, restless, unpleasant self-isolation, I am more able to become an easy participant in the world, to reconcile myself with the world, and honour my natural inspirations—that is, participate in the world in way that encourages me—and my specific history and preferences/inclinations—to be more open, less determined by self-defence (including defending myself from my own past).
What is yoga practice? Yoga as a practice is becoming aware of your freedom as you become aware of your determinacies—which is called self-awareness in yoga. Here, self-awareness does not mean self-observation in a therapeutic or managerial sense. It does not mean standing back from oneself as if the self were a project to be optimized; it means becoming aware of the conditions and tendencies already shaping one’s awareness before they harden into habit. Self-awareness just is becoming aware of the various factors determining our awareness. Becoming aware of the various factors determining our existing ways of being allows us to (1) transcend the limitations imposed by the factors that are disposable, and (2) pursue the freedoms permitted by those factors that are ineliminable. Self-awareness is self-transcendence. But self-awareness is not available to those who habitually flee themselves.
We might also call yoga a “practice” because there is no “end” to it. You—the person reading this right now—are (and will always be) simultaneously (1) a historical-material being required to live out the (endless flow of) needs of your (changing) determinate situation (that are not subject to your will) and (2) an awareness/consciousness that is not reducible to your materiality. In this context, practicing yoga—as the practice of noticing how your awareness is always already pre-wrapped-up—is in-disposable, not in the sense that you need it, but in the sense that you could never dispose of it even if you tried.
Part III | The Outcome of Yoga:
Life Beyond Immortality
& The Self Beyond The Self
What is the Ultimate Result of Yoga Practice? What is Self-Awareness?
Self-interested motivations try to secure a vulnerable, wounded, individual self. These motivations further reinforce the individual self’s sense of separateness, which further removes it from experiencing the sense of wholeness that it craves. This is precisely because the wholeness it pursues is purely personal: it is my wholeness, what will make me in-finite, myself bulletproof, fill my wounded/empty heart.
But seeking personal wholeness is often no different than seeking personal immortality. The self doesn’t exist in a vacuum but in a world. Wholeness demands reconciliation, both of “inner” and “outer” othernesses. Wholeness is a reconciliation and is not the result of self-elevation or fixing the terms of one’s situation so that the existing (craving) self feels better. Any “reconciliation” admits the will of more than one thing (in this case, freedom and determinacies—puruṣa and prakṛti in the language of sāṃkhya yoga); wholeness is not the consequence of the world bending to “me” and my personal will, elevating me, making me feel great all of the time.
This is the irony of self-awareness, self-realization, self-acceptance, self-compassion, self-love, etc.: they are the result of releasing the self-interested motivations borne of our reaction to our inner lack (i.e., seeking a permanent sense of personal completeness in the world). This is “accomplished” only by being able to sit with the anxiety of being incomplete. In other words, these modes of “self-care” are not things that you “do” (and certainly not the for the purpose of remedying inner lack), but are rather the results of freeing ourselves from the limitations imposed by our habitual self’s desire for unlimited recognition and/or security. Then, one can become more aware of—and responsive to—its own inner habits, needs, motivations, standards. It is our capacity to sit with ourselves that allows for releasing self-interest and to seeing directly—to knowing or even “realizing”—our self (and all that this contains/entails), including the ways in which our attention is always already (and irremediably) wrapped up in our material existential situation (which are also our “self”).
So, what is yoga? Yoga is what remains when we’ve abandoned the impossible quest for permanent personal wholeness/completeness/purity and when—unencumbered by toxic self-interest—we make contact with Reality itself: the singular Reality that does not conform to our individual will, the absolute Reality that gives me my will and of which me and my will are but an expression—the very flesh, so to speak, of the world.
The yogin recognizes that it can never be “whole” or “complete” (on its own) but rather recognizes that it is always already a participant in wholeness that precedes and exceeds itself and its personal will. The yogin realizes how it itself is something like an expression of wholeness that had previously been attempting to make wholeness its own (and experienced suffering as a result). As a participant in wholeness, the yogin recognizes that their own stability is not solitary, but relies entirely on the stability of the field they inhabit. In other words, the yogin recognizes a structural paradox: the very conditions that make the self possible (its dependence on the world) are the very things that make its invulnerability impossible.
As a result of this recognition, one is less entrapped by one’s own desire—less trapped by oneself. One does not become invulnerable; rather, one becomes increasingly “safe” in openness—less threatened by dependence, less defensive in exposure, and more able to remain in contact with reality without turning every discomfort into a struggle for personal security. One can participate in wholeness without needing to possess it, and remain open without immediately trying to defend, justify, or secure oneself. Openness is not the opposite of stability but its condition; stability does not emerge from sealing oneself off from dependence, vulnerability, or the world—freedom is not sealed-off self-sufficiency but a transformed relation to what exceeds one’s personal will. One does not become free by escaping embodiment, language, history, other people, and concrete situations; one becomes free by inhabiting them in a way that is reflective, owned, and responsive rather than merely reactive. In this way, renunciation is not finally valuable because it removes us from the world, but because it clarifies the terms on which we are always already in it. It creates the conditions for the quiet in which the self’s habitual strategies of securing itself can be seen.
To be sure, as a habit that runs deeper than any other habit, self-interest is not something that you will turn off once and for all; in fact, trying to accomplish this (getting rid of desire or of the ego) is precisely a manifestation of our original problem: the quest for permanent personal wholeness/completeness—this time by purifying oneself of self-interest. Instead, self-interest is released—gradually, more often than not—as we deepen our capacity to sit with the inadequacy that motivates the desire to become perfect/complete/whole/pure. In other words, we cannot dispose of self-interest, but we moderate it by no longer fleeing ourselves.
And so what is yoga? Again, yoga is what remains when we’ve abandoned the impossible quest for permanent personal wholeness and are able to make contact with Reality itself—to see our/the whole Self. In other words, yoga is realized in becoming aware of the way(s) in which your awareness is always already determined. Or, stated differently, yoga is the self-transcendence that is self-awareness. Yoga is realizing just this, my whole Self, the Self of which I am a part. Yoga is fulfilling the Self, being the Self, myself. Yoga just is no longer fleeing yourself.
So, what is yoga? Yoga is what remains when we’ve abandoned the impossible quest for permanent personal wholeness/completeness/purity and when—unencumbered by toxic self-interest—we make contact with Reality itself... yoga is realized in becoming aware of the way(s) in which your awareness is always already determined. Or, stated differently, yoga is the self-transcendence that is self-awareness.
Part IV | Transcendence:
An Introduction to The Non-Optional Dimensions of Experience
What is the Nature of Our Irrevocable Dependence on Structures of Dependence that Precede/Exceed Us?
What yoga discloses here is not a new, private, inner state that the self can possess, but the fact that the self is already constituted through conditions it does not control—the fact that the self does not self-exist. Before one reflects, chooses, improves, or even begins to ask what one is, one is already living through conditions that one did not create. What we take to be “our” inner life is not a sealed interior that stands apart from the world and then encounters a world. The body is not an instrument added onto an otherwise independent self; it is the ongoing condition of appearing, of feeling, of being affected, of mattering at all. The world is not something we later encounter from the safety of an inner chamber; it is the field in which we have always already been implicated. Our capacities for openness and stability are therefore never merely private achievements. They are shaped interpersonally and socially, and they are always vulnerable to material and political conditions that intensify insecurity, distortion, and self-protective striving. Contemplative practice can disclose how these conditions are not only “out there,” but lived, taken up, and reproduced in the very texture of experience. The body one inhabits, the language one thinks in, the habits one inherits and cultivates, the social recognition one depends on, the histories one is thrown into, the norms one has learned to take for granted—none of these are purely self-generated. They are the “material”, so to speak, the engagement with which a self is made.
This is why the self’s striving for invulnerability is so unstable. It is trying to secure itself against the very conditions that constitute it. It wants to be more substantial than its dependence, more real than its exposure, more self-contained, more continuous, etc.. But dependence is not a defect added onto an otherwise “complete” self. The self is always already shaped by embodiment and by the world of other people. The practices of yoga do not remove that dependence; they make it visible. In this sense, yoga does not give the self a private victory over its conditions. Rather, it discloses the fact that the self was never self-sufficient to begin with. What becomes possible in practice is not escape from embodiment, language, history, or other people, but a less defensive way of inhabiting them.
Depending on the standpoint from which one explores selfhood, these non-optional dimensions (e.g., embodiment, socio-cultural and linguistic history, etc.) can be named differently. But the point remains the same: though the self is not reducible to any single element that makes it possible, self is not outside what makes it possible. This is the ur-context of experience: there is no standpoint outside of experience to which one could retreat (from which one could fully explain, suspend, or master it) and then re-enter it from the outside. Every transformation is a transformation within the single experience that is/was always already happening, not beyond/before it. The monk who renounces the world and retreats to a cave is not outside of this structure; rather, their renunciation is the way they have taken up their situation. The stoic who trains themselves to be “above” relationship or emotion has already been constituted by them—constitution which includes their very desire to rise above them. The skeptic who refuses to commit is already taking up a stance whether they notice it or not. And reasoning your way out of these conditions doesn’t work; even those who theorize the (ontological) absence of free will must themselves contend with the anxieties of the experience of free will; they must still live from within the experience of having it whether they like it or not. What yoga reveals, then, is not an exit from experience, but the impossibility of any exit in the first place.
What yoga calls self-awareness is not self-observation in a therapeutic or managerial sense. It is not the project of standing back from oneself in order to optimize the self as if it were a machine. It is a more radical noticing: the recognition that what I take to be “my” inner life is already constituted through what exceeds me, and that the self I am trying to secure is already woven through with embodiment, relation, history, and dependence. In that sense, self-awareness is self-transcendence because it is not the elevation of a private self above its conditions, but the direct seeing of how those conditions were always already operating.
And this is why yoga cannot be reduced to a method for personal improvement. The point is not to become more polished, more purified, or more spiritually advanced. The point is to become less deluded about what one is. Once that becomes clear, the question of transcendence changes. Transcendence is no longer escape from the finite, embodied, socially formed self; it is the willingness to inhabit that finitude without making a project of denying/fighting it (which is what produces and re-produces most, if not all, of our suffering). That is the true dimension of transcendence: not leaving experience, but seeing that the self was never outside it.
These are the dimensions that traditional yoga has always pointed to as the true field of transcendence—not a private state beyond the world, but the very conditions in which experience unfolds and in which freedom is either realized or evaded.
In other words, as we become less habitually and unthinkingly compelled by craving/aversion—by needing the world to be a certain way—we become aware of the non-optional dimensions of experiencing: the true dimensions of “transcendence”. We become aware that we each are irrevocably embedded in structures of dependence that precede and exceed us, structures that will never allow us to self-exist. We become aware of our “entire” self—we cultivate self-awareness. And in yoga, self-awareness is self-transcendence.
Resources: Further Reading on the Philosophy and Practice of Yoga
FURTHER READING:
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
We do not have articles available on yoga history (including on Patanjali), but recommend James Mallinson’s and Mark Singleton’s 2017 book, Roots of Yoga.
For those looking to further explore the theme of “inner lack”, see the work of philosopher and Zen teacher, David R. Loy. Few have been able to articulate the basic problem of the suffering of “self” in phenomenological terms as clearly as Loy. His 2008 book, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution (Wisdom Publications) is a concise introduction to his thinking (and is highly recommended). For those with some background in Continental philosophy and psychotherapy, consider his book, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism (2018 [1996], Wisdom). For those looking to further explore the theme of “ontological security” (i.e., our desire to feel more “real”), see R.D. Laing’s 1960 book, The Divided Self.
For those looking to further explore how freedom is implicated in determinacy (and what this means for an ethics of openness), see philosopher John Russon’s 2017 article, ‘Freedom and Passivity: Attention, Work, and Language’. Russon’s highly-engaging and accessible philosophy is a rich exploration of phenomenology and existentialism and is highly recommended. John Russon’s YouTube Channel provides excellent companions (and introductions) to the dense (and rich) works of philosophy with which his scholarship engages (primarily phenomenology/existentialism, German Idealism, and ancient Greek philosophy).