Yoga Philosophy and the Nature of Experience: A Philosophy of Self-Awareness

This page anchors our work on the philosophy of yoga, which is part of our comprehensive Yogi’s Guide to Yoga, where Yoga is taught as a direct, phenomenological inquiry into the structure of experience itself.
Below, you’ll find foundational articles and videos exploring yoga not as self-optimization, but as awareness of the conditions that shape us—first as self-awareness, finally as Self-awareness.

The Shared Project of Indian Philosophy

Much of what is grouped under the banner, “Indian philosophy”, participate in a shared project: making sense of the reality in which we find ourselves. The classical systems largely pursue this by developing explicit metaphysical accounts of what ultimately exists—how things stand behind or beneath experience.

This shared project invites/demands an interesting insight: however far we range in our claims about reality, self, matter, or God, those claims themselves only ever appear within experience: as thoughts, images, arguments, intuitions, and ways of inhabiting the world. Before anything can count for us as a ‘brain’, a ‘world’, or a ‘substance’, it has already shown up within a field of awareness. A phenomenological approach makes this explicit, foregrounding experience/appearing as the place where reality is encountered at all. Whatever we think or believe, we only ever meet it as something that has already arrived in experience, and it is that way‑of‑appearing that this approach insists on studying. However we are trained to think—scientifically, economically, religiously, therapeutically—those frameworks do not float above life; they “sink into” the way experience is organized. They determine, among other things, what strikes us as obvious, what counts as a “real” explanation, what we notice, what we ignore. A phenomenological stance does not deny these frameworks, but asks how they are already structuring the experience we are having and then takes the structured experience as what must be examined first.

In other words, phenomenology foregrounds the experience you are always already having, the experience that you are having right now, which is the basis for all of your thinking, feeling, acting, perceiving—and your identity, your knowledge, your will, your desire (including the desire to understand and to be free of discomfort). The one, single experience that is always happening is the horizon of your experience, and any changes you experience will be changes within this singular experience—the one field in which everything shows up. Experience is the thing in/as which you exist. (This is a claim about how everything appears for us—within one ongoing field of experience—not a metaphysical thesis that reality ‘in itself’ is a single substance. In fact, nothing here settles whether reality itself is one, two, or many; the point is simply that whatever we think about it, we only ever meet it within this one field of experience.) In this sense, “yoga philosophy” names the study of experience itself.

This approach to yoga philosophy emphasizes the existential and phenomenological dimensions of experience—seeing yoga as a radical and direct inquiry into the structure/nature of awareness. As such, this reading resonates with themes across several classical traditions (especially Vedānta, Buddhism, and Sāṃkhya). This is not a metaphysical account of yoga, nor a survey of branded yoga styles, but a treatment of yoga as a practice of awareness (and, as such, self-awareness).

The Meaning of “Yoga”

In this phenomenological approach, “yoga” is taught as a direct phenomenological inquiry into the structure of experience itself. Historically, the Sanskrit word yoga has not belonged to a single branded system: it appears in classical Upaniṣadic literature, in the Bhagavad Gītā, in classical Yoga texts, in various Vedānta lineages, and in Buddhist and Jain contexts where intensive contemplative practice is described and practitioners are sometimes called yogin. Different traditions fill the term with different metaphysical content, but they consistently link “yoga” with disciplined practice aimed at a transformation in how experience and self are lived. The usage here stays within that family resemblance while making explicit that the focus is on the structure of experience, rather than on any one historical school or style.

Experience, Desire, and Suffering

Even in their most metaphysical mood, many of these traditions begin from a simple observation: ordinary life feels “off”. It is marked by error, restlessness, frustration, or outright suffering, and by a sense that things are not yet as they could or should be—what some texts call bondage or duḥkha, and others describe more neutrally as saṃsāra, the ongoing cycle of birth and death.

Once experience is taken as the starting point in this way, what appears is not a neutral field but a constant push–pull of grasping and avoidance, of wanting more of some things and less of others. From this standpoint, one way to describe what is happening is that the experience you are having right now tends toward “suffering” of various forms, the most foundational of which is produced by a sense of being incomplete, never “enough” as the self that we are. Instead of investigating this sense of inner lack, we run from it, seeking to secure our identities in the world via attention/security—more money, more fame, more status, more love, more enlightenment, etc.—more recognition. Or, we seek to rid ourselves of our perceived defects—less trauma, less karma, fewer negative emotions, fewer sins—so that we may be “free”. Either way, we become trapped in a cycle of running from (or trying to destroy) a sense of inner lack by trying to secure our independent existence in the world.

We do this by attempting to add weight to our individual image/existence (sometimes called our “ego”) so we can matter more, so we can feel more “real” and guard against unpredictable occurrences that stimulate our discomfort—so that we never feel compelled to strive for anything ever again. (Or, at the very least, we blend in enough so as not to seem any less real than everyone else.) We become tired of a world that won’t bend to our will. Needing the world to be a certain way because of our own self-insecurity is the source of discontent. And if/when we do manage to re-configure our world in ways we think will make us (finally) less insecure, we don’t feel “cured” because the configuration of the world was never the problem—our insecurity was the problem, and our needing [our insecurity to go away] only reinforced our insecurity (rather than made it go away).

Classical sources often describe this in terms of something like attachment, and taking what is “not self” as “self”. What is usually called “attachment” is not simply liking or caring about things. It is the way a particular configuration of the world starts to feel like the guarantor of my existence. A role, a relationship, a net worth, a reputation, a spiritual image—these stop being things in my life and become the things that are supposed to make me real. The same logic drives the “inner” projects: getting rid of trauma, karma, shame, bad habits, or difficult emotions stops being about healing and becomes about finally qualifying to exist; I enlist their absence in order to make me safe, clean, and allowed to participate.

From there, the ordinary movements of life—earning, relating, speaking, healing—reorganize themselves around this project of self‑guarantee. I don’t just want money; I want money that proves I am not small. I don’t just want recognition; I want recognition that proves I am not erasable. Success that proves I am not incompetent, achievement that proves I am not defective, love that proves I am not unworthy, control that proves I am not unsafe, autonomy that proves I am not dependent/weak, etc.—all in an effort to protect oneself against oneself (i.e., one’s own intolerable feelings). The trouble is that no configuration of the world can do this job, precisely because the self that is trying to secure itself is not a self‑existing substance at all.

In this sense, attachment is less about having or not having certain things—inside or outside—and more about enlisting parts of the world, or parts of myself, to do something they could never do: guarantee, once and for all, that this particular “me” is allowed to exist—guarantee that I may never again be made to feel invisible, ashamed, unworthy, guilty, defective, incompetent, exposed, dependent, anxious, or unsafe; that I may never feel compelled to strive for anything ever again. Our intuitive knowing that we are not self-sufficient—that we can be hurt, rejected, erased, etc.—isn’t idiosyncratic but constitutional, and motivates our quest(s) for self-security.

Of course, the more we desire something to make us feel good, the less we feel we have it; as an example, the more we want to be rich, the more everything reminds us of how poor we are. In other words, our quest for permanent freedom from our personal suffering only reinforces the very problem our quest was intended to subvert.

Yoga Practice and “Realization”

Different philosophical and contemplative traditions make different recommendations for how to respond to this situation. Some emphasize right knowledge and reasoning, some ritual and duty, others meditation or devotion; the sources drawn on here include all of these in different proportions. Read together through this phenomenological lens, they can be seen as pointing toward a similar kind of shift: away from compulsive attempts to secure an isolated “me,” and toward a recognition that what we call “my” existence is always already shaped and sustained by conditions—bodily, social, linguistic, historical—that precede and exceed it.

The antidote to our suffering is to address the very needing/striving, not by attempting to directly extinguish it, but by bearing direct witness to its many incarnations and to its texture and tone—and then by bearing direct witness to the myriad forces that determine our awareness: the body, society, language, culture, desire, other people, etc.—that is, by becoming self-aware, aware of our “whole” self, so to speak. This is self-awareness in yoga:

awareness of our habitual ways of feeling, thinking, acting, and perceiving—and especially our automatic habits of avoiding uncomfortable thoughts/feelings or clinging to whatever we think will eliminate these thoughts/feelings—so that we might become aware of them rather than having our existence determined by (avoiding or clinging to) them. This allows us to further explore the very “structure” of experience:
awareness of the non-optional dimensions of experience—the true dimensions of transcendence—that we each are irrevocably embedded in structures of dependence that precede and exceed us, and awareness of the ethical consequence of this recognition: I am better when everyone is better.

This content belongs to our Yogi’s Guide to Yoga, which contains a comprehensive exploration of the purpose of yoga, which also contains a section on yoga practice. Below you will find further videos and articles on topics in yoga philosophy.

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Yoga is the study of experience itself. Yoga is not the study of some other world/time/place that is outside of the experience you are always already having. Yoga is the study of the experience that you are having right now, which is the basis for all of your thinking, feeling, acting, perceiving—and your identity, your knowledge, your will. This one, single experience is the horizon of your experience, and any changes you experience will be changes within this singular experience—the one thing that is going on. Experience is the thing in which (or as which) you exist. This is the basis for yoga philosophy.