Yoga Philosophy: On the Nature of Experiencing
Yoga Philosophy Through Phenomenology
Written By: Balraj Persaud
This page presents a phenomenological approach to yoga philosophy: not a survey of Indian traditions, nor a metaphysics of some other world beyond experience, but a direct inquiry into the structure of the experience you are always already having. It begins by establishing why experience must be the starting point for any honest inquiry, and then examines how desire and suffering organize that experience—and how self-awareness changes your relationship to both.
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.
Any account of what stands behind our experience—some hidden self, ultimate reality, or first cause, etc.—only ever appears within experience itself. Every motivation or desire, question or belief, philosophy or practice—and even the very will to seek answers, or to end suffering—is only ever encountered within experience. In this way, yoga philosophy is not presented as a doctrinal system to be adopted, but as an inquiry into the only place any of this can ever be encountered: experience itself.
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 the classical Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, in various Vedānta lineages, and in Buddhist and Jain contexts describing intensive contemplative practice (and where practitioners are sometimes called yogin). Different traditions fill the term with different metaphysical content, but they consistently link “yoga” with disciplined practices intended to transform one’s experience of oneself and the world (even if these traditions did not share the same metaphysical commitments). Our usage stays within this basic orientation while making explicit that the object of our focus is on the structure of experience/experiencing (or self-awareness), rather than on any one historical school or style.
Any account of what stands behind our experience—some hidden self, ultimate reality, or first cause, etc.—only ever appears within experience itself. Every motivation or desire, question or belief, philosophy or practice—and even the very will to seek answers, or to end suffering—is only ever encountered within experience. In this way, yoga philosophy is not presented as a doctrinal system to be adopted, but as an inquiry into the only place any of this can ever be encountered: experience itself.
Scope & Methodology: Phenomenology (Experience First)
We treat yoga philosophy as a direct, phenomenological inquiry into the structure of experience itself. A methodological reminder follows: phenomenology does not step around/behind reality; it returns us to reality as encountered, to reality insofar as it is lived, given, and made available in experience. however far we range in our claims about, say, “reality”, “self”, or “God”, those claims themselves only ever appear within experience. We do not encounter these concepts (or anything) outside of experiencing.
Before anything can count for us as a “brain”, a “world”, a “self”, etc., it has already shown up within a field of awareness. Whatever we think or believe, we only ever meet it as something that has shown up in experience. This does not mean that we first inhabit a private inner sphere and then somehow construct or infer an outer world. On the contrary, lived experience is essentially passive: we don’t do experience; we experience—in other words, we find ourselves already experiencing. We can contrast this with the faculty of imagination: in imagination we are active: we set the terms and we can alter what appears at will. In experience, however, none of this is available to us; we do not set the terms and cannot alter what appears at will; appearing is always already happening, and this basic appearing is not subject to my will. We are given over from the very start to a world that shows up as there, as outside, as not simply of my own making. In other words, I find myself already involved in or exposed to or experiencing reality (or a world)—there is always already an ‘outside’. In yet other words, there is first the lived encounter, and only afterward do we theorize about what it is or why it is, etc. Experiencing is not produced by the terms of our reflective descriptions of it (e.g., metaphysical, scientific, philosophical, etc.); on the contrary, our reflective descriptions are always secondary attempts to stabilize, as it were, what was already underway. (And any questioning/theorizing itself must emerge from within this basic experiencing.)
A phenomenological stance takes experiencing—the ongoing context of appearing that is not subject to my will—as the place where anything like “reality” is encountered at all. Phenomenology studies the way things show up before translating the terms of our experience into a disciplinary vocabulary (eg., that of psychology, neurology, philosophy, etc.), and before treating any explanation that treats “brain,” “world,” “self,” or “God” as standing behind experiencing. What appears in experience does not first arrive as neutral bits of data and only later acquire meaning; rather, what appears is always already meaningful, it appears as already making some kind of sense (even if that sense is confusion). Meaningfulness is not something we add to neutral bits of data; experience arrives as already-meaningful—already-meaningful is what arrives.
And there is no “exit” from this field of awareness. One cannot step outside of experiencing, outside this basic context of appearing, because any attempt to escape/transcend/deny experiencing still takes place within the same field; the very act of denying or transcending is itself an “act” of experiencing which confirms rather than escapes the field it is trying to exit; in other words, the denial enacts what it is trying to deny. There is no view from nowhere, and no view from everywhere. Whatever we think reality (or “God”, or “self”, etc.) is, we only ever meet it within experience, within the one ongoing field in which things appear.
What we have identified as this basic context of appearing—that is, experiencing itself—is not a new name for a hidden thing/reality that is standing behind the experience we always already having, but is simply a description of the lived situation already underway. And this—experience—is not defined by a formal, permanent, finished metaphysical structure; experience is not defined by a collection of pre-existing transcendental filters imposed upon an otherwise neutral stream of data that, somehow, “produce” our experience. Rather than reflecting a fixed, finished structure, experiencing is better described as unfinished and murky, within which embodiment, spatiality, temporality, language, history, and desire (among others) appear not as arbitrary but as unavoidable or “transcendental” (in the sense that they transcend all of experiencing and/or we live through them) dimensions of experience, something like nodes or centres of weight or gravity around which the field of significance is continually bent or organized (where, importantly no such dimension or node exhausts the whole).
Our frameworks of interpretation—scientific, economic, religious, therapeutic, etc.—are not pure descriptions that float above our everyday lived experience, but rather “sink into”, so to speak, the way experience is interpreted and organized (including the way the very frameworks themselves are interpreted and deployed). These frameworks shape, among other things, such foundational matters as what seems obvious, what is noticed, what is ignored, what counts as relevant, what is accepted as explanation, etc. 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 very 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).
Yoga is not the study of some other world/time/place or plane of existence that is outside or prior to the experience you are always already having. The one, single experience that is always happening is the very horizon of your experience, and any changes you experience will be changes within this singular experience—the one field in which everything shows up, the one thing that is happening. To be sure, this is not an ontological claim that “only mind exists” (and that nothing exists outside of mind); it is a claim that whatever we think of as “mind” and “not-mind”, or “inner” and “outer”, are always already encountered together within experience, and that there is no stance one could ever adopt that is outside of this encounter. And this is also not a metaphysical thesis that reality [in itself] is a single substance. In fact, nothing here settles (or attempts to settle) whether “reality” itself is really/truly one, two, or many; rather, whatever we think about reality, we only ever meet it within this one field of experience. (Similarly, notice that no such conclusion about “reality” eliminates the lived experience of agency: even the most thoroughgoing denial of free will does not eliminate the lived experience of finding oneself at meaningful crossroads and having to deliberate, hesitate, decide, procrastinate, etc., and that the life that preceded arriving at such a conclusion—i.e., there is no free will—itself required living through precisely these types of experience.)
This is also not the story of a “pure consciousness” that is later affected by a/the world, but rather one in which what we call consciousness is encountered only in/through the world—that is, we never encounter consciousness as a pure, prior thing standing apart from embodiment, situation, and world. In this sense, the most immediate phenomenological point of departure is not something like, “we are consciousness”, but that “we experience”, and that this experiencing is always already underway.
And when we turn to experience in this way—that is, taking experiencing as the place where reality is encountered rather than as something like a veil that is hiding something more “real”—what we find is not a neutral field of information but a constant push and pull of wanting and avoiding, organized from the very start around a pervasive sense that things are not yet settled, not yet as they should be.
One cannot step outside of experiencing, outside this basic context of appearing, because any attempt to escape/transcend/deny experiencing still takes place within the same field; the very act of denying or transcending is itself an “act” of experiencing—this confirms rather than escapes the field it is trying to exit; in other words, the denial performs what it is trying to deny. There is no view from nowhere, and no view from everywhere. Whatever we think reality is, we only ever meet it within the one ongoing field in which things appear.
Experience, Desire, and Suffering: A Phenomenological Description
Even in their most metaphysical mood, many of these traditions begin from a simple observation: ordinary life feels “off”. It is marked by a kind of restlessness, frustration, or 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 in order to “settle” our experience, our sense that it is (or we are) incomplete, not “enough”.
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” in these contexts is not simply liking or caring about things. It is the way we hold that a particular configuration of the world will protect/guarantee my existence: a role, a relationship, a net worth, a reputation, etc.—these stop being things in my life and become the things that are supposed to make me real, supposed to ensure that I am noticed or, at the very least, ineffaceable. The same logic drives the “inner” projects aimed at protecting/guaranteeing my existence: getting rid of trauma, karma, shame, bad habits, or difficult emotions stops being about healing and becomes about finally “qualifying”, so to speak, to exist; I require their absence in order to make me safe, clean, and allowed to participate in the world.
As such, ordinary life—earning, relating, speaking, healing—becomes a tool for (and reorganizes itself around) a 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. I want 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 myself against myself (i.e., my 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. Whether the project is one of addition—mattering more, becoming more substantial, securing recognition—or subtraction—purging shame, trauma, defect, vulnerability—the underlying demand is the same: guarantee, once and for all, that this particular “me” is allowed to exist—guarantee that my experience is reliably smooth/safe, that “things work out for me”, that I am no longer haunted by the unrelenting background feeling that there is something wrong/missing, that I am secured (once and for all) against my dependence, contingency, and relationality, 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. (Of course, this analysis identifies the hidden ontological demand placed upon our actions but does not deny the practical legitimacy of ordinary ambition, emotional self-regulation, or skillful craft.)
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.
...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. Whether the project is one of addition—mattering more, becoming more substantial, securing recognition—or subtraction—purging shame, trauma, defect, vulnerability—the underlying demand is the same: guarantee, once and for all, that this particular “me” is allowed to exist—guarantee that my experience is reliably smooth/safe, that “things work out for me”, that I am no longer haunted by the unrelenting background feeling that there is something wrong/missing... 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.
Yoga Practice and Self-Awareness
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 our compulsive attempts to secure an isolated/unsettled “me,” and toward a recognition that what we call “my” existence is always already determined, shaped, sustained, etc. by conditions—bodily, social, linguistic, historical—that precede and exceed it.
Ultimately, the practice(s) of yoga just are just variations of no longer fleeing yourself.
‘No longer fleeing yourself’ is the practice of meeting the friction of experience directly—sitting with the uncomfortable momentum of our inner life without immediately handing our attention and behaviour over to the conditioned habits of grasping and avoidance you’ve inherited and developed in order to avoid your anxieties (both “destructive” and “constructive”), and to avoid the people and situations that produce your anxieties. We become hypersensitive to what we fear—skilled at how to prevent ourselves from feeling it—which distorts how we perceive ourselves and others. Most importantly, however, we crave things that we think will make our discomfort disappear—the job, the car, the house, the partner, the child, retirement, healing, enlightenment—which only amplifies the sense that we lack it, just as a stronger desire for money, fame, or status produces a stronger awareness of lack, obscurity, or powerlessness. Being able to sit with your anxieties means that your life won’t be determined by (avoiding) them.
Being able to sit with uncomfortable aspects of our inner life requires the cultivation of inner stability. No longer habitually absorbed in our own inner/outer world, we could re-possess our attention. In sitting with them instead of attempting to escape/destroy them, we are given to—among other things—our pursuit of a kind of invulnerability, our striving to never again feel anxious/unsafe or unworthy/small or guilty/defective, etc.; we are given to our relentless desire to outrun a feeling. And we notice—among other things—the radical and ungrounded dependence of our individual existence and the nature of its impossible (and relentless) quest to ground itself by trying to matter more, by way of having more, doing more, being more (and, in some instances, even giving more)—or by trying to purge its inner life of all defects/badness—so as to no longer be vulnerable to unpredictable sources of internal/external discomfort—no longer subject to its own vulnerability, relationality, contingency. We begin to become self-aware.
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. And in yoga, self-awareness is self-transcendence. Self-awareness has two dimensions:
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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:
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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 the recognition that because our existence is constitutively shared, our own flourishing cannot be severed from the relational field that sustains it.
Trying to combat our anxieties with techniques isn’t enough to reduce our suffering. Stress management techniques don’t address our core anxiety of inadequacy. Craving anxiety relief is still craving. And fighting our anxiety typically just results in more anxiety. And anxiety reduction—if it is the quest of an ego looking to further self-protect/elevate—only re-produces the suffering we were attempting to eliminate in the first place (if even only about sanitizing ourselves of our anxiety).
Regardless of one’s specific practice, one must remain mindful that even the practice of self-awareness can be colonized. I-making [ahaṃkāra, often translated as the noun, “ego”] turns self-awareness into self-improvement. It strives to “do” the practice well, to feel “negative emotions” less, to purify the self of discomfort. In this way, yoga becomes just another strategy to avoid vulnerability—another way to secure a self no longer dependent on anything or anyone.
Yoga just is no longer fleeing yourself—a process which may or may not include āsana practice. No longer fleeing yourself, the ego becomes transparent. As the ego becomes transparent, the soul—what it feels like to be this living body from the inside—is “set free”; it is no longer imprisoned by its own quest for self-existence, by its own quest to overcome its dependence. And when we stop organizing our lives around relief—eliminating exposure, managing perception, and trying to justify our right to exist, we might arrive at presence—the affective freedom to inhabit our experience without defending against it, and to organize our lives around meaning—no longer reducing the world (things, people, etc.) to a set of tools for our own self-security, but finally able to care about things for their own sake.
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. And in yoga, self-awareness is self-transcendence.