Dualism in yoga classically finds its practical expression in and through the problem of suffering. This served as the starting point of Indian philosophy, recognized as an inescapable fact of life. The sages were not so pessimistic as to say that there is no joy in life; but our joy is always qualified or limited by some form of pain and suffering, if only the painful experience that all good things come to an end. The pain of endings, of separation, of old age, sickness and death force us to take a step back and examine our situation; the experience of such pain motivates us to look more closely at our perception and experience of ourselves, and even to look at how we actively participate in creating the suffering that we claim we want to be free of.
Their conclusion was simple: at the root of suffering lies the fact of change; we become attached to and identified with things as they are, and we suffer when we experience the loss that comes with change. With that suffering comes a sense of how we have become separated or distanced from our own happiness or joy. Change is the cause of suffering (in direct proportion to our desires and expectations); a sense of separation or alienation is the effect. The sages of yoga wished to address both in terms that help us to understand and overcome them.
This sense of separation is at the heart of dualism or a dualistic view of the world. A dualism marks a disparity, division or chasm between two kinds of experience, and these two realms of experience seem impossible to reconcile. One poet-saint of India named Tukaram sang of this predicament in his bhajan, asking ‘Is this world poison, or is it nectar? On one side of the road I see people crying and suffering; on the other I see them laughing and joyful. Is this world poison, or is it nectar?’ How does one answer this question without discounting one side or the other?
That is the predicament set by the dualist, who argues that both sides are equally and ultimately true and real. A dualist will not attempt to fix or right the problem, since the problem is accepted as a ‘given.’ Instead, one can only ‘liberate’ oneself from the dilemma, escaping from participation in it. Happiness and sadness are two poles of a single problem known as samsara, a loose translation of which could be ‘going in circles’ or chasing one’s tail. One solution is to simply give up having and desiring a tail.
Yoga is the name given to the various ways of approaching and overcoming the predicament, not all of which are dualistic. One of the meanings given to yoga is ‘union,’ and in each philosophy in yoga, the ‘union’ that takes place has a slightly different meaning, depending upon the philosophy’s characterization of the problem, whether dualistic or nondualistic. In all cases, yoga suggests a return to a state of wholeness, an effort to make whole what has been split asunder. Yoga is an effort to come ‘home.’
We do experience glimpses of our own joy in our lives, and there are times when difficulties and suffering seem to distance us from our innate experience of our own joy. When we are happy, we feel ‘at home’ in our happiness; when unhappy, we feel alienated and estranged, as if in a lonely, foreign land. Yoga is a union in which we are reunited with our own joy, and tells us that that joy is an elevated and abiding spiritual state, our true home. It is a state far beyond what we briefly experience at the satisfaction of a fleeting desire.
Thus the companion to the question of suffering is the question each yogic philosophy has to answer, how or what are the ways in which we get separated from our own joy? And how is this separation to be overcome?