Two Dualisms

Yogic thought is marked by an awareness of two distinct (though related) dualisms, and is a response them. The first identifies the distance between human and divine experience; the other marks the way in which we often feel divided against ourselves as we get caught up in the daily whirlwinds of activity, thought and desire.

When looking at the yogic philosophers’ explorations into this experience, we find these two dualisms coming into their sharpest focus in two distinct periods of philosophy, though the yogis were aware of both dualisms in some fashion from the very start.

Division Between Human and Divine

However much we believe in divinity or the presence of the spiritual perfection, love and benevolence of God, most of us would admit that we don’t ordinarily experience that presence directly from moment to moment in our lives. To the yogi, belief or faith in that presence is not enough. The yogi wants to ‘realize’ or experience that presence at every moment, and wants no sense of separation, distance or alienation from the presence of the Divine to mar this constant communion.

The issue of this separation from the Divine is first taken up in the earliest texts of the Vedas, which addressed through myth the gap they felt between the human and the Divine. On the surface, the life of man and that of the ‘gods’ (and ultimately the Divine itself) are so different as to be separated by a chasm, though at the same time they are related by mutual dependence. Man (who labors to produce food and wealth) and the gods (who provide the resources through the elements) must offer to and nourish one another, bridging the gap between them through sacrifice and offerings, else they both suffer.

Thus the duality or ‘split’ came from the original act of creation; man’s spiritual response is to heal this split, bringing the manyness of creation back to wholeness. He does this through building a spiritual community among men as well as becoming whole within himself. The wholeness he brings about is then offered back to God in sacrifice, thus nourishing and restoring the Divine. In this way the circle between man and the divine is completed, and the dualism is healed.

Thus on the surface, the Vedas began with the assumption of a dualism, or dualistic view of the universe. Beneath the surface of the Vedas, however, there was a more profound mysticism that was nondualistic; later traditions – especially Vedanta – sought to draw this mysticism out as the essence of yogic experience, the real ‘Truth.’

The overall question posed by the Vedas was put in terms of sacrifice and offering, and remained for each yogic tradition to answer: what is the offering or sacrifice that we are called upon to make in order to achieve this wholeness, and how is the offering to be made? What are the means for offering ourselves back to the Divine, in order to reunite with the Divine Self?

Division Within – Between Heart (Soul) and Mind (Embodied Life)

Along with the feeling of distance from the divine, a second strain of dualism lies in the recognition that we often feel alienated or distanced from ourselves. We often express this alienation as the division or conflict between ‘heart’ (not just emotion, but a spiritual sense of self) and ‘mind’ (our thought, calculations and machinations revolving around the ego and its needs, desires and distractions)

This perception of a dualism was addressed most specifically in the Classical Period, where the dualism to be healed was within man himself – the gap between one’s physical / mental (in the most mundane sense of the ‘whirlwind’ of ordinary thought) life, and one’s innermost spirit or spiritual life. Yoga became more an attempt to overcome the division within oneself, and by that effort, to reunite with the Divine (since the Divine is one’s own true self).

The dualistic philosophies of the Classical Period ‘dissolved’ the problem by choosing one (the life of spirit or Purusha, the experience of samadhi) over (and to the exclusion of) the other (the material world of the body, the experience of the ‘fluctuations of the mind’ in the world of samsara). Patanjali gave detailed advice on how to make that choice in one’s yogic practice in his famous Yoga Sutras.

The nondualistic philosophies of the later, Postclassical Period argued that there was never really a ‘choice’ to be made, except in one’s own attitude, feeling and perception – one’s bhava or way of relating to and feeling toward self and world. There are not really two separate ‘worlds’ of spiritual and egoistic self, except in our ideas and perception. One does not realize the Truth by turning away from our ordinary world of experience – our experience of our own mundane self, but rather by looking more closely and seeing through the veil of ‘otherness’ by which we ordinarily relate to our ego-self and world. The world – and we ourselves – are an ever-changing expression of the Divine itself, and is never truly ‘other’ than this one divine creative Consciousness. Realization does not come about through exclusion of the material, limited aspect of our own being, but rather an awakening to the Truth that the Divine Self dwells within us as us; it is we, in our bound state, who perceive the Divine Self as other.