The central idea of both classical Saṁkhyā and Yoga is puruṣārtha, that all human action is done “for puruṣa’s sake,” or “having puruṣa as goal,” where puruṣa is “the fact of consciousness in the world” (Larson, 1969, p.168) [1], and the one acting toward this end or goal is prakṛti (psychophysical nature) or more specifically the part of psychophysical nature that we experience as insight, self-sense, and thought (buddhi, ahamkāra, manas; together forming citta or the “inner organ,” antaḥkāraṇa). Prakṛti, characterized by three “qualities” or guṇas is proven to exist because the experience and activity of all organisms must have an enjoyer (bhoktṛ) and a knower (jna), and because life works toward release from suffering (duḥkha), thus implying someone to be released. (SK 17). The two, seemingly rather incompatible, goals of action are therefore puruṣa’s enjoyment and release (bhuj- and muc-).

Life unfolds in a diachronic, emanational (satkārya) flow called pravṛtti or pariṇāma characterized by more or less “afflictions” (kleśas) or suffering (duḥkha). The more kleśas, the faster the downhill slide of life, more or less like the descent in the Puranas from higher and more dharmic cosmic states to less dharmic ones (kṛta to treta, dvapara, and kali yugas). As kleśas diminish through insight or meditation—as action becomes more akḷṣṭha—human existence calms (sam-ā-dhā-) and citta rises up to approach an asymptote of stasis and satisfaction, which is described as similar to the inherent freedom or isolation (kaivalya) characteristic of puruṣa. The state of the “person” at this point is more or less identical to that of the homogeneous “mūlaprakṛti” or original condition before the guṇas separated. Thus the highest stage of samādhi in Pātāñjala Yoga is calm, diffuse, full of potency but inactive; it is called the “rain cloud of dharma samādhi,” dharma-megha-samādhi.

Saṁkhyā concludes that the conscious spirits of humans (the original meaning of puruṣa is “man”) are numerically diverse because people are born and die at different times and in varying ways, and are constituted by varying proportions of the guṇas (psychomaterial qualities of existence, action, and fragmentation). [2] Puruṣas, however, are bare consciousness, never actually touching or interacting with the prakṛtic forces (we could view them as both particles and waves) that aim in their direction. Thus puruṣas are essentially indistinguishable from one another except numerically. They have no qualities including duration in time, physical dimension, etc. They are unattached/free “witnesshood” (sakṣitvam . . . puruṣasya . . . kaivalyam, SK19). The physicist Peter Pesic has coined a term for things of this sort that are indistinguishable but (pace Leibniz) still not numerically identical: “identicality” (Pesic, 2003) [3]. Consider the Leibnizian identity of indiscernibles:

“For any x and any y whatsoever, if x and y are identical, then x has all and only the properties of y.” Kapstein, 2001, p. 63.

Pesic claims to have found an apparent exception to this, entities that have all the same properties but are numerically distinct. He notes that each electron is a perfect instance of its species: it has exactly the same spin, charge, and mass as every other electron. But he goes farther, noting that there is no way to mark an electron so as to tell it from others. In this way, even numerical distinction comes into question, and it makes no sense, for example, in quantum physics to ask which electron is isolated within a magnetic field. It could be (there is a probability) that the electron in the box suddenly traded places with one outside. Similarly, puruṣas are all exactly alike and cannot be marked. They only appear to be marked by the variety of bodies whose energies they focus. Pesic tells us that

Identicality means that the members of a species have identity only as instances of the species, without any features that distinguish one individual from another. . .. [Identicality] signifies the exact negation of individuality; it includes total indistinguishability and complete equality of all observable features. (p. 102)

Puruṣas have all and only the same properties as other puruṣas when examined in their essential nature, though from the point of view of their prakṛtic circumstances they are different. Qua “embedded” in entities “from Brahma to a blade of grass” (SK 54) they are distinct from one another, and even from instant to instant they are different as their “bodies” traverse their life spans, moving for example from chick to full grown bird. At each “moment” there is what we might call the “puruṣa principle” or bare consciousness existent at that moment both as illuminating the event that the moment is, and as what the moment is for. Thus there are a multiplicity of puruṣas, although they are identical in nature, each consisting of the experiencer, owner, and object of potential release (mokṣa) in a particular moment. Momentary selfhoods succeed one another as the psychomaterial process that they reflect flows into its next state: the parallel with Buddhism is evident. (Parenthetically, nirvāṇa [nibbāna] occupies a position in the Buddhist psychology quite parallel to puruṣa in Saṁkhyā and Yoga. As Stephen Collins puts it, “[nirvāṇa] is the motionless and ungraspable horizon, the limit-condition that makes [the flux of the Buddhist world] a coherent whole.”)

In such a world, does it make sense to say that a puruṣa experiences pleasure, especially the supreme pleasure or joy of release, moksa? Can a puruṣa have the salvific vision and enter the ultimate bliss of kaivalya? We are caught in a fundamental aporia at the heart of both Saṁkhyā and Yoga: on the one hand, puruṣa must experience of the joy of release, like the suffering of bondage: because she is unconscious, prakṛti cannot experience anything. On the other hand, because he is essentially isolated from prakṛti, puruṣa cannot experience her suffering or bliss. (I note the gender implications in passing.) Clearly a literal statement either way would be unsustainable. We will examine three possible ways out of the flytrap. 1. Lloyd Pfleuger’s suggestion that yoga lives on the edge of enlightenment where prakṛti almost goes over the limit horizon of the black hole to recognize itself as puruṣa, [4] 2. Stephen Collins’s interpretation of nirvāṇa as an image of transcendence that gives a sense of an ending to endless flux [5], and 3. Leszek Kolakowski’s similar (non-)answer to the question, “Is God happy?”, that “happiness is something we can imagine but not experience.” [6] All three paths out of the aporia involve imagination and practice. They are not intellectual solutions but practical ones, ways of life and ultimately forms of culture.

Let us begin with Kolokowski, who notes that “[God’s] love is a source of happiness [for him] when it is reciprocated.” (p. 213). Because of the misery of life, God’s love (assuming it to exist) will not be reciprocated by a substantial fraction of human beings. Nevertheless, we can imagine happiness, which will necessarily be both God’s and that of humans simultaneously. It can be envisioned as a time when all humans have been saved by God and enjoy celestial bliss. Dante’s Paradiso might be the best example of such a vision. From Kolokowski let us take two concepts: reciprocity and imagination.

Pflueger, unlike Kolokowski and (as we will see) Collins, takes a more literal view of the interaction between puruṣa and prakṛti, but finds a liminal moment which is equivalent to the imaginal. This key moment is found in SK 66 when prakṛti recognizes that she has “been seen” (dṛṣṭāham) and simultaneously puruṣa realizes that he has “seen her” (dṛṣṭā mayā). For Pfleuger this is the penultimate moment, the moment of recognition just before the climax of liberation. At this moment puruṣa and prakṛti share the taste of freedom from opposite sides. The insightful mind (buddhi) fully realizes her unconsciousness, and proclaims “nāsmi na me nāham,” “I am not, I have nothing, there is no “I” in me.” (SK 64). Apophatically, this nay-saying of prakṛti’s self shows puruṣa himself. The reciprocity between the two principles is again clear, but what about the imagination, the cultural side of the relationship? Pflueger does not discuss this thematically, but he does make a brilliant leap between Saṁkhyā and Yoga texts in recognizing that the moment of seeing/being seen in the SK is the same moment in the YS that is imagined in the figure of the “rain cloud of dharma samādhi” (dharma-megha-samādhi). “The monsoon of dharma breaks the drought. Suffering is abolished.”

But Pflueger neglects a crucial element in the text in concluding that the moment of mutual recognition happens “just before” the climax of liberation. He rightly sees the sexual, orgasmic symbolism operating under the surface of the two texts, but locates the “knowledge” the partners—puruṣa and prakṛti— have of one another on the wrong side of orgasm. The verb (participle) dṛṣṭā is in the past tense, not the present. The climax has taken place, and we are now in the postcoital moment that will become culture and practice, will develop into the tradition of yoga and meditation that cultivates the mind-body and keeps it infused with the ongoing realization of puruṣārtha, the dedication of life to pleasing and enlightening, in the religious imagination, one who ontologically needs neither of these. The situation is like that of guru and disciple, or temple murti and worshipper: after the moment of enlightenment real sādhana begins, and pleasing the guru or god becomes the ongoing joy of the devotee/disciple. This is the origin of art, as dance, music, painting, and architecture express the afterglow of the mystical union that is at the same time a realization of absolute difference.

Stephen Collins, in developing an “imaginal” approach to nirvāṇa (to use Henry Corbin’s term rather than Collins’ French “imaginaire”) notes that “poetic evocation can achieve things that mere silence. . . cannot.” (p. 75). The imaginal nirvāṇa is the (one) unconditioned thing that gives coherence (by setting an end) to the conditioned, fire-like flux of the world. It is only because of nirvāṇa that the truth about the world is possible. It is a point outside conditioned origination that can see the latter as it is. This recognition is acknowledged metaphorically by the earth to which the Buddha points at his moment of awakening. We can see here a Buddhist parallel to the Saṁkhyā-Yoga moments of “seeing/being seen”, and also, repeatedly, in the years between Gautama’s awakening (nirvāṇa) and death (pari-nirvāṇa) as he interacts with his disciples. Between age 35 and 80 the Buddha wandered around north-east India spreading the word about the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path. Reciprocity between the Buddha and disciples at their moments of realization, as the former teaches and the latter understand his teaching, is everywhere implicit in the texts, and in fact is arguably the central point of the life lived by the Buddha and his community (saṇgha) during those years. The teaching is filled with images expressive of the living transformation of suffering into the bliss of nirvāṇa: fire, flowers, the “sphere where there is no water, earth, fire, nor air; no stars shine there, nor sun nor moon, and darkness is not found” [p. 80]. “I have been seen” but am “not I” (dṛṣṭāham and nāham).

Let us ask again the basic question, does puruṣa experience joy when the buddhi of prakṛti realizes, with finality, that she “is not, has nothing, and is not I”? We may imagine that it is for puruṣa’s sake that she realizes this, in an act of sacrifice, worship, and glorification or “māhātmya”: it is his joy she seeks, in her imagination, by this realization. Pleasing and releasing puruṣa, the ultimate goals of prakṛti, bring her into the penumbra of his world and give her a taste of release that may flower into a world here below filled with the radiation of citiśakti, the power of consciousness that resides “above.” Purusa’s pleasure is fully his, in no way the possession of prakrti as she empties herself without limit, feels for him and touches his feeling.

In evolving through time by expressing outwardly the inner potentialities of her nature, prakṛti simultaneously refers to and is guided by the consciousness principle puruṣa that shows her the “I”-ness that she needs to recognize in him, not in herself (the ahaṁkāra).