One, Seen Two Ways

I recently attended a talk by Swami Sarvapriyananda in Sydney titled "Oneness in a Divided World." He covered a remarkable amount of ground — consciousness studies, neuroscience, references to philosophers like Karl Popper and David Chalmers — before finally arriving at the Advaita Vedantic view of oneness. It was a fascinating talk, and it left me thinking about the parallels between Advaita Vedānta and Yoga, and how each tradition arrives at its own view of oneness.

Every contemplative tradition, it turns out, eventually arrives at the same question: who is doing the looking? Advaita Vedānta and Yoga both begin here, in the space between the seer and everything that is seen. But they arrive at different destinations — and understanding exactly where and why they part ways turns out to matter more for practice than for philosophy.

The Advaita Vedantic Vision of Oneness

Advaita Vedānta's method for approaching this question is called dṛg-dṛśya-viveka — discrimination between the seer (dṛk) and the seen (dṛśya). The process is systematic: examine the body, and notice it is seen, therefore not the seer. Examine the senses — seen, not the seer. Examine the mind, its thoughts, its moods — all seen, all objects of awareness, none of them the awareness itself. Examine even the intellect, the subtlest instrument of discrimination. Still an object. Still not it.

What survives this peeling-away is Ātman — pure witnessing awareness, the one constant behind every changing experience. Advaita's final and most radical move is an identity claim: this Ātman is not merely like Brahman, the ground of all existence — it is Brahman. The Upaniṣadic phrase for this is tat tvam asi, "that thou art." Not union of two things. Not two things at all. One reality, appearing to itself as many.

This is the oneness a yoga practitioner has usually already heard about, in some form, long before they ever open the Yoga Sūtras. Yoga's own philosophy has a strikingly similar structure — and a stopping point that's easy to miss.

The Yogic Parallel — and Where It Stops

Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras contain their own version of this discrimination, called Viveka (viveka-khyāti) — the clear, discriminating vision that distinguishes Puruṣa (pure consciousness, the seer) from Prakṛti (nature — everything seen, which includes not just the external world but the body, the mind, thought, intellect, and even the felt sense of being an individual "I"). Structurally, this is the identical move Advaita Vedānta makes with dṛg-dṛśya-viveka. The method of subtraction is the same: keep removing what is object, and see what remains as pure subject.

But Yoga's philosophy stops one step earlier than Advaita Vedānta's. Having arrived at Puruṣa as a witness wholly distinct from Prakṛti, the classical Sāṃkhya which underpins Yoga does not go on to declare that this Puruṣa is identical with one single, universal Brahman shared by all beings. This is a metaphysical fork — Sāṃkhya is dualist by explicit commitment. Even the word most associated with yogic liberation, kaivalya, reflects this — it means "aloneness" or "isolation," not "union." Each Puruṣa stands apart, liberated in its own separateness, not merged into a cosmic one.

Yoga is a separate system (darśana) just like Advaita, with its own internal logic, arriving at its own destination. While Advaita arrives at this through pure knowledge (removal of ajñāna), Yoga arrives at its destination through samādhi, which follows from the very definition of Yoga itself (yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, YS 1.2) — the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

That still leaves an obvious question, though. If discriminative seeing — whether it terminates at Puruṣa or continues to Brahman — is theoretically available to us, why don't most of us experience any of it? Why does even the more modest yogic vision of a witness distinct from mind and body remain, for most people, entirely theoretical?

Yoga, being grounded more in practice, gives an answer: kleśas — the afflictions.

The Yogic Move: Diagnosis and Treatment

The Yoga Sūtras name five kleśas: avidyā, asmitā, rāga, dveṣa, and abhiniveśa (ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and fear of death) (YS 2.3), and identify avidyā as the root from which the other four grow (YS 2.4). Avidyā, in this system, is defined precisely: it is mistaking the impermanent for the permanent, the impure for the pure, and — most relevant here — mistaking the not-self for the Self (YS 2.5). This is, in different vocabulary, the same confusion Advaita Vedānta calls māyā or ajñāna: mistaking the seen for the seer. 

Two traditions, two technical languages, diagnosing what amounts to the same fundamental problem. Diagnosis without treatment, though, is of limited use, and this is where Yoga distinguishes itself most practically: right at the outset of the sūtras, Patañjali offers two levers for stilling the mind's fluctuations — abhyāsa (sustained, dedicated practice) and vairāgya (non-attachment, dispassion toward the results and objects of experience) (YS 1.12) — which together are the engine of the entire system, leading to samādhi and from there to viveka-khyāti, the discriminative seeing that actually removes avidyā at its root (YS 2.26); this isn't a side effect of practice, it is the entire point of it. 

Kriyā yoga is a concrete, accessible on-ramp into this same abhyāsa-vairāgya engine, consisting of three components — tapas (disciplined effort), svādhyāya (self-study), and īśvara-praṇidhāna (surrender to the divine) (YS 2.1) — and Patañjali states its purpose immediately: kriyā yoga is practiced for cultivating samādhi and for attenuating the kleśas (YS 2.2). 

That word — attenuating, tanū-karaṇa, literally "making thin" — deserves attention: it is not the language of instant transformation, but of a gradual wearing-down, not a single decisive removal, which has real implications for how we ought to think about progress on this path.

The Cookbook and the Kitchen

Svādhyāya, one of the three limbs of kriyā yoga, looks very much like the Advaita Vedantic conception of pure knowledge, but in both traditions it unfolds in three stages: śravaṇa (hearing or listening), manana (reflecting on and questioning what was heard), and nididhyāsana (sustained, deep contemplation until it is no longer merely understood but lived). This progression matters, because it's tempting to treat svādhyāya as something closer to reading a cookbook — absorbing the recipe for liberation and mistaking that absorption for the thing itself.

Svādhyāya was never meant to end at hearing, any more than reading a cookbook was ever meant to substitute for cooking. You do not get fed by knowing the recipe, however precisely you can recite it. Hearing a lecture on oneness, however clear, is not the same event as realising it. So we need the full kitchen of kriyā yoga — tapas (disciplined effort), svādhyāya (self-study), and īśvara-praṇidhāna (surrender to the divine) — to get cooking in earnest.

But it would be equally misleading to suggest that once you start actually cooking — once practice replaces mere listening — the finished dish appears quickly, or all at once. This is exactly the honest note that kleśa-tanūkaraṇa strikes. Yoga offers the kitchen and the cookbook for the yogic goal: viveka will not come as a single decisive event; each returning to practice does not tear the veil away in one motion. It thins it, incrementally, sometimes imperceptibly.

Hearing about oneness is svādhyāya's first moment. What comes next is practice, through kriyā yoga (YS 2.1).

It is slow work, and it does not offer the satisfaction of a single leap into realization. But I believe it is the only kind of work that actually changes anything.

 

*this piece has been Co written with my friend "Claude" who finessed my ideas and offered several corrections... all in a matter of minutes

** Title image is a photo I took at an exhibit at art-science museum- Singapore

*** I found the hard copy of yoga sutras (image above) at art gallery of NSW in the museum shop when visiting the exhibit- Avatar- the many forms of Vishnu