Yoga and the epoché

credit: Dawn Conry

"So long as we are immersed in body consciousness, we are like strangers in a foreign country. Our native land is omnipresence."

"Eternity yawns at me below, above, on the left and on the right, in front and behind, within and without."



"With open eyes I behold myself as the little body. With closed eyes I perceive myself as the cosmic center around which revolves the sphere of eternity, the sphere of bliss, the sphere of omniscient, living space."

Paramahansa Yogananda

Phenomenology shares with Hindu wisdom the action of the epoché, the refrain from judgment of what's real and what's illusion, though the two approaches differ on what distinguishes reality from illusion to begin with.

When I practice the epoché, I'm taking whatever I'm aware of as-is. I refrain - I restrain my mental movement - from making instant determinations of the most basic kind: this is an object, that is a thought, this is a physical painful sensation, that is an image transmitted via my ocular nerve from the eyeball via photons, this is a daydream, that is a random thought and faintly flashing remembered smell of something.

That is the jumble of real and illusion that Husserl's epoché brings into view.

Phenomenology sees dreaming is different from waking, and the epoché refrains from saying so.

Hindu meditation - yoga - lumps all of what we experience - waking, dreaming, imagining -  into the Illusion category from the start. Yoga begins with the results of the epoché. 

But if Hinduism piles up all of reality and illusion into one big lumpy pile, what's left?

Yoga shows you how to spot it.

Yoga's beginning overlaps with the extent of phenomenology, which includes the actual physical/mental/emotional experience of struggle to relax body and mind so we can concentrate and meditate and refrain, and thus be able to spot the glitch, aka the space in the secret place in the body/mind/consciousness.