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Decolonizing Consciousness

The book intertwines several strands of scholarship in Indian Philosophy,

contemporary psychology and the lived Indian psychological practices
inclusive of Yoga, advaita, tantra and bhakti to engage in an exploration of
consciousness, cognitive science and philosophy.
The book examines the characteristics of consciousness by situating it
in the historical and cultural contexts of Euro-American as well as Asian,
particularly Indian philosophical tradition specifically, the Bhakti tradition
and creative living. The volume decolonizes the understanding of the ecol-
ogy of consciousness while accounting for the diverse strands, which have
given us a unique understanding of the mind, psychology, cognition and
philosophy of the mind.
This book will be of interest to students, teachers and scholars of
psychology, consciousness studies, cognitive science, philosophy, social
­
psychology, Yoga studies and Yoga psychology. It will also be useful for
Yoga professionals, social workers, therapists and anyone who is interested
to learn about consciousness.

Shilpa Ashok Pandit is an Associate Professor, School of Arts and Science,

Ahmedabad University, Navrangpura, Ahmedabad, India.
Decolonizing Consciousness
Reclaiming the Indian Psychology
of Well-being

Shilpa Ashok Pandit

First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Shilpa Ashok Pandit
The right of Shilpa Ashok Pandit to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-16090-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-37279-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-33620-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003336204

Typeset in Sabon
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents

Acknowledgementsvi

1 Decolonizing psychology: The ecology of consciousness

in Indian psychology1

2 Consciousness: Sat-Cid-Ānanda9

3 Deha: Consciousness, embodiment and idli-sambhār32

4 Conceptualizing Bhāvanā: Emotions and well-being58

5 Pramā: Consciousness and valid cognition79

6 Unmana-Manonmana: Psychology and the ‘no mind’106

7 Bhakti: Consciousness, social self and the aesthetic

of transformation134

8 Purṇa: Creative living and transcendence here and now159

Index 179
Acknowledgements

This book is a long time of about 25 years in making. As a student of

both the traditional Indian knowledge traditions and the contemporary
psychological sciences, I was and am frequently overwhelmed and intimi-
dated by the yawning gaps in theory and practices. Thus, the first offering
of ­gratitude is to the universal Guru-tattva that animates the worlds and
provides direction to the lost and wandering fools such as me. This Guru
manifests in form or as a song or a smell or a memory long past. I offer my
gratitude to the Guru as all the human and the non-human world and who
came to my life experience as pain and its relief, pleasure and its retreat.
The Guru thus allowed me to accept the possibility of what could be an
unalloyed witness as well.
I acknowledge the help of teachers and colleagues in psychology, phi-
losophy, Sanskrit, Music, Yoga and Biology, where conversations radiated
beams of light and bits of insight to see the warp and weft, the interweave
of knowledge.
I acknowledge the assistance provided by the editorial staff of Taylor
and Francis. I also thank the generous anonymous reviewers of the book.
I thank my research assistant – Ms Vaghela whose help in the review of
literature was valuable.
I offer this effort to my children and students, who are old and ancient,
even though their body-mind identities are young. They will also encounter
questions and try and find answers – within, in relationships as well as in
abstraction.
1 Decolonizing psychology
The ecology of consciousness
in Indian psychology

The decolonizing movement in social sciences

This book is a modest attempt to offer a decolonized recasting of the aca-
demic discipline of psychology to a consciousness-based Indian Psychology.
In attempting so, it assumes familiarity with several background debates
on psychology as taught, practised and theorized in the developing world,
including India. Some of the key debates and movements globally are pre-
sented as prefatory remarks.
The debate and movement to decolonize is alive in almost all humanities
and social sciences across the world. The decolonial scholarship has, till
now, primarily focussed on race and is a discussion point in South America
and Europe, but it recognizes the devastating impact of colonization across
the world: in Africa, South America, North America and Australia. Several
landmark works have triggered these debates, such as the decolonizing of
the research methods itself, by a Māori social scientist, Professor Linda
Tuhiwai Smith (Smith, 2021), which plainly documents that social science
research methods were by themselves methodologies of systematic loot and
appropriation of both symbolic and material indigenous resources. One
of the outcomes of colonization has been the effacement of the indige-
nous knowledge and wisdom traditions or the dilution and fragmentation
of the knowledge systems into the Euro-American analytical and disci-
plinary categories. Societies have faced a clean rupture and break in the
flow of their indigenous traditions, which has been recognized by schol-
ars of decoloniality. This has been documented by psychologists on Indian
psychological thought in India as well. Several issues that have further
effaced the Indian knowledge traditions, post-independence, are conform-
ity with the implanted existing university structures, the desperation to
secure tenured academic positions, institutional stagnation, etc. Not only
Indian psychologists but respected psychologists such as Moghaddam as
well have discussed intensively why ‘third world psychologies’ are mim-
icking psychologies through a process of double reification and proposed
that the solution lies in ‘Omni culturalism’ (see, Moghaddam, 1987, 2009;
Moghaddam & Lee, 2006). This book holds the view that the route to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003336204-1
2 Decolonizing psychology
‘Omni culturalism’ first passes through decoloniality and the necessary
reclaiming of the indigenous knowledge systems. Omni culturalism is an
ideal state for a global psychology, where no adversaries or binaries exist,
but its pathway is through intensive reflection and reclaiming of the indige-
neity rather than papering it over. In India, this quest has frequently been
‘dumbified’ into going straight ‘back to the glorious past’ or that there are
no differences, we are all one! Decolonization, as a process, will go through
several churns and the initial versions of the articulation of decoloniality
might struggle to find that exact note, given that there is a transition ongo-
ing after a rupture. The argument in India that decolonization would be a
‘right leaning’ project is amusing; an evidence of the maturity and histori-
cal understanding of the critique! In this first volume, the assumption that
the book follows is that the long and plural histories of India and its Indic
consciousness will allow for multiple Indigenous psychologies – a glorious
past with a healthy and mature recognition of the inglorious elements. This
would be the healing as a continuous process.

WEIRD, cross-cultural and cultural psychologies:

World-views and culture
Psychologists across the world have also increasingly acknowledged that
psychology and knowledge construction, as we know it, is the psychology
of WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed coun-
tries (Henrich et al., 2010a, 2010b; Jones, 2010; Nielsen et al., 2017). When
Moghaddam talked of a crisis in social psychology way back in 1987, he was
identifying the hope for a new psychology that would truly reflect the mul-
tiple ways of being and becoming across the world. In the immediate after-
math of the second world war, the colonies that became newly independent
inherited the category of ‘modern’ from their colonizers and started the
academic disciplines of psychology with modern institutions such as the
universities established by the colonial masters. It is not that the education
systems did not exist earlier, in these colonies; they were deemed irrelevant
and anti-modern. Around that time, the field of cross-cultural psychology
started developing and was seen as a great advance, where psychologists
recognized culture! Cross-cultural psychologists mostly embarked on com-
parative projects, where they essentially used their tools to compare differ-
ent cultural cohorts on the concepts and constructs as defined by them! The
key learnings from cross-cultural psychology were the idea of conceptual
equivalence, the much-delayed understanding of etic/emic and the imposed
etic (Moghaddam, 1987). The third and critical turn in studying culture
came when cultural and indigenous psychologies were acknowledged as
part of psychological knowledge canon, albeit in a marginal sense. In recent
years, cultural indigenous psychology and cross-cultural psychology have
increasingly gained acceptance in light of globalization (Berry et al., 1997;
Kitayama & Cohen, 2010; Shweder & Sullivan, 1993; Valsiner, 2014).
 Decolonizing psychology 3
If we were to locate this book in the mainstream psychology traditions,
it clearly finds itself under the cultural psychology domain and not the
cross-cultural psychology domain. Whereas cross-cultural psychologists,
mostly from the Euro-American lens impose a universal as defined by them
(imposed etic); Indian psychology is an insider emic psychology. As men-
tioned, the route to a truly global Omni cultural psychology will necessarily
go through the reclaiming of an indigenous cultural psychology because the
meta-theoretical assumptions of the indigenous cultural psychologies are
starkly different from the mainstream Euro-American psychology meta-­
theory. An Integrative global psychology, especially for a colonized country
such as India, can only be articulated through an emergent etic rather than
an imposed one. Indic civilization has an unbroken history of possibly sev-
eral psychologies; some common concerns continue to reverberate just like
the background note of a tānpurā in the Indian civilizational context. The
ontological categories, the epistemologies and the rhetoric, methodologies
and the axiology of the Indic civilizational consciousness are largely conso-
nant, without papering over the theoretical differences between schools of
thought in the Indian Knowledge Traditions (IKT, hereafter). Even so, this
book limits itself to the Āstikā systems within the broad Indic knowledge
systems, which include the Bauddha and the Jaina traditions.
Two words have recently been coined – Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS)
and IKT. The use of the term IKT is preferred in this book because tradi-
tions include all folk, multisensory, un-scriptured ways of being, becoming
and practice, whereas the term IKS alludes only to the formal systems of
knowing and being. Therefore, in this book, the term IKT is taken as the
first important term. Some key and unique features of Indian consciousness-­
based psychology are identified below.
That the Indian society is hierarchical has been alluded to by several social
science researchers. Another well-recorded discussion among social sciences
and psychology has been the seeming contradictions in the Indian social
context and the mindset. What seems like contradictions to non-Indians,
the Indian mind addresses them in unique and contradictory ways. The
Indian mindset has been discussed, most recently by JBP Sinha (Sinha et al.,
2010). He has argued that the Indian mindset is very context sensitive.
Just as Sinha discusses situations in the social context, this book holds the
position that because the Indian mindset is hierarchical, not just based on
social hierarchies, but task and ethical hierarchies as well, the Indian mind
uses these hierarchies as registers to interpret the same words, concepts or
frameworks according to the register and act differently. Indian psychology
also uses levels of consciousness as a hierarchy. Some well-known exam-
ples of that would be – the seven higher and nether worlds in the Hindu
Purāṅa-s, the levels of consciousness in the kundalini tantra system and the
idea of three bodies in Yoga (sthula, sooksma and kārana). The key point to
note, which is not seen anywhere in research literature, is that these levels of
consciousness and the placement of concepts in an architectural frame yield
4 Decolonizing psychology
both positive and negative definitions of the same concept. For example,
emotions, when tied to the body, yield a negative definition, while when
tied to spirituality, yield a positive definition. In flat conceptualizations of
mainstream Euro-American psychology, this looks like a contradiction.
Similarly, suicide is accepted as positive ‘giving up of the body’, when tied
to completing one’s duties; when running away from one’s duties, suicide is
not justifiable. Several more examples can be taken.
The second integrative feature of Indian psychology is that Indian
applied psychology practice consciously maps the internal representation
and external reality through specific correspondences. This conscious
correspondence is called ‘nyāsa’ or placing. Nyāsa is seen in temples, in
the human body, in the physical cities such as Varanasi or Ujjain and in
the chakra system in the human body. This has been noted by scholars of
religious studies, especially of the Tantra traditions (Dass & Das, 1979;
Dyczkowski, 1988; Karasinski-Sroka, 2021; Samdarshi, 2019). While
Samdarshi, in his 2019 paper, identifies these internal representations and
external reality correspondence in architecture, the Hindu temples of India
have always been seen with an internal representation correspondence with
the external temple. Layered on the top, additionally, is the systems of yan-
tra, which is again a correspondence with an internal and external reality
just like the practice of Nyāsa, which is a conscious association of psychic
elements with part of the body or the mantra. Just as Indian Psychology
bridges the mind-body dualism through the practice of Yoga, the practice
of tantra, bridges the internal and external duality or rupture, through its
practices such as nyāsa. Sadly, most psychologists in India are unable to
engage with Indian thought; these correspondences have not been studied
enough. Very recently, some scholars have tried to assess the working mem-
ory of Buddhist monks, who by tradition, engage in the worship/practice
of visualization of the Buddhas and their families called deity meditation
(Kozhevnikov et al., 2009). Visualization is a very widely used practice in
various traditions of Indian psychology, and this paper by Kozhevnikov is
a mere initial confirmation of the effects of Indian psychology practices.
The profoundly unappreciated part is the consciously created correspond-
ences between external reality and internal representation. More research
on this can be seen in Timalsina’s work, who, though a scholar of religion,
has identified these cognitive science connections with Hindu and Buddhist
tantra, especially, in reference to embodiment, suffering and healing (Hayes
& Timalsina, 2017; Timalsina, 2011, 2012).
The third integrating feature of the applied Indian psychology is e­ mpathy
and mirroring, which is utilized to address the self-other separation. This
has been fairly well studied in psychology of meditation, again albeit in
a reductive sense. An influential paper by Metzinger, on ‘minimal phe-
nomenal experience’ finds that meditators frequently feel a great sense of
compassion (Metzinger, 2020a, 2020b), which Metzinger links to certain
functions of the brain. In psychology and cultural anthropology literature,
 Decolonizing psychology 5
Rasa theory has been well studied. Rasa is the outcome of this mirroring
and the dissolution of self-other duality, which must begin with losing one-
self! Rasa theory literature is quite vast to be cited here, but some studies
can be further referred to (Pandit, 2011; Pandit & Misra, 2013; Sen &
Pandit, 2013; Timalsina, 2007).
In summary, the diverse and rich theories in the Indian psychology con-
text have primarily been to address the experience of duality, rupture and
separation. Within the IKT, there are 14 vidyas and several ṣāstra-s. Vidya is
understood as a pathway to learning and knowledge, whereas ṣastra implies
a masterly application that cuts the constraints off. Ṣastra has been wrongly
translated as ‘scriptures’ and most Indians also mindlessly use this transla-
tion. The Vidya that is the focus of this book is the ‘Adhyatma-vidya’ or the
pathway to know the self. Adhyatma in the Indic ontological-­epistemological
tradition is centred on self-illumined reflexivity and examination of con-
sciousness, across all binaries and dichotomies, which are otherwise seen in
contemporary world-views on philosophy of science and psychology.
In this book, a basic architecture of Indian psychology is attempted to
be reclaimed. This book references the arguments of philosophers in the
contemporary context, especially in debates about consciousness, intel-
ligence, artificial consciousness, etc. Across the chapters, the book uses
several primary sources such as the Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and its com-
mentaries, Advaita Vedānta texts – Brahmasutrabhasya and its commen-
tary by Adi Shankara, Sribhasya, which is a commentary by great master
Sri Rāmānujacārya. It also references the Upaniṣad and the interpretations
of selected Upaniṣads, primarily the Māndukyopaniśad. For knowledge
traditions, focussing on emotions and affective processes, the book has
referred to primary texts of Abhinavabharati and the Bhakti text – Bhakti-
Rasamrta Sindhu, apart from published papers by Indian Psychologists.
For the chapter on mind-no-mind, apart from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the
primary texts of Jīvanmukti Viveka by Sri Vidyaranya Muni have been
used. Across the chapters, several points arise from the author’s practice.
Therefore, all mistakes are due to the author’s inertia and sloth in practice
and interpretation.
Towards the objective of reclaiming consciousness-based Indian psychol-
ogy, this book has followed several path breaking attempts – especially,
by contemporary teachers such as Prof Paranjpe and Prof Rao, who have
earlier written the book, titled, ‘Psychology in the Indian Tradition’ pub-
lished by Springer. Additionally, books such as ‘The Handbook of Indian
Psychology’ and several other papers have been read and referred to. The
aim of this book was to build on the earlier work and show new perspec-
tives, according to one’s training and practice. Several radical and profound
insights, such as the deeper interpretation of the Māndukya Upaniṣad and
the clear examination of concepts such as ‘Adhyasa’ or ‘Rasa’ is not pos-
sible in the book, which will be attempted separately. Even the applied
psychology of Āyurveda, arising from the metaphysics of Sāmkhya, is not
6 Decolonizing psychology
addressed in sufficient detail in this book. These are key mindful gaps and,
hopefully, will be addressed by others in near future.
Some element of transitions from one familiar lexicon to another is
required. The book starts with the chapter on consciousness, which sets the
tone of an Indian psychology. This is followed by the chapter on body and
embodied consciousness, as most psychologists have missed addressing and
engaging with the sophisticated conceptualization of the body in the IKT.
The chapter is imperfect and needs more details or perhaps another book
but for the purpose of laying the basic architecture of Indian Psychology,
this suffices.
Mainstream psychologists trisect the scope of psychology, into cogni-
tion, affect and behaviour. Assuming broad and deep familiarity of the
contemporary psychology, on cognition, affect and behaviour, the next
two chapters lay out the initial frameworks of affect and cognition from
Indian psychology. The fifth chapter discusses social psychology from an
Adhyatmic point of view and suggests Bhakti as an Indian social psychol-
ogy. No psychologist in India till now has examined the notion that Bhakti
movement represents an Adhyatmik social psychology and, therefore, a
true Indian modernity, much before the problematic European modernity
and the current ideas of multiculturalism! In general, Buddhism is pre-
sented as an alternative to the problems of caste in the hierarchical Hindu
social systems. While the great Buddha was, indeed, the first of the Indian
modernists, preaching in Pali, the project of modernity to address the issues
of caste in Indian society is better addressed by Bhakti movement for two
reasons: one it democratized knowing and being in a shared social sense,
removing the barrier between monks/nuns as well as the laity and second,
Bhakti is more embodied and infused with day-to-day lived experiences –
with day-to-day rituals, music, dance and satsang. After the chapter on
Bhakti and social selves, the sixth chapter lays the framework for a radical
theory in Indian psychology of the ‘no mind’. Transcending the ‘mind’ can
there be freedom while living? What is the value of freedom otherwise?
Continuing in this refrain the next chapter addresses what has been called
as ‘everyday’ or small ‘c’ creativity. In contrast to the jazz and glamour
of big ‘C’ creativity, in mainstream psychology, it is the everyday creativ-
ity, which keeps the ‘self’ loose and nebulous, in its moment-by-moment
engagement with the ecology within and without. Everyday creativity not
only brings joy to the self and others but completes the ecology of con-
sciousness. Everyday creativity and its framework are thus conceptually
stronger and grounded in an Indic ontology and episteme than the posi-
tive psychology framework. Everyday creativity also links the diverse and
plural folk traditions of India, which were called ‘little’ by the colonizers.
Finally, the conclusion chapter will identify the fallacies of academic reason
if a universal rationality is assumed.
There is no claim whatsoever of any ethnic or religious superiority/­
inferiority. As the Pondicherry Manifesto of Indian psychology states, the
 Decolonizing psychology 7
term ‘Indian’ is used to honour that geography and a relentless search for
the unbounded truth; this relentless search was carried by the best of its
people – most radical in thought, compassionate in affect and ethical in
behaviour – the Guru-s! In the last 150 years of the exchange between east
and west, seekers of truth, beauty and love are found across the world. The
key political point, without generating adversarial binaries between east
and west, is the legitimate recognition and acknowledgement of the brutal
loss to the Indic civilization and its ontological, epistemological and axio-
logical frameworks due to colonization.
The most important purpose for Indian psychology is the key challenge
that materialism or physicalism throws at humanity. At the core of the phys-
icalist argument is the nature of self and whether humanity can be shaped
and controlled by humans themselves or by others and/or non-human forces.
Indian psychology presents an alternate world-view beyond the impurified
ideas of ‘God’, non-human machines and an emergent consciousness from
complex systems; a naturalistic philosophy, without the baggage of divinity
and spirituality from the Abrahamic religions, such that all is recognized as
divine and spiritual in a non-Abrahamic sense. The continued applications
of Indian psychology towards well-being emphatically state that the human
and indeed the whole universe is ever free; the only welcome bondages that
the self-accepts are the bonds of ahimsa (love) and dharma (coherence).
This is possibly the reason why Indian cultural psychologies and indeed
Asian psychologies present a strong counter to the physicalist argument.
For this reason alone, psychologists, not only from India but across the
world, need to be galvanized for instituting and practising an Indian con-
sciousness-based psychology.

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Mandalas: A cognitive approach. In Eloquent spaces (pp. 69–87). Routledge
India.
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the child. Psychology and Developing Societies, 25(1), 165–193. https://doi.
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Vijayalakshmi, C., & Pandey, A. (2010). An exploration of the Indian mindset.
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2 Consciousness
Sat-Cid-Ānanda

An incident triggered the thought process of this book. While taking a class
on introducing consciousness for a group of students doing their master’s
program in psychology at an Indian university, a student raised her hand
and asked the following question – ‘what has consciousness got to do with
psychology?’ This question was stunning and revealed the fundamental
ruptures in the mainstream psychology which we have been teaching and
indeed practising in India – the assumptions of behaviourism, the discon-
nect with Indian wisdom traditions and implanted academic psychology
in India and the labelling of psychological knowledge in Indian texts and
material – as irrelevant and unnecessary. Indeed – What has consciousness
got to do with psychology?! In this book, we will try to introduce and,
thereafter, critically compare concepts, frameworks and models of con-
sciousness and review whether consciousness has got anything to do with
psychology, esp. Indian psychology. In the process, we will discuss contem-
porary ideas about consciousness as well as the sophisticated frameworks
and perspectives from Indian knowledge traditions (IKT).
It would be interesting to consider that not only is consciousness a ‘hot’
topic in psychology, but ‘non-dual awareness’ is red hot topic in conscious-
ness! (Josipovic, 2014, 2010, 2019; Josipovic & Miskovic, 2020). What
has ‘non-dual awareness’ got to do with psychology? Does non-dual aware-
ness have applied psychology implications? Does it reflect in neural cor-
relates? These are exciting questions to consider. In the current context,
since 2000s, psychology has been experiencing a ‘consciousness boom’
(Dreyfus, 2011) and this consciousness boom itself has been a result of
several cross-currents of thought in the Europe and American history of
ideas, including a long exchange of dialogues between the East and the
West increasing in frequency from the early 20th century. Suffice to note:
Several changes have occurred in academic psychology as a result of this
long exchange, esp. in reference to health, well-being and the neuroscience
of consciousness (Walsh, 2015; Walsh & Shapiro, 2006). In fact, positive
psychology, which has been extensively taught in India, for more than ten
years now, explicitly acknowledges its roots in several non-European world-
views including the Indic consciousness-centred world-views. While calling
DOI: 10.4324/9781003336204-2
10 Consciousness
for the ‘culturally pluralistic’ rather than ‘culturally deficient’ theories of
psyche, standard textbooks of positive psychology acknowledge the diverse
Asian and Indian world-views arising from the Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina
thought, just as they discuss Zen, Daoism, Christian and Athenian views.
Psychologists in India took this question of positive psychology and its dis-
ciplinary roots through a vibrant special issue discussion on whether Indian
Psychology is, in fact, the original positive psychology arriving from India
or not (see Christopher, 2014; Rao, 2014; Salagame, 2014). Prof Rao, a
teacher for a generation of psychologists in India, forcefully argued that the
positive psychology movement that is so popular in the West has a very poor
theoretical basis. He further wrote that a strong theoretical basis to positive
psychology can be provided by the applied Indian psychological thought.
Rao also acknowledged the strengths of the positive psychology movement.
Note that the central, organizing principle of positive psychology is
well-being which has always been the central concept of being and living in
IKT; well-being is definitional to consciousness in the ‘non-dual’ school of
Vedānta! It appears then that consciousness is the elephant in the room that
is frequently unacknowledged, even while intellectually cogent discussions
are made about psychology and consciousness in India. Consciousness,
understood in IKT, is transcendental as well as embodied in the world as
the world. It is phenomenally ‘recognized’ by each one of us, moment by
moment in our life – while being awake, in dream, in sleep and in advanced
meditative states (Timalsina, 2008, 2011 and 2012). The phenomenal
awareness of consciousness has not been investigated by the traditional
Euro-American psychology for several historical reasons, and to reclaim
Indian psychology is to honour the centrality of consciousness in human
and non-human/animal psychology. Indeed, the questions of consciousness
are ferociously debated in reference to machine cognition, with the help
of new conceptual vocabulary such as ‘sapience’ and give novel interpre-
tations to agency and consciousness, intelligence, sapience and sentience.
Why have the psychology students in India not explored consciousness?
We will try to examine this question throughout as we also try to put forth
what the Indian applied psychological texts say – from Yoga to Vedānta to
Tantra. How have different systems – such as the Indian and the European-
American systems, viewed consciousness historically and in present times?
How have they seen the implications of their perspectives and approach
to consciousness reflect in the psychology that they constituted as ‘knowl-
edge’? These are some of the questions that will be discussed along the way.
We will return to this question and close this loop at the end of the chapter.

Booming inter-disciplinarity in mind sciences

The flavour of the current times is interdisciplinarity. Even as inter-­
disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity have been
academic buzzwords for the last three decades or so, several intractable
 Consciousness 11
questions before humanity, such as climate change, global warming, eco-
nomic and social inequalities, as well as the impact of technologies in our
changing societies and cultures have made interdisciplinarity imperative
for solving these problems. What do we mean by interdisciplinarity? It
is generally understood that interdisciplinarity would mean that scholars
from different disciplines would weigh in on a common topic from differ-
ent perspectives. Independent perspectives remain independent and it is for
the reader or the audience then to make sense of the different perspectives
or not. Most times, the readers and the audiences still continue to see dif-
ferent perspectives in silos. There may or may not be a lateral or vertical
integration or transfer of concepts, mental models and implications across
disciplines. Often time, the metaphors of one discipline get transferred to
the other, resulting in deep structure confusion. An example of this would
be the metaphor of information processing for brain. Ironically, when com-
puters themselves are re-fashioned as intelligent decision-making machines
such as Siri or Alexa, the brain is viewed as a machine, and by implication,
so is the self! This kind of inter-disciplinarity is similar to the story of the
wise blindfolded men, describing an elephant that they can’t see! We are
not able to come to a combined or an integrated view. One of the pathways
for interdisciplinarity could be where two professors/scholars/practitioners
from two different perspectives do combined work together. An example
of that is the combined work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in
the current times. Tversky was an economist and Kahneman is a social
psychologist. They combined work and triggered a paradigm change in
economics as well as in psychology.
In Indian history of thought, a radical foundational pathway of achiev-
ing inter-disciplinarity is integrality within the person. Polymaths such as
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Maulana Azad, Nikola Tesla or Edison,
with deep interest and contributions in different contexts would be a case
in point. The point to emphasize here is – we need true inter-disciplinarity
to solve fundamental problems, which is necessarily a profound mindset,
similar to a more trendy ‘multi-cultural mindset’.
Precisely, this kind of interdisciplinary thinking is being attempted here
and now in mind sciences. Cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists, philos-
ophers, and monks have been discussing with each other since centuries,
but more visibly in the last 50 years! Now, what are these ‘mind’ sciences?
Isn’t psychology about observable behaviour as any student of psychology
in India would automatically profess?
As a result of a 100 years of dialogical process, the mind sciences are
now changing and radically revising knowledge from single neurons to
connections between neurons (called connectionism); from experimental
psychology on single subjects to social and cultural cognition, and finally,
implications for social policy. In this, cognitive neuroscience, behavioural
sciences, lifespan development psychology, social psychology, law and
policy come together at different levels of analysis as well as profound
12 Consciousness
implications about how we want to move forward as a collective conscious-
ness. Let me explain the levels of analysis – at the cellular and sub-cellular
level, fascinating discoveries show the effect of behaviour on biochemistry,
epigenetic triggers and phenotypal expression starting from fetal develop-
ment, post-natally and indeed throughout lifespan development (McEwen
et al., 2016; Meaney et al., 2013; Parent et al., 2012; Weaver et al., 2004).
The development of brain and nervous system, which is studied as ‘cogni-
tive neuroscience’ and lifespan development is linked with other systems
such as endocrine system, immunity systems and genetics. Behaviour is a
‘key’ that frequently triggers and moderates the locks/expression of these
cellular and physiological systems.
At the next ‘body’ level, we see the behaviour of the body as a coordi-
nated system which is dually linked with the systems internally as well as
the external environmental context; this is a dynamic adaptation with the
micro-context and the macro-social context throughout the developmental
lifespan of this person-the mind-body and several minds and bodies, in
togetherness. Even at the level of the single ‘body’, it is emphasized that
the dynamic adaptation to the context is intimately linked with bacteria,
viruses and fungi systems, where the ‘body’ interacts with the micro-biome,
viruses, etc., who further interact with endocrine systems, the nervous sys-
tem and the mutation and expression of genes over a longer term. Finally,
closely overlapping with the lifespan development, we see social psychol-
ogy at the level of analysis of interpersonal relationships, community rela-
tionships and social structures and cultures. Note that social structures
and cultures give the mental models, mindsets and epistemic assumptions
to groups/communities and relationships as well as the individual as they
navigate through life towards well-being or illness. Thus, right from the
cellular to the trans-national social levels, there is an inter-linkage and this
inter-linkage rests on consciousness –its perceptions, cognitions, affect and
behaviour. Thus, consciousness appears as a system that accounts for sub-
systems of information generation, maintenance and exchange.
Importantly, this means that, if one systemic level is changed/modified, it
would have an impact upwards and downwards. The key insight that one
grasps in the IKT – which are consciousness centred and, therefore, applied
psychological – is that these levels pivot from yogic/conscious behaviour,
breath, emotion, cognition and/or social relations. It is fascinating that an
applied psychology, with conscious action/behaviour is at the centre of this
inter-system organization. If we look at knowledge this way, fundamen-
tally, we need an interdisciplinary logic in these times, where fragmentation
is mainstream and what we have is a WEIRD psychology (Heinrich et al.,
2010a, 2010b; Jones, 2010). This seems to be happening in the European
and American context in reference to cognition and ‘mind sciences’ and
that is leading towards an appreciation of ‘consciousness’ as well as Indic
ideas of consciousness. There is still a long way to go in terms of under-
standing the true import of this profound shift, but we have made a start.
 Consciousness 13
Tragically, this welcome, albeit disruptive churn is not happening in the
colonized Indian context where research, teaching and public discourse is
still imported/mimicked and stagnant.
As the movement to ‘decolonize’ psychology and, indeed, the social
sciences gains ground, several voices find space; welcome voices that cri-
tique not only external homogeneity but also internal homogeneity in dis-
course (Bhatia, 2017; Bhatia & Priya, 2019, 2021), we are hopefully moving
towards are truly universal psychology, rather than the imposed Western
European–North American psychology, with its debilitating theoretical
biases as default universals. In this polyglot churn, this book is situated
as a wholly indigenous and lived consciousness-based Indian psychology;
not discounting, but rather welcoming the fact that there may be multiple
psychologies in the Indic framework.
It is important to note here that, by decolonization, this book is not
taking a transactional political position of East vs West or Hindu vs non-
Hindu. Recognizing that the essence of Indian psychology has continued
from the Vedas and the Vedānta, before the common era, there have been
diverse plural traditions of living and these have indeed attracted seekers
from across the world, the book also reiterates the position taken herein
that the indigenous Indian psychology traditions were and have been bru-
tally and indeed violently invisibilized by the colonization structures and
practices (Asad, 1973; Cohn, 2020). This cannot be denied and needs to
be emphasized as the 250 years of colonial rule and the politics of knowl-
edge thereafter deeply disrupted the IKT and specifically possibilities of an
Indian psychology centred on consciousness, which has been a lived real-
ity of many, albeit not all people, communities since millennia. In the last
150 years, the West broadly has variously been inspired (through exchange),
co-opted and/or distorted (through other practices) the traditional knowl-
edge and wisdom from various colonized cultures. As mentioned, this has
radically changed psychology from what it was 70 years ago to what we
understand today. However, till the fundamental meta-theoretical assump-
tions of Euro-American philosophy of psychology and science are not revis-
ited, the immense potential of Indian psychology, even if co-opted/inspired,
will not fructify. The partial potential of applied psychology will also likely
be commodified and hijacked by market-based discourses, reflecting a seri-
ous distortion of the aims of Indian knowledge systems.
Scholars have pointed out that early psychology, which grew out of phi-
losophy in Germany and founded by Wilhelm Wundt did attempt to cap-
ture the lived experiences and the subjectivities of the people in a scientific
manner calling it ‘folk psychologie’. However, psychology shifted out of
philosophy and was deeply influenced by the then extant philosophy of
science. The positivistic, strict empiricist stance as a scientific method was
privileged at the exclusion of all other methods of knowing because psy-
chology aimed to solve concrete problems inspired by ‘natural sciences’. In
the early 19th century Europe, science and the scientific method was the
14 Consciousness
hope for suffering humanity, and there was a widespread disillusionment
with the church and theology. Philosophy in the European tradition was
seen as analytical with little scope for application. In this context, science
provided a solution to the masses in Europe; the scientific method and the
philosophy of science consumed the philosophers themselves, such as John
Mill, Francis Bacon, etc. In contrast and without papering over the serious
philosophical differences among different schools of Darśana, the Indian
context showed that Indian philosophy was always intimately connected
with lived experiences, religion as well as social applications so as to be
still able to solve human problems. Indeed, this linking and coherence were
mindfully instituted by the scholars, practitioners and teachers themselves.
We see this in Vedānta, Buddhism, Jaina thought, several schools of Hindu
philosophy such as Yoga-Sāmkhya, Āyurveda, the Bhakti movement and the
integrative Sufi-Islam and schools of tantra. Note that protest and resist-
ance and reformation in religious traditions were and have been ongoing,
without losing the scope for applications for well-being and the axiological
assumption of liberating beings from misery and suffering.
Science and the philosophy of science since two hundred years prior has
gone through transformations, particularly the ‘paradigms shift’ in physics
from Newtonian mechanics to quantum and particle physics. Kuhn (Kuhn,
2012), a philosopher of science in the mid-20th century, located the idea
of paradigm shift in the way, the hypotheses were framed, alluding to a
confirmatory bias in science method. Further to Kuhn, Popper (Popper,
2005) further worked on the scientific method and specifically the fram-
ing of the hypotheses to address this confirmatory bias in the reasoning
of the sciences. There have been several criticisms of the reasoning biases
in the scientific method by the non-Euro-American contexts, including its
focus on ‘standardization’, linearity, etc. This is primarily because the sci-
entific method and the framing of hypotheses are fundamentally based on a
split and a binary direction to how reality should be/is. Asian theorists, for
example, have pointed out this flaw in the hypotheses framing and testing
as it fixes the reality, that too in binary terms. Note that, Asian theorists
have been influenced by Buddhism and Buddhism particularly advocated
the middle path! Middle path meant that reality and, therefore, logic could
not be binary reasoning, rather, could be negotiated in terms of a dia-
lectic process. Thus, there are further logical possibilities with neither
and both along with either/or. This is seen in Yogācāra texts, particularly
sandhi-nirmochana sutra (often understood as ‘breaking of the binaries’).
It is remarkable that dialectics was seen as ‘minor logic’ in formal phi-
losophy in European tradition! Of course, contemporary advances in psy-
chology and, indeed, in artificial intelligence emphasize the fact that what
is called as ‘minor logic’ by formal philosophical standards is the critical
reasoning process of mature human beings, where contextual and dynamic
adaptation to uncertainty are the hallmarks of human perception-affect-
cognition-action nexus. It is ironic that mindlessly following this issue in
 Consciousness 15
formal philosophy of Europe, Indian scholars continue without question-
ing, even as there has been an attempt to decolonise research methods as
such (Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, 2021).
Despite these criticisms, the mainstream scientific method and the philos-
ophy of science underlying largely continues to follow the binary logic when
setting and framing the hypotheses. The main point to note here is that
in contrast to the mainstream of European philosophy, and not counting
the anti-positivistic philosophers, Asian philosophies were always applied-
analytical and psychological-lived in their orientation. This also means that
Asian philosophies were always based on a continuous tradition of not only
philosophers with the intellectual heft but also practices and lived experi-
ences of an applied psychology (Paranjpe, 2019, 2012; Rao & Paranjpe,
2016; Shweder & Sullivan, 1993). Each of the Asian philosophies and per-
spectives was coherent to and from philosophy and living – with a set of
ontological and epistemic framework. Since this was a lived and living phi-
losophy, there is a broad agreement on the axiological values of emancipation
and freedom from suffering. Paranjpe (Paranjpe, 2019; also see Cornelissen,
2008; Valsiner, 2014) has written extensively on these issues and identified
this key value of freedom from suffering as the central organizing principle
of all Indic psychologies. For example, there are different models discussed
in Indian history on the relationship between political power, religion and
spiritual power, where; most recently, Mahatma Gandhi, viewed political
power arising out of spiritual power. At different points of time in the India,
in history of ideas and action, different positions have been taken on whether
political, religious and spiritual power can be combined in one institution
or not. This is dialectically contrasted with the rupture of science, theology
and philosophy in the European and American context. Thus, there are sev-
eral differences between the history of ideas in the European and American
context and the Asian and, specifically Indian context. Additionally, in the
history of ideas in the European and American context, the relationship
between power and truth is deeply problematic – with history of the gen-
ocide of the Jews, the abuse of powers by the church and its reflection in
the philosophy of dialectical materialism of Marx. In the Indian context,
one cannot homogenize to say that there was no conflict between political,
religious and spiritual power or no questions of communities and caste or
take a position that denies these questions. However, it is clear that the way
to organise these questions and resolve these conflicts has been particularly
different than in the European and the American contexts, and these have
been conflated wrongly by the contemporary thinkers.
When the Western powers colonized much of the world, and indeed,
the British colonized India, the intention was not just trade alone, just as
early anthropologists did not seek knowledge alone! Historical research
has shown that anthropology and ethnography were deeply political colo-
nial enterprises and the intention of early researchers/anthropologists/­
historians was towards proselytization and the assertion of the supremacy
16 Consciousness
of the Western civilization when the British, Portuguese and French and
Dutch encountered the Indian context as the ‘other’ (Asad, 1973; Cohn,
2020; Dirks, 1989). This background brings us the central question about
consciousness and psychology. Certainly, there was discrimination and
marginalization in Indian society, but, equally, there were serious and deep
efforts at philosophical, historical and social levels towards a greater coher-
ence, a movement towards well-being.

Consciousness ‘boom’ in psychology

As mentioned in the earlier section, psychology split out of philosophy
because it wanted to apply knowledge and/or move out of the speculative
and analytical nature of European philosophy. In the early years, several
psychologists such as William James continued to straddle philosophy as
well as psychology, and therefore, there was a cross-fertilization of ideas
from philosophy to psychology. As such, the mainstream of psychology
always was influenced by a stream of philosophical thought called as
positivism, realisms and/or empiricism. It is important to note here that,
European philosophy had several other schools of thought as well includ-
ing phenomenology, hermeneutics and interpretivism. However, these were
and are not considered as mainstream. Till about 1950s, there was a dis-
tinction between the psychologies and the perspectives from Europe and
the perspective from North America in psychology. Indeed, early theories
and ideas in social as well as in lifespan development were quite differ-
ent in foci. However, with the rising influence of North American psy-
chology, at least in the global South, and indeed even in Eastern Europe,
Asia, North America and Australia, North American psychology, which
has been accused of methodological individualism became a default ‘uni-
versal’ psychology. It is in this context that we need to understand the
approaches towards studying consciousness in psychology. Whereas early
European thinkers such as Edward Titchener and Wilhelm Wundt were
interested in the nature of mind and functionalists such as William James
were interested in stream of consciousness, the issue of method and instru-
mentation, bogged them down seriously. With the influence of Watson, the
radical behaviouristic line of thought came to be dominated; these exclu-
sively focussed on reward and punishment or extractive models of learn-
ing. Clearly, learning among humans and non-humans is a much broader
concept and not necessarily tied up to rewards and punishments; the dom-
inance of the reward and punishment models and behaviourism, reduced
learning to habit formation and observable behaviour theorized through
stressed animal models, who were put into stress and then observed. Such
an approach completely denied not only the existence of agency and self, a
non-stressed approach to learning but also denied any research or academic
interest in consciousness. Thus, we see that, from World War II onwards,
whatever little interest that psychologists might have had in consciousness
 Consciousness 17
was completely relegated to invisibility because it could not be measured, or
empirically or instrumentally observed. At this point of time, from the end
of World War II to the 1970s and 80s, we see the split between European
and increasingly American psychology and the rest of the world. However,
radical behaviourism, with its main proponent Skinner reached its end of
influence in the 80s. There were several co-mingling currents of thought
that can be seen as responsible for this welcome relief. The first one was the
advances in computer technologies. The advances in computer technologies
had two world-view impacts; firstly, at the level of metaphor, now psy-
chologists were able to study and move beyond the dead-end experimental
psychology frameworks of memory, as ironically, it was computers that
showed the way for re-understanding the human memory. When Atkinson
and Shiffrin proposed a model of memory, they actually theorized some-
thing that was not clearly observable in terms of behaviour change; the
workings of the computers led to working models of what mind might be.
Note that Skinner and Watson denied the existence of mind since one could
not ‘observe’ or locate the mind. Secondly, advances in computer technolo-
gies corresponded with the advances in the medical imaging technologies.
Beyond electroencephalography (EEG), now scientists could study, even if
by proxy and by correlation, the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imagery that came alive in
brain while neurons were ‘firing’. Thirdly, earlier, brain structure and func-
tion were studied either post-mortem or in brains that had suffered insult,
trauma, or disease. With the advances in medical imaging technologies,
now the scientists could study live, non-traumatized brains. The advances
in medical imaging technologies are also important because those satisfied
the instrumental requirements of the behaviourist axiom about measurable
and observable behaviour, at least by proxy and inference. The level of
observability shifted down to neurons.
The broader advance in the thought was the ‘crisis’ in social psychol-
ogy. By the 1970s, most social psychologists even from North America
had recognized that Euro-American social psychology was in a crisis. The
knowledge produced by the Euro-American default social psychology was
dominated by data collected from white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, college
students, male! This could not be a universal psychology to be sure! Several
scholars, such as Moghaddam have commented upon this crisis in social
psychology (Moghaddam, 1987). Similarly, there was a crisis in mental
health that led to a shift from clinic and hospital driven approach to a
community driven approach to mental health. Alongside, the insularity of
psychology was questioned by several psychologists within.
Finally, there has been an increasing exchange between the philosophers,
meditation teachers, Yoga gurus, Buddhist teachers and practitioners from
East Zen, Kung fu, tai chi, Hatha Yoga, and so on, with thinkers, psy-
chologists, scientists and the general public. Many of the psychologists have
been students of masters from the East. Similarly, due to the 60s hippy
18 Consciousness
revolution, several people from Europe and North America travelled East
and learnt wisdom traditions, imbibing the Eastern world-view in the pro-
cess. Finally, it helped that, not only did we have the ‘linguistic turn’ in
social sciences, but we also had an increasing focus on affect, culture and
cognition and body as a site of phenomenological awareness.
Thus, we are able to ‘see’ from the 90s onwards, a slight but a sure shift
that would inevitably lead towards the study of consciousness. Certainly,
in the early years, the split between materialists, physicalists and integral-
ists (Indian influenced scientists and philosophers) was and has been sharp,
partly because of the body-mind dualism that European and American
thought has been struggling with relentlessly as it derives its meta-theoretical
assumptions from Greek logic and then Descartes. The physicalists under-
standing of consciousness is premised on the idea of body and the primacy
of matter. Key physicalists and computationalists are Dennett, Churchland,
Pinker and others. The integralist position is premised on the idea of the
integrity of the mind-body-consciousness complex and the expression of
consciousness as transcending while pervading the mind-body.
The Western philosophical ideas of consciousness and the meta-­theoretical
assumptions have created their own difficulties in terms of defining and
understanding consciousness, intentionality, awareness and qualia and of
their psychological conceptualization, including lived experience. This has
implications for the applied psychologies of liberation and freedom from
suffering and living while being free, as theorized in the ideal of Jīvanmukti
or Bodhisattva. Let us see the conceptual vocabulary used to understand
consciousness in the contemporary times

What is consciousness: Characteristics of consciousness

Defining consciousness is currently not possible for psychologists, given
that it defies the available categorical terms. Consensus is difficult within
contemporary European and American psychology, where there are sev-
eral perspectives and philosophical positions (Cornelissen, 2008). This is
comparable to the classical philosophical schools in India, where there are
several differences about defining and understanding consciousness, but
more significantly, in IKT, there is a broad agreement about the centrality
of consciousness as such. The centrality of consciousness in the Indian per-
spectives is most profound as the unique identifier in the IKT and has been
commented upon by scholars such as Rao and others. This is ‘game chang-
ing’ and redraws the landscape as all the meditative methods emerge out
of this realization of the transformations or appearance of an embodied-­
enminded consciousness, which transcends both the body and mind and is
recognized through meditation. The purely physicalist and computational
perspectives have taken the position that consciousness is in the complex-
ity of the neural function and structure of the brain; that there is no mind
apart from the brain. The representationalist position acknowledges the
 Consciousness 19
importance of the brain but views the mind as layered on top of the neural
activity, so to say.
Even within the assumptions of embodied consciousness, scientists have
struggled to understand the changes in brain activity and consciousness
due to alterations such as coma, anaesthesia, sleep, dreaming and wake
cycles. Within the wake cycles, there are variations in consciousness in
terms of awareness and focus/attention, such as reveries, day-dreaming and
meditation. Thus, most psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists have
focused on trying to understand the characteristics of consciousness. Some
of those characteristics are below:

A Subjectivity and phenomenal awareness – Subjectivity and phenomenal

awareness is ‘big problem for contemporary perspectives! In the IKT,
subjectivity is defined as a key characteristic of consciousness, even
as consciousness transcends subjectivity. Self and subjectivity are cen-
tred on a sense and awareness of one’s own self. Indeed, the question
that IKT asks is – can one recognise an ‘ownerless consciousness’? Can
one be phenomenally aware but without the ‘me and the mine-ness’ of
experience? These are some of the fundamental questions that com-
parative philosophers are asking, which IKT testifies as a lived. These
questions are not only central for understanding Indian Psychology but
also for understanding non-human machine cognition. From the IKT
point of view – can humans, arrive at a pathway of experiencing the
world without the ‘me and the mine-ness’ (mamakāra) of experience
and, therefore, be free of suffering? From the point of view of non-­
human machine cognition, the question is opposite – can machines
actually own up experiences and, therefore, be held accountable for
their actions? On non-human animal consciousness, the question is –
do animals have the ‘me and the mine-ness’ of experience? Do they
recognize their agency? These are some of the fascinating questions in
psychology, esp. cognitive and transpersonal psychology.
B Qualia – The quality of our experiences, the intensity and the variation
in these qualitative aspects is a defining characteristic of consciousness.
A simple example would be listening to music; the grasping/­approaching
and attending to music; the quality of our listening is differentiated by
the experiences in our life, the acuity of our sense organs, their past
training and the intensity of our attention – all affecting the quality
of our experience. The quality of experience is also dependent on the
context, the situation, the momentary affect and sustained moods that
we experience. Music performers can (rarely) have a bad day when they
cannot get the right pitch and tone, similar to students and novices,
who certainly are trying to train their mind-bodies.
C Unity and a unified field of awareness – ‘I’ consciousness is distin-
guished from ‘consciousness-as-such’ in IKT. ‘I’ consciousness has been
noted in the ancient Indian texts, where the self is understood as the
20 Consciousness
unifying function of ‘I’ – me and mine-ness experience. The conven-
tional self or ‘I’ consciousness identifies with the experiences is called
the ‘kartā (doer), jnātā (knower) and bhoktā (experiencer)’ and thus is
conceptualized as ‘baddha-bound/linked/attached’ to the experience,
thereby, indicating to the possibility of living while being ‘unbound’
to the phenomenal world. In mainstream psychology, the question is
framed in sensory-mind terms – the eyes see in rays of light, the ears
hear in sounds, music and silence; the taste and the olfactory sense use
molecule transformations and sense smell and flavour; touch is under-
stood in terms of pressure and temperature – yet the brain coheres
all the sensory inputs in a unified manner. How? Do we process the
colour, the fragrance and the taste of the Kesar or an alphonso mango
separately or is it only taste/smell/color; it is the same mango. Similarly,
when we move in the markets, especially in the Indian markets; on the
crowded streets of India we are deluged with intense colours, sounds,
fragrances and tastes; all through, the experience is understood and
processed seamlessly, cohereing in the subjectivity of the self and the
unity of the market place, itself!

There are other characteristics of consciousness as well, but in this section,

we have briefly tried to understand these key characteristics of conscious-
ness. In contemporary psychology and the curriculum that we teach in
India, we mostly focus on the waking states and briefly touch upon dreams
and sleep states only in descriptive EEG terms! In the last two decades,
there has been a differentiation of automatic wake states and deliberate
wake states, which is sometimes attended to. There is a marginal men-
tion of altered states of consciousness, typically in terms of drugs and sub-
stances abuse. This is appalling in comparison to the intensity of focus
on consciousness and the subtlest, most profound discussions in the IKT,
on consciousness as psyche-making, making India well-known across the
world. Recent research in the European and American tradition has caught
on and now started focusing on the availability of altered states of con-
sciousness as legitimate frameworks across all cultures in the world and
not just in India for enhancing a subjective well-being. Now, psychologists
agree that subjective well-being through these altered states of conscious-
ness is enhanced through trance states, lucid dreaming, hypnosis, religious
chanting and the whirling dances of the derveshes!
The mainstream understands psychology in terms of very broad under-
standing of personality, cognitions, thoughts, emotions, behaviour and
social relations. In comparison, Asian Psychologies and particularly the
Yoga as well as the mindfulness frameworks focus on what has been now
called as micro-phenomenology as integrated moment by moment experi-
ence. Mindfulness particularly focuses on moment by moment awareness of
behaviour, movements of thought, feelings, emotion, impulses, desires and
even physiological drives as a whole. These all constitute the contents of
consciousness, moment by ephemeral moment. With this brief background,
 Consciousness 21
let us introduce a model of consciousness from a Vedānta text called the
Māndukya Upaniṣad and see how it illuminates the study of psychology,
particularly for students of psychology in India
These co-mingling cross-currents of world-views and a thoughtful liv-
ing are slow, and yet a profound shift has affected not only psychology
and cognitive neuroscience; but rather other social sciences, law and public
policy as well. Instead of accounting for these co-mingling cross-currents
of thought, the psychologists in India –academia, research and practition-
ers have been stuck and stagnated in the outdated notions of psychology,
education and health. Dalal and Misra (2010) have discussed the ‘front and
the bulk’ of psychology in India. The front of psychologists in India have
done work and contributed (Sinha et al., 2010); the bulk of psychologists
in India continue to follow the colonial concepts, frameworks and meth-
odologies, and therefore, their research and practice has merely mimicked
the mainstream critiqued for a persistent sampling bias (see, Nielsen et al.,
2017). Indeed even today, it is fashionable to be a ‘behaviourist’ in a uni-
versity and very unfashionable to talk about philosophy and conscious-
ness! We discussed inter-disciplinarity earlier and mentioned that there
is an amazing interdisciplinary work happening in mind sciences in the
European and American context. Tragically, in the Indian context, which
is a civilizational cradle of systematic enquiries on consciousness, psy-
chologists, Indologists and others are stuck with old frameworks. So, the
question is – can we decolonize psychology, which then must necessarily
include diverse voices? One of the serious contributions of this decolonized
psychology would be a consciousness-based Indian psychology of well-
being and liberation from suffering.

Consciousness in Indian knowledge traditions

Psychologists in India have engaged in an academic debate – whether
psychology existed in India prior to the British. This is similar to several
African psychologists’ discussions as well. Such discussions are linked to
the stunning impact of colonization. The word ‘psychology’ as an academic
discipline did not exist in India prior to the introduction by the British in
the early 20th century. However, it would be interesting to note that the
first reference to the word – Manas (for psyche in psychology) appears in
the tenth mandala of the Ṛig Veda, in reference to a processing and coor-
dinating mechanism between the five different senses. There are several
references to the word Manas throughout the Vedic texts, which also pro-
ceed with a conceptualization of the antah-kārana translated as ‘the inner
instrument’. Antah-kārana, as discussed in the Vedic corpus, comprises of
four processes: Citta – the repository of all experiences/memories/actions/
impressions/impulses), buddhi – the process of decision making, judgement
and reasoning, ahamkāra – the sense of I, me and mine-ness, and Manas-
the mechanism of coordination and processing of sensory inputs. Note here
that, the Rig Veda is dated to about 5000 years before the Common Era
22 Consciousness
by some estimates. Thus, there clearly existed psychological frameworks;
several such frameworks have been very sophisticated, such as the Advaita
frameworks, which are then further detailed downstream. All have these
key concepts of consciousness, cognition, affect and action in their frame-
works as integrated systemic whole, thereby bypassing the legacy traps of
European philosophy and psychology.
Now, how do contemporary psychologists define and understand mind?
Till about a decade back, it was a moment to watch psychologists them-
selves getting flummoxed and fumble to define mind! Important to note
here is that, there are philosophies of mind, yet, the word mind itself has
not been defined in psychology till recently. Contrast this with a very clear
conceptualization of Manas as that which is relevant to processing of sen-
sory and physiological data and the coordination between the various
senses and cognition in the antah-kārana model.
With the advance in cognitive neuroscience and the great influence of
Tibetan Buddhism and especially His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, the
updated versions of cognitive psychology have defined mind as ‘the rep-
resentation of the external world in the functions of the brain’ whereas
psychology itself is defined now as ‘systematic study of the functions of the
brain, the mind and the behaviour’ (Matlin, 2006). About 30 years back,
psychology was defined as the study of observable behaviour alone. The
wonderful irony to emphasize here is that, psychology has a model of the
brain functions, but they struggle with a model of mind, frequently confus-
ing the mind with consciousness. This is the reason, perhaps, that contem-
porary psychology yields to physicalist models which equate the mind with
the brain. In comparison, in the antah-kārana model, we see a model of the
mind but we do not equate or map it with the activity of the brain alone
as IKS assumes the pervasiveness of consciousness. Are the cells conscious
or unconscious by themselves? Why, if at all, does consciousness emerge in
connections? Why do cells connect with each other?
Similar to the idea of Manas, the term or the notion of the ‘body’ has also
received attention in IKT. Depending on the meaning implied, three concepts
of the body can be introduced here, both from Yoga as well as Yogācāra.
From Yoga, the first meaning of the body and the word denoting the body is
‘Śarira’ – which has been defined as ‘that which decays’. Characteristics of
the body are also defined as that which grows, that which procreates, that
which decays and that which dies. The next concept which is used to denote
the body is ‘Kāyā’. Śarira and Kāyā, in IKT, are not limited to the physical
body. The word ‘physical body’ itself is a particularly amusing Indian con-
struction (what else) precisely because the yogic physiology in the Indian
world-view talks of three bodies – Śarira! According to yogic physiology,
we have three bodies interwoven with each other. The most obvious is the
physical body – the Sthula Śarira, the next is the psychological body – the
Sukṣma Śarira– and the most subtle aspect is the kārana Śarira, which is
the causal, intentional body. Similarly, the Yogācāra Buddhist theorizations
 Consciousness 23
also formulate the three Kāyā-s, the nirmāṇakāyā, ‘transformation body’,
the sambhogakāyā, ‘enjoyment-body’ and the dharmakāyā, ‘dharma-body’.
Finally, another concept that denotes the body is the word – ‘Tanu’. Tanu
as a technical concept, in Yoga sutra as ‘tanukārana’ means the weakening
of the pain and distress by manifesting itself materially. This is comparable
to ‘antah-kārana’; kārana as a word means to process and manifest. Other
concepts of body, utilized contextually, which are out of scope for further
discussion are Deha, Vigraha and Vapu.
The distinction between the mind and the body is important to re-­
emphasize primarily because the Greek thought and the Cartesian dual-
ism, which undergirds European and American psychology. Philosophy has
been struggling with this dichotomy and dualism between the mind and
the body. Almost all the contemporary psychology definitions, concepts,
models including the definitions of personality, self and indeed of behav-
iour have struggled with this dichotomy between the mind and the body.
In comparison, the Indian idea of mind and body is level by level iterations
of superset-subset relationships. The mind is a superset and is assumed to
include the body and continue even if the body dies. Sāmkhya texts clearly
describe the body as the material manifestation of the mind. As Sāmkhya
conceptualizes the body as the material manifestation of the mind, Yoga
practices focus on the mind through rāja and Hatha Yoga. The relationship
between the mind and the body has been the biggest problematic conceptu-
alization for contemporary psychology, which we will try and understand
in the chapters that follow.
After the preliminaries, and disaggregating the conceptualizations
of antah-kārana, Manas and Śarira, we come to the central idea of con-
sciousness. Consciousness as a central concept in all the Indian systems is
commented upon and noted by several philosophers and psychologists in
recent times as they were able to have a dual perspective having either being
trained in Indian philosophy and then having worked in American and
European universities or vice versa (Chadha, 2015; Ganeri, 2017; Hayes
and Timalsina, 2017; Paranjpe, 2012; Ram-Prasad, 2013; Rao et al., 2008;
Timalsina, 2008, 2011,2012). Consciousness is a central concept not only
in the classical Darśana-s but also in the two heterodox systems of Buddhist
and Jain thought. Even the Cāravākas, in their denial of consciousness,
were part of this investment of intellectual energy in the investigations on
consciousness. In line with this immense enquiry, the word consciousness
is named differently according to the particular functional and contex-
tual relevance. Several word concepts that indicate the word consciousness
in different functionalities and contexts of use and reference are Ātman,
Nija, Vastu, Svarupa, Brahman, Puruṣa and Dharma, Kshetrajna, Dehi,
etc. The word ‘ātman’ means consciousness which is bound/personalized- a
Jivātman and a paramātman. The word ‘Brahman’ means an unbounded,
continuous, unbroken consciousness as such, which is not bound by any
trace of intentionality. Similarly, there are other words such as nija – which
24 Consciousness
means the most intimate, personal; Swarupa, which means one’s own form.
This introduction for the word concept suffices for now, yet several vol-
umes have been written on consciousness and can be referred if required.
Do contemporary systems view consciousness, mind and the body in a
systemic framework? In the current flow of thought, the dominant per-
spectives, view the body as the primary, most ‘real’ and, therefore, ‘true’;
within the body, the nervous systems as central and the complexity of
this nervous system as expressed in the brain that gives rise to the con-
sciousness. Consciousness is also the representation of the external world –
which is the ‘mind’! There cannot be consciousness as such! Thus, there
are three key points for us to note – firstly, consciousness is an emergent
phenomenon contingent upon the complexity in the physiological systems.
Secondly, consciousness is with content or representational of something;
always with content. Thirdly, physiological systems and the body are pri-
mary. This conceptual architecture is deeply problematic for several rea-
sons. Firstly, we now know that no meaning exists in the single neuron;
indeed, where does meaning exist in the mass of neurons, glial cells and
neurotransmitters at the synapse? If you were to ask adrenaline, she would
say – this reductionism has damaging consequences! Adrenaline shows
action readiness and is seen in marathon running, just as running helter-­
skelter after spotting a mouse or attending an interview! Poor adrenaline
has been demonized for the last 70 years. So it is the reductionism on other
neurotransmitters and elements of the nervous system, including the brain.
Similarly, for the last 70 years, the hippocampus was the only structure
associated with memory; now we know that while the hippocampus is
important for memory consolidation, memory is in the architecture of the
brain itself; similar is the story with amygdala and unreasonable emotion.
The point to ask is –where is the meaning? Does meaning emerge at a
level of complexity or is it that pre-existing complexity and meaningful
order (dharma) devolve and manifest downstream as specific structures
and elements?
Because IKT asserts the latter world-view, scholars and philosophers have
also identified three central concepts in the IKT. These have been the pivots
of discussion through the history of ideas in the subcontinent. They are the
concepts of Dharma, Karma and Mukti/nirvāna. Each has been dealt with
extensively in IKT. These concepts are interwoven with the understand-
ing of consciousness as such, where this pre-existing meaningful order and
complexity is not related to Abrahamic God, but is experienced as an infin-
ity of intentional possibilities. Similar to the question about the relationship
between the mind-body and consciousness in contemporary psychology,
what is the relationship between the mind, body and consciousness in the
IKT? In the traditions which acknowledge the authority of the Veda, differ-
ent schools have conceptualized this relationship differently. Primarily, the
Vedānta view gives primacy to consciousness, that then acts as a witness
and the world devolves as an illusion or in some other views an active,
real and continuous transformation. The two heterodox schools have taken
 Consciousness 25
different positions as they dialectically engaged on these questions which is
seen in current discourse as well. (Metzinger 2020).
Thus, we turn our attention to the concepts that most seekers use –
enlightenment, liberation and freedom. What do we mean by enlighten-
ment, and how does it compare with the Indian word – mukti/nirvāna?
If we take the contemporary psychology view, then the death of the body
or indeed the death of the brain functions is the death of consciousness.
If we take the Vedānta view, then even if the body dies, nothing is lost to
consciousness – the cluster of experiences trans-migrate, to find a new body
and continue this circle of life, death and rebirth till it exhausts its karma
and/or gains self-realization. From a physicalist’s view, this sounds not
only pseudoscientific but delusional! Note, however, freedom in a purely
physicalist view of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon is a negative
definition; it is only possible with the death of the neurons. This freedom
cannot bring joy while living. Thus, a physicalist view is filled with terror
and the resultant pressure to predict, plan and control to prolong the neu-
ronal life. In contrast to a positive definition as seen in IP, particularly tan-
tra (Pandit, 2011; Pandit and Misra, 2013; Paranjpe, 2009; Sen and Pandit,
2013; Samadarshi, 2019; and Timalsina, 2007, 2011).
Recently, scholars have commented about how ‘modern’ and particularly
European, the word enlightenment is! While there are several models in
the IKT of Mukti, none is modern, most seem to be timeless. How would
enlightenment be related to consciousness, which is beyond the category
of ignorant/enlightened or renders the word enlightenment quite meaning-
less? How would Mukti be related to Brahman? The answer to the second
question is much easier because of the detailing in the conceptualization
and frameworks in IKT, where the Brahman doesn’t need any enlighten-
ment and none other to grant it. Brahman is that ownerless consciousness,
the consciousness as such; It is only the ‘I’ consciousness that must travel
towards enlightenment (Kristeller and Rikhye, 2008). With this brief intro-
duction to consciousness as Brahman, let us try and introduce a model of
consciousness from Indian psychology (IKT) in the next section.

An Indian model of consciousness – Māndukya Upaniṣad

Keeping consciousness at the centre, there are several psychological frame-
works of IKT which have been extensively used, notably from Patanjali’s
Yoga sutra to the Bhagavad Gita. In this chapter, we will start with a model
of consciousness most closely associated with the states of awareness in
an embodied consciousness. This model is the earliest and most profound;
it also easy to start with since it starts with embodied states of awareness
and beyond. This Upaniṣad is an explanation of the sacred ‘Om’ as the
four apparent states of consciousness, thus connecting profound philos-
ophy with the embodied nature of listening. Māndukya Upaniṣad is one
of the principal Upaniṣad in the Indian tradition. Upaniṣad, in Sanskrit,
means to sit next to a teacher and enquire about/engage with reality as it
26 Consciousness
is. Upa – means next to; ni – means with a firm resolve and ṣad – means
to enquire about reality. The word ‘teacher’ or implication of sitting next
to teacher is implicit in this word. Upaniṣad form, what is known as the
‘section of knowing’ – jnāna kānda in the Vedic corpus. They also come
at the end of the Vedic texts sequentially and, therefore, are also called as
Vedānta. Some scholars have also interpreted the term Vedānta as the frui-
tion or culmination of Veda as well. Since the Veda-s were remembered and
communicated orally, the learning teaching method was pivoted on pat-
terning, rhyming, pronunciation and verbal organization of knowledge that
facilitated exact recall. Each of the four Veda-s and its oral recensions were
remembered by specific oral tradition or lineage called as ‘shākha’ (literally
translated as branch). Each of the four Veda-s has several Upaniṣads associ-
ated with them. Thus, there are more than 100 Upaniṣads, even as there are
four Veda-s. The word ‘Veda’ itself arises from the Sanskrit root-vid, which
means to know/enquire/learn. Scholars have arrived at about hundred and
eight major and minor Upaniṣads. Out of these, 12 Upaniṣads are called as
principal Upaniṣad. Primarily, as Upaniṣad’s are aligned with certain Veda-s
and the Veda-s are themselves dated by scholars, the dating of the Veda
determines the Upaniṣad. A more important reason is that the Upaniṣads,
which have been commented upon by the great masters and teachers in the
Indian tradition, are called as Principal Upaniṣads. Māndukya Upaniṣad is
one of the principal Upaniṣads which has been commented upon by all the
grand masters and teachers of the Indian knowledge tradition.
Even as all the Upaniṣads discuss consciousness as such or consciousness
as reality, they particularly focus on certain specialization topics, facets
or characteristics that a student needs to enquire about. Thus, Taittriya
Upaniṣad is traditionally called as Ānanda Mimāṃsā and focuses on the
enquiry into the nature of well-being. Similarly, Iśa Upaniṣad enquires into
the pathways of well-being and recognizing consciousness as the reality
during the process of dying. Māndukya Upaniṣad, is a short and a profound
discussion on the principle that even though it appears that there are dif-
ferent states of awareness in consciousness, consciousness is one, undivided
and unaltered. Thus the first point to note in comparison to the contempo-
rary ideas of altered states of consciousness, the Māndukya Upaniṣad states
that the alteration of awareness and states of consciousness is an appear-
ance, whereas consciousness as such is undivided and unaltered.
The Upaniṣad discusses three apparent, easily available, cognizable states
of consciousness as waking, dreaming and sleeping. It describes the flow
and direction of awareness in each of the states. For example, in the waking
state called Jāgrata, the direction and flow of awareness is outwards, from
the senses towards the manifest world. In the dreaming state called svapna,
the direction and flow of awareness is within, yet objects, events and pro-
cesses manifest in the dream world. And in the dreamless sleep state called
Suṣupti, the direction and flow of awareness is confined in itself, there is
no manifestation to be aware of. Indeed, the phenomenal lived distinction
 Consciousness 27
between the world in the dream and the non-dream state is the most pro-
found to note. How do we know that we are seeing the reality as it is and not
as a dream? The purpose of dreaming and sleep is recently getting unrav-
elled. Sleep is the most profound of the embodied phenomena; all animals
go to sleep, despite or accounting for their fears of survival. The famous
‘Rātri Sukta’ in the Veda-s alludes to this fact with wonder and then reveres
the night as a Goddess who lets the creation sleep in her bosom!
All of us, know these states of awareness in our day-to-day living; the
Upaniṣad further states that the interweave, the background, the surround
of these three apparently separate states of consciousness is the constant,
unbroken, unaltered fourth – the ever-present, ever new, untouched con-
sciousness as such. In the Upaniṣad, this is called as Turiya – or ‘the fourth’.
In parallel, the Upaniṣad also maps the three states of embodied awareness
with the three sounds of ‘A’, ‘U’, ‘M’ and the fourth as unspoken. Scholars and
teachers have compared this unspoken fourth with the silence that pervades
and is then expressed as sound, language, text and music. The Upaniṣad
states that the Turiya or consciousness as such is like a four-­legged creature!
In the short twelve Mantra-s of this Upaniṣad, we see the definition of con-
sciousness, states of awareness and a model of consciousness connected to
audition-body-mind and indicating to transcendence of awareness. In con-
temporary psychology, both meditative states and substance-­induced states
are lumped together in ‘altered states of consciousness’ as if dream and sleep
are not altered states of consciousness to waking, which is assumed as the
default normal! In any case, we don’t know what is ‘altered’ as the quality
of the waking consciousness itself changes through the day, through rever-
ies, daydreams and other automatic behaviours. Note also that substance-
induced alteration of consciousness has damaging effects on body, brain
and behaviour over the short and long term, which cannot be said about
intentional cultivated meditational practice. These are basic framing errors
in the contemporary psychological frameworks, where new names need to
be coined to distinguish between these altered states of consciousness.
We can see that the Māndukya model of consciousness is grounded in but
not limited to the body-mind and brain. The model talks of phenomenal
awareness and sense perception moving outwards during waking state. In
contemporary psychology, this is easily measured through EEG and even
more advanced instrumentation such as fMRI and MRI. Perhaps the qual-
ity of the awareness in waking state (such as relaxed attention, to revery
to intense attention) may pose a challenge to the current instrumentation.
Next, the model talks of the dreaming and dreamless sleep state and dis-
cusses awareness and sense perception. This, again, can be studied through
neuroscience at a surface level as the ‘firing’ of the neurons in population or
sparse. The key point is that it asserts that there is an unaltered fourth – the
inter-weave, surround, base and apex. Given so, IKT overall, and not this
Upaniṣad in particular, then unambiguously devolves into specific method-
ologies and techniques to directly ‘recognize’ this unaltered fourth during
28 Consciousness
waking states, dreaming states and dreamless sleep states. Therefore, in
Indian Psychology, not only do we encounter detailed and specific mod-
els of refining phenomenal awareness during wake states but also practices
such as Yoga nidra that focuses on the awareness during dream and the in-
between states and several pranayam practices that closely follow the relax-
ation of deep sleep states, while keeping the awareness unaltered.
We discussed the characteristics of consciousness as discussed in main-
stream psychology. Awareness is an overlapping concept in both contem-
porary and Indian psychology; however, the key distinction is awareness in
IP is not broken into waking awareness, dreaming awareness and sleeping
awareness; neither is waking awareness or conscious attention alone con-
flated with consciousness. This is not a semantic quibble – if learning and
memory consolidate during rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rapid eye
movement (NREM) and cycles, then clearly, things experienced in waking
states are processed in dreaming states and are further available as learning
in waking states again (Kahan, T. L., & LaBerge, S.,1994). The profound
role of dreaming and sleep augments that awareness as such is unbroken,
whether in awake, dreaming and sleep physiological states. The role of
conscious attention and unconscious attention, explicit and implicit mem-
ory all get emphasized. If attention can be shared, which it can be during
intense attachment activities such as mother and child playing, then can
non-conscious attention also be shared and known? How do psychologists
answer this question? Suffice to say, awareness (of both variety-conscious
and unconscious), sense of existence/ownerless witness consciousness and
joy,/positive affect are the three characteristics of consciousness according
to IKT. They are simply understood as Sat, Cit and Ānanda. Note the defini-
tional nature of affect in consciousness. IKT doesn’t discuss characteristics
such as qualia or unified field as they are assumed in the sense of – me and
the mine-ness of experience. We will keep reviewing these questions in the
next chapters on body, affect, cognition and day-to-day living in freedom.

The dot: Conclusions and the movement forward

The practice of rangoli making every morning, also called as alpanā in
Bengal or Koḷam in Tamil, usually starts by inserting the dot in the c­ entre
as the day-to-day Indian cultural practices. Inserting the dot signifies the
awareness of infinite space and time turning into finitude; creation then
radiates outwards and also coheres back to the dot. This chapter has
inserted the central dot – the bindu, by discussing consciousness. You will
agree that there are dots, which are actually whorls, spirals and complex
mazes, when looked at closely! Centring consciousness through the model
introduced here is important because mainstream psychology is not able to
cohere back several points and advances in its research to the foundational
questions of being. In line with the intentions of the textbook, the next
chapter will start with the embodied consciousness.
 Consciousness 29
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3 Deha
Consciousness, embodiment
and idli-sambhār

Introduction: Embodied consciousness and

the taste and smell of the world
When we say that we are eating and enjoying idli-sambhār, a Khatta
Dhokla or a cocktail of flavours in a pāni puri, is consciousness involved
in the sensation, perception, working memory, long-term memory and the
phenomenal awareness of ‘I’ awareness OR Is consciousness completely
uninvolved? A myth that pervades India and students of psychology in
India is that consciousness is not related to psychology and lived experience
as such because it is always transcendental and otherworldly!
If consciousness is indeed otherworldly alone and not in the day-to-day
lived experience of this world, why do even philosophers or cognitive sci-
entists or the Veda/Vedānta even discuss it; what are we doing here? The
duality or split between material and spiritual, between this world and
the other world, is stark and most damaging in the logical scholarship of
mainstream Euro-American psychology. A sequel – the mind-body problem
is one of the biggest philosophical and belief questions in current science
and philosophy. Let us first set the tone for what the problem is. Clearly,
our bodies and minds are linked and they interact with the world. When we
eat khatta dhokla, the brain responds to the sensations and continuously
updates its perceptions and beliefs, memory traces of the khatta dhokla, to
then judge whether it’s a ‘good’ experience or not; this experience, good or
bad then gets transferred into and re-consolidated as the continuing new
memory of this person. The body cognizes the taste and the mind presum-
ably notes it.
The question that Euro-American philosophy has been wrestling with
is – are these two separate categories or the same? What is the relationship
between the two? Note that the Euro-American idea of ‘dualism’ is dif-
ferent from the functional dualism in Sāṃkhya. In Sāṃkhya and the later
developments in Indian thought, it is clear that ‘Prakriti’ or materiality
is an expression of the ‘Purusha’ or the principle of consciousness. Thus,
Sāṃkhya in IKS is functional dualism with essential monism. The issues in
the philosophy of psychology are different. If one experiences psychological

DOI: 10.4324/9781003336204-3
 Deha 33
states, for example, then how do they relate to physiological expression, or
do psychological states map with neurobiological correlates? These are the
questions that indicate dualism in contemporary psychology.
Some key divergences which explain the predicaments are a consensus
on the body as the primary category. Indeed, the general consensus, most
surprisingly, at least to an Indian person, is that since physics is the most
advanced science, one of the influential proposals has been to ‘reduce’ all
psychology to physical and mathematical laws and expressions! Nagel, in
his influential 1961 paper, basically argued that if theories could be reduced
to other theories, using bridge principles or bridge laws, then not only all
the scientific vocabulary will get standardized and translated into others,
but eventually, all theories (of mind and society) could get reduced to phys-
ics!! The strongest version of this argument would be a strict physicalist
and computational perspective. Therefore, all the theoretical and philo-
sophical attempts would be to reduce and map; in such a scenario, we can
clearly see that consciousness would be reduced to neurobiological corre-
lates if that was indeed possible; the rest would be just fantasy, including
the philosophers agreeing or disagreeing with each other!
Later thinkers, finding the obvious difficulty with reductionism, pro-
posed the ‘idea of multiple realizability’ (Fodor, 1975, 1980). This is to
propose that the same psychological state can be experienced with different
neurobiological structures among other creatures such as bats! For exam-
ple, does the experience of the fear map with the exact same neurons in
rats, humans, and bats? Indians might say, ‘the consciousness is the same’!
And they would miss the whole point. Indian knowledge systems look at
the consciousness principle as all-pervasive, and Euro-American philoso-
phers are trying to standardize and reduce the psychological to the phys-
ical while completely rejecting the ‘spiritual’. Indeed, the word ‘spiritual’
is problematic from IKT perspective as well and is not cognate with the
Sanskrit word – ‘Adhyātma’.
Consciousness, in such a circumstance, by most scientists and philoso-
phers, is viewed in the brain or in the realm of imagination or in the form
of abstraction or is ‘otherworldly’ in a theological sense. When Indian stu-
dents and people doing Yoga practice say, consciousness is ‘otherworldly’,
they are mindlessly transferring the binaries of the Abrahamic religions
about ‘this’ world and the ‘other’ world. Indeed, Indian traditions talk of
14 worlds, and the term ‘loka’ refers to the world as much as a state of
consciousness.
Several of these binaries that Euro-American psychology has hypno-
tized itself into including the subject-object and the material-spiritual cre-
ate a particular difficulty both ways – one, for scientific understanding
of psychology and consciousness, and two, for a non-stereotypical, non-­
esotericized understanding of Indian knowledge traditions (IKT) as well!
Perhaps a more direct illustration of an upward integration of
body-mind-consciousness in IKT would be to start from auditory senses of
34 Deha
patterns of sounds, of music, which is perceived, cognized, and enjoyed by
the body-mind to then immerse the person into deep absorption and pos-
sibly momentary experiences of no-thought, just awareness or choice-less
conscious attention, such that at points of time, consciousness is ‘altered’
into meditative states. In this upward integration example, there would
be no awareness of the body, as well as conscious thought, at the weakest
‘realization’. Thus, we need to re-examine the embodied consciousness of
the person in the Indian psychological traditions. In the IKT, the body is
conceptualized as the materialization of consciousness, and therefore, the
body is the pathway to access altered states of consciousness, recognize
self-nature and transcend the body awareness as well.

Transcendental and embodied consciousness: Pan-psychism,

challenges to physicalist and functionalist theories
In the earlier chapter, we introduced the Indian idea of consciousness that
pervades and is interwoven with all the states of awareness – awake, dream-
ing, and dreamless sleep and yet transcends or ‘overflows’ it. According to
the model of consciousness given in the Māndukya Upaniṣad, conscious-
ness pervades the three states of awareness and remains before and after
as well. In recent years, a similar-sounding proposal has been offered by
the American philosopher, Ned Block (2007), who argues that conscious-
ness ‘overflows’ conscious awareness. Block, along with philosophers such as
Fodor and Putnam, launched a philosophical proposal and argued against
the reduction in the understanding of consciousness from the physicalist per-
spective. Pan-psychism’s argument of consciousness means that all objects,
including physical objects, instantiate consciousness (Bruntrup & Jaskolla,
2016;Goff, 2015; Nagasawa & Wager, 2016). This argument, in its strong
version, means that consciousness exists prior to the physical objects and
all objects have a micro-consciousness in them! The ‘panpsychist’ proposal
has been controversial. In recent times, Information Integration Theory has
been proposed (Tononi, 2004), which states that consciousness is an inher-
ent aspect of reality, where the integration of information exchanged itself
constitutes consciousness. The key critique of pan-psychism is that it is not
able to explain the all-pervasive consciousness (called macro consciousness)
with consciousness among creatures (called micro consciousness) and how
and why these gradations in consciousness occur. Further, pan-psychism is
not able to propose an empirical way forward, and therefore, Euro-American
philosophers and psychologists cannot find new insights about mind-body-­
dualism as well as the reduction of mind into body or body into mind!
Perhaps, the ideas of pan-psychism and related proposals of cosmo-­
panpsychism (which is a better proposal than panpsychist monism), remind
us of similar debates among the three schools of Vedānta – the Advaita
school of Adi Shankara, the School of Viśiṣtādvaita and the dualists
(Dvaitins); noting that these debates happened at least a thousand years
 Deha 35
ago. Another key translatable concept from Euro-American philosophy, for
Indian students, is the proposal of P-consciousness and A-consciousness.
P-consciousness or phenomenality is broadly understood as ‘feeling’, which
is distinguished from psychology, or A-consciousness, which informs us how
a human access element from experience – access consciousness. There are
several philosophers who question this proposal of P and A-consciousness
as well. The questions are still open, with huge research projects raising
their stakes and claims on what reality should be prior to then run these
research programs! At least, through these proposals of consciousness as a
priori and overflowing, a possibility exists that the Indian knowledge sys-
tems may not be dismissed as superstitious. Notwithstanding these debates,
consciousness is embodied as experienced, whichever argument the student
might agree or disagree with; those disagreements relate to the conscious-
ness prior and later to the boundaries of the body and the brain. In ref-
erence to Māndukya Upaniṣad, the consciousness not only pervades and
transcends the waking state where one may or may not be consciously
attending to each and every aspect of one’s experience but also pervades
and transcends dreaming and dreamless sleep states – phenomenologically.
Thus, the first point to note is that when we are talking about transcendence
in the context of Indian philosophical traditions, nowhere are we implying
that transcendence is the opposite or contrary to the embodiment. At the
same time, we are also not trying to ‘reduce’ samādhi to body awareness or
the limited embodied consciousness alone.
As Ram-Prasad, a British philosopher of Indian origin, has said in
his paper on saving Indian philosophical assumptions from physical-
ism (Ram-Prasad, 2001), Advaita Vedānta asserts – the experience that
the non-­embodied consciousness of samādhi is the same/Identical as the
consciousness embodied as a person (called as Jivatma) is the central and
profound, no doubt, because it illuminates the whole of embodied con-
sciousness as experienced by the person, in their waking, dreaming and
non-dream sleep states. For all ‘practical’ purposes of the embodied con-
sciousness of waking, dreaming, and sleep states; this interwoven ‘fourth’
can always be accessed through contemplative practices called – adhyatma
sadhana. In this chapter, we will focus on the particular manner in which
Indian psychology has addressed embodied consciousness in variance with
mainstream psychology.
A positive theory of mind-body consciousness is given in the Sāṃkhya
tradition, which has been further developed in the non-dual schools of IKT.
Indeed, in the IKT, great detailing is done on the idea, experience, and the
processes of embodiment, which is seen as a downstream devolvement as
opposed to the process of integration, which is conceptualized as upstream
evolution. In the Yoga-Sāṃkhya system, the upstream process from the
body to awareness consciousness is called a Nivrtti marga, and a down-
stream process from phenomenal and awareness consciousness to body is
called the Pravritti marga. Pravrtti marga or the downstream devolution
36 Deha
is seen as the pathway to the world and its multiplicity. During the down-
stream process from pure awareness as consciousness to body awareness,
embodiment takes place, not just for humans, but all creatures of this ani-
mate and sentient world, and thus, phenomenal awareness becomes increas-
ingly specified. In the process of embodiment, ‘multiple realizations’ occur
at different levels of consciousness in the body. Some of the word concepts
utilized for embodiment are Śarira, Tanu and Tanukarana, Vapu and Kāyā
and Deha, Kalevaram, Murti and Vigraha. Each word has been defined
specifically in terms of its contextual and functional relevance. This func-
tional relevance is called ‘pravritti nimitta’. For example, the word śarira
denotes bodies and the ‘en-mind-ment’ of the body. This concept first
occurs in the Brahrdāranyaka Upaniṣad, one of the oldest Vedānta texts,
where the concepts of three bodies – Sthula, sukśma and kāraṇa śarira are
explicitly delineated. The Sthula Śarira is understood as a gross body or a
manifest body, the second is understood as the psychological body or the
body in mind and the third is understood as the causal body or the deep-
est aspects of the psyche which give rise downstream to expressed explicit
ideas, desires, thoughts and aspirations; feelings and other contents which
are amenable to conscious attention at least in part; a student of Indian psy-
chology traditions is trained to access and feel these as conscious awareness.
Similarly, the Ayurvedic texts have consistently used the word – ‘Deha’
for body and have detailed sections on what are the constituents of this
body. For example, some Ayurvedic texts explicitly specify the role of the
nutrition, malnutrition of the mother, and the genetic material inherited
from both the father as well as the mother as a constituent of what is called
the ‘Deha Prakriti’. Third, the particular word ‘Tanu’ and its process signi-
fying the word ‘Tanu kārana’ is found in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra (PYS) in the
second Sutra of the second chapter.
The key point to hold on from this brief discussion is that – we recog-
nize that consciousness is all pervasive and can be known as such during
advanced meditative states; this meditative experience, which overflows
the body awareness, will profoundly affect all the embodied states of
consciousness.
The idea of transcendence as an opposite to embodiment arises from the
Euro-American Cartesian dichotomy. Note that it is true that advanced
states of meditation must necessarily include awareness where there is no
conscious awareness of the body as such. This means that there are no
conscious thoughts of ‘I’, no awareness of breathing, and keeping the body
posture for an extended period of time. In almost all states of advanced
meditation, non-dual awareness as well as immersion, we do lose a sense
of body consciousness just as we lose a sense of ‘self’ consciousness. For
example, the sense of body consciousness emerges and becomes important
for our conscious attention as we age. We attain mastery in dance, we lose
the sense of body consciousness as a separate sensation in conscious atten-
tion while performing dance. However, in these ‘flow’ states, we continue
 Deha 37
to hold the sense of ‘I’ consciousness. Therefore, transcendence in Indian
psychology does not mean immediately losing of body consciousness like a
switch. It also means a graded loss of access and phenomenal consciousness.
The first level of understanding body and consciousness is that phe-
nomenologically we may lose the sense of the body as conscious attention
requires action from us many times during our state of being awake. At the
next level are states of meditation or sports or any kind of sensory-motor
mastery, where we lose the sense of body awareness during immersion into
any act. The third layer of meaning is those advanced states of meditation,
particularly where we are minimally aware of the body. These are called
minimally phenomenal states (Metzinger, 2020). To finally, come to the
most subtle layer of losing even those minimally phenomenal awareness
states in meditation. Even if most of us are not meditators or interested
in meditation as such as a subject matter of psychology or as students of
psychology, we still would be experiencing the first three layers of losing
the states of body consciousness or awareness while doing or enacting day-
to-day activities in our waking states.
Point of transition between two states of consciousness to recognize the
interwoven fourth.

Body in the mind! Consciousness and dreaming states

During dreaming states, psychologists of contemporary times have been
able to identify some critical characteristics that distinguish the dream-
ing state from the state of being awake. The first characteristic is that for
almost all states of dreaming, with the exception of particular disorders
such as somnambulism or sleepwalking, the motor functioning of the
body is absent and body awareness is minimal. We say minimal because,
even while in a dream, we are aware of our body such that it doesn’t fall
off the bed or such that it doesn’t topple over someone else by our side.
Phenomenologically, we do have an experience of ourselves as embodied
with an ‘I’ consciousness; we experience ourselves walking, talking and
interacting with people around us in the dream world, called Swapna Sriṣti
in the IKT. It is a phenomenological – a ‘lived’ world as is experienced.
Physiologically, while the motor functions are mostly switched off, the body
does respond to a mosquito bite or a sudden change in the temperature, etc.
the sensory functions are experienced internally/­phenomenologically, while
the sensory organs are minimally operating in the body. Clearly, we do not
operate the physiological visual systems, but we do see and experience sight
internally in the Swapna Srishti. Similarly, while the auditory system of the
body is minimally present, we do experience sound. Thus, we see that, if we
take awareness as such as the central pivot to organize consciousness and
locate awareness as a legitimate subject matter of psychology, the IKT seem
to have a much-refined subjectivity framework about dreaming states. They
indicate an alignment to the idea of a lived dream world. Following this
38 Deha
line, are several methods proposed in the IKT to change or regulate these
dream worlds and interpret the content of the dream world awareness –
non-psychoanalytically. The yogic practice of Pratyāhāra, which stands at
the fuzzy borders of external Yoga practice up to Prāṇāyāma (Bahiranga
Yoga sadhana) and the internal Yoga practice starting from conscious
attention till non-dual awareness in samādhi (Antaranga sadhana) pre-
cisely addresses to these states of consciousness which are at the graduated
sliding scales of an embodied awareness with body consciousness to an
embodied awareness with minimal body consciousness. In the practice of
Pratyāhāra, using systematic relaxation, body consciousness is minimized,
and lived experience of the body (phenomenologically) is leveraged for bet-
ter insight, interpretation, and recognition. In recent years, the practice of
Yoga nidra has been gaining a lot of popularity (Dwivedi, 2016; Moszeik
et al., 2022).
Minimized body consciousness results in mild to deep relaxation as an
outcome – the principle of Yoga nidra. Several contemporary practices of
relaxation are accused of being taken/lifted/inspired from Yoga without
honouring the lineage; however, we can say that the same principle of relax-
ation as minimal body discomfort to letting go of a separate sense of body
awareness is a feature of all relaxation states. The same logic of reduction
in body consciousness can be claimed to result in better performance in cre-
ative tasks such as sports, dance or creative pursuits that require sensory-­
motor coordination, where a minimized body consciousness is a separate
awareness and, therefore, increased psychological/mental flexibility results
from the mastery/skill in preparation and action (Gold & Ciorciari, 2020;
Sinnott et al., 2020), according to research in flow and eastern traditions
such as Zen, Tai-Chi and of course Yoga. In the particular context of Yoga
nidra, minimized body consciousness enhances the awareness of the body
as a lived experience in the dream and dream-like awake state. In tradi-
tional contexts, people who follow and consistently practice Yoga-nidra
report richer dream content, with greater self-awareness and, therefore, a
better ability to change or regulate one’s dreams. Neuro-physiologically,
contemporary psychology report evidence of learning and memory con-
solidation during sleep and dream states in the hippocampal regions of the
brain (Wamsley, 2019).
To understand embodied consciousness in the waking state from an IKT
perspective, we have more than 100 years of mainstream research evidence
that has now been accepted as the applied psychology of the east. The first
is the lived experience of body and body consciousness through the prac-
tice of Hatha Yoga and āsanas. Second, awareness through the sensory
self in Tantra, where the assumption of the sensory self, as it engages with
the ecosystem will question contemporary psychology’s notions of the self
as largely social. Is self-social? Several philosophers are argued that it is
not. If self is not social and also not transcendental then, what is it about?
(Zahavi, 2009). The idea of self as social, quite prevalent in mainstream
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