Yoga psychology - 3: Consciousness and Witness
In the third post in this series on Yoga Psychology, let us visit some of the core concepts of our sense of self and understand some of its nuances. The concepts presented here are not directly from Yoga Sutras. They stem from Vedanta, which in turn form the basis for the psychology of Yoga. In the first post in this series, we saw how our "sense of self" as an entity is different from our body, thoughts, emotions, and even our hard-coded genetic "nature". We can talk about all of them as if they were objects of inquiry while we, or our "self", is the inquirer. One of the postulates of Vedanta is that our sense of "Self" can never be the object of inquiry. It is always the inquirer. Just like the eyes can't see themselves, the "Self" cannot see itself. Our eyes can however, see an image of themselves (say in a mirror or a photograph) and realise that this image represents the very eyes which are doing the seeing. Similarly, we