Yoga and Science – Siegfried Bleher and Jarvis Chen

YOGA AND SCIENCE PART I: WAYS OF KNOWING

BY SIEGFRIED BLEHER AND JARVIS CHEN

Siegfried Bleher Jarvis Chen Photo: Travis L. Kelley

Intermediate Junior III Iyengar Yoga teachers Jarvis Chen and Siegfried Bleher recently arranged to have an informal

conversation about yoga and science. Jarvis is a public health scientist, a social epidemiologist who studies the effect of the social environment on health. Siegried teaches physics and studies nonlinear (chaotic) systems and their application to lowtemperature plasmas. The following is a portion of the conversation that took place Feb. 13, 2015. The intention of their conversation was to inquire into the role science can or does play in the study and experience of yoga. The conversation will be presented in three parts: Part I: Ways of Knowing, Part II: Layers of Utthita Trikonasana, and Part III: Science and Samadhi.

deeper drive to know. I am very much interested in, for such questions as the Big Bang? What intrigues me is the crosssubjective experience—and scientific cosmology.

Siegfried Bleher: My deepest interest in talking about yoga and science is related to ways of knowing, but it is in the limits of knowing.

Jarvis Chen: I think that would be a fruitful way to frame it— about the limits of the ways of knowing.

SB: I am not clear about your background…

JC: Because my background is epidemiology, clearly the scientific project of proving the efficacy of yoga is something I am familiar with—those techniques and how such studies are designed. And I have some ideas about critiquing what has been done so far, how it’s being approached by the scientific community. There is a set of contradictions between the way clinical science would prove the efficacy of yogic techniques with the way we would approach yoga as a healing technique. I am also interested in the question “how do we know?” because the scientist part of me is interested in things like objective knowledge and replicability, and at the same time, I read the Yoga Sutras and know that the highest forms of correct knowledge, of pramana, are direct experience, inference, and testimony. But they are more subjective ways of knowing. To me that’s part of the essential way of framing different ways of knowing: yoga as science and the scientific method as science.

SB: I have been interested over the years in work by Ken Wilber, who has written about the “eyes of knowing,” which are numerous, but the simplest way of formulating this is as the subjective experience becomes an assertion about the nature of

physical eyes, eyes of the mind, and the eyes of spirit. Each is valid, but deals with different kinds of information and so requires different ways of validating information. In a sense, we could address the question of ways of knowing from this sort of framework.

I am also wondering about giving our discussion a personal deeper interest? I have a deeper inquiry in mind. For example, I have been drawn to physics and science out of a sense of curiosity, but the more I understand, the more I am guided by a example, news about the Big Bang not being well-founded: If I went into the state of samadhi, would I get any insights into over between Samkhya cosmology—cosmology informed by

JC: It is interesting about Samkhya cosmology—are the assertions of Samkhya cosmology testable?

SB: Well, here we go! They are the product of deep subjective experience. As such, they satisfy certain criteria for validation. But are they testable in the usual scientific way? That is the question we are trying to address. That is, is the question wellposed? And I don’t have answers for that.

JC: When people pose the question of testability, when people conceive of their subjective experience of being-ness and tattvas (primary substances) that are articulated in Samhkya philosophy, are they articulating it as subjective experience or are they making assertions about the material reality of that subjective experience?

SB: That is a great question! What I understand is that these are assertions about objective truth, about objective reality.

JC: For me the question, “Is it well-posed?” hinges a little on the relationship between the being that knows, or the process of knowing, and the prakritic world around us. When people say they have a subjective experience of something, what is that as a way of knowing, exactly? What is the process by which a take: What is it that we are ultimately “pulled by”? What is our

material reality?

It is the limitations in one way of knowing that reveal a different way of knowing.

SB: There are two issues, from my perspective. One is, if I have an experience, what is my inner criterion that tells me I can believe it to be a true experience? That is independent from whether this experience is verifiable by others.

JC: That is a bit like Sutra II.22 krtartham prati nastam api anastam tadanya sadharanatvat: “The relationship with nature ceases for emancipated beings, its purpose having been fulfilled, but its processes continue to affect others.” For the person who has achieved Kaivalya, the material world still exists. To me this has always been dealing with the fundamental question of whether beings can have their own experience of material reality, or is material reality entirely the projection of the one purusha projecting into prakriti?

SB: I recall a sutra in the fourth pada as well that speaks about and discounts solipsism, which I think is related to what you are referring to. Sutra IV.16 says: na ca ekacitta tantram ced vastu apramanakam tada kim syat: “An object exists independent of its cognizance by any one consciousness. What happens to it when that consciousness is not there to perceive it?” (B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

JC: I think this is one of the foundational concepts in Samkhya philosophy, as opposed to those philosophies that claim subjective experience is all maya (illusion).

SB: So, which of these “darsanas” do we subscribe to? I myself believe that one’s life is to a large degree determined by our personal answer to this question. But we may never really know, beyond our choice.

JC: So even in Samkhya philosophy, all of prakriti, from the most subtle and undifferentiated to the most differentiated, has all the undifferentiated or unmanifest elements as potent or potential within it. So as a result, mind is present: both cosmic consciousness (mahat) and individual consciousness (buddhi) are present in the evolutes of prakriti. So it does speak to all of our material reality being, if not a projection of the mind, at least generated and evolved out of a more primal intelligence. For me the other thing I want to bring into this is, to go along with subjective knowledge, “flashes from inside,” in the way Guruji talks about instinct and intuition in one’s practice: Often the body responds in an instinctual way, but the way we apply our intelligence makes it possible to have intuition. And I think of that intuition as the part of the subjective way of knowing that touches on the truth. But I don’t know what that is compared with what I have been trained to think of as external, valid, replicable, verifiable ways of knowing. These are different activities. There is this experience I have with sadhana, especially with Guruji’s method, that gives me the experience that something is true, that is different from other ways of knowing.

SB: Suppose you were to pose a question that is amenable to scientific inquiry, something I have experience in or that you have experience in. Suppose you or I went into a deep intuitive state, either absorption or a deep meditative state. Would we be able to discover or find answers, before generating scientific results, that might be confirmed or discount our answer?

JC: I don’t know the answer to that!

SB: I am going to bring in a couple of things. I am familiar with work of neuroscientist Donald Hoffman, who talks about conscious agents that, in a way, create a shared reality as a result of the mutual interactions of conscious agents. He claims that nothing can be discovered beyond those mutual interactions. By the nature of how the senses work and how we interact with one another, to claim that something is really “out there,” independent of us, independent of the observer, is missing the point of our interactions. So that’s one thing. The other thing I wanted to mention is that from a fundamental view of nature founded in quantum physics, there is also the idea that whatever we see or believe to be true is in part a reflection of our own views, what we bring to the observation. They are inseparable from each other.

JC: Although it is also true that most physical things we observe in the regular world are well-enough described by Newtonian mechanics. For most regular things we observe in the world, we don’t see the underpinnings of the observer-related phenomena. But it’s the stuff at the edges where that becomes relevant.

SB: That’s right, but on the other hand, yoga brings us to the edge.

JC: Exactly, that’s a good way of putting it!

SB: Our instruments and our senses bring us to that edge. Microscopes that reveal things we can’t see with our unaided senses show us that the process of “seeing” is more involved than we think. With the visual sense, for example, which we take for granted, there is a deep, complicated process that takes place.

JC: In a way, this helps to frame why these ways of knowing feel quite different. It is that they deal with the inquiry about the

The new way of knowing becomes active and influences the former ways.

nature of experience, the nature of existence and experience in different domains of existence, sort of the everyday versus the stuff at the edges.

SB: And interestingly enough, it is the limitations in one way of knowing that reveal a different way of knowing. We push one particular way of knowing to its limit, and it doesn’t simply disintegrate, but it reveals, through its limitations, another domain. That’s what I see has happened in 20th-century physics: the revelation of the depth of involvement of the observer in what she is observing, as a limitation of Newtonian physics. And now quantum physics is encountering limitations as well. And so, embedded within the way of knowing described by quantum physics, I believe there is another realm that is embedded within that as a seed—and maybe the intuitive realm is embedded?

JC: I think that one of the reasons we were asked to talk about this is exactly the perception of contradictions between the scientific ways of inquiry and yoga: framing this in terms of what is revealed at the limits of one method and as the place where another method comes in is a really great way of framing it and a nice perspective. I have been thinking about what Guruji means when he says “intelligence.” What is the intuition that gives us that certainty that “this is correct, this is true”? A different part of me would have been encouraged to be quite skeptical about me being a single observer, making an observation, and asserting that it’s true. I do think that most of the questions about efficacy of yogic techniques happen entirely within the real world, and you can use standard scientific methods for them. At the same time, I think there is a problem with a tendency in clinical studies to assume there is a large population of exchangeable subjects that we can test something on, when in fact, even doing something quite simple with a yoga student who has a problem is a very individualized process and a very subjective one. Even there, the tension between making replicable observations in the day-to-day world versus the importance of the individual’s experience and the perception of that experience—the fact that these run into each other is a problem.

SB: So, Ken Wilber tried to address the different “voices” or persons during speech and inquiry. First person can be individual or multiple (“I” or “we”), second person “you” as individual or multiple, and “it” can also be individual or plural. Each person or perspective requires its own form of inquiry and process of validation. When we talk about the benefits of yoga, there is such a complex mixture of the different persons: If I have back pain, I may have pain without noticeable structural dysfunction as shown by X-rays. Or there may be a structural issue but without pain. There is a kind of physical verifiable structural dysfunction, but the subjective experience may not match. We assume there is a degree of matching between the physical verifiable world and the inner world of experience, but there is enough evidence to show that is not always true—they don’t always match. The idea of layering, the idea that deeper forms of prakriti are embedded in more differentiated forms, to me implies a kind of ordering—one is more primary. If you are able to view life from the undifferentiated layer, then you have a different view that is influenced by that perspective of the physical layer—you experience the physical layer in a different way; the physical eyes are changed by the spiritual eyes. So there is a kind of backward causation. The new way of knowing becomes active and influences the former ways. There is a temporal ordering in the sense of the new ways of knowing emerging when the former way reaches its boundaries. But there is also an ordering in terms of layering or complexity.

JC: This reminds me of things Guruji said about his experience of doing and seeing as someone who has done versus, for most of us, the experience of doing and seeing as people who are still seeking to do and see.

SB: In a simple way, I think we can probably all experience something similar as practitioners. When we first practice Utthita Trikonasana we have whatever that experience is like. After 10 or 20 years, we still practice Utthita Trikonasana, but that experience is different, isn’t it? I can recall Prashant’s description of Utthita Trikonasana as almost a pivot for every other pose, but that was certainly not my first encounter with the pose. But now I can have some inkling what he means. The other dimension of this is that now when I practice Utthita Trikonasana, the layers I’m touching in myself are multiple, whereas the first few years it was strictly the muscular, or physical, layer. So once a different way of knowing becomes active, it starts to reframe the previous layer, what came before it.

JC: I think talking about Utthita Trikonasana is a great way to frame this idea of the involution of the way of knowing in a clear way.

In Part II, Siegfried and Jarvis will continue their conversation on Utthita Trikonasana and the many layers we touch when we practice this and every other asana.