The legacy of ancient Samkhya with its universal naturalism might prove of help in a period of extreme reductionist materialism. Charged with materialism Samkhya is then again charged with idealism, and dualism, and shows a remarkable collation of opposites, and a distant resemblance to Kantian thinking. One problem is that this discourse has already been appropriated for any number of metaphysical speculations about cosmic involution, which don’t do justice to the original. At the point where it appears in the Bhagavad Gita it has already lost its original significance. The world of Samkhya points in principle to everything known in the ancient sutras, and this material is late in terms of our eonic Axial period, but still close to its source.

The history of Indian philosophy seems determined to place a Kapila right on schedule as an eonic sage, as the creator of Samkhya  in the time-period 600 B.C, as though to assist our delineation of eonic architecture. The evidence suggests that it was emerging from an Upanishadic phase that is registered even in the Mahabharata. The exact form that it took in the age of Gautama is not clear, but the influence on Buddhism  is so obvious that we can feel confident that the main features of the system were more or less in place in the time of Buddha. This is slightly out of character in the Upanishadic context, as these progress into the consolidation of Hinduism, but we should note that the whole tradition here has never truly been shown to have anything to do with Indo-European, or Vedic, religious traditions.

The fate of this system was denunciation by the later Shankarans who had quietly expropriated its terminology and concepts, witness the references in the misleading Bhagavad Gita. And they were not the last. Great later embarrassment rings through the history of mysticism and religion  in the fact that the great breakthrough of the classical Indian transition produced a ‘materialist’ mysticism. But such a thing was quite natural in the age of Buddha and Mahavir, although we cannot say what the true original form of all this was, for the Shiva cult and its yogi far predate Buddhism. All we see now are the later redactions of the Hindu medieval period, so concerned under the influence of Islam to conceal the whole subject in a monotheistic wrapper.

The sutra posits a dualistic distinction of prakriti and purusha. This double aspect model is the key. The ‘spiritual’ principle is strictly segregated from the sources of natural manifestation, and these include mind and soul. The ‘spirit’ of man is higher ‘material’, and not the same as purusha, which is uncreated, and uncreating. Prakriti comes in two aspects, uncreated, created. It is this unmanifest prakriti that is the obstacle to easy self-realization. The value of the Samkhya approach is to see that one mistakes one’s spirituality for what is in reality a material manifestation in subtle form. The beauty of the system of Samkhya, the codified echo of some unknown Buddha, as ancient as the speculations of Thales and as deserving of a place in the Smithsonian of proto-science, is its consistency and simplicity: everything is ‘material’ in an all-encompassing naturalism, that is, all is of a piece, matter, energy, mind, purpose, god, and yet beside this is a witness, perhaps misunderstood as ‘consciousness’, a term they did not use, and which mis-portrays the element ‘purusha’. It is misleading indeed to translate the term ‘purusha’ as consciousness. This ‘dualism’ then receives a sort of myth of the relation of the two in a striking image of a kind of evolution as punctuated equilibrium. This witness does nothing, and is neither god nor creator. Everything comes into existence from primordial matter as a cascade of evolutionary triads or gunas, doubling in number in some later formulations: 3, 6, 12, 24, 48,... This aspect is speculative and has degenerated into its own form of bogus cosmic mechanics that found its final burial grounds in the pastiche of such as Ouspensky.

The dualism of ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ disappears and become a ‘dialectic’ or triad, in a tetrad including purusha. It is not a dualism of matter and spirit, but a dualism between the ‘unnamable, but named, purusha’ and a natural triad, of three ‘matters’. Some of these ‘matters’ are unmanifest, and that’s what causes the confusion of spiritual samsara. The point is that the higher range of this triad, the ‘sattwic’ is confused with the spiritual. Perhaps it is the spiritual, but there is something beyond that. This dialectic is biophysical, the fact of the body, the mind, and the triadic ‘connector’, ‘e-motion’, desire, etc,… Science might have grown better in this acidic soil, as it thrashes about in Cartesian schizophrenia (although Descartes is attempting a similar gesture), sinking deeper even as Descartes is denounced, unable to get its ‘materialism’ in order. Samkhya is one great key to the labyrinth of Indian spirituality, tracing its origins to the era of Buddha.

Samkhya can be useful as a reminder that religions are not spiritual but upsurges in prakriti. Yogis hitchhike on the form and one day are found to have slipped away as the purusha element, allergic to religion, subtracts their name from the religious roll call. We see the point looking at the eonic effect with its ambiguous, now material, now spiritual, eonic emergents. The distinction of matter and spirit in Western language tends to divide the ‘sattwic’ from the whole man to call that the spiritual.[i]