A Few Thoughts on Matter
Or, Toward the Alchemy of Yoga
“No truth in the common assertion that evil is inherent in matter qua matter, since matter too has a share in the cosmos, in beauty and form.”
~ Dionysus the Aeropagite
I have long thought of Yoga as the innermost side of inner alchemy. In alchemy, Hermes teaches us that, “Fire became Earth. Separate the Earth from the Fire. The subtler is nobler than the gross.” Whether we call Her Shakti, Prakrti, or the One, we are given to understand — and through practice, come to experience — that every object of experience, from the subtlest intellect to the densest black hole, is produced from that One and never ceases to be that One. The Many truly exist; they are not illusions or misperceptions. But the Many nevertheless are evolutes of a single Substance which is also the Essence and Law behind their manifestation, change, and form. Matter is the “lowest” or “grossest” of her showings-forth, but far from the only one.
In Yoga, we seek first to “separate the subtle from the gross” — which is to say that we develop methods of experiencing the consciousness apart from the material body through which it instantiates. Both are of the same One, so it is not a question of one being good and the other evil. But the mind must return to the body, the Fire must once again become Earth. The task of the yogin, like that of the alchemist, is to wash away the obscuring elements which come between the layers of experience. Matter, then, is never the issue; “stuff” is no problem. Instead, this partially explains the emphasis on ethics in both traditions. Patanjali describes the ethical adjuncts as means of purifying the mind.
One thing we learn through both Yoga and alchemy is that, much as found in physics, matter is basically made up of packets of energy. Going beyond physics, however, the yogin and alchemist learn to peer another layer down, to the non-spatial essence of matter and energy, to the lines blur between “matter” and “mind”. Again, this does not make “stuff” merely a trick of the light. Rather, we must take up a phenomenological approach or our understanding hits the brick wall of epistemological materialism. And here we come to find that just as the substance of matter is energy, the substance of energy is relationship, and the substance of relationship is experience. While Yoga’s is fundamentally a realist metaphysics, epistemology is where it borders on idealism: everything that exists, exists in experiential relationship, and if something cannot be experienced, it is incoherent to say that it exists.
In the Yogasutra, Patanjali instructs that the One, Prakrti, has two purposes: experience and liberation. We find that Yoga defines our most fundamental relationship as one of ignorance, of misunderstanding both “self” and “not-self” and how they relate to one another. If matter is, as Samkhya and Hermeticism describe, relational in substance and experiential in essence, it is the gestalt of our ideas and relationships to matter which causes problems and never matter itself. And the One’s dual function of experience and liberation means that matter, inclusive of your unique living body and brain, are the foundation for the entire spiritual process. Per the alchemist’s formula, it is only by visiting the interior of the Earth — descending into matter — that we may rectify ourselves and discover That which brings perfection.