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SANKHYA PSYCHOLOGY
(viveka) is the cause, obviously a sufficiency will be the end of the experience of suffering. Viveka makes it possible for the individual to distinguish between his own life-principle and the indifferent matter that flows around it.
The matter stops being active', furthermore, the moment one becoines identificd with puruşa; therefore prakặti in action through the guņas is compared to a dancing girl of the seraglio, who ceases dancing the moment the onlooker loses interest. She withdraws from the presence of the king when he becomes bored with her exhibition of the world's delights and pains. Working through the guņas, prakști exhibits the wonders that we know and love, or fcel as suffering, but the eye that gives cnergy to the spectacle is the all-illuminating eye of puruşa, and the moment this returns to itsell, the world-scene disappears.
Because the subtle matter of the inner organ assumes all the fornis presented to it by the senses, objects tend to give to the mind a shape or character and to leave on it an impression, or "memory," more or less permanent. Not only the shape of the object itself, but also the associated fcelings and thoughts, as well as the will and determination to act that it aroused, remain as vestiges, and these may be reanimated at a later date by the impingement of something new. In this way memories are excited, images of recollection aroused, and continuities of life-desire, fear, and manners of conduct founded. The psychological process is understood in Särkhya and Yoga, that is to say, in strictly mechanical terms. The unceasing agitation of transformation brought to pass in the inner organ through perception, emotion, thought, and will is not different in kind from the changes observable in the outer world. The transformations are material in both spheres, purely mechanical processes taking place in maitei, the sole difference being that in the outer world (which includes, of course, the body of the subject) the matter is gross whereas in the inner it is subtle.
This mechanistic formula is of the essence of the Sānkhya,
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