Sutra 1.24

क्लेशकर्मविपाकाशयैरपरामृष्टः पुरुषविशेष ईश्वरः

kleśa karma vipāka-āśayaiḥ-aparāmr̥ṣṭaḥ puruṣa-viśeṣa īśvaraḥ

Ishvara is a special aspect of your individual consciousness that exists in perfect unity with the indivisible cosmic totality—untouched by the afflictions of ignorance, the ego, craving, aversion, and attachment, the actions driven by these afflictions, the consequences of these actions, or the impressions these actions leave in your personality traits, habits, and conditioned behaviors.

The consequences of your past actions.

actions, fruits of actions and impressions

kleśa = afflictions

karma = actions, causes

vipāka = the fruits of actions, effects

āśayaiḥ = resting place, impressions

aparāmr̥ṣṭaḥ = untouched

puruṣa = Self, Atman, Consciousness, Spirit

viśeṣa = special

īśvaraḥ = God

Source: Wikipedia: Samkhya

Puruṣa (पुरुष, “consciousness”) is the transcendental self or pure consciousness. It is absolute, independent, free, imperceptible, unknowable through other agencies, above any experience by mind or senses and beyond any words or explanations. It remains pure, “nonattributive consciousness”. Puruṣa is neither produced nor does it produce. It is held that unlike Advaita-vedānta and like Purva-mīmāṃsā, Sāṃkhya believes in plurality of the puruṣas.

Source: bhagavadgitausa.com: Kashmir Saivism

Purusa: The limited individual and the subject with five straitjackets 7-11. Trika philosophy depicts, “Purusa is Siva, who subjected Himself to the Kancukas” according to Tagare. Siva limits Himself so much to become Purusa that it is like a huge mountain reducing itself to an atom (anu). Anu has no spatial connotation but is a referent to Siva’s limited capacity in Purusa as avowed before. Just imagine a professor of English literature suffering a stroke, becoming limited in memory and ability and relearning his alphabets in his rehabilitation. The individual soul is the watered-down version of Sadasiva (Tattva 3), where in he is the enjoyer or experiencer and the subjective manifestation of Aham asmi idam (I am the experience) of Vidya Tattva. These limitations are Antahstha, which is the internal state of limitation, a condition wherein the Kancukas stand in the way.

Source: Ancient Indian Wisdom: Vāstu-puruṣa-maṇḍala

Puruṣa Generally meaning ‘person’ is the word of Vedic origin and derived from the Sāṅkhya ideology, to distinguish the principle of life and consciousness from inanimate but evolving Prakrti (Lakshmi-tantra 16,15). In the traditional texts, the word signifies godhead, usually Viṣṇu. Etymologically, the meaning would be “the spirit that is hidden in the body” (puri śete), the spirit that fills the universe and makes it complete (Pratima-kosha, P.88). In the Pāñcaratra texts, Puruṣa is mentioned as one of the five ‘powers’ of godhead (pañca-sakti: pārameśṭhi, puruṣa, viśva, nivṛtti, and sarva). Purusha is the power that manifests itself as the world (jaganmayi) (cf. Nāradiya-saṃhitā, 15, 122).

What is Īśvara?

According to Hindu philosophy (the Vaisheshika school), every effect must have its cause. This world, being an effect, must be preceded by a cause, and this cause is Īśvara. This cause we cannot see, because Īśvara has no visible body, not because it does not exist. Īśvara is creation. Īśvara fashioned this universe out of the ever-existing atoms. Sometimes Īśvara furthers the disintegration of atoms and at other times Īśvara initiates the constructive process of integration and unification of atoms.

It’s amazing to me how close this ancient philosophy got to what modern science knows today: Matter can neither be created nor destroyed and everything that we are, everything that we know, all of the matter in the entire universe, was once condensed into a single point, when 13.7 billion years ago, the Big Bang began the process of separating the whole into its parts.

13.7 billion years after the Big Bang, human consciousness allows us to understand that every atom in our bodies is billions of years old. The hydrogen and helium atoms in our body are nearly as old as the Big Bang itself. It only took a few hundred thousand years for these first atoms to form from the rapidly expanding dark plasma that filled the universe. The rest of the atoms in our body are only about a billion years younger than that. It took a billion or so years, after the first atoms formed, for gravity to organize them into galaxies of stars. Then there was light, the Cosmic Dawn. The light was stellar fusion, stars forging new atoms from hydrogen and helium. 

Our own sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant cloud of hydrogen and helium. Bits of gas and dust expelled during the sun’s birth circled around it for 60 million years, gradually gathering together, gaining in size with each collision, until our own little clump of atoms, the Earth, was formed. Our planet is is 4 1/2 billion years old and for 4 1/2 billion years, our planet’s atoms, have cycled through everything and everyone on Earth.

“Every time you breathe in, you’re breathing atoms of air that were once inside another human being. Every time you take a drink of water, you’re drinking water that was once inside another human being. And every bite of food you take consists of atoms that were inside another person. We all share the same planet, the same biosphere, and — at a fundamental level — even the same atoms.

“At an atomic level, we’re all incredibly deeply connected. Inside your body, right now, are hundreds of billions of atoms that were once inside each other human being on Earth. Throughout the generations and the aeons, those same atoms continue to make up everything: the atoms of the dinosaurs, the plants, the trilobites, and even the single-celled organisms that once dominated our planet are now inside you.”

Everything in the universe, including the unique collection of atoms that compose each of us, was once condensed into a single point of infinite density and unimaginable heat. 

Īśvara ignited the Big Bang, setting creation in motion and triggering the series of events that led to this moment, with this particular arrangement of the atoms, but Īśvara remains untouched by all of that. 

Īśvara is a level of consciousness that is untouched by kleśa, karma, vipāka and āśayaiḥ (attitudes or actions, how our attitudes and actions impact our lives and our sense of who we are, all the pitfalls of human consciousness).

kleśa = afflictions

According to Buddhist psychology, mind is fundamentally pure but it is compromised by unhelpful attitudes known as kleśa that stand in the way of spiritual practice and obstruct wisdom:

  1. greed (lobha),
  2. hate (dosa),
  3. delusion (moha),
  4. conceit (māna),
  5. speculative views (ditthi),
  6. skeptical doubt (vicikicchā),  
  7. mental torpor (thīna),
  8. restlessness (uddhacca);
  9. shamelessness (ahirika),
  10. lack of moral dread or unconscientiousness (anottappa).”

In Mahayana Buddhism it refers to “afflictions” or “vices”

There are two types of kleśa:

  1. inner attachment (ādhyātmikasaṅga); doubt (vicikitsā), pride (māna), etc.
  2. outer attachment (bāhyasaṅga); lust (rāga), hatred (dveṣa), etc.

Ignorance (avidyā) is both inner and outer.

Another list of “six defilements”:

  1. rāga (passion),
  2. pratigha (repulsion),
  3. māna (conceit),
  4. avidyā (ignorance),
  5. kudṛṣṭi (bad view),
  6. vicikitsā (doubt).

karma = actions, causes

Karma (कर्म).—The activities which veil the inherent nature of the soul. They are of eight types: knowledge-obscuring, intuition-obscuring, misery and pleasure experiencing, deluding, life span determining, physique making, status determining and obstruction.

vipāka = the fruits of actions, effects

āśayaiḥ = resting place, impressions

‘stock’ or ‘the balance of the fruits of previous works, which lie stored up in the mind in the form of mental deposits of merit or demerit, until they ripen in the individual soul’s own experience into rank, years, and enjoyment’

aparāmr̥ṣṭaḥ = untouched

puruṣa = Self, Atman, Consciousness, Spirit

viśeṣa = special

īśvaraḥ = God

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