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There Is No Real God In The Sankhya Philosophy

There are persons who are selfish, who have experienced life in the world as full of misery, who believe in rational intelligence and follow the methods of observation and generalization as in science. The difference is that science does not go beyond data collected and verified by the five senses; while these Sankhya philosophers under take subtler generalizations based on the subtle truths perceived by yogic methods of concentration. Their ultimate conclusions are:

There are two eternal existential categories – consciousness and matter.

There are innumerable ‘consciousnesses’ (conscious entities) called purushas.

All matter, gross and subtle, is unified in an indiscreet matrix called prakriti.

This indiscreet prakriti functions in the presence of the purushas and evolves into the world. Its purpose is to give experiences (enjoyment) to the purushas and then to release them into a state of kaivalya or moksha.

Kaivalya or moksha means conscious dissociation from prakriti. Man is miserable because of his wrong identification with the evolutes of prakriti from gross matter up to buddhi (the faculty of intelligence). So moksha consists in conscious dissociation from prakriti – leaving it to work for others. Such an individual (the mukta) is free from the possibility of misery.

The Sankhyas do not know whether there is anything called ananda, or bliss, apart from release from the possibility of duhkha, or sorrow.

There is no real God in the Sankhya philosophy. They say, ‘If God is perfect why should He create this universe? If God is imperfect He cannot create it.’ They accept a ruler god, omniscient and omnipotent for all time – that individual, who, instead of enjoying his separation from prakriti, identifies himself with prakriti in its entirety rather than with its individualized evolutes. So he gets the power to direct the affairs of the world.

So the Sankhyas do not get stuck with the five organs like the scientists, but are confounded by the buddhi which results in this purushaprakriti separation. They say, ‘The purusha has no sukha-duhkha (happiness or misery)’, and yet they posit the difference in individual perception of sukha-duhkha as proof of the existence of (an infinite number of) different purushas! This means that they are not able to remove the ‘my’ factor from consciousness.