While the scientific investigation of consciousness is a nascent field, a few decades old (Crick and Koch, 1992), the investigation of consciousness from a philosophical and experiential standpoint has been carried on for many millennia. Notably, many schools of Eastern philosophical and contemplative traditions like Yoga and Buddhism have not only engaged in rigorous experiential inquiry of consciousness spanning at least a few thousand years, but also embedded elements of such inquiry into their soteriological goals. Recent work has elaborated how certain Buddhist meditation traditions may inform a study of consciousness (Lutz et al., 2007, 2008; Grabovac et al., 2011; Josipovic, 2014). However, there is currently little understanding of consciousness from the standpoint of a tradition whose initial development likely predates and influenced the historical Buddha, whose subsequent development interacted heavily with development of Buddhist contemplative practices (Bronkhorst, 1993; Kalupahana, 1994; Sarbacker, 2006; Wynne, 2007; Gray, 2016), and which continues to be alive in the present day. I refer to the Tantric tradition of Yoga¹, which involves manipulating consciousness through meditation practice with the soteriological goal of experientially “realizing” consciousness in its “purest” or primordial essence (Gray, 2016). Here, I attempt to outline the psycho-philosophy of Tantric Yoga, and some of its associated practices used in attaining such “realization.” I use for specificity, praxis from a living Tantric Yoga tradition, namely Ananda Marga, whose literature also offers philosophical advances to the age-old Samkhya philosophy (Anandamurti, 1998) that historically formed the bases of Yoga (Bharati, 2001; Burley, 2006). Situating Tantric Yoga practices and their outcomes within both traditional philosophy and a phenomenological model of cognition, I discuss how they could inform contemporary inquiry into consciousness.

By most accounts, consciousness comprises the object present in consciousness (i.e., what one is conscious of) and the subjective aspects (the who that is conscious of that object) (Bliss, 1917; Bakan, 1958). As tasks for manipulating the former are relatively more straightforward, most theories of consciousness are developed to account for the object of consciousness (e.g., (Graziano and Webb, 2015; Dehaene et al., 2017; Brown et al., 2019). Recently, several authors have proposed that altered meditative states could be used to manipulate and study the subjective or subject-object interaction aspects of consciousness (Berkovich-Ohana and Glicksohn, 2014; Metzinger, 2020; Josipovic, 2021), though more clarity is needed in terms of the specific phenomenology of such states and the practices used to arrive at them.

There have been a few previous attempts at elaborating specific meditative traditions/practices with regards to how they can contribute to an empirical study of consciousness. For example, Wallace (Wallace, 1999) described the phenomenology of the Buddhist tradition of shamatha, or concentrated meditation practices where gradually deeper concentration is described as allowing meditators to examine consciousness—particularly, its subjective and pre-reflective attributes—in a more refined manner. Subsequently, Lutz et al. (2007) detailed Buddhist meditation practices and described three broad categories of practices: (1) those that involve developing single pointed concentration on a meditated object (or, focused attention), (2) those that involve cultivating a faculty of meta-awareness not directed toward any specific object to gain insight into a background awareness upon which mental activity transpires (open presence), and (3) those involving feeling loving-kindness toward others that is not directed toward a specific individual or a group of people (non-referential compassion). Of these, they propose the second one as particularly relevant to the study of consciousness because it involves de-emphasizing to varying degrees, first, the object of consciousness, and subsequently, a subjective feeling of possessing a sense of self (Josipovic, 2014; Dor-Ziderman et al., 2016). This kind of experiential reduction is proposed to result in advanced cases in ‘non-dual’ states, where the subject-object structure of consciousness itself be eliminated. While Wallace (1999) and Lutz et al. (2007) were influenced primarily by Tibetan Buddhism, similar descriptions of the three categories of practices have also been presented from the perspective of a contemporary Theravada Buddhist tradition (Grabovac et al., 2011). These descriptions have been accompanied by studies investigating neural correlates of self-reduced or non-dual states in long-term meditators (e.g., Josipovic, 2014; Dor-Ziderman et al., 2016) and have been followed by recent theoretical work on the possibilities and implications of the idea of a non-dual or minimal consciousness on consciousness research (Metzinger, 2020; Josipovic, 2021).

So far, the use of meditation as an empirical method to study consciousness has mainly focused on Buddhist contemplative traditions (except, see Shear and Jevning, 1999). Despite the importance of manipulating and deducing aspects of consciousness in Yogic meditation traditions, little work has been done toward understanding how these schools may contribute toward an understanding of consciousness. One reason for the lack of understanding Yogic descriptions of consciousness is their heavy reliance on epistemologies that have not been efficiently translated into contemporary frameworks of cognition.

Recently, researchers have attempted to develop an understanding of how the Yogic system of philosophy (which also forms the basis for Tantric Yoga epistemology), namely Samkhya philosophy, could inform contemporary research on cognition and consciousness (Sedlmeier and Srinivas, 2016; Tripathi and Bharadwaj, 2021). Samkhya is considered to be one of the oldest philosophical systems in the world (Raju, 1985). According to Samkhya, mind and matter are a composite of two primordial essences. One, a ‘‘ground’’ consciousness, known as Purusha, which is the witnessing counterpart of mind and matter, but is in itself devoid of any mental or physical activity. And second, an operative or energetic principle (Prakriti) that ‘‘activates’’ Purusha to transpire physical and mental activity².

From the perspective of conscious experience, the intuition behind the two essences, Purusha and Prakriti, is that the former accounts for the fact that there is consciousness at all, while the latter accounts for the contents of experience. A metaphor sometimes used to illustrate the two Samkhya components is that Purusha is the light illuminating the room while Prakriti accounts for the contents of the room. Prakriti is proposed to further comprise three qualifying principles or gunas, namely, sattva, rajas and tamas that activate Purusha. Sattva is said to engender “desirable” mental qualities like equanimity, compassion, benevolent intellect, and spiritual curiosity. Tamas, at the opposite end, is said to make the mind dull, inactive, or lazy. Rajas is said to make the mind active, both in a positive (i.e., sattvic) sense of a drive to pursue one’s life purpose and a negative (tamasic) sense of anxious or uncontrollable mental activity. Rajas is thus considered as positioned between Sattva and Tamas. Each individual’s mind is theorized as a collection of the three gunas in varying degrees. In the historical Samkhya model of the mind elaborated by Sedlmeier and Srinivas (2016), the mind is functionally composed of three elements; a ‘sense mind’ that perceives sensory information, the ‘ego mind’ that attaches the perception to the individual’s sense of self, and the ‘intellectual mind’ that reacts to the information. They also mention that the purpose of a yogi is to make the mind gradually more sattvic through meditation, though it is not clear how this process may be achieved. More broadly, it is also not currently clear if and how Yogic meditation states inform the Samkhya framework and whether such a framework in turn informs consciousness studies? In other words, is the use of the Samkhya framework for Yogic meditation simply historical baggage from a time when philosophical understanding lacked present-day sophistication, or is there something about specific meditation states that phenomenologically conforms to the Samkhya model in a way that would make it relevant for contemporary theories of consciousness? In the following sections, I address these points in light of a living Tantric Yoga tradition, namely Ananda Marga. I choose this specific tradition because Ananda Marga’s preceptor, Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti)³, offers theoretical developments to the Yogic Samkhya model that map it to specific structures of consciousness, along with laying down precise meditation practices to induce states that purportedly make these structures of consciousness amenable to experiential reduction⁴ and thereby analytical deduction (Anandamurti, 1970, 1998).

I first clarify the terms Tantra and Yoga in the context of this paper as they are often used in a variety of different ways (Gray, 2016; Mallinson and Singleton, 2017), most of which are not relevant to this paper. The terms Tantra and Yoga can be traced back to written texts from at least fifth century CE (Gray, 2016) and fifth to third century BCE (Flood, 1996), respectively; though oral traditions refer back to much further back in time (Mallinson and Singleton, 2017; Bjonnes, 2018).

Vastly different traditions and systems of practice come under the broad category of Tantra (White, 2000; Gray, 2016). However, from the perspective of meditation practices (especially in relation to the exploration of consciousness), the common feature of these practices is contemplating something subtle (like the idea of a transcendental or a non-local consciousness) through a relatively gross or embodied form (e.g., a deity/Guru, a geometric pattern or yantra, a sound or mantra). In expounding Ananda Marga tantric practices, Sarkar offers a definition of Tantra based on its Sanskrit etymology (Anandamurti, 1994b). Sanskrit is an ancient language whose word constructions are an amalgamation of root sounds or words. Thus, by deriving the definition of Tantra from its linguistic roots, Sarkar intends to imbue Tantra with a primordial semantic essence that may have been lost in its transformation through the ages. The word Tantra is etymologically derived in two ways. One, where the word root ta(m) means mental staticity (much like its use in the word tamas, above), and second from the word root tan, which means expansion. In both cases, the word root tra means emancipation, or release from. According to Sarkar, Tantra is thus a system of practices that liberate the mind from mental staticity or that help expand the mind to the point that it is liberated from “mundane bondages” (Anandamurti, 1994b).

The word Yoga also appears in traditional texts with multiple definitions (Mallinson and Singleton, 2017; Bjonnes, 2018). Probably the most popular definition is the one appearing in the classical Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, dated between 400 BCE and 300 CE. This definition states, ‘Yogas chitta vrtti nirodhah’ (Bharati, 2001; Desmarais, 2008; Bærentsen, 2015), roughly translating to, Yoga is the ability to control mental fluctuations. Another definition that appears in a later text called the Jnana Samkalini Tantra, states ‘Sarvachintaparityago nishchinto yoga uchyate’ (Prajnanananda, 2010), or Yoga is a state where the mind is free from all thoughts. A third definition of Yoga is ‘Samyoga yoga ityukto jiivatmaa Paramatmanah’ or Yoga is the unification of individual consciousness with Cosmic Consciousness (i.e., individual Purusa or jiiva with the Cosmic Purusa or Parama Purusha)⁵. This definition is thought to have first appeared in the text Yoga Yajnavalkya, estimated between 2nd century BCE and 4th century CE (Divanji, 1953; Mohan, 2000), though Sarkar attributes its existence to oral traditions much longer (Anandamurti, 1994a).

In his exposition of Yoga praxis, Sarkar, utilizes this third definition of Yoga, which he suggests is the one that most conforms with the etymological essence of the word Yoga (Anandamurti, 1994b). According to him, the word Yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root yunj, literally meaning union or unification (which are also derived from a similar Indo-Latin root). Moreover, this third definition corresponds to a non-dualistic interpretation of Samkhya in contrast from Patanjali’s dualistic view (Schweizer, 1993; Tripathi and Bharadwaj, 2021), which conforms with Tantric styles of Yoga (Anandamurti, 1970, 1998)⁶.

As mentioned above, in traditional Samkhya philosophy, the action of Prakriti on Purusha leads to the intellectual, ego, and sense mind (Sedlmeier and Srinivas, 2016; Tripathi and Bharadwaj, 2021). Here, Purusha is the underlying “ground” consciousness upon which all mental activity transpires. In this sense within conscious experience, the mind is defined as any kind of expression, movement or activity upon Purusha (this is a critical point of difference between the Samkhya model of cognition and contemporary cognitive psychology, where in the latter everything within conscious experience would be considered mind).

In his philosophical works, Sarkar further builds upon the Samkhya model by proposing that the three gunas influence Purusha to engender a hierarchy of structures of consciousness from subjectivity to objectivity. To illustrate this, he considers how an awake conscious experience presents itself to the first-person as expressed in their verbal description of it, and divides it into different experiential subcomponents (Anandamurti, 1998). He considers as an example, the statement “I am reading a book” (Figure 1A). Here, ‘‘book’’ is the object of consciousness. Sarkar describes the mental object as the ‘‘shape’’ taken by the ‘‘object portion’’ of the mind, which he labels citta⁷ . The mental act of ‘‘I am reading,’’ and in general any mental action, he attributes to ahamtattva or ego portion of the mind, what he sometimes calls the ‘‘doer I’’ (aham literally means ego, and tattva means essence). Next, he proposes that implicit within the mental action is the subjective quality of being someone who in turn performs the action. This existential feeling is immanent in the phrase ‘‘I am,’’ where the subject of experience possesses a feeling that ‘‘I exist irrespective of what I do’’ (i.e., irrespective of the action performed by ahamtattva). Sarkar calls this aspect of the subject, mahattattva or the portion of the mind that gives an individual an ‘‘I’’ feeling or a feeling that ‘‘I exist’’ (mahat means great). Finally, he proposes that there is a further sense of phenomenological duality inherent in the conscious feeling of ‘‘I exist,’’ where ‘‘I exist’’ or ‘‘I am’’ comprise two separate structures of consciousness; one an unqualified ‘‘I’’ and second the property that qualifies the ‘‘I’’ into experiencing itself. In other words, implicit within mahattattva (or ‘‘I am’’) is a pure essence of ‘‘I,’’ which he also calls the witnessing consciousness or the ‘‘knower I’’ (i.e., the ‘‘I’’ that knows that ‘‘I exist’’) that is transcendental to mental activity. The reason he considers this ‘‘I’’ as transcendental is that it is devoid of even basic self-reflectivity and is thus not accessible as a conscious experience (and in that sense could be considered metaphysical or metempirical). It is upon this non-reflectable ‘‘I’’ that all mental experience (including the reflected sense of ‘‘I am’’) is said to transpire. To summarize, according to this framework, a conscious experience comprises three potentially dissociable aspects of the subjectivity -- a pure witnessing consciousness, a sense of existential feeling to the individual, the doing portion of the mind - in addition to the mental object⁸.

Sarkar then connects the above dissociated structures of consciousness to the Samkhya framework (Figure 1B). He equates the witnessing “I” to purusha (also commonly known as atman). He proposes that mahattattva or the “I exist” aspect of the mind emerges by the activity of sattvaguna upon Purusha (specifically, by the metamorphosis of purusha by sattvaguna into mahattattva). Next, the activity of action-oriented rajoguna (the conjuncted word for rajas + guna) upon mahattattva results in the ahamtattva, the doing aspect of the mind. Finally, the activity of the static tamoguna (tamas + guna) upon ahamtattva results in citta or the mental object, which by nature is static. Through this formulation, he provides a systematic cognitive extension to the Samkhya framework.

Sarkar’s philosophy outlined above implies a systematic dissociation of the components of consciousness culminating in what is considered the transcendent. The first-person experience of dissociating these components in consciousness is said to have transformative existential implications to the experiencer and in their relationship to others, central to the Tantric Yoga goal of self-realization⁹. Specifically, the three mental cognitive structures--namely the mental object (citta), mental doership (ahamtattva), and the existential aspect of mind (mahattattva)--induce different types of differentiations and dualities in consciousness. These differentiations within consciousness prevent the realization of the ‘‘true essence’’ of consciousness, which is free from all ‘‘bondages’’ and suffering, and is by nature transcendental and ‘‘infinitely blissful’’ (ananda)¹⁰. The differentiations and dualities are said to be reduced and gradually eliminated through a systematized set of meditation practices (known as sadhana) leading the practitioner to the undifferentiated or non-dual stance of consciousness (purusha). In his seminal 1955 work, Ananda Marga: Elementary Philosophy, Sarkar describes how the three stages of differentiation are eliminated stepwise (Anandamurti, 1998):

In other words, according to Sarkar, the first stage of sadhana involves suspending or “converting” the citta into ahamtattva. The second stage involves converting the ahamtattva into mahattattva. And finally, mahattattva into purusha. Additionally, in this passage, he also offers a cognitive definition for what are historically considered the two most advanced states of absorption in Yoga, namely savikalpa and nirvikalpa samadhi (Bharati, 2001). I elaborate on this in the next section about praxis.

I offer a joint traditional, cognitive, and a praxis-based account of Tantric Yoga meditation states. I do so by first using traditional Samkhya philosophy and its recent developments by Sarkar to arrive at what may be considered a theoretical phenomenological dissociation of structures of consciousness into the mental object (citta), the sense of performing a mental act upon the object (ahamtattva), an existential feeling invariant of the mental act and object (matattattva), and a proposed meta-empirical transcendental stance (atman) (Anandamurti, 1998). I then offer an account of the Ananda Marga Tantric Yoga practices that are used to translate this theoretical dissociation into a practical dissociation to validate the theory in the first-person. I briefly discuss the implications of the present work on consciousness research.

Citta and ahamttatva have clear parallels in contemporary consciousness studies. Citta can be considered synonymous with the contents of consciousness, which include both sensory (exteroceptive, interoceptive, or proprioceptive) and conceptual (thoughts, memories, emotions) objects. Ahamtattva includes among other features a sense of agency and ownership in relation to one’s actions, body and mental contents in general. Both topics are extensively studied in cognitive science. Recent work moreover relates the two by positing the sense of agency or ownership as a higher-order cognitive process making (Bayesian) probabilistic predictions about (lower-order) sensorimotor contingencies (Hohwy, 2015). When it comes to the contents of consciousness, current research paradigms typically operate by manipulating the availability of sensory stimuli to perceptual awareness — i.e., when stimuli that become perceptually aware versus when they do not (e.g., backward masking, threshold detection, or visual illusions such as binocular rivalry). However, in such paradigms even when a subject lacks awareness of a sensory stimulus, it is not as if they are not aware of anything at all; they would, for example, still be aware of the background upon which the stimulus is presented. In other words, there is still an object present in consciousness, like the stimulus background or mask. Such paradigms thus tacitly assume that consciousness is equivalent to the object in consciousness and do not address the possibility of reducing (or removing) objectivity itself from consciousness. In recent years, several researchers have proposed the use of meditation-induced states of consciousness to investigate an “objectless” awareness (Lutz et al., 2007; Josipovic, 2014; Vago and Zeidan, 2016; Srinivasan, 2020), “awareness of awareness” (Gamma and Metzinger, 2021; Sparby and Sacchet, 2022), “pure consciousness” (Metzinger, 2020) or “consciousness as such” (Josipovic, 2021). The present work contributes to this literature by outlining a traditionally inspired cognitive framework for such states, which in turn enables an understanding of the heterogeneity of them. For example, the present work suggests that it may be appropriate to label such states in a graded manner as “object-reduced states” (e.g., Figures 2D–H) with very specific potential states being truly objectless [see Josipovic (2021) for how different objectless states may be phenomenologically approached by different meditation techniques]. Such an approach could potentially help achieve common ground and allow us to make sense of states from different traditions in relation to how they inform consciousness studies. A more practical consequence of this idea of object-reduced consciousness is that studies of such states would be better of using continuous qualitative scales (Dor-Ziderman et al., 2016; Katyal and Goldin, 2021a) rather than treating them as categorical (i.e., with object vs. objectless) as is done in neuroimaging designs using block-based contrasts (e.g., Josipovic, 2014; Winter et al., 2020). As with previous work on other meditation techniques (Lutz et al., 2019; Pagnoni, 2019), practices involving reduction of citta and ahamtattva could be understood mechanistically in terms of active-inference-based accounts of predictive processing. According to such accounts, higher-order cognitive processes are proposed to generate predictions about lower-order sensorimotor contingencies and the mismatch in such predictions act as signals that impel an agent to act upon the world to improve the accuracy of future predictions (Friston, 2010). Experiential co-reduction of citta and ahamtattva may work by withholding top-down propagation of predictions through so-called “meditative non-action” (Pagnoni, 2019). Our recent study offers a promising step in investigating this idea (Katyal and Goldin, 2021b). We recruited long-term Tantric Yoga practitioners and matched controls who reported their perception on a binocular rivalry stimulus before and after a period of meditation while measuring EEG. During binocular rivalry, separate images are presented to the two eyes, and individuals typically perceive only one eye’s image at a time alternately with the other image every few seconds. We found that following meditation (that involved a combination of reducing citta and ahamtattva), the long-term meditators had prolonged periods of perceiving a mixture of two eye’s stimuli. Moreover, the change in mixed percept durations following meditation correlated negatively with gamma-band phase-synchronization between parietal and occipital sites, suggesting a mechanism based in decoupling of lower-order sensory regions from higher-order regions where perceptual interpretations supposedly take place (Kleinschmidt et al., 2012). Follow-up studies could combine refined qualitative methods to understand how meditator’s are phenomenologically approaching the mental object (here the rivalry stimulus) combined with neural and behavioral investigation to further understand mechanisms of reduced object and mental activity aspects of consciousness.

Reduction in object- and mental-action-related aspects of consciousness raise a critical question with regards to theories of consciousness. Is there a residual aspect of consciousness beyond these two aspects? Despite a plethora of popular consciousness theories (Graziano and Webb, 2015; Dehaene et al., 2017; Brown et al., 2019), none of them explicitly discuss such an aspect of consciousness. As mentioned above, such an idea is however consistently being discussed in recent theoretical work inspired by meditation traditions (Dunne et al., 2019; Srinivasan, 2020; Josipovic, 2021). For example, Dunne et al. (2019) use the Buddhist Mahamudra literature to propose the idea of a “non-propositional meta-awareness,” which they claim is “the aspect of consciousness that persists even after explicit focus on an object is dropped” (Dunne et al., 2019). They differentiate this aspect of consciousness from the kind of meta-awareness typically studied in psychology, which is propositional in nature with regards to mental content and is active only intermittently (e.g., a meta-awareness like: “I am [/am not] reading right now”). Conversely, non-propositional meta-awareness is a sustained phenomenal quality that runs in the background evaluating how one attends to the world. More recently, Metzinger (2020) has proposed that this kind of a background awareness (what he calls a “minimal phenomenal experience”) may be a Bayesian representation of basic bodily processes involved in tonic alertness. Josipovic (2021), on the other hand, proposes such an awareness to be non-representational in nature. An alternative way of conceiving reports ‘minimal phenomenal’ experiences (Shear and Jevning, 1999; Gamma and Metzinger, 2021) based on the present framework could be that they lie along a spectrum of the amount of minimal representational content (such as tonic alertness) present in consciousness combined with a non-representational object-absent aspect of consciousness. And, when the content is fully reduced, the result is a purely non-representational conscious state akin to Savikalpa Samadhi. Testing such a framework, while challenging, is not impossible, would require combining advances in first- and third-person approaches. For example, recent promising work on decoding mental representations using neuroimaging (e.g., Gilboa and Moscovitch, 2021) could be combined with refined empirical phenomenological methods like micro-phenomenology that help participants gain access to pre-reflective aspects of experience (Petitmengin et al., 2018; Kordes et al., 2019) that a participant may have overlooked while reporting a minimal phenomenal experience (like the duality between me and my body).

Finally, in the above account, the idea of atman as attained during Nirvikalpa Samadhi is absent any experience (and is thus meta-empirical). While this implies that the possibility of atman is not amenable to reflective (or pre-reflective) empirical inquiry, there are still empirical questions in need of study. According to anecdotal accounts, Nirvikalpa Samadhi induces in the physical body a state similar to rigor mortis (or postmortem rigidity), the third stage of death characterized by a stiffening of muscles (e.g., Pranavatmakananda, 2017, Chapter 14, Para 3; see https://osf.io/c4uht/ for a video document; Devashish, 2012). However, unlike postmortem where this state onsets after ∼4 h, it onsets soon after samadhi, and unlike postmortem the meditator “returns to life” after the samadhi ends. Such a claim warrants empirical observation, and if proven would raise the philosophical questions about possibility of a “transcendental” state beyond conscious experience.

It should also be noted that, in Tantric Yoga, the experience of pure consciousness (mahattattva) is considered different from pure consciousness itself (atman) in that the latter is devoid of experience. In the context of current literature on meditation-induced non-dual conscious states (e.g., Josipovic, 2021), this may be a feature unique to this meditation tradition. However, it is possible that other traditions also have similar concepts [e.g., the final state of emptiness (sunyata) in some Buddhist schools or the final state of fanaa in Sufism may also be one empty of experience]. Future cross-traditional work where academic experts from many different traditions collaborate with experts in philosophy of mind (e.g., Siderits et al., 2011), could help arrive at the generalizability of the structures of consciousness elaborated in the present framework more broadly beyond this tradition.

In summary, first-person inquiry of advanced Tantric Yoga meditation states may offer key insights into consciousness and its components. At the same time, Tantric Yoga practices may offer a unique method for a systematic manipulation of consciousness that can aid its empirical study in ways that have not yet been amenable to inquiry in cognitive science.

Consciousness comprises a subject-object structure involving a mental action or attitude starting from the “subjective pole” upon an object of experience. “Objectless” meditation states are proposed as means to study subjective aspects of consciousness where the object of consciousness has been experientially reduced. Much of this work has been done using Buddhist meditation traditions. Another ancient Indian tradition of meditation, namely Tantric Yoga, also involves a rigorous manipulation of the subject-object structure of consciousness. Currently little is understood about how precise Tantric Yoga meditation practices could aid the study of subjective aspects of consciousness. In this paper, I expound on philosophical insight and practical procedures from a living Tantric Yoga tradition of Ananda Marga in relation to how they inform our understanding of consciousness. Specifically, Ananda Marga’s preceptor, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, offers philosophical developments to the ancient Indian philosophical system of Samkhya, in a way that aids contemporary understanding of consciousness in its subject-object structure. Tantric practices taught by Sarkar are then developed in this framework to allow a meditator to gradually reduce from experience the object of consciousness followed by different aspects of subjectivity. The presented work is discussed in light of existing literature on meditation and consciousness research.

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.