Consciousness, Cognition, And Selfhood: A Dialogue Between The Yogavāsiṣṭha And Western Psychological Thought

Abstract

This article develops a comparative dialogue between the Yogavāsiṣṭha and major strands of Western psychological thought concerning consciousness, cognition, and selfhood. The Yogavāsiṣṭha presents mind not merely as an inner faculty but as a world-forming movement shaped by intention (saṅkalpa), latent dispositions (vāsanā), memory, and misidentification. Western psychology, by contrast, has approached mind through psychoanalytic, cognitive, humanistic, phenomenological, neuroscientific, and predictive-processing frameworks. Using a qualitative, conceptual-comparative method, the study examines five points of contact: the constructed character of the personal self, the role of habitual conditioning, the relation between cognition and suffering, the importance of meta-awareness, and the possibility of psychological transformation. The analysis finds substantial functional convergence between the Yogavāsiṣṭha’s account of vāsanā-driven experience and contemporary ideas of schemas, automatic thought, self-models, and predictive inference. It also identifies an important affinity between the text’s practice of witnessing mental events and modern concepts such as decentering, mindfulness, and cognitive defusion. However, the traditions remain philosophically distinct. The Yogavāsiṣṭha treats consciousness as foundational and liberation as recognition of non-dual awareness, whereas most Western psychological theories remain methodologically naturalistic and define successful change in terms of adaptation, symptom reduction, agency, or well-being. The article argues that a responsible dialogue should preserve these differences rather than collapse them into superficial equivalence. Such a dialogue can enrich contemporary psychology by supplying a process-oriented account of selfhood, a refined vocabulary of conditioning, and an ethically grounded model of freedom from compulsive identification.