ABSTRACT
In his magnum opus Cognitive Anomalies, Consciousness and Yoga (2011), K. Ramakrisna Rao reviews both Eastern and Western approaches to understanding consciousness. In this, he develops a model of body-mindconsciousness relationships (a “BMC” or “Trident” model) that tries to find the points of convergence between Eastern dualism of the kind found in Samkhya Yoga philosophy and classical Eastern monism of the kind found in Advaita Vedanta. He also presents a very interesting point-bypoint comparison of his BMC Trident model with reflexive monism (RM), a psychological / philosophical analysis of the same relationships, viewed from a Western perspective, that I have developed over many years. Intriguingly, in spite of their being lodged in very different traditions, Rao finds many points of convergence between his own synthesis of Eastern philosophy/ psychology and reflexive monism – along with a few divergences. Given their very different points of departure, any genuine convergence between Eastern and Western understanding of body, mind and consciousness offers the promise of a more global synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. In the hope of furthering this project, I give my own analysis of some of these convergences and divergences below.
