Purusa

 Now if anybody makes the mistake of thinking that he lives at the same time in the basement and on the fourth story, that he is the purusa himself, he is crazy.  He is what the German very aptly calls verruckt, carried off his feet up to somewhere else.  He just sits up there and spins.  We are allowed to behold only the purusa, to behold his feet up there.  But we are not the purusa; that is a symbol that expresses the impersonal process.  The self is something exceedingly impersonal, exceedingly objective.  If you function in your self you are not yourself – that is what you feel.  You have to do it as if you were a stranger: you will buy as if you did not buy; you will sell as if you did not sell.  Or, as St. Paul expresses it, “But it is not I that lives, it is Christ that liveth in me,” meaning that his life had become an objective life, not his own life but the life of a greater one, the purusa.  TPoKY 40

You see, values, convictions, general ideas are psychical facts that are nowhere to be met with in natural science.  One cannot catch them with a butterfly net, nor can one find them under microscopes.  They become visible only in anahata.  Now according to tantric yoga, the purusa is first seen in anahata: the essence of man, the supreme man, the so-called primordial man then becomes visible.  So purusa is identical with the psychical substance of thought and value, feeling.  In the recognition of feelings and of ideas one sees the purusa.  That is the first inkling of a being within your psychological or psychical existence that is not yourself – a being in which you are contained, which is greater and more important than you but which has an entirely psychical existence.  TPoKY 46