Ardhanarishwar, there is purusha and there is prakriti, and these two are as separate as the clockmaker and the clock. Purusha is the soul, the Self, pure consciousness, and the only source of consciousness. The word literally means "man." Prakriti is that which is created. It is nature in all her aspects. Prakriti literally means "creatrix," the female creative energy. Unlike in the Western religions, purusha did not create prakriti; in fact, if given a choice, purusha would prefer to have never met prakriti at all. But purusha is responsible for prakriti becoming animated, alive. Some philosophy holds that there are countless individual purushas, each one infinite, eternal, omniscient, unchanging, and unchangeable. There is no single purusha that sits hierarchically above any others. There is no creator god, no puppet master pulling any strings. Since purusha is pure consciousness, it follows that prakriti is unconscious. Prakriti is everything that is changing. Prakriti is not just the physical aspects of the universe that we can sense; it is our very senses themselves - our thoughts, memories, desires, and even our intelligence. Prakriti is everything that is that isn't conscious. Consciousness resides only in purusha, or more properly, as purusha.

Purusha, pure and distant, is beyond subject and object. One cannot understand purusha, for that would make it an object. Purusha cannot know or understand anything either, for that would make purusha a subject. Purusha simply just is. But, because of the presence of prakriti, purusha gets attracted to nature in the way a man is attracted when he watches a beautiful woman dancing. He cannot help but try to get closer. And then the disaster occurs: purusha becomes trapped inside prakriti. Like Brer Rabbit when he touches the Tar Baby, purusha gets more and more entangled in prakriti. Soon purusha forgets that it was ever separate and ceases to struggle to regain its freedom. The union of purusha and prakriti was a horrible mistake. This unfortunate marriage should never have happened. The only remedy: a fast and thorough divorce! Like Brer Rabbit, the only way to be freed from the Tar Baby is to be thrown into the briar patch where we can scrape off prakriti and finally free ourselves. The briar patch is the practice of yoga.  The yoga of the Yoga Sutra is about getting a divorce, as quickly as possible. If you don't do it now, you will have to come back again and again, suffering countless new lives, until you finally get that divorce and are free at last. Purusha is easy to comprehend; we all seem to have an instinctive or intuitive understanding of the concept of soul or consciousness, even if we cannot describe it exactly. But prakriti is a bit more foreign. What is prakriti made of? Let's take a closer look at the underlying strands of prakriti.