Sutra 1) Austerity, study, and the dedication of the fruits of one’s work in God: these are the preliminary steps toward yoga.
The first chapter of the Sutras were devoted to the aims of yoga, now Patanjali begins with a chapter on its practice.
These preliminary steps toward, or practicing yoga are known as Kriya Yoga, meaning works toward yoga through austerity, study and dedication.
Austerity or discipline of the senses, self control is vital, but it should always be practiced in moderation. Yoga is not for one, who overeats, nor for the one who fasts excessively.
The Bhagavad Gita defines austerity as reference to the spirit within, straight forwardness, harmlessness, physical cleanliness and sexual purity.
It also emphasizes to speak without causing pain to others, to be truthful.
The practice of serenity, sympathy, meditation upon the Self, withdrawal of the mind from the sense objects and integrity is referred to as austerity of the mind.
Study refers to the study of scriptures and other books that lead to the perusal of a spiritual life, as well as study the nature of consciousness.
The dedication of the fruits of one’s work to God is to work with non-attachment for the fruits of one’s labor. Having done the best one can do, he must not despair if the work brings disappointing results, or is harshly criticized, neither must one give way to pride if he is praised for his accomplishments. Ultimately one must remember that he is not the doer.
Sutra 2) Thus we may cultivate the power of concentration and remove the obstacles to enlightenment which cause all the suffering.
Sutra 3) These obstacles, the cause of man’s sufferings are ignorance, egotism, attachment, aversion and the desire to cling to life.
These are the five kinds of pain. Of them ignorance is the cause and the other four are the effects.
Sutra 4) Ignorance creates all the other obstacles. They may exist either in a potential form, or they may have been temporarily overcome or are fully developed.
As we have seen in the preceding Sutras, austerity, study and the dedication of the fruits of our labor to God are the three preliminary steps toward the power of concentration that leads to perfect yoga. They are the means of removing the obstacles to concentration and enlightenment which exist within the mind. The word obstacle is worth considering, because it suggests a different emphasis which distinguishes Yoga from Christian thought on this subject.
When a Christian speaks of sin, he means an act of disobedience and ingratitude toward God. By God he means God the Father, the Reality as it appears in time and space in the aspect of Parent and Creator of the universe, who in yoga is called Ishvara.
When Patanjali speaks of an obstacle, he refers to the negative effect which follows an act of ignorance. Like a whirlwind, it obscures the light of the Self within man.
Christian thought emphasizes the offense against God, who is other than oneself, while yoga emphasizes the offense against one’s own true nature, which is the Self.
Both approaches have their dangers if not correctly understood. The danger relative to the yoga approach lies in one’s mental inability to comprehend the enlightened Self. It is easy to confuse the Self with the ego, as it is equally easy to feel remorse of an offense against the ego and resolve, at least for the time being, not to repeat such an offense.
The Christian tradition is essentially dualistic. It stresses the importance of God and minimizes the indwelling soul. The value of this approach is that it teaches devotion to God; the danger is, that one may revert to self- loathing and despair. God the Father is so awe inspiring and just, Christ so good and pure that man perceives himself in comparison as a hopeless sinner. This causes one to regress into the lowest condition of egoism, identifying oneself with one’s own weakness and a feeling that the only escape is in the belief that Christ died for one’s sins and therefore one is saved only through an outside influence.
Sin it should be stressed is only part, it has to be completed by punishment. This is unfortunate, because in the relative world, many sins appear to be unpunished. Here arises the fallacy that God may perhaps have favorites, that some people are punishes and others are not. In Christianity scriptures there are many situations, where the unrighteous acts are flourishing without any occurring retribution.
Patanjali can help the sin obsessed Christian, for his word obstacle is a good and accurate, unsentimental word which suggests a course of positive action. One does not lie down and pity oneself when confronted with an obstacle. One goes to work to remove it. Obstacles are the resulting consequences of cause and effect in the world of relativity.
Sin has only one spiritual consequence, it creates an obstacle to Self realization and enlightenment; this obstacle is its own punishment.
If one judges his thoughts and actions from Patanjali’s viewpoint, asking oneself: does impending action add to or impede the path to Self realization, one will avoid the error of imagining that sins are definite acts of absolute fixed values which can be qualified, graded and listed. They are not. What is wrong for one person may be right for another.
Patanjali teaches to regard sins with a certain scientific detachment to avoid the two extremes of lazy tolerance and futile disgust. One needs to realize, that obstacles have a meaning, which when observed in a detached manner will teach one that he is off course in reaching his destiny, the Self.
Sutra 5) To regard the non eternal as the eternal, the impure as the pure, the painful as the pleasant and the non-Self as the Self, this is ignorance.
Sutra 6) To identify consciousness with that which merely reflects consciousness, this is egoism.
Ignorance, according to Patanjali, is false identification. It is a misunderstanding of one’s real nature. If one says: “I am this body, named ...”, one is regarding the non self as the Self. This act of ignorance will lead to other similar acts. By denying the Self within us, we deny it everywhere. We misread nature. We dwell on the outer form of things and see the universe as multiplicity instead of unity.
Pure eternal joy and peace are to be found only in union with the Self. Ignorance keeps us from that union, but the dim confused longing for happiness remains. Then we are driven to seek it in the external world. We are forced to accept substitutes. Instead of eternity we cling to the temporary, we accept substitutes instead of eternal values. Our happiness is short lived.
The central act of ignorance is the identification of the Self, which is consciousness itself, with the mind and body, or that which merely reflects consciousness. This is what is defined as egoism. We need to ask: what is it that is behind the eyes that sees, behind the ears that hears, behind the mind that is aware; is the consciousness of the immortal Self.
Western philosophy produces two schools of thought with reference to consciousness, the idealist and the materialist.
The materialist believes that consciousness is a product in progress that it arises when certain conditions are fulfilled and is lost when these conditions do not exist.
The idealist on the other hand believes, that consciousness is the property of the mind and is therefore faced with the conclusion that it must cease whenever the mind is unconscious.
Modern scientists generally reject both these hypothesis. They believe that consciousness is always present, that it is everywhere present in the universe, even though its presence cannot always be detected by scientific methods.
For more information refer to: “What is Life”, by Ervin Schrödinger.
This is also the viewpoint of Vedanta and yoga.
Sutra 7) Attachment is that which dwells upon pleasure.
Sutra 8) Aversion is that which dwells upon pain.
Both are obstacles to enlightenment, or even to relative knowledge of a person or object. One cannot have any impartial, dispassionate insight into the character of one to whom one is blindly attached, or whom one blindly regards with aversion. The spiritual aspirant must not love the things of the world too much, but must not hate them either. Aversion is also a form of bondage. One is tied to what one fears. This is why in one’s life, the same problems, the same dangers or difficulties, will present themselves over and over again in various aspects, as long as one continues to resist or run away from them instead of examining cause and solving them.
Sutra 9) The desire to cling to life is inherent both in the ignorant and the learned. This is because the mind retains impressions of the death experience from many previous incarnations.
The doctrine of reincarnation is common to Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga. It was apparently accepted by early Christians, but finally rejected.
Throughout the journey in consciousness, the individual is subject to the law of karma. His desire to act according to the laws of nature regulates the speed of his progress. He creates or removes his own obstacles to enlightenment. His present state is continuously being conditioned by past karma. Death does not interrupt the process, neither does re-birth. The individual is merely born with a body, a mind, a character and social surroundings, which express the sum total of his karmic imprint at that particular moment in time.
The doctrine of reincarnation is distasteful for some people because it makes everyone responsible for one’s own present condition. It means taking responsibility, while some prefer to blame God, or their parents for making them what they are.
At first, the doctrine seems grim and heartless, but it is actually a profoundly optimistic belief in justice and order of the universe. It is we and not God, or our parents, or our fellow men that created our present situation and it is we who can change it. There is no excuse for self pity and no reason to despair. We are not helplessly doomed.
Patanjali relating fear of death to reincarnation. Why incarnation, would one not be more afraid of the unknown in the first instance of death? What he is referring to is the intermediate state between death and rebirth which represents a lucid post-mortem interval during which an individual takes stock of his life and is compelled to review his past deeds together with the consequences they must now produce in the next birth upon earth or elsewhere. In the clear light of the Self, he sees what he has made of himself, which for many can be a humiliating and painful experience.
From the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad on death:
“There are two states for man, the state in this world, and the state in the next; there is also a third state, the state intermediate between the two, which can be likened to a dream. While in the intermediate state, a man experiences both the other states, that in this world and that in the next; and the manner thereof is as follows: When he dies he lives only in the subtle body, on which are left the impressions of his past deeds, and of these impressions he is aware, illumined as they are by the Self. The pure light of the Self affords him light. Thus it is that in the intermediate state he experiences the first stats, or that of the world. Again, while in the intermediate state, he foresees both the evil and the blessings that will yet come to him, as these are determined by his conduct, good and bad, upon the earth, and are by character in which his conduct has resulted. Thus it is that the intermediate state he experiences his second state, of the life in the world to come”.
It should be remembered, that when one awakens to one’s true nature, he will no longer cling to normal sense consciousness, but instead embrace living from higher states of awareness, one that lead to liberation and the embracing of the Self and God. He will realize, that he is Sat, Chit, Ananda, ever existing, ever conscious, bliss.
Sutra 10) When these obstacles have been reduced to a dormant form, they can be destroyed by resolving the mind back into its primal (original) cause.
Sutra 11) In the fully developed form, they can be overcome through meditation.
It is simpler to consider these two Sutras in reverse order, since the obstacles to enlightenment must first be overcome in their fully developed or gross form. The way in which this is accomplished is as previously mentioned, through austerity, study and to dedicate the fruits of one’s work to God; realizing, that He is the doer. When the obstacles in the fully developed form have been overcome, they will still exist as tendencies (samskaras). These samskaras are then to be destroyed when the mind is resolved back into its cause that is into Prakriti, from which the mind was projected. This is done in the process of samadhi.
Sutra 12) A man’s latent tendencies have been created by his past thoughts and actions. These tendencies will bear fruits, both in this life and in lives to come.
Sutra 13) So long as the cause exists, it will bear fruits such as rebirth, a long or short life, and the experiences of pleasure and pain.
Sutra 14) Experience of pleasure and pain are the fruits of merit and demerit, respectively.
Sutra 15) But the man of partial discrimination regards all experiences as painful. Even the enjoyment of the present pleasure is painful, since we already fear its loss. Past pleasure is painful because renewed cravings arise from the impressions it has left upon the mind. And how can any happiness last if it depends only upon our moods? Those moods are constantly changing, as one or another of the ever-warring gunas seizes control of the mind.
Patanjali cautions us against assuming, that some of our thoughts and acts have no consequences because they are not yet apparent. He tells us, that some acts have latent tendencies and will express when the time is appropriate. Acts of merit will bring pleasant results, but he states, that pleasant and unpleasant are only relative terms. They are one of a pair of opposites.
From the point of view of the spiritually discriminating man, all experience can be painful, because it binds him to this world as it renews his sense craving. The only true happiness lies in the union with the Self. All other happiness is relative, and impermanent.
Sutra 16) The pain which is yet to come may be avoided.
There are three kings of karma, the karma which has already been created, and stored up, so that it will bear fruit at some future time; the karma created in the past, which will bear fruit in the present moment and the karma which we are now in the process of creating by our thoughts and acts.
Of these the already existing karmas are beyond our control; they will become our experience, as they work themselves out. The karma which we are now creating can be avoided, by ceasing to desire the fruits of the action for ourselves and instead surrendering them to God.
Sutra 17) This pain is caused by false identification of the experience with the object of experience. It may be avoided.
The experiencer is the Self, our real nature. The object of experience is the totality of one’s world including the mind and the senses. In reality, only the permanent Self exists, which is eternally free. But by false identification through maya (illusion), which represents the mystery of our present predicament, the Self is mistaken for the individual ego, subject to all thought waves which arise in the mind. This is why we imagine we are happy or unhappy, angry or lustful; I am this or that, this is the ego speaking.
The danger lies in that as long as we falsely identify with the ego, we cannot know the Self.
Sutra 18) The object of experience is composed of the three gunas: sattva (illumination), rajas (activity) and tamas (inertia). From these the whole universe has evolved. Together with the instrument of knowledge, such as the mind, senses etc. and perceived objects, such as the physical elements. The universe exists in order that the experiencer may experience it and thus become liberated.
Patanjali here may be accused of presenting a negative view. To this accusation he replies:”It is you who is really afraid. It is you who shrinks from experience. You talk so much about your pleasures, yet you know nothing about pleasure. You never try to understand its nature. The universe of sense experience is a great book and he who reads it through the end with discrimination will know at length that there is nothing but the Self. No experience is in vain; no page of that book is superfluous, provided the reader learns something from it and passes it on to the next. But you never learn. You never pass on. You read the same page over and over, repeating the same meaningless experience, like a person who is half asleep, reading without remembering a word.”
Everything that happens to us no matter how seemingly trivial, throughout the day, offers some hint which could lead us toward wider spiritual knowledge and eventual liberation.
Sutra 19) The states of the gunas are defined (the gross element), the undefined (subtle element), the merely indicated (the cosmic intelligence), and the uninvolved (prakriti).
The system of yoga is built on the cosmology of the Sankhya philosophy. According to Sankhya, nature is both the material and the cause of the universe. In nature there are three gunas: sattva, rajas and tamas. Tamas is all that is dark, all that is ignorant and heavy; rajas are activity and sattva is calmness, light.
Nature before creation is called undefined. It is in a state where there is no distinction of form or name and where the gunas are held in perfect balance. When the balance is disturbed, the three gunas begin to interact with one another and the result is the formation of the universe.
The three gunas also exist in every person. When sattva prevails, one becomes filled with knowledge, when rajas is dominant one is active and predominance of tamas leads to darkness, idleness and ignorance.
According to Sankhya, the highest manifestation of nature consisting of these three gunas is called mahat, buddhi or intelligence, universal intelligence of which human intelligence is a part.
In Sankhya psychology there is a sharp distinction between the function of the manas or mind and the function of the intellect or buddhi.
The mind’s function is to collect sense expressions and present them to the buddhi, the individual mahat, which then decides about them.
Out of mahat comes ahamkara or ego, from which again come the subtle elements. The subtle elements combine and become gross material, the external universe.
According to Sankhya, from the intellect down to a stone, all are produced of one substance, differing only in finer and grosser states of existence. The finer are the cause, the grosser the effect.
Beyond nature is Purusha (spirit) which is not material. The Purusha is not similar to anything else, neither the buddhi nor the mind nor the tanmatras (fine substances) or the gross materials. It is not like any one of these; it is entirely different in its nature. It is stated, that the Purusha is immortal because it is not the result of any combination.
That which is not the result of combinations cannot die.
This explanation should give us clarification when it says that the states of the gunas are the defined, the undefined, the merely indicated and the signless.
The defined are the gross elements; the undefined are the tanmatras which cannot be experienced by the senses of ordinary men. However, Patanjali states, that after some time and by regular meditation, perception will become very fine and one can see a certain light (aura) which every living entity emits. We do not all see or feel these tanmatras, but we all emit them.
The indicated is the cosmic buddhi or cosmic intelligence. It is the first manifestation of nature; from it all other manifestations proceed.
The signless, or nature is surrounded by differences between evolutionists and religion. Religion says that the universe comes out of intelligence. The theory of God, taking the word in its psychological significance, is that intelligence comes first in the order of creation and that out of intelligence come gross matter.
Evolutionists say, that first comes matter and then intelligence.
Yoga goes beyond both intelligence and matter to Purusha or Self which is beyond intelligence, and of which intelligence is just a borrowed light.
Sutra 20) The Seer is intelligence and though pure, sees through the coloring of the intellect.
Sankhya postulates that from the lowest form up to intelligence, all is nature; beyond nature is the Purusha, which has no qualities.
How then does a Purusha appear happy or unhappy? This occurs, when the purusha identifies with its reflection, which is intelligence or the first manifestation. Sankhya states that intelligence is a compound, it grows and diminishes, it changes just as the body changes, and because it changes, it cannot be immortal.
The Self (soul) is the centre where all the different perceptions become unified. Freedom should not be identified with intelligence and mind, as they are bound to the physical, just as the body is bound.
