This post is part of a series I am writing as I read the The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. All posts in this series can be found through the "Sutra Readings" category.
The Settled Mind – Chapter 1 (sutras 41-44):
The settled mind, according to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, is like the flawless crystal. Not because it is clear, but because it absorbs what is placed before it, including the process of the “absorption”:
41. As a flawless crystal absorbs what is placed before it, so the settled mind is transparent to whatever it meets – the seer, the process of seeing, or the object seen. This is samāpatti – the state of mental absorption.
This state of “mental absorption” is also the ideal state of scientific inquiry, as posited by Western science, is it not? There is no rapture in this state, no union or even communion with any of the major or minor gods of the pantheon teeming with the products of the human mind’s proclivity to get distracted and taken in by its own image-making capabilities. This is a state in which nothing escapes awareness, not even the process of the awareness itself.
The yoga sutras -- coming as they do from the place that also gave the world the concept of zero -- are the earliest forms of a science of the mind. But more than that, they are deeply concerned with the investigation of the processes of consciousness itself. Steeped as we are in a post-enlightenment view of the self as ego on the one hand and nothing more than just a bunch of neurons firing, on the other, it might be hard for us to appreciate the subtle levels of distinctions the sutras urge us to keep in mind when we are dealing with, well, the mind.
There are steps, or stages, of “mental absorption,” or in the study of the mind’s journey deeper into the vast realm of consciousness;
42. The first stage of absorption is when the object of attention is gross [as in physical, or material … or empirical] and its name and other thoughts are mingled together in the mind.
43. The second stage is when the memory is purified and the mind is quiet enough to be absorbed in the object of attention [as being in the zone, I suppose…]
44. In the same way the third and fourth stages of absorption are explained: these occur when the object of attention is subtle.
So, at the highest level of mental absorption, an object ceases to be the object of the senses, as well of the intellect. I suppose, one can say that it ceases to be an object altogether, at least in the sense in which we understands objects to be the solid contents of the world and of our awareness of them as such.
Many artists (and athletes, and gardeners, and, and … well, the list goes on) know that second stage of mental absorption in which the mind is infused with attention, and in which an object is utterly transformed, though really, it is the mind and awareness that are changed.
All this is very abstract – that is, unsettled in my mind. Outside the window, it is dizzyingly bright with sun. Inside, the dehydrator’s fan is turning and turning, and the kitchen is permeated with the scent of onions and sweet potatoes giving up the water from their cells. As I write this, the phone keeps ringing, with my sons checking in from faraway places… And I can’t seem to untangle my wanting to understand the yoga sutras and all the distractions, small and big, welcome and feared, in the way of my being able to do so. And then, there is the question, too: why bother with this at all? Who cares and how is this of any help when it has been said by so many others so much better … including the poets:
Flying a Kite
It seems to me the kite
Has all the fun,
The view,
The weightlessness,
The wind,
Ecstatic shudders,
Tail streaming out,
The urging higher,
The exhilarating dives,
and me down here,
Left holding the string.
(Elson, 2001)
Works Cited
Elson, R. (2001). A
responsibility to Awe. (A. B. Cintio, Ed.) Oxford: Carcanet.
Patanjali. (1982). The
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.
~ to be continued
