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 45-48):
Once – and only that one time in my life – as a child, I had an extraordinary experience. Truly “extra” ordinary. Here is what I remember:
I was sitting somewhere on a rock. I think it was summer, and we must have been on one of our Sunday outings into the oak-studded hills near the town where I grew up. I remember the clear blue sky bound to the earth by the line of the hills. I can still feel the grainy heat of the rock on which I sat. But what I remember the most was a sudden sliding of my childish consciousness into a vast space in which I had this vision of the world (well, the universe,) so utterly independent of me and my understanding that it made me feel, well, I had no words then, but practically one with everything in that universe. And that universe, in my 9-year-old's mind, was infinite, with the one in which I lived a speck on the thumb of someone in a vaster universe, and with that someone on someone else’s thumb in an even vaster universe… and so on.
So, naturally – or maybe with my mind in which the only thing settled so far are the heavy residues of memory – I read the next set of sutras as that progression of awareness from one’s thumb’s through all the thumb’s in the universe in order to arrive to a complete view of the world, and so perceive the only thing that is possible to see from here: the truth.
45. The range of subtle objects includes all the levels of creation, extending the limit of the gunas[1].
46. These levels of samādhi are concerned only with external objects.
47. But on refinement of the fourth stage of absorption, there is the dawning of the spiritual light of the Self.
48. This level is ritambharā, where consciousness perceives only the truth.
In effect, these sutras say that the settling of the mind, as it goes through the four stages, from the world of objects to that of energy, then light, is a process that brings expanded knowledge of both the nature of world and the nature of consciousness. In this, yoga is not about self-absorption through the body, or trough an awareness of self, or even self. Above all, yoga is not about taking that spiritual bypass to avoid congestion and metering lights on the tangle of roads in life.
Works Cited
Iyengar, B. (2005). Light
on Life. Rodale.
Patanjali. (1982). The
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.
[1]
The gunas, according to Vedic philosophy, are the three qualities of nature
and translate, roughly, as solidity, dynamism, and luminosity
(Iyengar, Light on Life, 2005)
. Or, mass, energy, and light, if you are scientifically inclined….~ to be continued
