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.
Chapter 2: Treading the Path (Sutras 4-9)
The next set of sutras elaborates on the five main causes of suffering: ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and the fear of death:
4. Ignorance of our real nature is the source of the other four [forms of suffering], whether they be dormant, weak, suspended, or fully active.
5. Ignorance is the failure to discriminate between the permanent and the impermanent, the pure and the impure, bliss and suffering, the Self and the non-Self.
6. Egoism, the limiting sense of “I,” results from the individual intellect’s attributing the power of consciousness to itself.
7. Attachment is clinging to pleasure.
8. Aversion is clinging to pain.
9. And the fear of death is a spontaneous feeling,
deeply rooted in us all, no matter how learned we may be.
(Patanjali, 1982)
When you start to think about it for a while, you realize that ignorance, the ego, attachment, aversion, and fear, are all creatures of the mind. Born of the mind, they also derive their sustenance from the mind. I get that. We all get that – and easily, too, at least when it comes to our wit’s end, that space far from the heart. The hard – no, make that the seemingly impossible part – is discrimination. It is the part that takes some into the damp forest for years of contemplation, others into the arid desert, or to wherever they undergo that trial by the fire of temptation, weakness, self-delusion, or whatever it takes to reach beyond the confines of suffering.
Not much of an illustrative example, but for the one who experienced it, it was a deep foray into what lies beyond attachment and aversion. The one I am talking about had come to yoga – or rather, retuned to it after decades – on the heel of illness and pain, none of which dampened her desire to outdo herself, given her fiery ambitions. This meant that each yoga pose she undertook was a special challenge, not to stay on the path, but to the ego, which had an endless appetite for proving things. Headstand, of course, was the prize that had eluded her, even back a couple of decades ago. And so she undertook the challenge with great gusto, not to mention much fanfare. As soon as he had a taste of the world upside down with her head on the floor, she seized every opportunity that was given to propel herself into this position.
But, as her practice deepened – in spite of herself, mind you – and as she studied with more teachers who gently nudged her to work deeper in a sense that was foreign to her body, she started to hear her bones speak, as they have before, back in her youth when she decided not to do headstand. As her bones, especially her cervical spine, claimed more of her attention and focus – though there was no pain as such to bring her attention to it – she decided the best course was to take another step toward discrimination: an X-ray done of her neck and shoulder. Sure enough, C4 of her cervical spine sported an ungainly spur and a large gap….
Does she care that she won’t be doing any more headstands? Not at all… In yoga classes, she stands with the therapeutic students at the wall by the ropes, and she focuses on the poses she is given with as much pleasure as she had for headstands. Well, pleasure is the wrong word, because she is not emotional about this process. It’s as if a layer in her body has been shed lately, as if she had loosened a notch on the tightly wound reins of her bones. And yet, given that glimpse of freedom in the way in which the bones move, her movements are much more reined in, they are much smaller, and more subtle. As she stands in them, minding not just the bones, but also the breath, she listens to her companions labored breathing and notices the strain pooling in various parts of their bodies. The way they grip the ropes is heard in the rattle of their breath, the way they hold on for dear life is manifest in the reluctance of their bones to let the muscles move.
The wall and the ropes, for her, are not so much props, as reference points that help her gauge the small movements, or, in some cases, actions, of the various parts of her body. When she is in a pose now, she tries to focus her mind (and breath) on the process of the pose, that is, on the way in which the pose is movement, rather than pose, or destination. That’s because, she has finally caught on that the aim of yoga is not the perfect pose, but the experience of freedom that comes from yoking body and mind in the moving through the pose.
Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.
~ to be continued
