Patanjali

The earlier sources in this book have a name, a face and a date. We know where Carla Rueckert was born, what Darryl Anka did for a living, in which village Sai Baba grew up.

Now we are going to speak of someone about whom we know practically nothing.

We do not know when he lived. We do not know where. We do not know whether he was one person or several. And yet what he wrote almost two thousand years ago remains, to this day, one of the most precise manuals ever produced on the workings of the human mind and on what lies behind it.

The name is Patanjali.

A man about whom almost nothing is known#

About the historical person, scholars disagree on almost everything.

There is a Patanjali the grammarian, author of the Mahabhashya, a monumental commentary on Sanskrit grammar, placed with confidence in the middle of the second century before Christ. And there is the Patanjali of the Yoga Sutras. Indian tradition says they are the same man. Most modern scholars disagree: the two works differ too much in vocabulary and in subject.

As for the date of the Yoga Sutras, the proposals range from the second century before Christ to the fifth century after. The philologist Philipp A. Maas, on the basis of a comparison with contemporary Buddhist texts, places the work around the year 400.

In other words: two thousand years, give or take a few centuries.

What the tradition preserves is not biography, it is legend — and the legend is beautiful enough to deserve recording. It is said that a yogini named Gonika, at the end of her life and with no heir for her knowledge, prayed for a son to whom she could pass it on. As she prayed with her hands cupped, something fell into them. The name comes from that: pata, that which falls, and añjali, the hands joined in reverence.

That which fell into the offered hands.

It is also said that he was an incarnation of Adi Shesha, the cosmic serpent on which Vishnu rests.

None of this is history. But notice what the legend affirms, because it is consistent with everything we will see next: the knowledge was not conquered. It was received by the hands that opened.

What a sutra is#

Sutra means "thread" — the same root as our word "suture".

A sutra is a sentence compressed to the bone, made to be memorized and then unfolded by a teacher. No ornament, no example, no repetition. It is a text written for a culture without the printing press, in which the book was someone's memory.

This explains why the Yoga Sutras are, at the same time, extremely short and inexhaustible. There are 196 aphorisms, divided into four chapters, which fit in a few pages — and on which commentaries have been written for two millennia without exhausting the subject.

The four chapters are:

• Samadhi Pada, 51 sutras, on contemplative absorption and what yoga is.
• Sadhana Pada, 55 sutras, on practice and on the obstacles.
• Vibhuti Pada, 56 sutras, on the powers that arise along the way — and on the danger of being enchanted by them.
• Kaivalya Pada, 34 sutras, on liberation.

And, before we go further, a necessary warning: what is called yoga in the West today — the class of postures — corresponds to one of the eight steps Patanjali describes: it is a doorway, and the path continues beyond it. The whole text devotes three aphorisms to physical posture. The other 193 deal with something else.

Two verses that contain the whole book#

The Yoga Sutras begin without ceremony. The first aphorism says only: "Now, the teaching of yoga."

The second is the definition, and it is one of the most important sentences ever written about the mind:

"Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind."

Stop at this sentence.

It does not say that yoga is conquering something. It does not say that it is developing a power, reaching a state, acquiring a virtue or deserving a grace. The central word, in Sanskrit, is nirodha: cessation, restraint, stilling.

Yoga is defined by subtraction.

And the third aphorism says what happens when this subtraction is complete:

"Then the Seer is established in its own essential nature."

Read slowly. Its own nature. Not a new nature, not a better nature, not a nature conquered with effort. The one that was already its own.

The fourth aphorism closes the reasoning by explaining what happens the rest of the time, which is where you and I spend our lives:

"At other times, the Seer is identified with the fluctuations."

There is the complete diagnosis, in three sentences. You have not lost your nature. You have confused it with the noise passing over it.

Imagine a choppy lake. While the water moves, you do not see the bottom — you see waves, reflections, fragments of broken light. Still the water and the bottom appears. It was there all along. It was not built by the stilling.

Purusha and Prakriti#

To support this, Patanjali works with a distinction inherited from the Samkhya philosophy, and it is the heart of this chapter.

There are two categories, and only two.

Prakriti is nature. Everything that changes, everything that moves, everything that has form. The body is prakriti. The emotions are prakriti. And here is the part that usually surprises: the mind is also prakriti. Your thoughts, your memories, your intelligence, your personality — all of this is nature, is subtle matter, is something that happens.

Purusha is pure consciousness. That which observes all of this. And purusha does nothing: it does not think, does not desire, does not act, does not evolve. It only witnesses.

If you followed the previous chapter, you have already recognized the design. Purusha is the Atma under another name, within another philosophical system.

And now the decisive statement of the whole system:

Purusha was never bound.

Never. Not for a moment. Freedom is not a state to be reached, because pure consciousness was never limited by anything at all. What exists is a confusion: purusha sees itself reflected in the waves of prakriti and concludes that it is a wave.

The whole of human suffering, for Patanjali, is a mistake of identification.

Avidya: the fundamental error#

Patanjali gives a name to the five poisons that sustain this error, and calls them kleshas, the afflictions:

• Avidya — ignorance, and the root of all the others.
• Asmita — identification with the ego, the certainty of being this character.
• Raga — attachment to what pleases.
• Dvesha — aversion to what displeases.
• Abhinivesha — clinging to one's own life, the fear of death.

The last four are born from the first. And the first, Patanjali defines thus:

Avidya is taking the impermanent for the permanent, the impure for the pure, suffering for pleasure, and the not-self for the self.

Hold on to that last part, because it is the most important in this entire chapter.

Taking the not-self for the self. Avidya, the root of all human suffering according to this system, is confusing what you are not with what you are. It is looking at the waves — the body, the personality, the history, the defects, the wounds — and saying "this is me".

The limitation lies in your believing that you are imperfect.

The eight steps#

The path Patanjali proposes has eight limbs, the ashtanga, and they are not successive stages: they are eight fronts that support one another.

The first two are ethical, and come before any practice:

• Yama, the five commitments toward the world: nonviolence, truthfulness, not stealing, moderation and non-accumulation.
• Niyama, the five commitments toward oneself: cleanliness, contentment, discipline, self-study and surrender to the Divine.

Then come:

• Asana, the steady and comfortable posture.
• Pranayama, the regulation of the breath.
• Pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses.
• Dharana, concentration.
• Dhyana, sustained meditation.
• Samadhi, absorption.

Note the order, because it is a declaration of principles. Posture appears only third, after ten moral commitments. In Patanjali's system, the contemplative way begins by settling how you treat other people.

Compare this with Sai Baba's five human values, in the previous chapter. They are practically the same list.

Kaivalya#

The last chapter deals with the goal, which Patanjali calls kaivalya.

The word is usually translated as "liberation", but the literal meaning is something else: it means isolation, in the sense of absolute independence. It is purusha ceasing to confuse itself with prakriti. Consciousness recognizing that it was never any of the things that pass through it.

And notice what kaivalya is not.

It is not a reward. It is not a place. It is not a prize for good behavior. It is not something you receive from outside, nor a new state that comes into existence.

It is the end of a misunderstanding.

Nothing has been added to you when it ends. Something has simply stopped being confused with you.

What Patanjali confirms of what we have already seen#

The inversion changes everything: if we were created imperfect, we need to add what we lack; if we were created perfect, we need to let go of what no longer serves. It is what the yogis call coming home.

Patanjali defines yoga, in the second aphorism of the book, as nirodha — cessation. Not as acquisition. Two thousand years earlier, the same movement: taking away, not putting in.

This does not mean there is no work. A few aphorisms later, Patanjali says how the cessation comes about: through practice and non-attachment, abhyasa and vairagya. And he asks that the practice be sustained for a long time, without interruption and with devotion. The effort is real, and it lasts a whole lifetime. Only it is the effort of taking away.

We wrote that the essence is perfect and the manifestation is perfectible. Patanjali separates purusha, which was never bound and has nothing to learn, from prakriti, which is where everything happens and everything is transformed. The same division, with other names.

The belief "I am imperfect" is limiting, and perhaps it is precisely that belief which needs to be eliminated. Patanjali calls it avidya, places it as the root of all human afflictions, and defines it exactly as the act of taking the not-self for the self.

And we used the image of the Sun behind the clouds: the dark sky did not put out the Sun, it only covered it.

Patanjali uses the lake. Bashar uses ice. Ra uses the prism. Sai Baba uses the breath.

Five images, and all of them say the same thing: what you are has not gone away. It is underneath.

And now, once more, the question that opened this book.

What is the true nature of the human being?

Ra answered "You are". Bashar, "You exist". Sai Baba, "Embodiments of the Divine Atma".

Patanjali answered in the third aphorism, before teaching any practice — and offered nothing new. He pointed to what was already there, beneath the choppy water:

The Seer, in its own essential nature.

Four witnesses have been studied, none of them knowing about the others. Now, at last, we can come home — and reopen the objection we set aside.