Notes

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - Book by Swami Satchidananda Saraswati

** World Yoga Day **

International Day of Yoga JUN21

Learn the true meaning of yoga.

When you hear the word “yoga,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? If you’re from the modern West, it’s probably an image of someone stretching.

But if you dig into yoga’s ancient Eastern roots, you’ll find that it’s much more than just a form of physical exercise. Dating back thousands of years, it’s a spiritual philosophy and practice that promises self-transformation and encompasses a wide range of topics: mind and body, morality and ethics, and metaphysics and psychology, to name just a few.

As a philosophy, yoga can seem a little esoteric at times. But as a practice, it’s pretty down-to-earth. It lays out a straightforward, step-by-step path to achieving inner peace and happiness, teaching you how to overcome the obstacles you’ll encounter along the way.

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Sri Swami Satchidananda interprets the Yoga Sutras in a way that makes them open to people of any spiritual background.

Sometime between 500 BC and 300 AD, an Indian spiritual teacher named Patañjali described the core principles of yoga in a series of 196 aphorisms, which are called sutras in Sanskrit. The result became known as the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali.

This is one of the main ancient texts about yoga, so if you want to learn about yogic philosophy and practice, it’s a natural place to start. There’s just one problem: the way it’s written.

Each sutra is a short, dense, often cryptic sentence or sentence fragment. Many don’t even have clear subjects and predicates. Some believe that’s because they’re just shorthand notes Patañjali’s students jotted down as reminders of what he said in lectures. As a result, the sutras require thoughtful translation and interpretation.

Enter twentieth-century Indian yoga master Sri Swami Satchidananda.

The key message here is: Sri Swami Satchidananda interprets the Yoga Sutras in a way that makes them open to people of any spiritual background.

As a young adult, Satchidananda studied agriculture, science, and technology, but he grew dissatisfied and eventually gave them up to devote himself to yoga. For years, he regarded the Yoga Sutras as the guiding text of his spiritual journey. In the late 1970s, after becoming an internationally renowned yoga master, he decided to write his own translation and interpretation of the Sutras in order to bring it to a religiously diverse modern audience.

Now, the Sutras are considered a Hindu scripture, but Satchidananda didn’t identify himself as belonging to Hinduism or any particular religion. He saw yoga as just one of many ways of expressing, understanding, and applying the same basic truths contained in other religions and spiritual philosophies, such as Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Consider the word yoga itself. In Sanskrit, “yoga” means “union.” In practicing yoga, you’re trying to achieve union – which raises an obvious question: Union with what? Like the world’s many different spiritual traditions, Satchidananda calls it many different names: God, Puruṣa, Atman, Īśvara, the Seer, and the cosmic mind, among others. But to him, the name isn’t the important thing; it’s the underlying truth that matters.

And what is that truth? Well, ultimately, it surpasses the limits of language, but it’s the idea that there’s some sort of spirit, substance, principle, consciousness, being, or force lying beyond and manifesting itself within the material universe.

Call it what you will. The point is to recognize it, connect to it, and let its power transform you.

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The practice of yoga produces results that you can verify for yourself through experience.

If you have a purely scientific outlook, you might be put off by all this talk of God, the cosmic mind, or whatever else some yogi wants to call the mysterious something supposedly underlying the universe.

But consider this: If a scientist told you that everything is ultimately just energy manifesting itself in various ways, would the idea of something underlying the universe seem more reasonable?

If so, and if the word “energy” resonates with you, go with it. Satchidananda doesn’t ask you to subscribe to any particular vocabulary, doctrine, or set of concepts for describing, explaining, or understanding the world. He simply invites you to use yoga as a tool for changing yourself and your relation to that world. And here, as in science, one thing ultimately matters most: producing verifiable results.

Here’s the key message: The practice of yoga produces results that you can verify for yourself through experience.

In Satchidananda’s view, the philosophical ideas and scriptures of yoga exist only to satisfy the intellectual side of the mind. They’re attempts to express the ultimately inexpressible truth about the self and the universe. But according to those same ideas and scriptures, that truth cannot be apprehended by simply thinking or reading about it. It can only be fully grasped through direct experience.

That’s where the practice of yoga comes in. It has eight components: the practice of abstinences, observances, posture control, breath control, sense control, concentration, meditation, and contemplation. We’ll go into each of these components later, but for now, the point is simply that the practice of them is supposed to either produce or prepare you to produce experiences of the truth.

And what exactly are those experiences and that truth? Well, this goes back to the meaning of the word “yoga”: the act of coming into union with God, the cosmic mind, or whatever you want to call the mysterious something underlying the universe. That union is the experience. And the existence of that underlying something is the truth.

According to Satchidananda, Patañjali, and other yogis, the experience of that truth will bring you transformative joy and peace, and the practice of yoga is just a way of gaining that experience. But you don’t have to take their word for it: just try it and see for yourself.

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The philosophy of yoga teaches you to stop identifying yourself with external things – including your mind and body.

At this point, you might be eager to jump straight into the practice of yoga. After all, that’s what it’s all about, at the end of the day.

But to understand the practice of yoga on an intellectual level, it helps to know the philosophy behind it. Now, depending on your background and sensibilities, that philosophy might seem a bit arcane – but don’t get hung up on it. Think of it like a ladder: it’s useful for getting to the top of something, but once you arrive where you want to go, you can leave it behind.

The point of the philosophy of yoga is to help you embrace the practice. Once you do that, you can be done with it, if you want to.

The key message is this: The philosophy of yoga teaches you to stop identifying yourself with external things – including your mind and body.

The easiest way to get a handle on the philosophy of yoga is to start with yourself. Who or what are you? All sorts of answers might come to mind. “I’m a man or woman, mother or father, lawyer or doctor. I’m short or tall, rich or poor, black or white,” or whatever the case might be.

But here’s the thing. All these words express ideas your mind has about certain aspects of your body, your life, or your relationships with other people or things.

In saying things like “I am a parent” or “I’m rich,” people are essentially identifying themselves with their ideas about those other things. However, in and of themselves, they aren’t those things. A mother isn’t her child. A rich man isn’t his bank account. These identifications are therefore false.

If you get rid of all your false identifications, what does that leave you with? “Well, then I’m just my body or my mind,” you might say. But notice your language here: my body, my mind. These are things that belong to you – a body and mind you can observe. But to whom, exactly, do they belong? And who’s observing them?

Well, you are! That means you can’t be your body or your mind either, so there must be something else that’s the real you.

But what’s left?

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The True Self is spirit, and the same spirit is inside everyone and everything.

Think about it like a math equation: Subtract your body, your mind, and everything else that’s external to you – things like your job, wealth, gender, and so on. What remains? Well, there’s just you. To put it more philosophically, all that’s left is the pure “I,” cleansed of all false identifications with everything that’s not your self – that is, non-self. Let’s call this pure “I” the True Self.

This applies to every other person, too. Shorn of false identifications, each of them is also just a pure “I.” For them, that’s the True Self as well.

But wait a minute – if the True Self of both you and your neighbors is just a pure “I” that can’t be distinguished in terms of anything you’d normally use to identify people, how can you draw a distinction between you and them?

Well, you can’t – that’s precisely the point!

The key message here is: The True Self is spirit, and the same spirit is inside everyone and everything.

If the True Self underlying your mind and body can’t be differentiated from the True Self underlying everyone else’s mind and body, they must be the same thing. The nature of that thing defies language, but to talk about it, we need to give it a name. “True Self” is one. “Spirit” is another.

Now, the same argument can be extended further to all living beings and even inanimate objects. Take anyone or anything in the universe, subtract the qualities with which your mind falsely identifies it, and eventually, all you’re left with is another True Self or spirit, which cannot be differentiated from any other.

Thus, the same spirit pervades everyone and everything in the material universe – from humans to dogs to rocks. Beneath all of their outward appearances of difference, all these things and beings are essentially the same True Self.

In the Sanskrit terminology of yogic philosophy, the totality of the material universe is called Prakṛti. It includes everything you’d normally describe as matter, like everyday objects and bodies. But it also includes your mind, which yogic philosophy sees as simply the product of matter taking on an especially subtle, complex form.

The True Self or spirit underlying Prakṛti, in turn, is called Puruṣa. The relationship between Prakṛti and Puruṣa is at the heart of yogic philosophy. And as we’ll see, it’s also the point at which that philosophy turns into practice.

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As Prakṛti, the mind is a distorted, egoistic reflection of Puruṣa.

“But wait,” a skeptic might object. “That still doesn’t answer the question, ‘What is the True Self?’ Sure, it can be given other names, like ‘spirit,’ and it’s the same spirit in everything and everyone – but what exactly is it?”

Good question – and the very fact that you might feel a need to ask it poses a problem in itself. If the True Self exists, how can you even be wondering what it is? After all, if you are the True Self, then presumably no one should know what it is better than you! So why the mystery? And why do people normally identify themselves with things that aren’t the True Self?

To answer these questions and resolve this apparent paradox, you need to delve into one of the deepest layers of yogic philosophy.

Here’s the key message: As Prakṛti, the mind is a distorted, egoistic reflection of Puruṣa.

Imagine the mind is the surface of a lake. If you look at it, you see a reflection of various things, including the other parts of your body, of which your mind is just a part. They also include the other beings and objects of Prakṛti, or the overall material universe, which the mind perceives through the body’s senses, and of which it is also just a part.

Now, think of what happens to the surface of a lake when it’s disturbed by something like mud or wind – it becomes cloudy or wavy. In that case, its reflections become distorted, like those of a funhouse mirror.

Something similar happens to the mind. Negative thoughts, emotions, desires, attachments, and false beliefs fill the mind with turbulence and impurities. These make the mind’s “mental water” murky and wavy, leading to distorted reflections of reality.

But here’s a question that brings you to the crux of the matter: If the mind is like a mirror, who is looking at it? The answer is Puruṣa, or the True Self. But if the True Self is looking at a distorted mirror, the result will be a distorted reflection of the True Self. And we can give that distorted reflection a well-known name: the ego.

As we’ll see, the ego is at the root of all people’s woes – and the point of practicing yoga is to help overcome it.

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Ignorance of the True Self leads to egoism and suffering.

Okay, so let’s recap: there’s the mind, which is like the surface of a lake. There’s the True Self, which is reflected on that surface. And then there are things like negative thoughts and emotions making the surface distorted. As a result, the mind produces the ego, which is a distorted reflection of the True Self.

Now, if you look at the surface of the lake – in other words, if you look at your own mind – what do you see? Who’s there? “Well, it’s me,” you might say. But it’s not really you. It’s the ego, rather than the True Self.

But in looking at the surface and saying, “That’s me,” you’re ignoring the True Self and identifying with the ego – and the word for that is egoism, which can land you in all sorts of trouble.

The key message is this: Ignorance of the True Self leads to egoism and suffering.

By looking at your mind’s distorted reflection of the True Self and saying, “That’s me,” you’re not only identifying with the ego, but with all the baggage that comes with it. After all, what do you see in the reflective surface of your mind? A distorted reflection of your True Self, yes – but remember what’s distorting it. Everything you’re seeing on the surface of your mind’s “mental lake” is getting tinted and rippled by the negative thoughts, emotions, desires, attachments, and false beliefs that are contaminating and agitating it.

What you’re seeing in the ego – in your distorted reflection of the True Self – is therefore a reflection of these mental impurities and disturbances that are producing the ego. In identifying with the ego, you’re also identifying with them.

For example, if you have a desire for wealth, an attachment to possessions, or a belief that you are your body, you’ll identify with that desire, attachment, or belief, as well as the things that they’re about. As a result, if something bad happens to them, you’ll interpret it as something bad happening to you, rather than to them – that is, rather than to things that exist outside of yourself, as part of the non-self, which is what they really are. And even if nothing bad happens to them, you’ll worry about all the bad things that could happen to them.

Either way, you’re now suffering because of how you view yourself and the world around you, thanks to the distorted – and distorting – mirror of your ego.

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Practicing yoga makes your mind calm and clear so you can behold the True Self.

So how do you transcend your ego and escape your suffering?

Well, it’s simple – at least in theory: make the turbulent, tainted “mental water” of your mind calm and clear. Then you’ll see the truth: an accurate reflection of your True Self. Replaced by this reflection, your ego will then disappear from your mind, along with your egoism and the suffering it produces.

For example, when something bad happens to your business, career, or anything else you falsely identify yourself with, you'll no longer see it as happening to you. Instead, you’ll experience it as happening only to that other thing. It may be damaged or even destroyed, but you – the real you, the True Self – will be unaffected.

But how do you make the mind’s “mental water” calm and clear? Well, that’s where the practice of yoga comes in.

The key message here: Practicing yoga makes your mind calm and clear so you can behold the True Self.

If you want to make water calm and clear, you have to start by removing the things that are stirring it up and contaminating it. The same goes for the mind and its “mental water.” That means getting rid of all your negative thoughts, emotions, desires, attachments, and false beliefs.

Of course, that’s much easier said than done. Where do you even begin?

Well, in yoga, the answer is to begin by practicing a set of five abstinences and five observances called yamas and niyamas, respectively. The five yamas are to avoid stealing, lying, greediness, lustfulness, and violence. The five niyamas are to dedicate yourself to purity, contentment, acceptance of pain, the study of spiritual texts, and service to God, the Supreme Being, or whatever you want to call it.

By practicing these abstinences and observances, you begin to turn away from the external, material world and start to focus on purifying your mind. How? By improving your moral and ethical conduct, loosening the hold of bodily desires and worldly attachments, ceasing to look for truth and happiness outside yourself, and beginning to look for them within yourself. Or, to be more precise, you start looking for them in the True Self – the spirit inside you.

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Yogic practice contains a variety of physical and mental exercises that help you reach a spiritual state called Samādhi.

The moral and ethical principles of the yamas and niyamas might seem easy to follow. For instance, unless you’re a pathological shoplifter, stealing doesn’t seem that hard to avoid.

But this is a simplistic, overly literal understanding of what it means to steal. Stealing is more than just running off with an item from a store. It’s taking away anything that doesn’t or shouldn’t belong to you, misusing it, or keeping it to yourself.

Do you own more possessions than you really need? That’s stealing from other people who lack the things they need. And unless you’re using your every breath to do good deeds, even your breathing could be considered a theft of air from the world.

Point being, unless you become a saint, you will always have room for moral and ethical improvement. In the meantime, there’s plenty of other work for you to do to make your mind calm and clear, so it can behold the True Self.

Here’s the key message: Yogic practice contains a variety of physical and mental exercises that help you reach a spiritual state called Samādhi.

You’re probably familiar with one way of calming and clearing your mind: meditation. But if you’ve ever tried it, you also know it’s not as easy as it looks. It’s hard to focus on one thing – especially when your body aches, your mind’s aflutter, and various unwanted thoughts, sensations, and emotions keep popping into your awareness.

The physical and mental exercises of yoga are meant to counteract these obstacles to meditation. Posture control exercises help you train your body to keep still for an extended period. Breath control exercises help you gain the ability to produce the slow, steady, balanced breathing that both accompanies and encourages deep focus and mental tranquility. Sense control exercises help you to tune out distracting sensations. And concentration exercises help you to strengthen your ability to focus your mind on simple, everyday things, sensations, images, qualities, and ideas.

Once you’ve got those down, you can move on to meditating on one thing that matters most: the True Self, God, spirit, or whatever you want to call it. At some point in your meditation practice, your mind may become so calm and clear that it will eventually lose any sense of you as a subject meditating on an object. The subject and object will fuse together, and any sense of separation between them will disappear.

At that moment, you’ll have reached the final step of yoga: Samādhi, or contemplation, where the True Self is finally revealed in all its glory.

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Suffering comes from people identifying themselves with their egos. They see their egos as their selves because of a lack of mental clarity and tranquility that derives from negative thoughts, emotions, desires, attachments, and false beliefs. By following the moral precepts, ethical principles, and physical and mental exercises of yogic practice, you can remove these disturbing and contaminating factors from your mind, making it calm and clear. This enables you to see an accurate reflection of the True Self, which will allow you to transcend the ego and achieve inner peace and happiness.

And here’s some more actionable advice:

Be good.

Samādhi may be the final step in yoga, but it’s also just the beginning of the next stage of your spiritual journey. This stage circles right back to where you started: morality and ethics. Once you’ve reached Samādhi, you don’t just sit around like a statue and contemplate the True Self all day. Remember, the True Self is the spirit inside everyone, not just you. So to serve that spirit, you need to serve other people. The more you understand the True Self and see it as the same essence of both you and your fellow beings, the more you stop seeing any distinction between you and them and start to “love your neighbor as yourself.”