Patanjali's Yoga Sutra: Yoga Vedanta

Almost all Advaita Ashrams teach Yoga and many Sanyasis are accomplished Yogis as well. Advaita centres are often called Yoga-Vedanta centres. Swami Sivananda was one of the foremost proponents of Patanjali Yoga and one of his principle disciples Swami Vishnudevananda used to demonstrate during his lectures. Yoga sutras of Patanjali compliment Vedanta and provide the framework for sadhana or spiritual practice

The Yoga Sutras, in fact, is primarily a manual for the practitioner rather than an exposition of Yoga philosophy. Moreover, in addition to its primary function as a spiritual manual containing clear and precise information about how to actually and factually directly experience the human soul in this life, the chitta/purusha dualism of the text has much to offer modern discussions on the philosophy of mind and consciousness, and the sa?skāra/kle?a model has enormous contributions to make to contemporary approaches to therapy and psychoanalysis. Patanjali has not attempted to use rational conceptual thought to express states beyond reason and conceptualization.

When the purity of the intellect is equal to that of the purusha, kaivalya liberation ensues. The Eight Limbs of Yoga—a gradual progression from the external to the internal throughout the limbs. Yama, abstentions, moral restraints—- if one’s goals are to remove consciousness from identification with the body and the mind, one must curb activities that pander to the grosser urges of the body—violence, stealing, deceit, sexual exploitation, and coveting are generally performed with a view to improving one’s bodily or material situation and must be resisted by one striving for transcendent goals.

Niyama, ethical observances; Each limb furthers and deepens this internal progression. The second limb, the Niyamas, are cleanliness, contentment, austerity, study [of scripture], and devotion to God. These deal with how the yogī cultivates his or her own lifestyle. Asana, posture; focuses on stretches and postures with a view to preparing the yogi's body to sit for prolonged periods in meditation. Prā?āyāma, breath control; By regulating and slowing the movement of breath, the mind too becomes regulated and quiescent.

Pratyahara, withdrawal of the senses; removing consciousness from all engagement with the sense objects (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch). Dharana, concentration; involves fixing the mind on one place. concentration, but it can be disrupted if the senses come in contact with objects that are extremely dear to the practitioner. Dhyana, meditation; when the mind can focus exclusively on that object without any other distraction, Dhyana, has been achieved. Samadhi, full meditative absorption—when that same dhyana shines forth as the object alone and [the mind] is devoid of its own [reflective] nature.

The last three limbs are essentially different degrees of concentrative intensity and culminate in the realization by awareness of its own nature, asampraj?āta-samādhi. When these three are performed together, it is called samyama. Moreover, Patanjali considers the five previous limbs of yoga to be the external limbs and the final three limbs of yoga to be internal. tad apibahir-a?ga? nirbījasya. This sutra indicates that Dharana, dhyana, and conventional Samadhi, although internal when compared to the first five limbs of yoga, are themselves considered external, bahira, in relation to the highest type of Samadhi known as nirbīja. Even the last three limbs involve focusing the mind on an object and, of course, both the mind itself and all its objects are prakriti, and therefore external, from the perspective of purusha. Nirbīja-Samadhi comes about only when all eight limbs of yoga have reached their conclusion.

For there to be any coherence to the law of karma, the condition of the living beings in samsara, and the decision to take up the path of yoga and follow the yama and Niyamas or essentially any of the prescriptions of the Yoga Sutras; one must assign free will to the purusha as the ultimate agent of its condition. why? Because if free will is situated not in purusha but in buddhi, then no one who had ever attained kaivalya by disconnecting from buddhi would find any will in the pure purusha to return and inform others about it. No one could report back about the experience, there being no will to do so in the state of pure consciousness.

Moreover, if the yogī knows everything prakriti, as indicated in these sutras, yet Ishvara knows something that surpasses this (ati?ayam), then might one have some grounds to infer that ī?vara’s additional omniscience, so to speak, might be associated with some level of experience beyond prakriti? In any event, where Patanjali differentiates between the omniscience of liberated purushas and that of ī?vara's, the Vedanta Sutras make a parallel statement pertaining to the difference between the omnipotence of liberated purushas and that of Ishvara . The former has all the divine powers except the creatorship of the universe (jagadvyāpāra-varjitam). Thus, in the Vedanta tradition, ī?vara’s omnipotence is unsurpassed, as his omniscience is for Patanjali

Powers of yogi : Powers are accomplishments for the mind that is outgoing but obstacles to Samadhi. A yogī should not think that these powers, which appear spontaneously, are the goal, and must reject them. Siddhis could be attained by five different means, only one of which is through meditation (the others being through birth, herbs, mantras, and the performance of austerity) is without the storehouse of karma.The yogī respects the will of Ishvara, the Lord, who is eternally perfect and by whose will the natural order of things was arranged in the first place.Free from personal ego and desire, what reason could the yogī have to interfere with ī?vara's plan?

By bringing [previous] sa?skāras into direct perception comes the knowledge of previous births—karma, is performed and is recorded as sa?skāra, just as sound can be recorded on a tape recorder or an image on a film. When the conditions are appropriate, these sa?skāras bear fruit and produce the results of karma: type of birth, longevity, and life experience. Accomplished yogis can access the stock of karma accumulated from previous lives.From [their] ideas, one can attain knowledge of others’ minds while the yogī may be able to perceive the emotional state of mind of others, he or she may not necessarily be aware of the object, alambana, causing that state of mind since this object is not the object [of the yogi's mind].

By performing samyama on the outer form of the body, invisibility [is attained]. This occurs when perceptibility is obstructed by blocking contact between light and the eyes minimize the tamasic element that allows sight (or, put differently, maximize the translucent sattvic element), such that light rays do not have a sufficiently dense (tamasic) surface to bounce back to an observing eye (in the same way that air and ether cannot be perceived due to their relatively higher proportion of sattva).

And the body is visible due to the tanmātra or subtle element of form, rūpa (As we know, the gross visible elements are transformations of the tanmātra subtle elements.) By manipulating the tanmātra of form, the yogī can prevent light bouncing back off it to the eye of the receiver. Karma, in addition to type of birth and life experience, determines longevity, so through knowledge of one’s karma and its fructification—the sa?skāras, once again—one can determine one’s moment and circumstance of death.

And through the sheer intensity of total absorption on a feeling such as (Maitri, friendship; karuna, compassion; muditā, joy; and upek?ā, equanimity) , the chitta of the yogī becomes so completely pervaded and charged with that feeling that it emanates out and affects other people. The yogi's intense concentration on any power, such as the strength of an elephant, his mind can manifest that same power in his body.

Chitta in Yoga metaphysics is potentially all-pervading when its rajasic and tamasic potentials are suppressed. Thus, when fully sattvic and focused, it can bypass or transcend the senses and contact objects beyond the normal reaches of the senses. Just as one can attain knowledge of different realms in the universe by performing samyama on the sun, and knowledge of the arrangement of the stars by performing samyama on the moon, Patanjali states that, on a micro level, one can likewise develop intimate knowledge of the physical body by performing samyama on the navel, nabhi-cakra.

[By samyama] on the pit of the throat (from the base of the tongue to the stomach) comes the cessation of hunger and thirst. By loosening the cause of bondage, and by knowledge of the passageways of the mind, the mind can enter into the bodies of others—- by the cultivation of Samadhi, the strength of this karma becomes weakened,the yogī can remove his mind from its moorings in his own body and settle it into someone else’s body & the powers of the senses follow the mind in this transference. Not only is levitation attained by mastery over the udāna-prā?a (manifests up to the head ), says Vyas, but by the manipulation of this prana, the yogī takes the auspicious upward path out of the body at death. This is a reference to the two pathways that can be taken by the departed soul after death, an upward one toward liberation and a downward one toward rebirth.

Now who we will be in our next Birth?? Chitta, of course, is not created anew each birth as the gross body is, but is transferred from birth to birth. So the particular blueprint of the next body embedded in the subtle matter of citta in accordance with the sa?skāras of that specific citta is filled in, or materialized, by the gross elements. The changes [in bodily forms that take place] in other births is due to the filling in by prak?ti. In short, gross matter emanates out of subtler matter and fills in the various forms of the universe.

One may argue that the experiences of yesterday should be more fresh than the experiences of a hundred days ago, and that therefore if one had been a human in the most recent past birth and a cat one hundred births earlier, the experiences in the human birth should be fresher and more vigorous in the citta and thus more potent in determining one’s next birth. But the laws of karma do not work this way. Sa?skāras remain equally stored in the citta like seeds irrespective of whether they are of one’s last birth or of a birth aeons ago.

The sa?skāras are beginningless, because the desire [for life] is eternal. And the memory of death can be only from a previous life. In this way, the desire for self-preservation is observed in every creature, and this is because the unwelcome experiences of death in previous lives is recorded on every citta, manifesting as fear when triggered by a threatening external cause. Since [sa?skāras] are held together by immediate cause, motive, the mind, and the object of awareness, the sa?skāras cease when the latter cease.

ī?vara is the essential instrumental cause in activating prak?ti. In the production of a pot, the other instrumental and material causes—the initial idea or blueprint of the pot, and the clay, water, and potter’s wheel—are useless without the instrumental cause of the potter. Like the potter, ī?vara, in conjunction with other instrumental causes such as kāla, Time, and dharma and adharma—that is, karma and its consequences—is the instrumental cause that awakens the inherent power of prak?ti to produce its effects. Once activated by the instrumental causes, prakriti's inherent qualities impel it to flow in accordance with the channels of human activity, dharma and adharma, just as water’s own qualities impel it to flow to a lower place once the obstacles damming it have been removed.

If purusha were directly aware of external objects (if there were no chitta), it would itself be an actor, by virtue of interacting directly with the world, as well as ever-changing, by virtue of being aware of, processing, and thinking about one object after another, as is entailed in everyday consciousness. If purusha were subject to change in this way, it would not be eternal—eternal means unchanging. Therefore, purusha is passive and unchanging, according to Yoga metaphysics. Consequently it is the chitta that changes and modifies itself according to the objects of perception.

This transformed chitta, that is, chitta molded into the particular form of the external object, the pot, is presented to the changeless and eternal purusha. The consciousness of purusha, which eternally radiates forth, thereby becomes aware of the chitta in this particular mold of a pot. Purusha has not changed or transformed by being aware of chitta and its machinations, nor has it acted; its awareness has merely encountered the chitta in its modified forms of pots and so forth. Although it is unchanging, consciousness becomes aware of its own intelligence by means of pervading the forms assumed by the intelligence.

The gunas is to provide either material experience or liberation . The ongoing permutations of the gunas refer to the change inherent in prakriti existence, which is caused by the constant maneuverings and interactions of the gunas with each other. Change is for the purpose of experience. With the yogi's complete detachment from any sort of experience, even those of the siddhis, the gunas no longer have any impetus to provide a never-ending variety of stimulation: “As the dancer ceases from the dance after she has been seen by the audience, so Prakrit ceases after having revealed her nature to the purusha; prakriti says "I have been seen and never again comes before the sight of purusha”. Om Shanti