Patanjali Yoga Sutra - VI

Imagination-Visualisation

Shabdagnananupati Vastushunyo Vikalpaha

Following Pramana and Viparyaya, Vikalpa is the third faculty of the mind. The mind is just like a toggle switch. Each time the same mind can function with one faculty or the other. When it sees something and grasps it, it becomes the understanding mind. At another time, the same mind can have a distorted vision, leading to misunderstanding.

Vikalpa is imagining something which is not, following sounds and words one is hearing or has heard before. The misunderstanding in the case of Viparyaya is a distorted vision. In the case of Vikalpa it is a doubt, uncertainty, indecision, hesitation, suspicion, contrivance, artfulness or a dilemma, caused by what one has heard. Many a time, our first impression of a person may get distorted if we have heard something unpalatable told about him/her by another. The opinion may change when we get to know the person more and find that what we heard was not true!

This can be seen most with children. If the child has heard a fake roaring sound of a lion, in a dark room, where it cannot see anything, it will hear the roar of a lion and cry, imagining a lion to be there.

Vikalpa is a function of the mind, negative when it gets anxious, imagining situations which are not and perceiving people different from what they actually are. A wife who is anxiously waiting for her husband to return home from office imagines some mishap if he is a little late, for instance.

The other end of Vikalpa is Sankalpa or creating a positive affirmation. This is a commonly practised self-improvement technique to create an image of a desired situation or goal and work for it to happen. A student who wants to become a doctor can create the image of becoming one in his or her mind and work to make that ideal a reality.

Great revolutions, movements, achievements in life are usually the result of a Sankalpa of an individual or a group of inspired people who work with a strong vision or a dream for the future. Vikalpa denotes the imaginative and creative faculty of the mind.

Photo: A night skyline view of the Chicago Tribune building. A building such as this is the result of the sankalpa of the architect who visualised it in his mind before even laying the foundation. - Swahilya Shambhavi.

(Bhagavad Gita, Vignana Bhairava Tantra, Himalayas, swahilya.soulmate@gmail.com)

Patanjali Yoga Sutra - 5

Misapprehension

Viparyayo Mithyagnanam Atadroopa Prathistam

Out of the five capabilities of the mind, Viparyaya, or the ability to misunderstand or misapprehend a situation or a person is the second.

Few are the people who can see the world with plain eyes. There are many who need power glasses. Some others see the world through coloured lenses and there are many who see the world through cracked glasses.

The mind is like a glass. When the glass is polished and clean, we can see clearly. When there is a stain on the glass, the vision also contains that stain, which is not in truth there.

The texture of the mind is dependent on the experiences a person goes through in this lifetime, his or her social, economic and environmental conditioning. And the differences we see among humanbeings at birth is because of the different experiences each one has gone through in the previous lifetimes and their response to it.

A clear mind is one that is not having disturbing thoughts. It is just like a serene surface of a lake with clear water. We can see through the lake and even the pebbles on its bed.

A disturbed mind is one that has rushing flow of thoughts. Though the telecast from the station is clear, if there is a problem with the television set, the picture will not have clarity.

To quote an example for misapprehension, we can take a rose for instance. A rose is simply a rose. A botanist will call it with a botanical name and look at it as a specimen to study due to his academic conditioning. A poet will look at it with a poetic mind and sing that life is not a bed of roses, but has its thorns too. A lover will see the same rose as a possible gift for his beloved and plan how to pluck it. A priest might be wondering how to offer it at the altar of his deity while a bee will be sipping the honey from the flower without a thought!

There will be misunderstanding and misapprehension as long as the thoughts agitate in the mindscreen in multiple, criss-crossing frequencies. When the mind is fine-tuned, with the practice of Yoga, then the screen is not agitated and helps the individual to perceive people, circumstances and situations with clarity. - Swahilya Shambhavi.

(Bhagavad Gita and Vignana Bhairava Tantra. (swahilya.soulmate@gmail.com)

Patanjali Yoga Sutra - 4

Three types of cognition

Prathyaksha Anumana Agamaha Pramanani:

Out of the five different activities of the mind, Pramana or its cognitive ability using its own yardstick is of three types.

The first is Pratyaksha. Through the five senses, the mind recognises an object directly and clearly. For instance, if there is a tree before you, your eyes see the form and the different colours of the tree. Your ears perceive the sounds of the rustling leaves and the birds on the tree. The tongue can taste its leaves and fruits and know about the tree. The nose can, by smell, understand the presence of a tree and the skin can touch, feel and know that the tree exists. This is the direct cognitive capacity of the mind through the five sense organs.

Anumana is the second tyle of understanding by the mind. For instance, you are standing on a ground where a tree existed before, but has been chopped of presently. From your previous exposure to a similar tree, your mind can understand how this tree would have been and recall its smell, sounds, texture, colour, taste and looks.

The third faculty of cognition by the mind is through the Agamas or a body of information compiled or written by reliable sources. This applies to understanding abstract ideas. For instance you wish to know about the world. It is too big for your five senses to grasp. So you look up a globe or an atlas compiled by sources you think are reliable.

It is the same with concepts such as Yoga. You refer to the yoga sutra, the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads or any sacred texts for that matter. For an understanding of abstract concepts and ideas, the cognitive faculty of the mind relies on Agama or texts that have been written down in the past. - Swahilya Shambhavi. (Bhagavad Gita and Vignana Bhairava Tantra. (swahilya.soulmate@gmail.com)

Patanjali Yoga Sutra - 3

Five functions of the mind

Vritti Sarupyam Itaratra

Vrittayah Panchatayyah Klishtaklishtaha

Pramana Viparyaya Vikalpa Nidra Smritayaha

*****

When the mind is tranquil, it can grasp the truth. But when the mind is distracted, there is a misunderstanding of the truth in terms of quality and depth. Just as the pure white light of the sun gets refracted into many colours, giving rise to illusionary patterns, a mind that is tossing about does not allow a clear perception of the truth.

There are five activities of the mind. They can be either of help in creating a feel-good factor, or can create a lot of misunderstanding and disturbance.

The five activities of the mind are Pramana - Cognition of, understanding and grasping an object or an idea. Viparyaya - Misapprehension or confusion. Interpreting what one sees in ways it is not actually, misunderstanding. Vikalpa - Imagination. One can imagine a positive situation, for instance - when caught in difficult circumstances, the mind can provide temporary relief by imagining a situation where there are no problems.

Vikalpa can be negative too. For instance, when a person approaches with a good intention, the mind can imagine the person approaching with an ulterior motive behind.

The fourth activity that the mind is capable of is called sleep. When all its faculties go to rest and does not work, the mind is at sleep. The mind is not on its office seat, minding its business of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching - but takes a holiday and shuts shop.

The last capability of the mind as described by Patanjali is memory. Whatever it has experienced through the five senses, is stored as memory in the unconscious and sub-conscious layers of the mind. When the situation requires, the conscious mind can remember and recall the object or situation. This quality of the mind helps us to identify objects and people and helps in calling a computer as a computer and a car as a car. If this faculty was absent, we would be calling the tree a tubelight or a chair as daddy!

(Photograph: Geese wading in a rainwater percolation pond off a Naperville road in Chicago.)

(On Bamboo Wisdom find a verse-by-verse explanation of the Bhagavad Gita and on the Vignana Bhairava Tantra in Cosmic Consciousness - Swahilya Shambhavi. (swahilya.soulmate@gmail.com)

Patanjali Yoga Sutra - 2

If the mind is quiet, so what?

Tada Drashtuhu Swarupe Avasthanam: What happens when there is a quietening of the flow of thoughts? One is able to get an understanding of something that is fundamental, refreshing, infinite, everlasting, original, fresh and unnoticed all the while.

The practice of Yoga in whatever form, whether it is the Yoga with the body, Hatha Yoga, Pranayama - the breath, Karma Yoga - through all the actions performed in a day, Bhakthi Yoga - through emotions of love felt for all and several innumerable forms of Yoga practices, one achieves just a singular goal. At the end of the practice, the mind is quiet as there is a finetuning in the flow of thought frequencies. The actual Yoga happens when the thought waves of the individual merge with the thought waves of the cosmos.

And this is the eternal original essence that one is able to experience when the mind is still. Just as when the river is turbulent, you can see just the ruddy, foaming eddies, gushing in currents. But when the water is tranquil, one gets a much deeper insight into what lies down in the river bed. With a quiet mind around, one is able to see through the world with the tranquil vision of truth. - Swahilya Shambhavi.

(Picture: The campus at the Chicago Law School, University of Illinois.)

Yoga Sutra

Patanjali's insight into Yoga

There are many things that come to us as treasures of the past. The most important of them all are the books that have codified knowledge. The better if they remain undistorted over the centuries, so we can still taste the essence.

One of those texts that is the most spoken about today is the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali. He codified Yoga as we know it today into a garland of aphorisms tied through a connecting thread. He is known to be a person who was human up to his shoulders, a conch in his left hand and a disc on his right, with a sword on each of the other two hands. A snake above his shoulders, he is extremely white in complexion with a thousand hoods. Patanjali was an Avatar (incarnation) of Adisesha, the snake that yields itself as a bed for Lord Vishnu in the ocean of milk.

In modern-day understanding, Patanjali is a sage who sounded the conch which served as a clarion call to the people seeking to live a life of integrity, uniting the individual mind with the cosmic consciousness.

Sutra is a thread. It also means a tight aphorism where words are used with deep brevity. Chanting the lines again and again will produce a certain vibration in the mind that reveals by itself, the many inner layers of meaning that is packed in it. With an increase in intensity of the chanting, the revelation of the meaning is deeper. The brevity has also ensured that the transmission of knowledge happened accurately, without loss in interpretation by the line of descendants.

The Samadhi Padaha is the first part which defines Yoga.

Atha Yoganushasanam: This is Yoga. What a beautiful sentence! This - that is, everything that we hear, see, smell, taste and touch and experience through these senses is Yoga. The being is Yoga. The Universe, with its suns, moons, stars, space and the planets, is Yoga. Everything that is included in the This - is Yoga. And that includes the nothingness and the silence too.

Yogaha Chitta Vritti Nirodhaha: There is some more to the This. Yoga is the stopping of the flow of thoughts. Rather, it is a way of being with the This - the everything, without being carried away by the tiny waves of thoughts in the thin screen of the mind. Yoga means to view the world through the open window and not through a screen which has properties of colour, space, time and characteristics.

The thoughts cannot be stopped. It is like telling all the waves of the ocean to be quiet in order that one can see the ocean! The thoughts will continue to come and go. But Yoga is the art of being like the empty sky. Different moods of the sunlight may reflect on it, in colours of blue, pink, orange, purple and black. Different objects may move past it, clouds, snow, hail, birds, aeroplanes, kites. But the sky remains as it is. Identifying with the unmoving consciousness and witnessing the thoughts go by as clouds in the sky is Yoga. - Swahilya Shambhavi.

(Picture: A cold afternoon in Chicago. When it comes to Yoga, nature is the best teacher. When it is warm, the trees and the earth spring with life. When it is cold and freezing, they shed their leaves and just be!)

(You may wish to look up for update on the Bhagavad Gita on Bamboo Wisdom and on the Vignana Bhairava Tantra. Discussions and questions on any of the posts may also be mailed me at swahilya.soulmate@gmail.com.)

Bhagavad Gita - Chapter VI

Not more not less, but just right

In the sixth chapter, called Athmasamyama Yoga - the Yoga of becoming one with the soul, Sri Krishna continues with techniques of Pranayama, Hatha Yoga and Dhyana. But he cautions in two beautiful verses:

Nathyashnatasthu Yogosthi Nachaikanthamanashnathaha

Nachathi swapnashilasya Jagrato Naiva Charjuna

Yukthahara Viharasya Yuktha Cheshtasya Karmasu

Yukta Swapnavabodhasya Yogo Bhavathi Duhkhaha

*****

Success in Yoga cannot happen for the person who eats too much or too little. Here lies the caution for those who storm the fast food centres and those who suffer themselves out starving with fasts, diets and rituals. It is also not for those who sleep too much, nor to those who are awake all day.

For one who eats moderately and in using the body, mind and intellect in entertainment and getting entertained, who works in a detached manner, giving one's best but not anxious of the results, who sleeps moderately - a practitioner of such Yoga sees an end to the sorrow of existence.

(For a verse by verse explanation of the Bhagavad Gita and its application in daily life, please log on to Bamboo Wisdom.) - Swahilya Shambhavi.

The Bhagavad Gita - V

The Yoga Sutra of Sri Krishna

There has been some delay, since I last posted on the Gita. I was away in the Himalayas at Ukhimath, where Sri Krishna is supposed to have fought Banasur from the place where the Bholeshwar temple stands today. And he also attended the wedding of his grandson Anirudh with Usha, the daughter of Banasur at the Omkareshwar Temple. There is the Usha Anirudh Vivaha Sthal, where people worship even today! At the Bharath Sevashram Sangha where I stayed, I woke up to the chants of the Gita for the whole two weeks I was there and chanted Gita at the satsangs at night studying the meanings of the verses. (That was just an aside to explain my absence from my blog for nearly a month!)

We have heard of the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali. But in the Gita, Sri Krishna mentions many a sutra (formula) to be in Yoga, Brahman, the Absolute.

Sparshan Kritva Bahir Bahyan Chakshush Chaivanthare Bhruvoh

Pranapanau Samau Krithva Nasabhyanthara Charinau.

Yathendriya Mano Budhihi Munir Moksha Parayanaha

Vigathechchabhayakrodhaha Yahsada Muktha Eva Saha.

The verses here show the path to liberation. Withdrawing oneself from all the perceptions of the five senses - shutting the eyes, and not reacting to the inputs through the ears, tongue, nose and skin, being aware of the space between the eyebrows (temple), watching the incoming and the outgrowing breath until it flows steadily, not expresssing through action or desires, fear or anger, the sage in meditation who aspires for liberation alone, becomes a free mind.

Amid extremely disturbing situations, the path to freedom is to simply withdraw. Shut up and sit down. Close the eyes. Breathe in and out with focus on the breath. If provoked, do not react with either fear or anger, expect with desire or anxiety. But just be in the empty space within. Being with the flow of life is the freedom of a meditative mind. - Swahilya Shambhavi.

(Picture: Bholeshwar Temple at Ukhimath, Himalayas.) (You may wish to check out the latest update on .soulmate.) For a verse-by-verse explanation of the Bhagavad Gita, please refer to Bamboo Wisdom, beginning New Year.

Bhagavad Gita - 4

The Essence of the Gita

In the fourth chapter of the Gita happen the two verses that is quoted often as the essence of the Bhagavad Gita. They are:

Yada Yadahi Dharmasya Glanir Bhavathi Bharatha

Abhyuthanam Adharmasya Tadathmanam Srijamyaham.

The second is the even more famous verse which follows and which everyone holds on to as a divine prophecy:

Parithranaya Sadhunam Vinashayacha Dushkritam

Dharma Samsthapanarthaya Sambhavami Yuge Yuge.

The literal meanings for the verses will go like this: Oh leader of the Bharata race! Wherever there is a decline of righteousness and adharma or injustice raises itself, my spirit will appear.

The second verse: To protect the good and destroy evil, for establishing righteousness, I will appear time after time through every age.

*****

These two are the most popular, yet the most misunderstood verses of the Bhagavad Gita too.

The dharma that gets destroyed is not to be understood in a people-centric manner. Even for an atom, as well for a universe, there is something called a sustainability quotient for its existence in that particular form to fulfill its purpose in life. Until that purpose is fulfilled, a misalignment of the energies can cause damage. The consciousness manifests at these points, or rather the ever present consciousness is available for a support to fall back on when there is such a shake in the balance. This in essence is the meaning of the verse where Sri Krishna says my spirit will be sent.

And again, Parithranaya Sadhunam Vinashayacha Dushkritam is not about the God being partial and protecting some do-gooders and hating those who are otherwise! Such a partial god is no god. It rains the same over good and bad. The wind blows alike for the good and bad. So does the sun shine or the waters of the ocean touch the feet alike to the good and the bad. And in reality, these two polarities do not exist as there is no one yardstick to understand the good and the bad. Yet, for some discipline and balance in society, some order to run day-to-day life of the plants, animals, humans and all the other species and inhabitants of the Earth and the rest of the Universe, there is a common principle of sustenance called Dharma. When there are forces of energy that swell to destroy this principle of sustenance, the excesses are absorbed readily in consciousness and life begins afresh. The truth of the Divine law of peaceful co-existence and harmony is established.

- Swahilya Shambhavi

Picture: The unseen principle that forms the backdrop for the delicate balance in nature is Dharma. Consciousness is the bedrock of Dharma. This is the law of nature.

Bhagavad Gita - 3

Your actions and thoughts dissolve in Consciousness

If Krishna tells Arjuna to fight, in common parlance, it means action. Arjuna is a warrior and hence is job - Swadharma is to fight. For the rest of us, it is what we do - moment to moment. It is just about 100 per cent action, performed in the peak of consciousness. When a painting is being done, a poster is being crafted, a statue is being sculpted - all that the creator knows is the one stroke that he is working on at that moment. And that action springs from the consciousness and is dedicated to consciousness. There is no sculptor, artiste or craftsperson there. The energy in the cosmos flows through the mind and the body and creates the piece of art, the sculpture, the poem, the music, the drama or sends the ball in the cricket field flying over the boundary for a sixer.
The Bhagavad Gita is just about 100 per cent action. And this verse in Chapter Three sums it up.

Mayi Sarvani Karmani Sanyasyadhyatma Chetasa
Nirashir Nirmamo Bhuthwa Yudhyaswa Vigathajwaraha.

Krishna - the Consciousness, commands to Arjuna - the confused mind. United with the one Consciousness, you give yourself fully and fight as all actions finally rest in Me (Consciousness). Fight without desire. Fight without thinking that you are fighting. Put all your energies into that fight. Now in this moment, be.

This attitude is not just for the battlefield, but in our day to day life. Being there, where one is, waking, looking into the mirror, smiling, eating, playing, talking, sleeping....as if one was doing it all in a battlefield when alertness and awareness needs to be at one's peak for mere survival.

- Swahilya Shambhavi.