Yoga

"29. तत् प्रत्यक्चेतनाणधगभोऽप्यन्तयामाबावि ॥ २९॥ tatah pratyakchetanadhigamopyantarayabhavashch From that is gain (the knowledge of) introspection, and the destruction of obstacles. The first manifestation of this repetition and thinking of Om will be that the introspective power will be manifested more and more, and all the mental and physical obstacles will begin to vanish. What are the obstacles to the Yogi?"

"1. OM: Here follows Instruction in Union. Union, here as always in the Scriptures of India, means union of the individual soul with the Oversoul; of the personal consciousness with the Divine Consciousness, whereby the mortal becomes immortal, and enters the Eternal. Therefore, salvation is, first, freedom from sin and the sorrow which comes from sin, and then a divine and eternal well-being, wherein the soul partakes of the being, the wisdom and glory of God."

"1. The binding of the perceiving consciousness to a certain region is attention (dharana). Emerson quotes Sir Isaac Newton as saying that he made his great discoveries by intending his mind on them. That is what is meant here.... It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given spot, and hold it there Attention is the first and indispensable step in all knowledge. Attention to spiritual things is the first step to spiritual knowledge."

"The Yoga Sutras are the basic teaching of the Trans Himalayan School to which many of the Masters of the Wisdom belong, and many students hold that the Essenes and other schools of mystical training and thought, closely connected with the founder of Christianity and the early Christians, are based upon the same system... the Sutras have been dictated and paraphrased by the Tibetan Brother and the commentary upon them has been written by myself, and subjected to revision and comment by the Tibetan."

"a. Meditation, and its stages"

"1. Assuredly, the exposition of Yoga, or Concentration, is now to be made. The Sanskrit particle atha, which is translated "assuredly," intimates to the disciple that a distinct topic is to be expounded, demands his attention, and also serves as a benediction. Monier Williams says it is "an auspicious and inceptive participle often not easily expressed in English.""

"...the entire human family (with the exception of a percentage which entered the race too late to permit of the full flowering of the soul) will manifest as Sons of God with all the powers of the God unfolded and consciously used on the physical plane and in the physical body. Patanjali says that three things will bring this about, coupled with the following of certain methods and rules, and these three are:"

"Devotion involves certain factors which it is valuable for the devotee to realize. 1. A capacity to decentralize oneself, to change one's attitude from self-centredness and selfishness to one of outgoing to the loved one... 2. Obedience to the beloved object once that beloved is known. This has been called in some translations "complete obedience to the Master" and this is the true and accurate translation but in view of the fact that the word Master connotes (to the occult student) one of the adepts, we have chosen to translate the word as "Ishvara," the one God in the heart of man, the divine Jiva or "point of divine life" at the centre of man's being. This is the same in all men, whether savage or adept; the difference only lies in degree of manifestation and of control. Complete obedience to any guru or mahatma in the sense of complete subjugation of the will is never taught in the true science of yoga. Subjugation of the lower man to the will of the inner God is taught and all the methods and rules of yoga are to this specific end. This should be carefully borne in mind. "Spiritual reading" is the most significant and occult preliminary thereto."

"It should be ever borne in mind that Patanjali had no need to assert or enforce the doctrine of reincarnation. That is assumed all through the Aphorisms. That it could be doubted, or need any restatement, never occurred to him, and by us it is alluded to, not because we have the smallest doubt of its truth, but only because we see about us those who never heard of such a doctrine, who, educated under the frightful dogmas of Christian priestcraft, imagine that upon quitting this life they will enjoy heaven or be damned eternally, and who not once pause to ask where was their soul before it came into the present body. Without Reincarnation Patanjali's Aphorisms are worthless. Take No. 18, Book III, which declares that the ascetic can know what were his previous incarnations with all their circumstances; or No. 13, Book II, that while there is a root of works there is fructification in rank and years and experience. Both of these infer reincarnation. In Aphorism 8, Book IV, reincarnation is a necessity. The manifestation, in any incarnation, of the effects of mental deposits made in previous lives, is declared to ensue upon the obtaining of just the kind of bodily and mental frame, constitution and environment as will bring them out. Where were these deposits received if not in preceding lives on earth — or even if on other planets, it is still reincarnation. And so on all through the Aphorisms this law is tacitly admitted. (Preface)"

"We must here bear in mind that we are beginning the book which outlines the practical part of the work, which gives the rules which must be followed if the aspirant hopes to achieve, and which indicates those methods which will bring about the realization of spiritual consciousness. The objective has been dealt with in Book I. The aspirant naturally says on concluding Book I, "how desirable and how right, but how shall this be? What must I do? Where shall I begin?" Patanjali starts at the very beginning and in this second book he indicates:"

"This book is meant for sincere students, and especially for those who have some glimmering of what Krishna meant, when in Bhagavad-Gita he said, that after a while spiritual knowledge grows up within and illuminates with its rays all subjects and objects. (Preface)"

"Patanjali's rules compel the student not only to acquire a right knowledge of what is and what is not real, but also to practice all virtues, and while results in the way of psychic development are not so immediately seen as in the case of the successful practitioner of Hatha Yoga, it is infinitely safer and is certainly spiritual, which Hatha Yoga is not. In Patanjali's Aphorisms there is some slight allusion to the practices of Hatha Yoga, such as "postures," each of which is more difficult than those preceding, and "retention of the breath," but he distinctly says that mortification and other practices are either for the purpose of extenuating certain mental afflictions or for the more easy attainment of concentration of mind. In Hatha Yoga practice, on the contrary, the result is psychic development at the delay or expense of the spiritual nature. These last named practices and results may allure the Western student, but from our knowledge of inherent racial difficulties there is not much fear that many will persist in them. (Preface)"

"24. I's'wara is a spirit, untouched by troubles, works, fruits of works, or desires. 25. In I's'wara becomes infinite that omniscience which in man exists but as a germ. 26. I's'wara is the preceptor of all, even of the earliest of created beings, for He is not limited by time. 27. His name is OM. 28. The repetition of this name should be made with reflection upon its signification."

"The utterance of OM involves three sounds, those of long au, short u, and the "stoppage" or labial consonant m. To this tripartiteness is attached deep mystical symbolic meaning. It denotes, as distinct yet in union, Brahma, Vishnu, and S'iva, or Creation, Preservation, and Destruction. As a whole, it implies "the Universe." In its application to man, au refers to the spark of Divine Spirit that is in humanity; u, to the body through which the Spirit manifests itself; and m, to the death of the body, or its resolvement to its material elements. With regard to the cycles affecting any planetary system, it implies the Spirit, represented by au as the basis of the manifested worlds; the body or manifested matter, represented by u, through which the spirit works; and represented by m, "the stoppage or return of sound to its source," the Pralaya or Dissolution of the worlds. In practical occultism, through this word reference is made to Sound, or Vibration, in all its properties and effects, this being one of the greatest powers of nature. In the use of this word as a practice, by means of the lungs and throat, a distinct effect is produced upon the human body. In Aphorism 28 the name is used in its highest sense, which will necessarily include all the lower. All utterance of the word OM, as a practice, has a potential reference to the conscious separation of the soul from the body."

"26. स ऩवू षे ाभ ् अणऩ गरुु ् कारेनानवच्छदे ात ॥् २६॥ sa poorvesham api guruh kalenanavachchhedat He is the Teacher of even the ancient teachers, being not limited by time. It is true that all knowledge is within ourselves, but this has to be called forth by another knowledge. Although the capacity to know is inside us, it must be called out, and that calling out of knowledge can only be got, a Yogi maintains, through another knowledge. Dead, insentient matter, never calls out knowledge. It is the action of knowledge that brings out knowledge. Knowing beings must be with us to call forth what is in us, so these teachers were always necessary. The world was never without them, and no knowledge can come without them. God is the Teacher of all teachers, because these teachers, however great they may have been—gods or angels—were all bound and limited by time, and God is not limited by time. ..."

"27. तस्य वाचक् प्रिव् ॥ २७॥ tasya vachakah prannavah His manifesting word is Om... The commentator says the manifesting word of God is Om. Why does he emphasise this? There are hundreds of words for God. One thought is connected with a thousand words; the idea, God, is connected with hundreds of words, and each one stands as a symbol for God... Is there any material sound of which all other sounds must be manifestations, one which is the most natural sound? Om (Aum) is such a sound, the basis of all sounds. The first letter, A, is the root sound, the key, pronounced without touching any part of the tongue or palate; M represents the last sound in the series, being produced by the closed lip, and the U rolls from the very root to the end of the sounding board of the mouth. Thus, Om represents the whole phenomena of sound producing. It must be the natural symbol, the matrix of all the variant sounds. It denotes the whole range and possibility of all the words that can be made. Apart from these speculations we see that around this word Om are centred all the different religious ideas in India; all the various religious ideas of the Vedas have gathered themselves round this word Om. The word has been retained at every stage of religious growth in India, and it has been manipulated to mean all the various ideas about God. Monists, Dualists, Mono-Dualists, Separatists, and even Atheists, took up this Om. Om has become the one symbol for the religious aspiration of the vast majority of human beings. Take, for instance, the English word God. It conveys only a limited function, and if you go beyond it, you have to add adjectives, to make it Personal, or Impersonal, or Absolute God. So with the words for God in every other language; their signification is very small. This word Om, however, has around it all the various significances. As such it should be accepted by everyone."

"30. व्याणधस्त्यानसंशमप्रभादारस्याणवयणतभ्राणन्तदशनय ारब्धबणू भक - त्वानवणस्थतत्वाणन णचत्तणवऺऩे ास्तऽे न्तयामा् ॥ ३०॥ vyadhistyanasanshayapramadalasyaviratibhrantidar shanalabdhabhoomikatvanavasthitatvani chittavikshepastentarayah Disease, mental laziness, doubt, calmness, cessation, false perception, non-attaining concentration, and falling away from the state when obtained, are the obstructing distractions."

"33.... Nature’s task is done, this unselfish task which our sweet nurse Nature had imposed upon herself. As it were, she gently took the self-forgetting soul by the hand, and showed him all the experiences in the universe, all manifestations, bringing him higher and higher through various bodies, till his glory came back, and he remembered his own nature."

"Glory unto those who have realised their own nature! May their blessings be on us all!"

"The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are in themselves exceedingly brief, less than ten pages of large type in the original. Yet they contain the essence of practical wisdom, set forth in admirable order and detail. The theme, if the present interpreter be right, is the great regeneration, the birth of the spiritual from the psychical man: the same theme which Paul so wisely and eloquently set forth in writing to his disciples in Corinth, the theme of all mystics in all lands."

"2. Union, spiritual consciousness, is gained through control of the versatile psychic nature. The goal is the full consciousness of the spiritual man, illumined by the Divine Light. Nothing except the obdurate resistance of the psychic nature keeps us back from the goal. The psychical powers are spiritual powers run wild, perverted, drawn from their proper channel. Therefore our first task is, to regain control of this perverted nature, to chasten, purify and restore the misplaced powers."

"The first book of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is called the Book of Spiritual Consciousness. The second book, which we now begin, is the Book of the Means of Soul Growth. And we must remember that soul growth here means the growth of the realization of the spiritual man, or, to put the matter more briefly, the growth of the spiritual man, and the disentangling of the spiritual man from the wrappings, the veils, the disguises laid upon him by the mind and the psychical nature, wherein he is enmeshed, like a bird caught in a net."

"The most striking thing in it is the emphasis laid on the Commandments, which are precisely those of the latter part of the Decalogue..."

"Therefore Patanjali, like every great spiritual teacher, meets the question: What must I do to be saved? with the age-old answer: Keep the Commandments..."

"3. These are the hindrances: the darkness of unwisdom, self-assertion, lust, hate, attachment. Let us try to translate this into terms of the psychical and spiritual man. The darkness of unwisdom is, primarily, the self-absorption of the psychical man, his complete preoccupation with his own hopes and fears, plans and purposes, sensations and desires; so that he fails to see, or refuses to see, that there is a spiritual man; and so doggedly resists all efforts of the spiritual man to cast off his psychic tyrant and set himself free."

"4. The darkness of unwisdom is the field of the others. These hindrances may be dormant, or worn thin, or suspended, or expanded. Here we have really two Sutras in one. The first has been explained already: in the darkness of unwisdom grow the parasites, hate, lust, attachment. They are all outgrowths of the self-absorption of the psychical self... they must be fought and conquered, or, as Patanjali quaintly says, they must be worn thin,-as a veil might, or the links of manacles."

"6. Self-assertion comes from thinking of the Seer and the instrument of vision as forming one self. ... To translate this into our terms, we may say that the Seer is the spiritual man; the instrument of vision is the psychical man, through which the spiritual man gains experience of the outer world."

"7. Lust is the resting in the sense of enjoyment... Sensation, as, for example, the sense of taste, is meant to be the guide to action; in this case, the choice of wholesome food, and the avoidance of poisonous and hurtful things. But if we rest in the sense of taste, as a pleasure in itself; rest, that is, in the psychical side of taste, we fall into gluttony, and live to eat, instead of eating to live. So with the other great organic power, the power of reproduction. This lust comes into being, through resting in the sensation, and looking for pleasure from that..."

""Before the soul can see, the harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion....” From The Voice of the Silence"

"The Science of Raja Yoga, or the "Kingly Science of the Soul," as laid down by its main exponent, Patanjali, will eventually find its greatest demonstration in the West... exemplified in the right use of the mind and its utilisation by the soul for the achievement of group objectives and the development of group consciousness upon the physical plane."

"All the various Yogas have had their place in the unfoldment of the human being. In the first purely physical race, which is called the Lemurian, the Yoga at that time imposed upon infant humanity was Hatha Yoga, the Yoga of the physical body, that Yoga which brings into conscious use and manipulation the various organs, muscles and parts of the physical frame. The problem before the adepts of that time was to teach human beings, who were then little more than animals, the purpose, significance and use of their various organs, so that they could consciously control them..."

"In Atlantean days, the progress of the sons of men was procured through the imposition of two Yogas....Laya Yoga, the Yoga of the centres... Later on, Bhakti Yoga, growing out of the development of the emotional or astral body... Now... the subjugation of the mental body and the control of the mind is brought about through the practice of Raja Yoga, and the fifth initiation, that of adept, is the goal for evolving humanity. Thus, all the Yogas have had their place and served a useful purpose and it will become apparent that any return to Hatha Yoga practices or those practices which deal specifically with the development of the centres, brought about through various types of meditation practices and breathing exercises, is, from a certain aspect, a retrogression."

"Clearly, this notion of karma yoga is just a children's tale to keep everybody happy by boosting the non-yogi's spiritual self-esteem. What it describes is something you could call 'ethical living', and everyone agrees that this is important, but it is not yoga. In Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, it is given a place under the heading 'yama', the rules of ethical conduct .... a precondition for yoga practice, but not identical with it nor a substitute for it."

"Fiery aspiration is the sublimation of karma yoga. Devotion to Ishvara is the sublimation of bhakti yoga, whilst spiritual reading is the first step to Raja Yoga. "Devotion to Ishvara" is a large and general term covering the relation of the personal self to the higher self, the Ishvara or Christ principle in the heart."

"...if we divide the human torso into three departments it might be stated that:"

"Therefore, without being attached to the results of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for by working without attachment one attains the Supreme.[28]"

"It might be of value here if we dealt with the various "yogas" so as to give to the student a clear concept as to their distinctions and thus cultivate his discrimination. The principal yogas are three in number, the various other so-called "yogas" finding their place in one of these three groups:"

"Raja Yoga stands by itself and is the king science of them all; it is the summation of all the others... Karma Yoga has a specific relation to physical plane activity, and to the working out into objective manifestation of all the inner impulses. In its ancient and simplest form it was the yoga of the third or Lemurian root race and its two best known expressions are: a. Hatha Yoga, b. Laya Yoga. The former has specifically to do with the physical body, its conscious (not subconscious and automatic) functioning and all the various practices which give man control over the different organs and the entire mechanical apparatus of the physical body. The latter has to do with the etheric body, with the force centers or chakras found in that body..."

"You can take brass and polish a thousand years. It's never going to be gold. You cannot take a donkey and train for a hundred years. It never could be a horse."

"At the end of a session in 2002, he lay on his back, knees bent so that his calves were beneath his thighs, arms out to either side, weights holding him down. He lay still for 12 minutes, perfectly immobile except for the twitch of a pinkie. Asked what he was thinking, he replied, "Nothing.""

"His first teacher was his brother-in-law, a Brahmin scholar who had set up a school of yoga at the Jaganmohan Palace, and who sometimes denied his student food if his performance was deemed inadequate. He then a teenager, was the youngest member of the Maharaja of Mysore’s entourage, and was asked to demonstrate his ability to stretch and bend his body for visiting dignitaries and guests. Menuhin, who visited India in 1952, heard of his practice and penciled him in for a five-minute meeting, and was so instantly impressed that the session went on for more than three hours. He [Iyengar] recalled, in an interview with CNN, that "the moment I adjusted him and took him, he said, I’ve never felt this sense of joy, elation.""

"Ms. Sridhar-Iyengar said her grandfather recognized early on that yoga, up until then viewed as a mystical pursuit, "had something for everybody, not just the intellectually or spiritually inclined." "He felt satisfied," she said. "Even at the end, even a few weeks before, he said, 'I’m satisfied with what I’ve done.' He took yoga to the world. He knew that.""

"We were just coming out of the ’60s change-your-consciousness thing, and many of us were in our heads, and wanting to meditate, and reach Samadhi, or enlightenment. He was, like, ‘Stand on your feet. Feel your feet.’ He was so practical. His famous quote was, ‘How can you know God if you don’t know your big toe?’"

"He was the first to introduce simple props such as ropes, belts, wooden blocks and bolsters to enable the elderly and less fit to maintain classical postures correctly and safely. The Iyengar form of yoga is now often employed by physiotherapists treating people with spinal injuries and back problems to recover full movement."

"Menuhin became his fervent disciple, describing him as "my best violin teacher". As well as using his new discipline on one famous occasion to conduct the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with his feet while standing on his head, he [Menuhin] invited him to teach in Switzerland, and introduced him to his students in London, to other artists, and to royalty."

"Mr Iyengar was credited with his own brand of yoga, and taught author Aldous Huxley and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, among other celebrities. … One of yoga's finest teachers, he practised what he called an "art and science" for more than eight decades and ran one of India's top yoga schools in Pune. He continued to practise — "practice is my feast", he once told a correspondent — in his old age and could still do the sirsasana — or the headstand — for half an hour until last year."

"Great lion of Indian yoga."

"Generations will remember him as a fine Guru, scholar and a stalwart who brought Yoga into the lives of many across the world."

"He was credited with bringing the 3,000-year-old oral tradition and physical practice of yoga to the West; he promoted a system, notable for its use of props and its step-by-step approach to the "asanas" (yoga positions), which is now the most widely practised form of the discipline in the world."

"Guruji did warn me: "Relaxation doesn't mean yoga is a soft option. It's a disciplined subject — a casual attempt only gains casual results.""