Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

Author(s): Prabhavnanda Swami, Christopher Isherwood
Publisher: Ramkrishna Math Madras

Page 10

PATANJALI YOGA SUTRAS
wants to attack someone.” Ahamkara screams: “It attack me, Patanjali. It is / who see this bull. It is 1 frightened. It is I who am about to run away.” Later, branches of a nearby tree, ahamkara may add: “No that this bull (which is not I) is dangerous. There ai who do not know this; it is my own personal knowledg will cause me to avoid this bull in future.”
God, the underlying Reality, is by definition omn If the Reality exists at all, it must be everywhere; it present within every sentient being, every inanimat God-within-the-creature is known in the Sanskrit lan the Atman or Purusha, the real Self. Patanjali speal of the Purusha (which means literally “the Godh dwells within the body”), but we shall substitute throughout this translation, because Atman is the w in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, and stud therefore likely to be more accustomed to it. Accordi Upanishads and the Gita, the one Atman is present creatures. Patanjali, following Sankhya philosophy, that each individual creature and object has its sepa identical, Purusha. This philosophical point of differ no practical importance for the spiritual aspirant.
The mind seems to be intelligent and conscious. Y osophy teaches that it is not. It has only a borrowe gence. The Atman is intelligence itself, is pure consc The mind merely reflects that consciousness and so a be conscious.
Knowledge or perception is a thought-wave (vrir mind. All knowledge is therefore objective. Even w ern psychologists call introspection or self-knowled jective knowledge according to Patanjali, since them the seer, but only an instrument of knowledge, an