Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

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

Page 12

PATANJALI YOGA SUTRAS
people believe that the practice of yoga is concerned with “making your mind a blank”-a condition which could, if it were really desirable, be much more easily achieved by asking a friend to hit you over the head with a hammer. No spiritual advantage is ever gained by self-violence. We are not trying to check the thought-waves by smashing the organs which record them. We have to do something much more difficult to unlearn the false identification of the thought-waves with the ego-sense. This process of unlearning involves a complete transformation of character, a "renewal of the mind,” as St. Paul puts it.
What does yoga philosophy mean by "character''? To explain this, one may develop the analogy of the lake. Waves do not merely disturb the surface of the water, they also, by their continued action, build up banks of sand or pebbles on the lake bottom. Such sand-banks are, of course, much more permanent and solid than the waves themselves. They may be compared to the tendencies, potentialities and latent states which exist in the subconscious and unconscious areas of the mind. In Sanskrit, they are called samskaras. The samskaras are built up by the continued action of the thought-waves, and they, in their turn, create new thought-waves the process works both ways. Expose the mind to constant thoughts of anger and resentment, and you will find that these angerwaves build up anger-samskaras, which will predispose you to find occasions for anger throughout your daily life. A man with well-developed anger-samskaras is said to have a bad temper." The sum total of our samskaras is, in fact, our character-at any given moment. Let us never forget, however, that, just as a sandbank may shift and change its shape if the tide or the current changes, so also the samskaras may be modified by the introduction of other kinds of thought-waves into the mind.
While we are on this subject it is worth referring to a