Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

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

Page 61

YOGA AND ITS AIMS
"Realization," said Swami Vivekananda, "is real religion, all the rest is only preparation-hearing lectures, or reading books, or reasoning, is merely preparing the ground; it is not religion. Intellectual assent and intellectual dissent are not religion." Religion is, in fact, a severely practical and empirical kind of research. You take nothing on trust. You accept nothing but your own experience. You go forward alone, step by step, like an explorer in a virgin jungle, to see what you will find. All that Patanjali, or anybody else, can do for you is to urge you to attempt the exploration and to offer certain general hints and warnings which may be of help to you on your way.
Patanjali tells us that, in the state of nirvichara samadhi, the mind becomes "pure" and "filled with truth." The mind is said to be pure because, in this state, all the minor thoughtwaves have been swallowed up by one great wave of concentration upon a single object. It is true that "seeds" of attachment still exist within this wave, but only in a state of suspended animation. For the moment, at least, they can do no harm, and it is very improbable that they will ever become fertile again, because, having progressed thus far, it is comparatively easy to take the final step which will cause their annihilation.
The mind, in nirvichara samadhi, is said to be filled with truth because it now experiences direct supersensory knowledge. Those who have meditated on some Chosen Ideal or spiritual personality experience direct contact with that personality, no longer as something subjectively imagined, but as something objectively known. If you have been meditating on Krishna, or on Christ, or on Ramakrishna, and trying to picture any one of them to yourself in your imagination, you will find that your picture dissolves into the reality of a living presence. And, in knowing that presence, you will see that your picture of it was imperfect and unlike the living original. Those who have had this experience liken it to the action of a magnet. In the preliminary stages of meditation,