Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

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

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PATANJALI YOGA SUTRAS
Western philosophy produced two schools of thought with regard to the problem of consciousness-the materialist and the idealist. The materialists believed that consciousness is a product in a process; that it arises when certain conditions are fulfilled and is lost when these conditions do not exist. Thus, according to the materialist philosophers, consciousness is not the property of any single substance. The idealist, on the other hand, believed that consciousness is the property of the mind, and were therefore faced with the conclusion that it must cease whenever the mind becomes unconscious.
Modern scientists would seem inclined to reject both these hypotheses, and to believe that consciousness is always present everywhere in the universe, even though its presence cannot always be detected by scientific methods. In this, they approach the viewpoint of Vedanta. And indeed there are some distinguished scientists and scientific writers whose thinking has brought them to a study of Hindu philosophy. For example, Erwin Schrodinger in his book What Is Life? writes as follows:
Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.... How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of the limited region of matter, the body.... Now, there is a great plurality of similar bodies. Hence the pluralization of consciousness or minds seems a very suggestive hypothesis. Probably all simple ingenuous people, as well as the great majority of western philosophers, have accepted it.... The only possible alternative is simply to keep the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.; that there is only one thing and that, what seems to be a plurality, is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian Maya); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt. Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys....
Yet each of us has the undisputable impression that the sum total of