Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

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

Page 82

YOGA AND ITS PRACTICE
71
his experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as 'I.' What is this 'T?
If you analyze it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that, what you really mean by 'l', is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. “The youth that was l' you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore.... nor will there ever be.
सुखानुशयी रागः ॥७॥ 7. Attachment is that which dwells upon pleasure.
दुःखानुशयी द्वेषः ॥८॥ 8. Aversion is that which dwells upon pain.
Both are obstacles to enlightenment, or even to relative knowledge of a person or object. You cannot have any impartial, dispassionate insight into the character of one to whom you are blindly attached, or whom you regard with disgusted aversion. The spiritual aspirant must not love the things of this world too much; but he must not hate them either. Aversion, also, is a form of bondage. We are tied to what we hate or fear. That is why, in our lives, the same problem, the same danger or difficulty, will present itself over and over again in various aspects, as long as we continue to resist or run away from it instead of examining and solving it.