Remarks about Patanjali Yoga Sutras
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 5 years before Jun 24, 2017
MiBeloved 5 years ago
For me Patanjali set up the syllabus for yoga, something which is standard regardless of the teacher for meditation. The way I see it is that if a system does not fit into Patanjali’s lay out, it cannot give the proper results from meditation.
That is a big claim of course!
But consider if you were inventing a gasoline combustion engine from scratch. You plan to do that without looking at anything which was done before by other inventors, can you really come up with something which has no cylinder. Can you design it with a rectangular instead of circular combustion chamber?
So with Patanjali one gets to see what the yogi did in their research in yoga.
The main thing I feel is the last 4 stages of pratyahar, dharana, dhyana and samadhi.
Patanjali puts the last three stages as a sequential practice named samyama.
Which suggested that these stages move one into the other spontaneously during meditation, so that if you are doing dharana, it might evolve all on its own into dhyana which might evolve further into samadhi.
Now there is one more important thing which is kaivalya or kevalam, where Patanjali described that in two stages.
The elementary one is when the observing self splits off from its psychic perception equipments. Due to that split, the equipments become purified. Then the final stage of kaivalya is when the observing self reunites with the purified perception equipments.
This is a mile away from how some yogis defined kaivalya as Oneness. I have not seen any of this Oneness in the Sanskrit of Patanjali.
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