Brain is the CPU that receives sensory impressions like a CPU of a Computer‘just receives it, nothing more.
Mind is the Activity of The Brain.
As the Brain receives the sensory impressions from the Neurons, another part which Patanjali calls Mind classifies them into groups of sensations and records them.
Then we have Buddhi(Intellect) which has the attribute of distinguishing and labeling the information as correct or incorrect, Right or Wrong.
To pass such judgments and classify the Intellect has to have a frame of reference and a Director.
This is Chiththa.
I do not have an equivalent for this in English.
Chiththa is not Consciousness ,not Buddhi but that lies in between.
When we think of some thing thought waves are created.
There is debate even to-day among psychologists on how the Concepts are formed.
Visualization of Stream of Consciousness , Writing
These ways are inclusive of thoughts which are inclusive of thoughts against the course of action we may contemplate later.
For instance, if even if one is a teetotaler, our thought processes includes the thought of Drinking enjoying.
It is the Buddhi which approves or disapproves drinking.
This Buddhi is directed by a Higher level.
For we are aware of the Buddhi or Intellect; we are aware of its presence.
This Chitha is what determines and directs the direction the Buddhi or Intellect has to take.
The Intellect directs Mind, Mind the Brain and the Brain the sense organs.
These activities take place simultaneously and they are so swift we fail to note them.
How does Chiththa choose a particular direction?
This, as Patanjali would explain later,is because od Vasanas or the tendencies.
Now Patanjali says Yoga is about Chiththa.
He does not say ‘modify Chiththa for Chiththa per se can not be modified as it is an attribute of Brahman , The Ultimate Reality.
The description of Brahman is ‘ Sat, Chit, Ananadam’,’Being,Chiththa(attribute of Consciousness) and Bliss.
So Patanjali calls for the modification of Chiththa.
That is you make an effort and attempt to modify the Impressions of The Chiththa.
This, Patanjali says , is possible by The practice of Yoga.
The Chiththa, being the attribute of Consciousness, once you clean it up you will be able to realize the Pure Consciousness within, which is a part of the Universal Consciousness.
Recall Swami Vivekananda’s Words. What is in The Microcosm is in The Macrocosm and what is in the Macrocosm is in The Microcosm”
There probably is no Text that has been as misinterpreted as Patanjali‘s Yoga Sutra, barring the exception of Srimad Bhagavd Gita.
We have charlatans ranging from Chandra Swamy,Baba Ramdev to our own Sri Sri Ravi Sankar,Nithyananda.
These frauds have some funny names like Sudarshana Kriya.
Nothing can be further from the Text of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra.
Yoga Sutra has to be read in original.
I have been thinking for quite some time now to reproduce the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali with The Text and a strict translation.
The first lines till the line before the last was written on 5 June 2012.
Normally I write as I feel straight without writing on MS Word, edit and post to WordPress.
If, in the middle, I felt like not proceeding, I delete the post and that’s it.
In this case I do not know why I did not delete the post.
This morning i decided to write on Yoga Text and as I started writing in my normal way, I noticed had a draft made already!
I had just returned from visiting the temples in South India(20 temples in 5 days), which included a Tirupattur, where the only Temple of Brahma exists(there is a post on this under Hinduism,Bhakthi).
This Temple has the Jeeva Samadhi of Patanjali(Vyakrapada).
Is this a coincidence?
Onto the subject.
Many sites are available on Patanjali and I am not planning to write on the Life of Patanjali.
Patanjali.
My intention is to write a Text explanation, with out any color, of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra.
As many know there are Four ways to realize the Self or God in Hinduism.
But the path to realization need not necessarily be through only these.
As Lord Krishna says in The Bhagavad Gita ,these are some of the ways the learned(look, who is calling others ‘learned’),but one should and is free to choose what suits him best’
Patanjali explains the Raja Yoga by his Sutras, Aphorisms.
There are 196 Sutras .
These appear under Four Chapters.
1.Samadhi Pada, explains the different Samadhis or the Super States that one can attain by practising Dhyana( there is no word in Sanskrit that is used to mean ‘ Super Natural,Super State when it tries to explain Philosophy for in Hinduism nothing in the Universe is Super Natural; every thing is Natural).
2.Sadhana Padam, contains details thre Rules for Yoga.
3.Vibhuti Pada has Benefits, results and the super powers one would acquire by practicing Yoga.
4.Kaivalya Pad, which describes the Liberation of the Soul.
One important point has to be borne in mind.
Patanjali’s Yoga is not some thing one should learn by Text Book .
One has to learn it from a Guru and this Guru is definitely not the self advertises masters of Yoga however famous they are.
If your thirst and yearning for Yoga is intense you will have a Guru reaching out for you.
Please read my post on ‘Upadhyaya, Acharya and Guru”
Sutra 1.
Atha: Yoganusaasanam.
“This. is., is precept of Yoga’
What is Yoga?
Yoga means ‘Union’ or more correctly Reunion.
Union is with the Reality from which we delude that we are different.
Unless these these eight steps are followed in order and you have a personal God Yoga will not be effective.
What is now being taught by so called Gurus is nothing but a fraud on Yoga.
Read Patnjali’s Yoga Sastra.
Yoga in this sense belongs both to Hindus and non Hindus if they follow it correctly.
Hinduism does not need labels;it does not need some one’s certification.
It is for your benefit.
Take it as it is.
Forward Received by me..
Sheetal Shah, an official with the Hindu American Foundation, hears a lot about the physical practice of yoga these days – but not much about its religious roots.
So her group, which seeks to provide what it calls “a progressive voice for American Hindus,” recently mounted a “take back yoga” campaign, including appearances at conferences and attempts to raise media awareness of the practice’s Hindu origins.
For Shah, who is the Hindu American Foundation’s senior director, yoga is primarily a moral and spiritual philosophy, a fact she says has been lost as the popularity of physical yoga has boomed in the West. “There has been a conscious De-linking between Hinduism and yoga,” in the United States and elsewhere, she says.
Yoga is mentioned in many of the ancient Indian texts that form the basis of the religion now known as Hinduism, which claims to be the world’s oldest religion – and which is the third most-practiced faith on the planet.
One main source of yoga philosophy is the sage Patanjali, who lived in the 2nd century B.C. and whose Yoga Sutras describe a philosophy comprising 8 limbs, one of which is the physical poses, or asanas, which are commonly referred to as yoga in the West.
Other elements of Patanjali’s yogic philosophy are concepts like the yamas, moral vows that include chastity and nonviolence.
Sheetal Shah of the Hindu American Foundationpractices yoga asanas in her home. She tries to incorporate yogic concepts like nonviolence into her life.
In a yoga class offered by the Hindu Temple Society of North America in a New York temple, yoga is taught as a spiritual practice in which the physical asanas are an essential component. But the practice is supposed to lead to meditation.
“Yoga is really a spiritual discipline,” says Uma Mysorekar, the Hindu Temple Society of North America’s president. “From its origin in Hinduism, yoga really originated from a Sanskrit word yuj, which means union.”
That union is supposed to happen, she said, “between individual being or the soul with Paramatman,” or cosmic being.
According to a 2008 study commissioned by Yoga Journal, there are roughly 16 million yoga practitioners in the United States. Those people spend $5.7 billion dollars a year on yoga classes and gear.
Most of that yoga is marketed as physical exercise as a health practice. Some Sanskrit terminology is usually used, and many practitioners in a non-religious context say they sense a vaguely spiritual aspect in the activity.
But most American practitioners wouldn’t go nearly so far as to label yoga as a religious act or even to relate it to a specific religious tradition.
“Yoga is a great thing, no matter what style you do, how you come about it, why you come about it, what you end up with spiritually from it,” says Donna Rubin, the founder of Bikram Yoga NYC, a New York chain of yoga studios offering yoga in the style of Bikram Choudhury, a contemporary Indian yogi who now lives in Los Angeles. “So to start nitpicking or criticizing this type of yoga or that type of yoga or what it’s not doing or what it should be doing, I don’t really see the point of that.”
Bikram yoga involves a set series of postures performed in a heated room.
“Bikram has developed this specific series so that it’s more accessible,” said Christopher Totaro, a Bikram Yoga NYC instructor. “It’s more palatable to a wider demographic of people by pulling that religious part or separating that religious part from it.”
Yoga students exercise at an Atlanta Hot Yoga class in Atlanta, Georgia. Classes are conducted in a room heated to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Among those that have taken up yoga in the United States are devout followers of Western religions.
Atlanta, Georgia’s Northside Drive Baptist Church holds a weekly yoga class.
Amanda Gregg, who instructs the class, says that she is respectful of Hinduism but argues that yoga didn’t “come from” Hinduism as much as it developed alongside the religious tradition.
“Although Hinduism and yoga grew out at the same time of the Indian subcontinent and there are references to yoga in the Upanishads and in the Bhagavad Gita, that doesn’t mean that Hinduism has the exclusive hold on yoga,” she said, referring to sacred Hindu texts. “Sort of like Jews don’t have the exclusive hold on prayer.”
Some churches attempt to “Christianize” yoga by adding Bible verses to the practice, but Northside Drive Baptist Church does not.
Related.
Is Yoga a Form of Hinduism?
Is Hinduism a Form of Yoga?
– Wendy Doniger
Debates about these questions have been making headlines lately. Some American Hindus have argued that American yoga is not Hindu enough, that Hindus should “Take Back Yoga” (the label of a campaign by the Hindu American Foundation). Other Americans agree that the Hindus should take back yoga—but because yoga is too Hindu: R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if they value their (Christian) souls, for “yoga, as a spiritual practice, runs directly counter to the spiritual counsel of the Bible.” The problem should not have been breaking news; a spoof in 2003, “Yoga: A Religion for Sex Addicts,” depicted a Christian minister who was asked, “Should Christians practice Yoga?” He replied, “Are we going to have to bring this whole thing up about Yoga again? I thought our Sunday school curriculum included lessons about the evils of everything Oriental, including Yoga!”
But the issues involved are not trivial. Is yoga, in fact, “a spiritual practice”? More particularly, is it a Hindu spiritual practice? The word “yoga” originally meant “yoking” horses to chariots or draft animals to plows or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate). Though many yoga practitioners, particularly but not only Hindus, insist that their practice can be traced back to the Upanishads (c. 600 BCE) and Patanjali (c. 200 CE), the word “yoga” in these texts designates a spiritual praxis of meditation conjoined with breath-control, “yoking” the senses in order to control the spirit, and then “yoking” the mind in order to obtain immortality.
Buddhist sources in this same period also speak of techniques of disciplining the mind and the body, and the word “yoga,” owing as much to Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to mean any mental and physical praxis of this sort. (Similar disciplines arose in ancient Greece and, later, in Christianity, a subject on which Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault had a great deal to say). This is the general sense in which the word “yoga” is used in the Bhagavad Gita, a few centuries later, to denote each of three different religious paths (the yoga of action, the yoga of meditation, and the yoga of devotion). But these texts say nothing about the physical “positions” or “postures” that distinguish contemporary yoga. The postures developed much later, some from medieval Hatha Yoga and Tantra, but more from nineteenth-century European traditions such as Swedish gymnastics, British body-building, Christian Science, and the YMCA, and still others devised by twentieth-century Hindus such as T. Krishnamacharya and B. K. S. Iyengar, reacting against those non-Indian influences.
So there is an ancient Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of what people do in today’s yoga classes. Contemporary yoga traditions are a far cry both from the Upanishads and from Hatha Yoga. Most twenty-first century American yoga practitioners have more in common with a jogger than with a meditating sage; they want to relax after a hard day at the office, tighten up their abs, and reduce their cholesterol and their blood pressure; their yoga of relaxation and stretching may also involve regular enemas, a cure for back pain, a beauty regime, a vegetarian diet with a lot of yogurt (which is not etymologically related to “yoga”)–oh yes, and a route to God.
Is yoga, then, for the mind or for the body? Is it like going to church or like going to the gym? Is it a spiritual praxis or an exercise routine? To all these questions, the answer is: yes. For some people (both in India and in America) it has been one, for others, the other, and for many, both.
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