Love Unfolds Like Flowers in the Sky
Mary Taylor
The Yoga Sūtra, which as you know was composed by Patañjali, is kind of a universal text that comes in four different chapters called Pādas. Pāda means foot and so you can look at the Yoga Sūtra as four-legged animal with good balance, good footing. The subtle and complex teachings are organized so that they loop back on themselves from different perspectives as you work your way through the text. In that way, if you make it through the entire book, you might be enlightened. But don’t count on that because, clinging to the idea of enlightenment pretty much guarantees you’ll never get there. Regardless, any one sūtra is enough to keep most of us occupied and happy for years.
In the text Patañjali takes various practices of his day and different philosophies or ways of explaining those practices and he identifies patterns within them with the idea that if you practice with the insight that occurs naturally through the practices themselves, then it could lead to awakening—true liberation.
Much better than approaching something with a sense of attachment to outcome or from a strictly mental perspective is to combine whatever corner of it you understand mentally and then to allow the process of deep understanding to unfold organically by giving intuitive and embodied experiences equal weight to your mental experience of the subject. And this is really what a practice is—something that assimilates your understanding of things through alternative channels of perception and experience.
In the first chapter of the Yoga Sūtra, called the Samādhi Pada, Patañjali goes right to the heart of what these practices and philosophies are all about and he talks about samādhi. He doesn’t speak of samādhi in the terms it’s often thought of in modern yoga as the goal of yoga or as a static, blissful state of enlightenment. Instead, he details samādhi as a process of diving into increasingly deep layers of mind and that can eventually lead one toward freedom, which is what we’d call yoga. He defines yoga as the suspension of thought in context of different types of samādhi. For example, there is samādhi that occurs when the mind is focused on a particular content. In this case, he is not describing the wandering mind that flits around to focus on whatever happens to pop up moment to moment, but rather this form of samādhi, called saṃprajñāta samādhi, occurs after you’ve trained the mind to retain focus on a chosen field through the practices of dhāraṇa (concentration) and dhyāna (meditation). Saṃprajñāta samādhi is said to be accompanied by reasoning, reflection, bliss, and a sense of “I am ness” or pure being. After time practicing saṃprajñāta samādhi, the content drops into the background and you experience what Patañjali calls asaṃprajñāta samādhi, or samādhi with no pattern of intuition through which the mind concentrates.
In his commentary on the Yoga Sūtra I.K. Taimni describes asaṃprajñāta samādhi as being similar to the feeling of being in an airplane and moving through a cloud bank. It’s not like you’ve forgotten you’re in an airplane above ground, but when in the cloud you’re in a sort of suspended state until you pop back out the other side and the perspective of being in the plane above earth is reestablished. The content is dropped when you transition into asaṃprajñāta, and soon there is a sense of distraction—perhaps something completely off topic, or perhaps an awareness that you are in the process of focusing—and you pop back into everyday thought or if you remain aware of your process you may stay in saṃprajñāta samādhi a little longer.
So, samādhi begins with the conscious effort to focus and then to get to any of the more spacious forms of samādhi, you must pass through saṃprajñāta samādhi. If you continue to read the Yoga Sūtra you’ll discover that the process is not dependent on the specific content of your mind. It isn’t as if you must focus on the divine or on a particularly blissful occurrence for this to happen, it turns out you can focus on anything and that whatever is right before your eyes is, in fact, the easiest thing to focus on! More important than the topic of focus is the process.
The idea is that you concentrate the mind on a single point—or a single field really—and eventually this yields insight and a letting go in to the unknown. It happens naturally and at that point you experience, very briefly at first, asaṃprajñāta samādhi. The more you practice, the more quickly you drop from one form of samādhi to the next. Eventually, after practicing these two initial forms of samadhi, when the process is almost second nature, it may be possible to couple the experience with an awareness of the divine nature of one’s mind. An awareness of this process and its divine nature then leads one into a more subtle layer of mind and the experiences are referred to as sabīja (parallel to and the culmination of saṃprajñāta) or nirbīja (parallel to and the culmination of asaṃprajñāta) samādhi.
You should read and re-read the Samādhi Pāda to get Patañjali’s explanation of this process. In the chapter he also speaks of the obstacles to samādhi and by the end of the first chapter, there’s an outside chance that simply by reading about all this you’ve tasted asaṃprajñāta samādhi. But more likely you’re out there with the rest of us, left quite mystified as to what he is actually talking about.
So, then you move into the next chapter called Sādhana Pāda. Sādhana means “what to do.” Patañjali adds that into the book next because the first chapter has left you thinking, ”Oh! All you have to do is concentrate your mind with absolute pure attention on whatever arises. Ha! How on earth do I do that?” So you look back at the first chapter for clues as to how to proceed and you find that Patañjali says that this form of concentration and samādhi come naturally for those who have no bodies. Just the nature of existence causes enlightenment for those people. But for others—which is all of us—he says you must have great śraddhā (trust). Plus, you need tremendous vīrya (courage) and you need an excellent memory or smṛti.
In this case, memory means that you observe the pattern of your immediate perception. Have you ever experienced that, like when you’re standing there having locked yourself out of your car for the thirtieth time? “Oh, there’s a pattern here.” If you have smṛti or memory, you start to go “aha!” and then you actually learn something from your experiences. Like hiding a spare key under the chassis of your car. Until the car gets stolen because you used one of those magnetic metal boxes that attaches to the car that even a five-year-old knows about. Smṛti means deep memory and it is when you start to see the actual nature of your experiences. That’s when you practice samādhi or training the mind in the ability to concentrate on your experience with such absorption that you forget yourself. When this occurs, the mind ceases creating an object and a theoretical observer—no subject or object—in that absorption.
At that point you have the opportunity to remain focused and to practice prajñā, which is intuitive wisdom or insight into the actual nature of the reality of experience. Shrāddha, vīrya, smṛti samādhi, prajñā—those are the five things you can do if you happen to have a body or if you don’t spontaneously fall into asaṃprajñāta samādhi and wake up to the nature of everything. Once you get a taste of asaṃprajñāta samādhi you’ll be sober enough to think about overcoming obstacles, and so that’s probably why Patañjali puts them in the first chapter—in case someone experiences samādhi. So, they can study and integrate overcoming obstacles into their approach from the beginning. Which is probably a good idea for all of us.
The Second Pāda though does not assume you’ve experienced samādhi. It’s about practice and it’s for ordinary people. It’s for us. In the second chapter Patañjali gives us kriyā yoga. But be careful! This is not the Kriyā Yoga that’s trademarked, this is the kriyā yoga that’s free for all people to practice. Yoga should never be trademarked, though we do so anyway. Patañjali defines kriyā yoga as tapas, which means to burn or to shine, and it’s what you do in any practice when you sit down, and you decide upon a game. A practice is like defining a game. You define a container for your experience and then somehow through the practice of superimposition, making one thing stand for another, you are able to corral your mind into a single space. The normal activity of the mind—that of projecting outwards, in which you start to blame your environment or other beings or when you start moping about your own misery—all that is suspended. Instead, you cease projecting and face the experience as it is. This process creates heat. Which makes sense if you think about it. By projecting out into the world all of our insecurities, flaws, emotions and so on we release our intensity—our heat—outward and then we never really cook. The alchemical process of transformation requires one heats things up a bit.
In the 60’s yoga people often considered tapas as “psychic heat” in which your soul was burning, like the dark night of the soul. Any proper practice produces that feeling of heat or tapas—it usually takes at least 15 minutes to get the flames going. Then things change and the practice becomes svādhyāya which means to meditate or to concentrate the mind on “svā”, upon oneself. What happens with a healthy practice is that rather than trying to solve the problem of your misery by fixing external and immediate causes, or projecting everything outward, you look into your actual self, if even simply to consider whether or not there is a self there! It’s almost a psychological process, not one of analysis, but of looking into what’s actually going on, looking through the suppositions and presuppositions and seeing through the emotions. Looking right at the immediate experience itself. So svādhyāya would include meditation practice, just as tapas would include meditation practice.
If the svādhyāya goes deep enough, the next stage of kriyā yoga is Iśvara praṇidhāna, which means surrender to Iśvara. Iśvara is usually translated as God, but it can also be translated as pure awareness, pure consciousness, or that which is beloved. This is a much more unrestrained definition since the God is sometimes co-opted by religious doctrines. In this sense, surrendering to Iśvara means that you accept things utterly as they are, not knowing what they are, or were, or will be. In other words, you enter samādhi through Iśvara praṇidhāna. When you imagine and feel the beloved—which happens somewhere in the core of your body—there is a profound sense of union and joy so there is no longer craving, anxiety and so on. There’s only satisfaction! This is what it means in the first chapter of the Yoga Sūtra, that one of the techniques to enter into deep samādhi is to surrender to Iśvara.
On a practical level, what this means is to “let it be”. Remember that in practical or immediate terms Iśvara isn’t necessarily the image you have of Iśvara. It isn’t the being that is out there somewhere, pulling the strings. To the inquisitive devotee, Iśvara is the joy that you are experiencing through your heart in the present moment. Perhaps it is some sort of glorious, effulgent radiation of light or heat that emanates from your idea of Iśvara. Or maybe through thousands of chains of cause and effect, what you are experiencing in the present moment is minuscule and you are unable to form a concept about it and explain what you’re experiencing to another. But still, somehow you know that it is the energy of Iśvara. Even if you are a severe dualist, maybe what you experience is the feeling of joy at what you think is the rejected energy of Iśvara. After all, Iśvara rejected the universe 13.7 billion years ago with the big bang, not wanting anything to do with it. Now to the devotee who has learned to make their desires smaller and smaller and smaller, even a rejected universe is still made of indescribably sacred energy because at one time, Iśvara touched it and so it is sacred.
The point is that whatever your theology is, even if it’s a difficult one like that, the very thing you are experiencing, the sensations you are experiencing when you surrender are Iśvara which doesn’t confirm anything that you think about Iśvara. It means that you are experiencing and allowing them to unfold or to be and the nature of any experience, any vibration or pattern, is that it is interconnected with all other patterns and vibrations, so the experiencing of it deeply in a devotional sense is the allowing of it to unfold and to stretch out in all directions without interfering with it, until there is samādhi, utter absorption without subject or object.
So kriyā yoga or this three-fold yoga process of tapas, svādhyāya and Iśvara praṇidhāna, is a simple solution to undoing the mystery of the first chapter of the Yoga Sūtra. It works pretty well. We should all try it.
