The Essential Yoga Sutra Page 5

  A totally calm and properly focused mind brings negative thoughts to a standstill, at which point the outer breath simply stops.

  So the breath is connected to the inner winds, which are linked to our very thoughts. This means that if we keep a close eye on our breath—both during our yoga exercises and throughout the day as well—then we can monitor the state of our mind and the condition of those two troublesome side channels.

  If you think about it, breath can be in three places: all breathed out, when it pauses momentarily; all breathed in—again a pause; or moving between these two states.

  In meditation, in a yoga pose, and with the boss at work we strive to keep our breaths long and slow, with a constant even inflow and exhale. This keeps the inner winds calm and thus our mind clear and focused.

  When we're nervous or upset, inhales tend to go much quicker than exhales. We correct this by mentally counting the seconds for each, until inhales and exhales take equal time. Then extend the calm exhales further.

  Since the inner winds are tied to our thoughts, with proper training we can also mentally direct a certain number of breaths through specific inner blockages, and then the inner winds will follow.

  So the breath can be outside, inside, or experienced as moving between the two. But there's also that fourth possibility, when it stops altogether.

  We experience something close to this when we are reading a really good book, or trying hard to hear a faint sound. The closer we concentrate, the more calm the inner winds become, and thus the breath. When the breath actually stops for long periods of time, it does so for one of two reasons: either our focus in general is perfect, or we have destroyed the very thoughts and winds that create the veil of the Great Mistake.

  Of course the first can help us get to the second, but it's the second one we want: that's what Master Patanjali defined as yoga itself, back in the beginning. All the physical practices of yoga are aimed at stilling the side channels, which causes us to see ultimate reality and eventually turns our body into light: an angel who appears wherever someone needs.

  These results in physical yoga, and especially the breath exercises, come only after steady work with a qualified teacher. Someone who's been trained personally by a Master in an authentic tradition. Someone who's obviously keeping up a good practice, and gotten results. Don't try to force things yourself, or do them incorrectly; you could very well hurt your body or mind. Success comes very surely and naturally only by planting the right seeds—through the yoga of self-control and commitments.

  And so we have finished the first four of the five “outer” limbs of yoga: self-control, commitments, yoga exercises, and breathing practices. There's obviously a progression here; for example, the very act of being careful not to hurt others—purposefully planting good seeds—is the only way to get good at yoga exercises. But being sure to breathe calmly reaches back and allows you to be nice to others. And so each of the eight limbs supports each of the others, creating a self-perpetuating, upward spiral in our lives.

  Here again, our physical senses are wonderful tools, and it's fine to enjoy a slice of pizza or a bowl of ice cream. To make serious progress in our goals of saving the universe, though, we have to manage these senses sensibly.

  Enjoy a song fully and then turn off the radio, before it becomes background noise. Do your yoga exercises modestly but steadily, and you'll suddenly get cravings for the exact type of food, and the quantity of food, which is healthiest for you. Cultivate the art of happy silence, enjoyed with friends.

  Eventually these will lead to the highest form of silence: direct communion with the ultimate.

  The third cornerstone for the house of yoga consists of the three inner limbs or practices, along with their practical applications. At the end of the last chapter we were learning to control our senses, which brings us automatically to focus. It's like finding your friend in a crowd at the train station.

  On one level, the mind focuses on a single object through the process of eliminating all other objects around it: everything is the opposite of all that it's not. You check and eliminate faces in the crowd, and steadily narrow your focus down to your friend's face.

  The more faces there are to weed out, the more difficult it is to find your friend. The more objects you possess in your house; the more unimportant things you have to do all day; the more useless news you've heard and the more you meet with others for unmeaningful talk, then the less chance you'll be able to focus.

  Once we reach a single point, we need to stay there, threading that path between thinking of other things and dozing off mentally. Thinking of death fixes the first; thinking of destiny fixes the second.

  At some point, through a modest but very regular daily practice of meditation (performed according to the authentic instructions of that qualified teacher), we attain total stillness of the mind: focus that is fixed.

  They say that stopping the Great Mistake is like chopping down a big tree. Perfect focus and the ability to stay are like two strong arms. But however strong we may be, we can't simply push a tree down. We need a very sharp ax.

  To make meditation perfect, it's not enough to simply mentally stare at something like our breath for a long time. The mind even then is making its constant, deadly error, and we must fix it or come to the end of our life unfulfilled.

  As we meditate we need to strive to see the one thing that is simply … missing, clear gone. We need to realize that nothing is anything; that is, even the hotness of a fire never belonged to it. It is I who make fire hot.

  An ax lifted high with two strong arms has a certain undeniable power to it. You have ability to put your mind on a single point and to keep it there unwavering for an hour or more. At the same time, you totally understand where the thing you're focused on is really coming from—and not coming from. These three together—focus, fixation, and wisdom—represent a kind of teamwork or combined effort that will literally save your life, and the lives of many others.

  Now you possess a truly powerful weapon, the one and only weapon that can destroy the pain of our world. This is the eye of wisdom—a metaphorical third eye—the light of knowledge within our deepest mind.

  The three begin as an intellectual experience, and then a direct one, of ultimate reality. They combine with ultimate love and lead us through progressively higher levels of giving, ethical living, patience, effort, concentration, and understanding.

  Compared to all that we have ever been—compared even to the first five practices of yoga—the combination of these three limbs is literally the most precious thing in the world. But even they are as the mind of a child compared to where they will take us.

  How does the team of perfect stillness and swordlike wisdom do its work? One day, after much practice and study—and if we've planted the necessary seeds by serving others—then we rise into an extraordinary meditation. Outside of time itself we commune with ultimate reality, for the first time. After a brief while, we return.

  There is a similar but infinitely less important experience where we fall into a deep, nearly unconscious state of meditation. We may awaken from this meditation hours later, and it feels like only a moment has passed: as if our mind itself had stopped.

  But in neither meditation has the mind actually stopped. In the higher one, the Great Mistake has stopped for a while; in the lower one, only our surface consciousness has been suspended. In both cases we can only stay “in” as long as our seeds allow us: there is no conscious effort to awaken.

  Stopping the Great Mistake completely, even for a few minutes the first time, eliminates certain negative thoughts forever. But again, their eternal absence also relies on seeds.

  Using stillness and wisdom, to see thus how thoughts can pause, transforms the experience into the higher version.

  And so we may experience deep states of meditation where our mind seems to be stopped. It's important to use our higher stillness and meditation to understand the experience and transform it into something
that can really help us with more serious issues, such as stopping pain and death itself.

  The question then becomes how long we can stay in a place where the Great Mistake has stopped. The answer, for the first time, is that we stay only for a few minutes. Our pure seeds are still too fragile to maintain the stopping: they spend themselves; the stopping stops; and the Great Mistake resumes, despite ourselves.

  During these few minutes, other powerful but fragile seeds have maintained both the meditational wisdom and the single-pointed stillness upon which it rests: our old team. They too though are at the mercy of their respective seeds—seeds to start, and seeds to stop.

  We transform the pair as well then when we turn them upon themselves, realizing fully that realization can last only as long as our seeds do. This in turn sends us back to work on the first two limbs of yoga: planting seeds by taking care of others.

  It's crucial to realize that the simple act of understanding a thing can transform its very condition. People who truly understand external physical elements like water can, through that act of understanding, change the water into something solid and walk upon it. By understanding the sense power of vision, they can see around the world, or cure the blind.

  All such transformations are possible only because all things are as they are at the mercy of one other thing. And this is the fact that no thing ever begins or ends. Nor does it pass through any other stage, like staying.

  Focus your mind upon the exact moment you read this … word. But there was a part of this moment when you started to see the w, and a later part of the moment when you finished seeing the w.

  And so on, infinitely. We can't be seeing what we're seeing, because there's no point where we started to see it. If we do see words— and we do—then it can be only because our mind has placed them down here upon the page.

  If things actually begin only due to a tiny mental picture we impose upon two otherwise unrelated microseconds, then what things become when they finish beginning has to come from the same place. When you truly understand this, you can turn bricks into gold.

  But would you want to? With the unbearable emotional and physical pain that tears at every single person in this world, we would be compelled to use our abilities for a higher purpose. And so we begin the description of how we use the combination of stillness and wisdom to gain the powers of an angel.

  If one moment in time is only a perception, then all moments are, and we could learn to see ahead and backward in time, to help people. We would also learn that we are mistaking our tiny mental pictures for “actual” objects. Since these pictures are what words are, we would then gain power over words themselves: the ability to speak to all people, guide all people, in their own language.

  Transforming past and future seeds into present ones, we can describe to people the events of their past lives and our own, so they can grasp how everything comes from the way we've treated others.

  In the previous chapters we spoke about the Path of Seeing: that brief period when we commune with ultimate reality. In the hours after this experience, we temporarily gain the ability to read other people's minds. As we progress through the next path, this ability becomes more and more stable.

  Again, it's not that we can share mental seeds that are based or located in another person. Seeds in our own mind can be put there only by our own actions toward others. If this were not the case, then we simply wouldn't be here in this broken world. Masters of the past, in their infinite compassion, would have given us their own perfect seeds long ago.

  And so reading another person's thoughts—and we really do— comes from our own seeds; if it came from theirs, then they wouldn't be having the thoughts.

  Reading other people's minds—or even just sincerely trying to— is an important skill if we have something precious to teach them. We can peek in and see what they enjoy, and what they hope for, and the extent at that moment of their capacity to digest ideas.

  People who are advanced in the path gain the power to become invisible whenever they wish to. Again, this is a matter of consciously manipulating how the pieces of an object—such as the color and outline of one's own body—are organized into that object by the mind. And this can be done only if the correct seeds have been planted. And this can be done only if one has been good to others: good enough to see them not see you, if that could help them.

  We should say here that not everyone who possesses powers such as invisibility necessarily fully understands where they come from, how to keep them, or how to use them to help others. Sometimes a miracle may happen to us simply because of some old good seeds suddenly ripening—but if we don't understand the process, we can't repeat it.

  People who meditate very regularly, even if they only use meditation to “space out” for a while, may temporarily gain a few powers. This is because, in any deep state of meditation, we simply cannot commit the negative actions and thoughts toward others that keep us from these powers.

  You buy your mother-in-law a new shower mat, in the hopes that she might like you more. The next day she slips on it and hurts herself.

  We know enough by now, about how things really work, to know that she didn't slip because of the mat—but rather because of something negative she herself did to someone prior to that. And our good intentions cannot go wrong: the desire to please her will bring us many good things in the future.

  Which doesn't change the fact that it would be nice to know, with confidence, the exact final consequences we can expect from any particular action we undertake. Someone who really understands how the seeds work can perceive which seeds in the storehouse will eventually open and sprout and which will forever lie unopened.

  This is because merely failing to understand how the seeds work is what makes impure seeds viable and potent. Remove the Great Mistake, and old bad seeds never go off.

  There are specific methods for using omens to see what might happen—such as foretelling death from people's shadows. In the end these too work only if we have the right seeds, from taking care of others.

  It's obvious by now that the extraordinary, unexpected powers we might want to seek in order to be of service to others all come from planting the right seeds. And so here the Master reminds us of the very most powerful way of planting these seeds: the practice of the Four Infinite Thoughts, from the first chapter.

  Infinite love, which wants to give all living beings everything their heart desires. Infinite compassion, which wants to remove their tiniest little pain. Infinite joy, which wants to take them to a higher happiness than just houses and hamburgers: to a place of infinite happiness, beyond all fear or death. And infinite equanimity, which wants to do this for everyone, not just friends or family.

  In Master Patanjali's day, an elephant was the ultimate war machine, powerful enough to destroy any obstacle. And so a being who had reached spiritual perfection was called a War-Elephant. When we transform into this angel, we will have ultimate powers: ultimate compassion; a knowledge of all things; and the ability to show ourselves anywhere in the universe, any time, to help others.

  This is the true evolution of all the powers. You will see a child fall from worlds away, and be there to catch him or her, before you think to.

  Back in the second chapter, when we spoke about the physical yoga exercises, we mentioned three main channels where inner wind, or prana, travels through the body. It's crucial to understand these channels, because we can then control our very thoughts, which are linked to the winds. We actually work on the physical body to stop the Great Mistake of the mind.

  The central channel follows the spine; slightly to our right of it runs the sun channel. Tied to the winds that flow in this channel travel our “hot” negative thoughts: anger, hatred, jealousy, all based on disliking objects, events, and people because we fail to understand how we ourselves have produced them.

  Stilling the turbulence of inner winds within the sun channel has the effect of freeing us from misunderstanding our outer realit
y: the world, the earth. The beauty of yoga is that we work on this channel simply and effectively through selected physical yoga exercises.

  Breath control, practiced with authentic guidance, further achieves this goal. And then finally we use the teamwork of the last three limbs of yoga—mental focus, fixation, and wisdom—to still the sun channel from the inside.

  To the left side of the central channel runs the channel of the moon. If the sun channel, which is bloodred, carries largely male energy— externally focused and action-oriented—then the milky-colored moon channel carries mostly female energy—introspective and thinking-oriented.

  Within this channel run all our thoughts of liking things in the wrong way because we misunderstand them: taking the last maple-covered donut for ourselves.

  When our yoga practice stills the winds in the moon channel, the very root of these thoughts is stopped. This is the tendency to see ourselves and our own mind—all the tiny sparks or stars of consciousness within us—as something too that comes from its own side, and not from our seeds.

  Something to realize here: the very seeds that create us create our world. The seeds that create the first division of all—the channels of sun and moon within our very bodies—also make us male or female. They create day and night, sun and moon, you and me, earth and stars. The state of our world is a perfect reflection of the state of our channels, and thus our hearts.

  The central channel, colored like crystal flame, runs up and down the body like the great axis around which the stars turn. It follows the line of the spine from between our legs to the tip of our head, curving down to a point between the eyebrows.