the goal of yoga

The promise of yoga is Cosmic Consciousness. As Patanjali explains in his first chapter, by surrendering to your higher power, chanting, breathing, and meditation, you will find an imperturbable peace saturated with truth and wisdom. You will gain a self-mastery so complete that no matter what happens, you will glide through life in states of awe, wonder, bliss, and conscious awareness. Whether life brings you pleasure or pain, fortune or misfortune, when you act, it will be from a deep reservoir of compassion, kindness, delight, and equanimity.

In his second chapter, on the practice of yoga, Patanjali lays out a method for letting go of the only thing that stands between you and permanent ecstasy: the triggered reactions of your judging mind.

First, Patanjali’s gives us Ten Commandments for taming the ego’s self-will: swearing off violence, lying, stealing, promiscuity, and materialism, and cultivating cleanliness, contentment, studiousness, the fire of transformation, and surrender to your higher power.

Then, he gives us six prerequisites for Cosmic Consciousness: sitting still, minding your breath, tuning out distractions, focusing your attention, finding your flow, and getting completely absorbed in it.

Patanjali’s third chapter, on the object of yoga, begins with the final three, the focus (3.1), flow (3.2), and absorption that eventually deliver moments where only the essence of your focus shines forth, as if empty of its own form (3.3). In this state, you experience a merging with that essence, as your form falls away, too, dissolving into Oneness with the living organism known as the Universe. Richard Bucke tells us what this is like in his 1900 book Cosmic Consciousness:

All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city. The next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then. I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure, all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed.

If you haven’t experienced that yet, don’t worry, you will. Just start each practice with a decision to focus and not be distracted. Patanjali is a good coach and has words of encouragement for you. When an equal amount of time is spent distracted and focused, you’re in the transition to one-pointed, focused attention (3.12). When you’re no longer distracted, in an uninterrupted flow of focused attention, you’re making the transition to Cosmic Consciousness (3.11). When your identity begins to disappear, you are in the transition to complete freedom from the ego (3.9). The flowing current of focused attention will wash away every last residue of ego identification (3.10) and transform thought into a state that reveals its essential nature (3.13). Eventually, the constant chatter of your inner monologue will go quiet. In life, the ingrained habits of your personality, your likes and dislikes, your hangups and issues, and your triggered reactions, will begin to recede. Take note of this growing freedom and know that you are in the transition to total mastery over your thoughts and behavior. Your previous ignorance is gradually being replaced by dharma, the truth of your essential nature.

If you meditate on who you are in the past, present, and future (3.16), you’ll see that from conception to death is constant change, but who you feel you are stays the same (3.14), so you can see from this there’s an aspect of consciousness distinct from this succession of identities (3.15).

If you meditate on the paradox of “understanding,” how we confuse words and ideas with reality, you will discover the distinction between language, symbols and meaning, and gain insight into “the cries of all beings” (3.17).

The next set of aphorisms are probably best translated with the caveat “you can,” like, “Through direct perception of your samskaras (personality traits, habits, and conditioned behaviors), you can gain insight into your past incarnations.” (3.18) Is it necessary to visit past lives in search of the roots of our samskaras in order to free ourselves from them?

Patanjali doesn’t seem to think so. In sutra 3.22, when he talks about observing the law of cause and effect to read the past and predict the future, he says, if you trace karma back far enough, you’ll see that it has no beginning and has existed from time immemorial. If you follow karma into the future, we all meet the same end. Why bother to tracing your karma all the way back to the Big Bang or all the way forward to your inevitable death, if you can release yourself from the bonds of karma by meditating on compassion, loving kindness, equanimity, and joy (3.23), or by the divine power of om (which he refers to the elephant in sutra 3.24).

Patanjali undercuts much of what he says about the powers that can be attained through the practice of yoga.

About obtaining insights into others’ minds, he says that even if you can read people’s minds, you’re only getting their ego, you’re not penetrating to their essential nature which is beyond the reach of the senses (3.19 and 3.20).

Want to be invisible to others?Patanjali says, it’s easy. All you have to do is make sure there’s no contact between your body and light. In the dark, we’re all invisible (3.21).

After teasing us a bit about our misplaced desires for the powers of fortune telling, mind reading, and invisibility, Patanjali gets serious when he says that the light of consciousness reveals subtle, veiled and remote knowledge (3.25). What else could have allowed us to set calendars based on the Earth’s revolution around the sun (3.26), and the moon’s around the Earth (3.27), or to navigate by the stars (3.28)?

Similarly, Patanjali’s instructions on the chakras are straightforward: engage the root lock at the pelvic floor for steadiness (3.31), focus on your solar plexus to understand the systems of your body (3.29), listen to your heart to gain insight into the workings of your mind (3.34), move energy into the pit of the throat to subdue hunger and thirst (3.30), and meditate at the third-eye for revealed wisdom (3.32).

Patanjali insists that, by meditation, anything and everything can be revealed to you (3.33).

In sutra 3.35, Patanjali explains that the true Self is pure consciousness and is only and always the knower. It isn’t an object, so you can’t meditate on it, you can only meditate as it. By meditating as the Self, you attain extraordinary faculties of prescience and extrasensory perception (3.36).

Patanjali tempts us with the ability to move our minds into other people’s bodies (3.38), to ascend over water, mud, or thorns (3.39), to light fires with the power that circulates at our navels (3.40), to have superhuman hearing (3.41), to become light as cotton and travel through space (3.42), to attain perfect bodies of beauty, grace, strength, and adamantine hardness (3.45).

Should we take Patanjali literally? Maybe. We know yoga can produce a perfect body and the other things that were fantasies in his time are commonplace today: virtual reality, flight, real-time face-to-face communication at any distance, suits for floating in outer space. To invent these things, humans had to sit still, tune out distractions, focus their attention, find their flow, and get completely absorbed, just as Patanjali teaches. Is this the purpose of meditative focus, to harness the power of the mind to stretch the limits of human potential?

These lines from the Katha Upanishad are a useful roadmap for navigating the territory Patanjali has led us into:

Though one sits in meditation in a
Particular place, the Self within
Can exercise its influence far away.
Though still, it moves everything everywhere.

The force is in us, but not of us. We could use it to figure everything out, from the quantum to the cosmos. We could go intergalactic with the transhumanist merger of man and machine or with out-of-body feats of concentrated Consciousness, but we have to escape human hubris to understand that no matter how clever and skillful we become at manipulating our environment, we are playing in a universe that the force of Cosmic Consciousness made and maintains. We can travel anywhere by any means and we will still look out on the inconceivably vast universe from our extremely limited perspective as tiny humans.

We have to keep this in mind to understand sutra 3.43 where Patanjali tells us that actually passing out of, and acting outside of, the body is the ultimate freedom. By this, he says, that which conceals the light of Consciousness is destroyed.

And sutra 3.44, where Patanjali tells us that by meditating on the significance of the conjunction of physical existence, the essential nature of human consciousness, and divine consciousness, mastery over the five elements of creation (earth, fire, water, air, and ether) is obtained.

When we hear these sutras, we imagine being humans who can act outside our bodies like the wizards and witches of children’s stories or who can master the five elements like comic book heroes, but a human wielding power beyond their own body or over the five elements is an insignificant speck of dust compared with the Cosmic Consciousness that is moving everything everywhere.

Patanjali is trying to help us shift our goal from being humans with the unlimited powers of Consciousness to being Consciousness itself.

In the state of Cosmic Consciousness, physical existence, the essential nature of human consciousness, and divine consciousness are one and the same. When you sit in awe and wonder experiencing unlimited Oneness, your individual will falls away.

Individual will only exists as a revolt against human limitations. You are integral to, inextricable from, essential to, indivisible from, and one with what is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, but until you know this, you will feel limited, small, and flawed, and you’ll have the nagging sense of needing to improve yourself somehow. In this state of separateness, desire keeps getting stronger, but the spiritual breakthrough you crave is blocked, because it can’t come through self-will, only through surrender.

It’s like what Albert Einstein is said to have said about not being able to solve a problem with the same thinking used to create it. Alan Watts’s talk “Mind Over Mind” is about this paradox:

[N]obody seems to want to be in charge of themselves, because they feel they can’t do it. As Saint Paul said: “To will is present with me. But how to do good I find not. For the good that I would, I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do.” So there, at once, we are in difficulty. Because trying to improve yourself is like trying to lift yourself up into the air by tugging at your own bootstraps—and it can’t be done!

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[I]f you are really aware of your own inner workings, you will realize there’s nothing you can do to improve yourself, because you don’t know what better is, in any case. And you, who will do the improving, are the one who needs to be improved.

When you see, in other words, that doing something about your situation is not going to help you. When you see, equally, that trying not to do anything about it is not going to help you, where are you? Where do you stand? You’re nonplussed and you are simply reduced to watching.

So here’s the situation, you see: the whole idea of self-improvement is a will-o’-the-wisp and a hoax. That’s not what it’s about. Let’s begin where we are. What happens if you know? If you know beyond any shadow of doubt that there is nothing you can do to be better? Well, it’s kind of a relief, isn’t it? Now, you say, “Well, now what will I do?” See, there’s a little fidget comes up. Because we’re so used to making things better—leave the world a better place than when you found that sort of thing; I want to be of service to other people, and all these dreadfully hazy ideas—and so there’s that little itch still. But supposing, instead of that, seeing that there isn’t really anything we can do to improve ourselves or to improve the world, if we realize that that is so, it gives us a breather—in the course of which we may simply watch what is going on. Watch what happens. Nobody ever does this, you know? And therefore it sounds terribly simple. It sounds so simple that it almost looks as if it isn’t worth doing. But ever just watched? Watch what’s happening, and watch what you are doing by way of reaction to it. Just watch it happen.

Surrendering your individual will is essential to experiencing Oneness. The desire to attain supernatural powers is a symptom of individual will. That’s why, in sutra 3.37, Patanjali poo-poos what he’s enticed us with. These are powers in the worldly state, he tells us, but they are obstacles to Cosmic Consciousness.

What Patanjali’s done here is similar to what Yama, the king of death, does to the young Nachiketa in the Katha Upanishad where he refuses to disclose his secrets until he is sure that Nachiketa isn’t tempted by any power, worldly or otherwise:

I spread before your eyes, Nachiketa,
The fulfillment of all worldly desires:
Power to dominate the earth, delights
Celestial gained through religious rites,
Miraculous powers beyond time and space.
These with will and wisdom have you renounced.

Patanjali admits no limits to human consciousness. Does he exaggerate? Think of everything that has been achieved by humanity since Patanjali’s time and the technological marvels we take for granted today.

And, yet, what we still struggle with is mastery over our own minds and emotions. So much in our world has changed, but the afflictions Patanjali lists in sutra 1.30 (illness, sluggishness, doubt, impaired judgment, burnout, overconsumption, low self-esteem, failure, and relapse) remain the same, because, as Patanjali says in sutra 2.3, we remain ignorant, believing we are the ego, plagued by its cravings and aversions and afraid of the death of this limited identity because we can’t conceive of anything beyond it.

In sutra 3.47, Patanjali takes us back to the one true siddhi, mastery over indriya, the senses, emotions, and mental and spiritual faculties. As a result of mastering indriya, the mind becomes quick enough to perceive the causeless (Shiva; consciousness) and the cause (Shakti; energy).

With the wisdom that comes from the uninterrupted discernment of distinguishing the knower (consciousness) from the known (the ego), you attain omniscience and supremacy over all states of being.

When you have no desires, even for that, the seeds of bondage are destroyed and you attain absolute independence.

You could be invited to join the gods and you wouldn’t show the slightest smile of satisfaction, knowing how careful you’d have to be not to slip into the undesirable state of ego identification.

How do you reach this state? Saṃyama on the present, as it unfolds moment by moment.

From one moment to the next, what makes each separate and distinct is the moment’s location in our subjective experience of time, but the common denominator is the constant of consciousness, where there is no distinction and each moment is witnessed alike.

It’s liberating to take the seat of the witness, observing each moment with conscious awareness, which has everything as its object and which is not the object of anything.

Through this process, Sattva becomes as pure as Puruṣa, without the characteristic marks of the ego. Then the Puruṣa, shining in its own pure light, stands alone.

You become pure consciousness.

In Vibhuti Pada, Patanjali tells us there are no limits to human consciousness. It has the power to produce any number of experiences, including entering another person’s body, leaping over water, mud or thorns, self-luminescence, supernatural hearing, traveling through space as light as cotton, and even passing out of and acting outside the body. We can master the five elements of creation, become as small as an atom, attain perfection of the body and freedom from the laws of nature.

Think of everything that has been achieved by humanity since Patanjali wrote these words and the technological marvels we take for granted today. Was he wrong?

And, yet, what we still struggle with is mastery over our own minds and emotions. So much in our world has changed, but the afflictions Patanjali lists in sutra 1.30 (illness, sluggishness, doubt, impaired judgment, burnout, overconsumption, low self-esteem, failure, and relapse) remain the same, because, as Patanjali says in sutra 2.3, we remain ignorant, believing we are the ego, being plagued by its cravings and aversions and afraid of its death.

With the wisdom that comes from the uninterrupted discernment of distinguishing the knower (consciousness) from the known (the ego), you attain omniscience and supremacy over all states of being.

When you have no desires, even for that, the seeds of bondage are destroyed and you attain absolute freedom and independence from the ego.

You could be invited to join the gods and you wouldn’t show the slightest smile of satisfaction, knowing how careful you’d have to be not to slip into the undesirable state of ego identification.

How do you reach this state? Saṃyama on the present, as it unfolds moment by moment.

prajńā = a specific type of mystical cognition arising out of the steady fixing of the mind to an object, seven stages of prajńā corresponding to the stages of yoga ascension

Triśikha-brãhmana astanga-yoga

Yama = want of attachment (vairāgya)

Niyama = attachment to the ultimate reality (anuraktih pare tattve)

Asana = indifference to all things

Prāna-samyamana = the realization of the falsity of the world

pratyāhāra = the inwardness of the mind

dhāranã = the motionlessness of the mind

dhyāna = thinking of oneself as pure consciousness

samādhi = forgetfulness of dhyānas

Dhyãna-bindhuThe self as the essential link of all things, like the fragrance in flowers or the thread in a garland or the oil in sesamum.

3.1. Concentration is the process of focusing your attention on one thing. This can be your breath; something to look at, hear, smell, taste or feel; a sound, prayer, or affirmation you’re chanting or singing; or a physical or mental activity you’re engaged in.

3.2 An uninterrupted stream of single-pointed focus is meditation, a flow state.

3.3 When only the essence of your focal point shines forth, as if empty of its own form, this is the state of Cosmic Consciousness where everything appears as a manifestation of Loving Awareness.

3.4 Attuning yourself to Cosmic Consciousness is not a linear path. You are likely to move in and out of states of concentration, meditative flow and deep absorption.

3.5 Master this process and the transcendental insight of Cosmic Consciousness will dawn.

3.6 The practice of yoga may not be linear, but it does have levels of sorts.

3.7 For example, the last three limbs of yoga are likely to take you much deeper than the first five…

3.8. …but they’re just scratching the surface compared to the transcendent state of perpetual Cosmic Consciousness.

3.12 Until you reach that ultimate state, start each practice with a decision to focus and not be distracted. When an equal amount of time is spent distracted and focused, know that you are in the transition to one-pointed focus.

3.11 When you’re no longer distracted by anything and obtain perfect focus, know that you’re making the transition to Cosmic Consciousness.

3.9 As your mastery over your mental vortexes emerges, your personality traits, habits, and conditioned behaviors begin to subside. Before they return, consciously connect with these moments of freedom and know that you are making a transition to complete freedom from the ego.

3.10 Soon, you’ll experience a flowing current of mastery that washes away every last residue of ego identification.

3.13 Eventually, by always going back to focusing the senses and faculties, you will transform your mind into a state that reveals its essential nature. You will notice that…

3.14 …from conception to death, who you were in the past, who you are in the present, and who you will be in the future, are all very different. The one constant is the light within. Your essential nature is always the same.

3.15 When you reason that there is an aspect of consciousness distinct from this succession of identities, you expand your awareness to hold this distinct consciousness within it.

3.16 That is the insight gained from training your focus on the three-fold transition of past, present, and future.

3.17 The paradox of “understanding” is that we confuse words and ideas with reality. By training your focus on the distinctions between language, symbols, and meaning, you can gain insight into the cries of all creatures.

3.19 You can even obtain insight into other people’s minds…

3.20 …but that mental exercise cannot penetrate to their essential nature, which lies beyond the reach of the senses.

3.21 By training your focus on the form of your body as perceived by others, you can gain the power to obstruct their sight. If there is no contact between your body and the light, you are invisible.

3.18 Through direct perception of your personality traits, habits, and conditioned behaviors, you can gain insight into your past incarnations.

3.22 By training your focus on the law of cause and effect, you can gain insight into the future to read the omens and timing of death, or you can go into the past to see how something entered into being and trace it all the way back to its source, but you may find that it has no beginning and has existed from time immemorial.

3.23 By training your focus on compassion, loving kindness, equanimity, and joy, you invigorate these qualities.

3.24 By training your focus on the power of an elephant, you can attain it. Have you ever noticed how the symbol for om looks like an elephant?

3.25 The light of knowledge reveals subtle, veiled, and remote knowledge.

3.26 By training your focus on the sun, you can gain insight into the solar system.

3.27 By training your focus on the moon, you can gain insight into its phases.

3.28 By training your focus on the pole star, you can gain insight into your spot on the Earth and the Earth’s spot in the galaxy.

3.29 By training your focus on your solar plexus chakra, you can gain insight into the systems of your body.

3.30 By training your focus on your throat chakra, you can gain the power to subdue hunger and thirst.

3.31 By training your focus on your root chakra and the lock at the base of your spine, you can gain steadfastness.

3.32 By training your focus on the celestial radiance of the third-eye chakra, the perfected ones may reveal themselves to you.

3.33 Truly, everything can be revealed to you.

3,34 By training your focus on the heart chakra, you can gain insight into the working of your mind.

3.35 Even in its purest form, the field of matter and energy to which your mental vortexes belong is part of existence, making it quite distinct from Consciousness, the knower. Your mind is in the opposite category of existence; it is what is known. Consciousness, the Self, is never an object of experience; it is the subject, the one who is aware, the one who knows. Existence comes into being to be known by Consciousness. Consciousness comes into being to know Existence. By training your focus on your own object, your own mind, you gain the insight of Consciousness.

3.36 By training your focus on being Consciousness, you gain extraordinary faculties of prescience and extrasensory perception.

3.37 These are powers in the worldly state, but they can be obstacles to Cosmic Consciousness.

3.38 When what causes you to be bound to your body loosens, your perception is free to roam and your mind can enter into other people’s bodies.

3.39 You can master the upward-moving life-wind and attain the power to ascend over water, mud, thorns, etc.

3.40 Master the life-wind that circulates about the naval to use your breath to light a fire and shine.

3.41 Master the element of ether, located at the third eye and represented by a spiral, for supernatural powers of hearing. Have you seen how the ear (cochlea) is shaped in a spiral?

3.42 Meditate on the relationship between the element of ether and the body, and your body can become as light as cotton, traveling through space.

3.43 Actually passing out of, and acting outside of, the body is the ultimate freedom. By this, that which conceals the light of Consciousness is destroyed.

3.44 Meditate on the significance of the conjunction of physical existence, the essential nature of human consciousness, and divine consciousness to master the five elements of creation (earth, fire, water, air, and ether).

3.45 You can attain a perfect body of beauty, grace, strength, and adamantine hardness.

3.46 By training your focus on the significance of the conjunction of the instruments of knowledge, the knower, and what is known, you attain mastery over the senses, emotions, and mental and spiritual faculties.

3.47 By mastering these, the mind becomes quick enough to perceive the Causeless (Shiva; consciousness) and the Cause (Shakti; the energy that breathes existence into being).

3.48 With the wisdom that comes from the uninterrupted discernment of distinguishing the knower from what is known, you attain omniscience and supremacy over all states of being.

3.49 When you have no desires, even for that, the seeds of bondage are destroyed and you attain absolute independence from the ego and the field of existence in which it resides.

3.50 You could be invited to join the gods and not even show the slightest smile of satisfaction, knowing how careful you’d have to be not to slip back into the undesirable state of ego identification.

3.51 By training your focus on the present, as it unfolds moment by moment, comes the insight born of discernment.

3.52 From one moment to the next, what makes each separate and distinct is the moment’s location in our subjective experience of time, but the common denominator is the constant of consciousness, where there is no distinction and each moment is witnessed alike.

3.53 It’s liberating to take the seat of the witness, observing each moment with conscious awareness, which has everything as its object and which is not the object of anything. This is the wisdom born of discernment.

3.54 When your existence is as pure as Consciousness, without the characteristic marks of the ego, then Consciousness, shing in its own pure light, stands alone.