Commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

MOVING INTO LOVE

                                                                        Kathy Newburn

The Yoga Sutras provide techniques and practices that train the mind and make it a vehicle of the soul.  The sutras were brought forward by the great Indian forerunner Patanjali, who lived 11,000 years ago and laid down in writing what had been an oral tradition for training spiritual seekers in ancient india.  

The sutras are a collection of 196 aphorisms that synthesise the teachings of yoga. Although the sutras were popular during earlier centuries they were lost from the 12-19th centuries and were only discovered and popularized at the end of the 19th century by Swami Vivekananda and the Theosophical Society. 

This teaching has served the need of humanity and will continue to do so for the next 7,000 years, which would put us into the beginning of the age of Scorpio, when it appears we will be ready for another step forward in the unfoldment of the path of return.  

So while we live in a world wherein people are constantly seeking new and improved systems of spiritual training, this methods of Raja Yoga have stood and will continue to stand the tests of time, providing a sound and safe method advocated by the spiritual Hierarchy. 

The sutras provide the means whereby we can move from the sense of being the isolated self-centered individual trapped within the sense of “I” consciousness-- the unillumined lower mind, devoid of any influence of the the soul’s light and into the stage wherein illumination by the Self, the soul, unveils the reality underlying all things. 

 A saying in an old English book illustrates this point::  “That the man who sees the one Self in everything and all things in the self, he seeth verily.  He seeth and all else is blindness.“ The sense of separation, while a necessary stage in the evolutionary processs, if overly indulged creates a fundamental short-circuiting of the divine circulatory flow if it is not superseded by the calling in of the light.  If the sene of separation endures, it becomes like a branch that grows out of the trunk of a tree which does not recognize its interrelatedness with the whole of the tree that would easily appear if the horizon expanded.  “He who sees clearly, recognizes the unity and that the life of the tree flows into every branch, creating oneness”--this is the consciousness of the soul. 

Despite the separation that stems from the unredeemed lower mind, within the depth of the heart unity is to be found. This essential divinity resides within each and every thing and within each and every human heart. People have thought that by retreating from the world, they could find divinity.  But if God is everywhere, he must be in the cities, as well as in the mountains; in the home and not only in the retreat centers.  And while the solitary life is sometimes needed to break ties and patterns overly indulged in in previous incarnations, the true hero of the spiritual life shuns no place or no person. Solitary lives are needed to learn detachment.  But they will later be left behind, bringing the light of life to every situation.

It is our attitudes that must change, asking nothing and seeking instead to give-by giing up-- seeking not the fruit of action but rather simply acting, for the love of giving.  Activity is the way of evolution, without effort and struggle we float adrift within the backwater of life and miss out on the forward moving currents of the river. 

In Discispleship in the New Age, Vol. II, p. 30 the Tibetan writes, “There is no separation but only identification with the heart of all love; the more you love the more love can reach out through you to others. The chains of love unite the world of men and the world of forms and they constitute the great chain of Hierarchy. The spiritual effort you are asked to make is that of developing yourself into a vibrant and powerful centre of that fundamental, universal Love.” 

*****