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Practice is really the key word. Yoga does ascribe importance to knowledge, but underlines the fact that mere knowledge will not lead to liberation. Thus Patanjali’s Yoga-sutra has often been called a practical handbook, a help guide of sorts rather than a scholarly work. It stresses repeated practice of the yoga system to become an adept, an endeavor that asks for both sustained time and effort. It is thus that potential students are classed into four categories based on their inherent skills, devotion, aptitude and concentration.

Concentration is particularly important. One of the first aphorisms in the yoga-sutra is “chitta vritti nirodhah”. This can be translated as “restriction of the fluctuations of the consciousness”.

The word chitta denotes the mind as composed of its three elements:

• manas or the mind linked to the senses and having the power of attention, selection and rejection,

• buddhi or intelligence and

• ahamkara or ego.

The chitta or consciousness is constantly in flux since it is bombarded by input from all its three parts. It is difficult, in a normal life, to be free from these inputs and they become the sources of distraction due to which the mind is never still. Unfortunately a troubled or turbulent mind can never be one with the Universal spirit and cannot see itself and others as part of, or as manifestations of, this spirit or paramatma.

The goal of Yoga is thus clear right from the beginning – a subduing of the fluctuations of the mind, which distract it from an appreciation of reality as it really is, and not as it is perceived.

The yoga-sutra is first and foremost a practical handbook. All authorities on Yoga lay emphasis on continued sadhana or abhyasa (constant practice). Accompanying constant practice is also renunciation. Renunciation here does not mean renunciation of the material world, by escaping away from cities, crowds. This would be too easy and would be a negation of Creation. Renunciation means the giving up of all desire, of thought and action which act contrary to the Universal spirit. Renunciation does not mean renunciation of action, but rather of any desire for the end result, to accept with equinanimity the end result.

– Continued

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