Yulia and I are meeting weekly to discuss Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. I found the following insightfulg passages from Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood’s translation.
1.2 Yoga is the control of thought-waves in the mind.
1.13 Practice is the related effort to follow the disciplines which give permanent control of the thought-waves of the mind.
1.15 Non-attachment is self-mastery; it is freedom from desire for what is seen or heard.
1.18 … [Concentration] is attained by constantly checking the thought-waves through the practice of non-attachment.
1.20 The concentration of the true spiritual aspirant is attained through faith, energy, recollectedness, absorption and illumination.
1.30 Sickness, mental laziness, doubt, lack of enthusiasm, sloth, craving for sense pleasure, false perception, despair caused by failure to concentrate and unsteadiness in concentration: these distractions are the obstacles to knowledge.
1.32 [The distractions] can be removed by the practice of concentration upon a single truth.
1.33 Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked.
2.3 These obstacles—the causes of man’s suffering—are ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and the desire to cling to life. 107
2.5 To regard the non eternal as eternal, the impure as pure, the painful as pleasant and the non-Atman as the Atman—this is ignorance. 117
2.7-2.8 Attachment is that which dwells upon pleasure. Aversion is that which dwells upon pain.
3.47 Perfection of the body includes beauty, grace, strength and the hardness of a thunderbolt.
4.25-4.26 The man of discrimination ceases to regard the mind as the Atman. When the mind is bent on the practice of discrimination, it moves toward liberation.
Title above is from Sri Easwaran’s Meditation: An Eight-Point Program..
