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The universe of experience is our own enamel, so to say, and the real universe is the parasite serving as nucleus. The ordinary man will never understand it, because when he tries to do so, he throws out an enamel, and sees only his own enamel.
It is the mind-stuff, and Vrittis are the waves and ripples rising in it when external causes impinge on it.
Again, the mind is in three states,
Rajas, Tamas, Sattva
Let the reins go, and the horses will run away with you. Anyone can do that, but he who can stop the plunging horses is the strong man.
The Chitta manifests itself in the following forms — scattering, darkening, gathering, one-pointed, and concentrated.
The commentator says, the third form is natural to the Devas, the angels, and the first and second to the demons.
(some) painful and (others) not painful.
I hear it said that the character of the man is not of so much importance as what he may say; we must first hear what he says. This may be true in other things. A man may be wicked, and yet make an astronomical discovery, but in religion it is different, because no impure man will ever have the power to reach the truths of religion.
When you are going to be angry or miserable, reason it out how it is that some news that has come to you is throwing your mind into Vrittis.
Their control is by practice and nonattachment.
When a large number of these impressions are left on the mind, they coalesce and become a habit.
Our character is the sum-total of these marks, and according as some particular wave prevails one takes that tone.
Never say any man is hopeless, because he only represents a character, a bundle of habits, which can be checked by new and better ones.
What is practice? The attempt to restrain the mind in Chitta form, to prevent its going out into waves.
sense-enjoyments
to control the twofold motive powers arising from my own experience and from the experience of others, and thus prevent the Chitta from being governed by them, is Vairagya.
It is the highest manifestation of the power of Vairagya when it takes away even our attraction towards the qualities. We have first to understand what the Purusha, the Self, is and what the qualities are.
Tamas, another Rajas, and the third Sattva. These three qualities manifest themselves in the physical world as darkness or inactivity, attraction or repulsion, and equilibrium of the two.
Self of man is beyond all these, beyond nature. It is effulgent, pure, and perfect. Whatever of intelligence we see in nature is but the reflection of this Self upon nature. Nature itself is insentient.
The non-attachment, as described in aphorism 15 (as being control of objects or nature) is the greatest help towards manifesting the Self.
In the Samprajnata Samadhi come all the powers of controlling nature.
There are two sorts of objects for meditation in the twenty-five categories of the Sankhyas, (1) the twenty-four insentient categories of Nature, and (2) the one sentient Purusha.
Vitarka means question; Savitarka, with question, questioning the elements, as it were, that they may give their truths and their powers to the man who meditates upon them. There is no liberation in getting powers.
There is another Samadhi which is attained by the constant practice of cessation of all mental activity, in which the Chitta retains only the unmanifested impressions.
The method is to meditate on the mind itself, and whenever thought comes, to strike it down, allowing no thought to come into the mind, thus making it an entire vacuum. When we can really do this, that very moment we shall attain liberation.
When persons without training and preparation try to make their minds vacant, they are likely to succeed only in covering themselves with Tamas, the material of ignorance, which makes the mind dull and stupid, and leads them to think that they are making a vacuum of the mind.
You may ask, what state would that be in which there is no mind, there is no knowledge?
You must always bear in mind that the extremes look very much alike.
What is the result of constant practice of this higher concentration? All old tendencies of restlessness and dullness will be destroyed, as well as the tendencies of goodness too.
Those good and evil tendencies will suppress each other, leaving alone the Soul, in its own splendour untrammelled by either good or bad, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient.
But Kapila teaches that there are many souls, who, though nearly attaining perfection, fall short because they cannot perfectly renounce all powers. Their minds for a time merge in nature, to re-emerge as its masters.
They are Yogis who have fallen short of perfection, and though, for a time, debarred from attaining the goal, remain as rulers of parts of the universe.
Grief, mental distress, tremor of the body, irregular breathing, accompany non-retention of concentration.
To remedy this, the practice of one subject (should be made). Making the mind take the form of one object for some time will destroy these obstacles.
Friendship, mercy, gladness, and indifference, being thought of in regard to subjects, happy, unhappy, good, and evil respectively, pacify the Chitta.
Some of this I have told you before, but a little repetition will serve to fix it in your minds. First, you must remember that this Prana is not the breath; but that which causes the motion of the breath, that which is the vitality of the breath, is the Prana.
Again, the word Prana is used for all the senses; they are all called Pranas, the mind is called Prana; and so we see that Prana is force.
The Chitta, the mind-stuff, is the engine which draws in the Prana from the surroundings, and manufactures out of Prana the various vital forces — those that keep the body in preservation — and thought, will, and all other powers.
The more thoughtful the man, the more complicated will be the streets in his brain, and the more easily he will take to new ideas, and understand them.
Those forms of concentration that bring extraordinary sense-perceptions cause perseverance of the mind.
This naturally comes with Dhâranâ, concentration; the Yogis say, if the mind becomes concentrated on the tip of the nose, one begins to smell, after a few days, wonderful perfumes.
Take some holy person, some great person whom you revere, some saint whom you know to be perfectly nonattached, and think of his heart. That heart has become non-attached, and meditate on that heart; it will calm the mind.
What results from this constant meditation? We must remember how in a previous aphorism Patanjali went into the various states of meditation, how the first would be the gross, the second the fine, and from them the advance was to still finer objects. The result of these meditations is that we can meditate as easily on the fine as on the gross objects. Here the Yogi sees the three things, the receiver, the received, and the receiving instrument, corresponding to the Soul, external objects, and the mind. There are three objects of meditation given us. First, the gross things, as bodies, or
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the real germ of religion, and that I propose to call the struggle to transcend the limitations of the senses.
In all organised religions, their founders, prophets, and messengers are declared to have gone into states of mind that were neither waking nor sleeping, in which they came face to face with a new series of facts relating to what is called the spiritual kingdom.
The answer to this is that even the Buddhists find an eternal moral law, and that moral law was not reasoned out in our sense of the word But Buddha found it, discovered it, in a supersensuous state.
Thus, a tremendous statement is made by all religions; that the human mind, at certain moments, transcends not only the limitations of the senses, but also the power of reasoning.
It then comes face to face with facts which it could never have sensed, could never hive reasoned out.
We are always struggling to raise ourselves up to that ideal.
They find out very soon that that infinite pleasure is not to be got through the senses, or, in other words, the senses are too limited, and the body is too limited, to express the Infinite.
