The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - Chapter 4 - On Realizations
Patanjali
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- Psychic powers arise by birth, drugs, incantations, purificatory acts or concentrated insight.
- Transformation into another state is by the directed flow of creative nature.
- Creative nature is not moved into action by any incidental cause, but by the removal of obstacles, as in the case of a farmer clearing his field of stones for irrigation.
- Created minds arise from egoism alone.
- There being difference of interest, one mind is the director of many minds.
- Of these, the mind born of concentrated insight is free from the impressions.
- The impressions of unitive cognition are neither good nor bad. In the case of the others, there are three kinds of impressions.
- From them proceed the development of the tendencies which bring about the fruition of actions.
- Because of the magnetic qualities of habitual mental patterns and memory, a relationship of cause and effect clings even though there may be a change of embodiment by class, space and time.
- The desire to live is eternal, and the thought-clusters prompting a sense of identity are beginningless.
- Being held together by cause and effect, substratum and object- the tendencies themselves disappear on the dissolution of these bases.
- The past and the future exist in the object itself as form and expression, there being difference in the conditions of the properties.
- Whether manifested or unmanifested they are of the nature of the attributes.
- Things assume reality because of the unity maintained within that modification.
- Even though the external object is the same, there is a difference of cognition in regard to the object because of the difference in mentality.
- And if an object known only to a single mind were not cognized by that mind, would it then exist?
- An object is known or not known by the mind, depending on whether or not the mind is colored by the object.
- The mutations of awareness are always known on account of the changelessness of its Lord, the indweller.
- Nor is the mind self-luminous, as it can be known.
- It is not possible for the mind to be both the perceived and the perceiver simultaneously.
- In the case of cognition of one mind by another, we would have to assume cognition of cognition, and there would be confusion of memories.
- Consciousness appears to the mind itself as intellect when in that form in which it does not pass from place to place.
- The mind is said to perceive when it reflects both the indweller (the knower) and the objects of perception (the known).
- Though variegated by innumerable tendencies, the mind acts not for itself but for another, for the mind is of compound substance.
- For one who sees the distinction, there is no further confusing of the mind with the self.
- Then the awareness begins to discriminate, and gravitates towards liberation.
- Distractions arise from habitual thought patterns when practice is intermittent.
- The removal of the habitual thought patterns is similar to that of the afflictions already described.
- To one who remains undistracted in even the highest intellection there comes the equalminded realization known as The Cloud of Virtue. This is a result of discriminative discernment.
- From this there follows freedom from cause and effect and afflictions.
- The infinity of knowledge available to such a mind freed of all obscuration and property makes the universe of sensory perception seem small.
- Then the sequence of change in the three attributes comes to an end, for they have fulfilled their function.
- The sequence of mutation occurs in every second, yet is comprehensible only at the end of a series.
- When the attributes cease mutative association with awarenessness, they resolve into dormancy in Nature, and the indweller shines forth as pure consciousness. This is absolute freedom.
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