The Stages of Samadhi: Patanjali on Those Born Awake and the Path for Everyone Else

Raja Yoga Sutras, Lecture 10. Samadhi Pada, sutras 1.19 and 1.20.

What this lecture takes up

Most people who have heard the word samadhi picture a man sitting motionless for days. Swamiji spends the first eight minutes of this class taking that picture apart, and he does it without softening the point: a person who passes into a hibernating state is read by the world as a yogi, and the world is guessing. Samadhi in Patanjali is not a posture and not a duration. It is a graded series of states, each one defined by what the mind is still holding onto.

At 07:24 he names the subject and begins the ascent. Savitarka, at 09:53, is the level where the mind still argues with itself, and his measure of progress there is deliberately unglamorous: your mind was running in a thousand directions and you have brought it to five hundred. Savichara, at 11:36, is where the intellect stops arguing and starts seeing. Sananda, at 12:35, gets the most vivid image in the class, a man standing on the exact patch of ground where a treasure is buried, certain he has found the place, who has not yet dug. Sasmita, at 14:58, is where the sun reflected in a bucket of water begins to climb the thread of light back toward the sun itself.

Then the class turns, and the turn is the reason to watch it. At 14:08 Swamiji names a danger that most presentations of Raja Yoga leave out entirely. A seeker can arrive at sananda, draw genuine power from the mind, and still have the ego completely intact. What that produces is not a sage. It is a person who announces that he is the greatest, because he is Brahman.

The last half of the class is sutras 1.19 and 1.20, and they divide the human race in two. Sutra 1.19 is about the few who arrive already established: Dhruva, Nachiketa at five years old, Shankaracharya. Sutra 1.20 is the ladder for everyone else, and it has five rungs.

Passage index

Every entry below jumps to that moment in the lecture.

The invocation sets the whole standard

The class opens on the traditional adoration to Sage Patanjali, and Swamiji does not treat it as ceremony. The verse credits Patanjali with three gifts: the Yoga Sutras for purifying the citta, the mind stuff; the Ayurvedic medicine for purifying the body; and the grammar for purifying speech. Three scriptures, three instruments, and Swamiji reads them as a sequence of ideals rather than a list of achievements. First render the body healthy. Then discipline the speech, because a sound body with an undisciplined tongue is not an advance. Only then does the work on the mind mean anything.

He pauses on the grammar longer than a listener might expect, and the reason matters. Sanskrit grammar in this tradition is not a schoolroom subject. It is the study of root sounds, of how a single seed such as sat expands into satsanga, good association, and sanmarga, the good path. Mantra rests on that science. So the invocation is not a preamble to Raja Yoga. It is a statement about what purification means at three levels, and the citta is only the last of them.

Why Raja Yoga names the storehouse

At 03:43 Swamiji lays out the mind in four aspects, and the definitions are worth holding precisely. Manas is the busy conscious mind gathering perceptions through the senses. Buddhi, the intellect, is at work at the same time, deciding which impressions pass deeper and which are ignored. Ahamkara, the ego, assists the intellect, and his warning about it is compact: the ego should not rule the mental process. And chitta is the unconscious storehouse where every impression gathered through the other three is deposited.

Raja Yoga, he says, focuses on chitta, and the reason is efficiency rather than preference. Address the storehouse and the others are implied in it, because the intellect must work well and the senses must do their job before anything reaches the store cleanly. The goal is a chitta absolutely purified, and that condition is liberation. Any movement toward it is yoga.

What samadhi is not, and why no practice is wasted

Before the ladder, Swamiji clears the ground. For the vast majority of people samadhi has not been understood, and many who have heard the word carry an active misconception: anyone who passes into a hibernating state is taken for a yogi, deep in samadhi. He makes a joke of it, and the joke has a blade in it, because the assumption is not harmless. It sets the wrong target. A seeker who believes samadhi means stillness will measure himself by how long he can sit.

What he describes instead is a disciplinary practice. You confine yourself to a position, a mantra, a discipline of prayer and of concentration, and you hold the mind in that concentration until it passes beyond its normal range and glimpses higher consciousness. The defining feature of that state, and the reason he calls it disciplinary rather than final, is that you come in and out of it. It is entered and it is left.

The goal of the practice is that the state stop being an event. When superconsciousness becomes perpetual, it is called sahaja samadhi, the natural condition. At 09:14 he names it, and the distinction between disciplinary samadhi and sahaja samadhi organizes everything that follows: the four lower levels are all things you enter and leave, and the direction of the whole path is toward a condition you no longer have to maintain.

Then he adds the line that any discouraged practitioner should hear. Even in the disciplinary state, each time you raise the mind to a high level you are acting on your impressions, and those impressions become better. Nothing you have practiced is rendered void. That is not consolation. It is a statement about mechanism: the store of impressions is what practice actually works on, which is why chitta, the store, is the target Raja Yoga names.

Union that works by subtraction

At 06:15 the class takes a turn most introductions skip. Yoga means union, and at the ordinary level that is exactly how the mind hears it: I am separated from God, and yoga will unite me. But at a higher level, Swamiji says, yoga is viyoga, separation.

The illustration is a dreamer. You do not unite a dream figure with the waking person by addition. You wake up, and the uniting consists entirely of removing the dream. Every attachment inside the dream is dissolved rather than fulfilled. The Gita uses the same word for the same reason. So the higher work of yoga is subtractive: not the acquisition of a new state, but separation from what was never you. That reframing is what makes the ladder of samadhi legible, because each rung is defined by what has been let go rather than what has been gained.

The four levels of lower samadhi

Savitarka is where vitarka, doubt, is still present, but confined to a narrower range. Swamiji’s measure of success at this stage is the most quotable thing in the class precisely because it is so modest, and he says it without irony: bring the mind from a thousand directions down to five hundred, and you have succeeded.

Savichara is the level where buddhi becomes genuinely operative and begins moving toward intuitive knowledge rather than theoretical conclusion. Sananda goes past the ordinary intellect and touches the source of the ego, and the release of stress at that moment is enormous. His image for it is exact: a man has followed every instruction to the place where the treasure is buried, recognizes the place, and is overjoyed, and he has not found the treasure. Sasmita reaches the root itself. The reflected sun in the bucket, which had asked who am I and been told by the fishes and the frogs that it is the sun, now catches hold of the thread of light and starts to move.

The trap at sananda, and why it is in this class

At 14:08 Swamiji names the risk plainly, and it is the passage that separates this lecture from a survey of terms. A person can become contented at sananda without stepping beyond egoism. From that position it is possible to draw cosmic energy through the mind while the ego is fully intact.

What follows is not sanctity. It is a superiority complex with scriptural vocabulary attached: I am the greatest, because I am Brahman. The kingdom of heaven is within me, therefore I am above you. Swamiji has met this and describes it as a risky situation rather than a moral failing, which is the more useful framing, because the seeker in that position believes he has arrived. The teaching value of the warning is diagnostic. The presence of power is not evidence of progress. Only the dissolution of the one claiming the power is.

Viveka-khyati, and what does not change

At 16:10 viveka-khyati develops, the discernment that separates the seer from every sheath around it. Swamiji’s image is caterpillar to butterfly, a transformation of the intellect rather than an addition to it. In the bucket, the reflected sun begins to recognize that it is not the bucket, not the water, not the fishes and frogs.

Then comes the line that gives the whole class its sobriety. With all this attainment, nothing has changed. Not a single hair has turned luminous. The person in day to day life is the same person. What has occurred is an internal enrichment, and that, he says, is the characteristic of genuine spiritual advancement. Anyone who has expected a visible sign should sit with that.

Asamprajnata samadhi and kaivalya

All the lower states are samprajnata, still related to the bucket and the water. Asamprajnata is the highest, and Swamiji describes its subtle insight in the plainest possible terms: the body I am not, the mind I am not, the intellect I am not, and the condition is joyous, comfortable, expansive. Practice of asamprajnata samadhi ends the world process for that soul, which attains kaivalya, absolute freedom from the cycle of birth and death. He sets the Vedantin’s Brahman and the Buddhist’s nirvana side by side as two descriptions of one attainment, and notes that the Gita joins both words into one phrase, brahma-nirvana.

Sutra 1.19: those born already established

Bhava-pratyaya videha prakriti-layanam. The sutra concerns yogis who perfected the ananda and asmita levels, developed viveka-khyati in an early form, and were able to transcend the body and even the causal layer of the three gunas. Videha means bodiless. A small impediment, pratibandha, remains, and it is removed in the next embodiment by the very process of taking a body, without further effort.

From 25:30 Swamiji names them. Dhruva was a child. Nachiketa was five years old and attained the highest consciousness. Shankaracharya, he says, was like that; so were Jesus and Buddha, who may appear to practice a little and are drawing on resources already complete. And he generalizes the principle in a way that is easy to miss: a child prodigy in mathematics or music is not an accident of heredity. In a universe governed by an omniscient intelligence, nothing arrives by chance. What looks like a gift is a continuation.

Sutra 1.20: the ladder for everyone else

Shraddha virya smriti samadhi prajna purvakah itaresham. For those who were not born established, five steps, in order.

Shraddha is faith, and faith is not uniform. Following the Gita, Swamiji sorts it into three registers. Sattvika faith turns toward God. Rajasika faith attaches to yakshas and rakshasas, which the masses read as ghosts and demons and which he reads as the two obsessions of the acquiring mind: getting what you do not have, and protecting what you have got. Filling the bucket, then sealing its holes, and never resting either way. Tamasika faith attaches to bhutas, which means things of the past, memories with no remaining meaning that the mind refuses to shred. At 36:30 he describes what sattvika faith does to the intellect: knowledge stops being superficial and begins to have an effect on the person holding it and on the people around him.

Virya is strength, and he opens with the lowest and entirely legitimate form, physical strength, the kind that thrills a crowd. Then he moves to the strength that arises from yama and niyama, from a vow kept, from prayer and surrender. His image is a flower that blossoms and holds countless bees by the ear. Weakness, he says, is what turns a small difficulty into a mountain.

Smriti is memory, and the question is which memory. A mind restricted to its nervous system remembers what it did at ten years old and calls that a life. A mind that has drawn from beyond the nervous system carries something else. His illustration is electrical: every bulb receives energy through the wiring, and the wiring receives it from a deeper source. Then samadhi becomes the natural condition rather than an event, and prajna is the intellect wholly transformed.

What can actually be changed in a person

Inside the discussion of smriti, Swamiji makes a claim that deserves to be lifted out, because it is where this lecture stops being a map of states and becomes an argument about human beings.

Modern psychology, he says, sets a ceiling. There is only so much you can change, and past that the person is what he is. A criminal stays a criminal. He rejects the ceiling, and not on sentiment. Out of many criminal personalities, great sages have arisen. The mind can be worked on. Love of God can be admitted into it.

The mechanism he offers is the one he built earlier in the class. Every bulb draws its energy through the wiring, and the wiring itself draws from a deeper source. The nervous system is the wiring. If the mind tunes to what stands behind it, even in small measures and in ordinary moments, something begins to move, and what moves is not a mood. It is the same power that fashioned the brain, and it can refashion it.

That is why he insists the change is available in small things. Becoming a devotee even in small measure is already drawing from that subtle source without the person knowing it. The claim being made here is precise, and it is the practical payoff of a class that spends most of its length on states few listeners will reach this year: the ceiling other frameworks assume is not where this tradition places it.

Sthita-prajna: the ocean that is not disturbed

The class closes on the Gita’s image of the established sage. Countless rivers enter the ocean and the ocean is not perturbed. Countless clouds cross the sky and the sky is unchanged. Countless projections play across a screen and nothing has happened to the screen. Apuryamanam, constant inner fullness. That state, he says, is the goal, and whoever attains it attains brahma-nirvana.

Terms used in this lecture

Chitta: the unconscious storehouse of impressions. The aspect of mind Raja Yoga targets.
Manas, buddhi, ahamkara: the busy sense mind, the discriminating intellect, the ego that asserts this is me and this is mine.
Viyoga: separation. Union achieved by removing the illusion rather than adding a state.
Savitarka, savichara, sananda, sasmita: the four levels of lower, samprajnata samadhi.
Viveka-khyati: the discernment that distinguishes the seer from the sheaths.
Asamprajnata samadhi: the highest samadhi, no longer related to the bucket and the water.
Kaivalya: absolute freedom from the cycle of birth and death.
Bhava-pratyaya: the condition of those who arrive in a body already established.
Shraddha, virya, smriti, samadhi, prajna: faith, strength, memory, absorption, transformed wisdom.
Sthita-prajna: the sage established in wisdom, undisturbed by what enters.

Questions to sit with

Of the five steps in sutra 1.20, which one have you been skipping?
Where in your practice have you mistaken the arrival of power for the dissolution of ego?
Which of your memories are bhutas, things of the past your mind refuses to shred?

Provenance

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Samadhi Pada, sutras 1.19 and 1.20. Raja Yoga Sutras Lecture 10 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation.

The full lecture archive is free to listen to at yogaresearchfoundation.org.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.