The Five Means to Samādhi: Raja Yoga Sutras, Lesson 11

Patañjali spends one sūtra on the people who arrive already awake, and then he turns to everybody else. Lesson 11 of Swami Jyotirmayananda’s Raja Yoga Sutras series takes up Samādhi Pāda 1.20 and 1.21, and the shift between them is the whole reason this lecture is worth an hour of your attention. The nineteenth sūtra described bhava-pratyaya, the rare soul in whom enlightenment dawns without apparent effort, even, as Swamiji puts it, while still an infant in the mother’s womb. The twentieth begins with the word itareṣām: for the others. That is the address on the envelope, and if you are reading this, it is your address.

What follows is not inspiration. It is a sequence, and Swamiji treats it as one: śraddhā, faith; vīrya, strength; smṛti, what the mind stays engrossed in; then samādhi; then prajñā, the intuitive intellect. Each term is load-bearing, and each one grows out of the one before it, which is why the lecture keeps circling back rather than marching forward. Faith is not the mood you bring to practice. It is the substrate that generates strength, and strength is what changes what your memory does with your life.

Then, at 44:19, sūtra 1.21 adds the variable nobody enjoys hearing about. Tīvra-saṃvegānām āsannaḥ: for those who move with intense momentum, the goal is near. Swamiji closes by laying out three degrees of intensity, mṛdu, madhya and adhimātra, mild, moderate and intense, and points out that they apply to both abhyāsa, repeated practice, and vairāgya, dispassion. Two variables at three settings each gives nine kinds of practitioner, and only one of the nine is on the fast road. It is a quietly uncomfortable close to a warm lecture, and it is delivered without any scolding at all.

Where to listen

The opening is about your tongue, and it is not a digression

The lecture begins with the traditional invocation to Patañjali, who is credited with three gifts: the yoga scripture for purifying the mind, the Ayurvedic scripture for purifying the body, and a grammar for purifying speech. Swamiji lingers on the third. Health of the body is the foundation, he says, and it is not enough on its own. If the body and mind are being built up while the tongue stays divided, then something is not really evolving.

He gives the Vedic rule at 03:06: satyaṃ vada, priyaṃ vada, na vada satyam apriyam. Speak the truth, speak it pleasantly, do not speak an unpleasant truth. What makes this passage useful rather than pious is the sequence of self-examinations he attaches to it. First, will these words touch the heart of the person in a profoundly positive way? If not, stay quiet. Then, having sweetened the speech, step back and ask again: what will the effect be? Am I satisfying my ego by saying this, or am I helping the person by pointing out their error? And his verdict, if the honest answer is the first one, is severe: that is not the real practice of truth, even though it looks like truth.

This sits at the front of a lecture about the five means for a reason. The whole sūtra is about substrate, about what your practice is actually made of underneath its appearance. A truth told to feed the ego has the shape of satya and none of its substance. Keep that in mind when the lecture reaches śraddhā, because faith has counterfeits too.

Nobody hands you your gifts

Before he names the five means, Swamiji spends several minutes closing off an escape route. Some souls are born awake, and he does not soften how strange that sounds: you never think of children being infants even before birth, enlightened. Birds are born to fly and do not apply for a flight license. Fish are born to stay in water, keeping their eyes open, doing trāṭaka all the time. The image is affectionate and it is also an argument, because the next thing he says is that none of it arrives by accident.

Whatever you have acquired in this life has not been imposed on you by some whim of the Creator. Your intelligence, your particular gift for music or mathematics, none of it came from a mix-up of chromosomes. It came from karma, from your own repeated guiding of your own mind through many embodiments. Then a line that is worth sitting with, at 08:36: “Others exist only to support your karma.” Their presence affects you positively or negatively depending on your own karma, not on their whim. This is not a comfortable teaching and Swamiji does not present it as one. It removes the option of explaining your inner life by reference to what other people did to you.

The Naciketā story at 09:09 is the counter-example that makes the point vivid. Offered six hundred years of health, rulership over the earth, friends, and universal recognition, the boy answers, in Swamiji’s telling: O Lord, don’t fool me. At the end of six hundred years you will snatch it all away, and I will have been kept dull and foolish the whole time. There is nothing graceful about it. Even in early boyhood he can tell the difference between the transient and the goal, and the goal is a full revelation of who am I.

Śraddhā is a capacity, not a mood

At 11:34 the sūtra is recited, and Swamiji begins on śraddhā. His gloss is technical rather than devotional. The syllable dhā, he says, means intellect, and as the intellect gets purified it acquires the ability to reflect the truth. Faith, in this reading, is the intellect’s reflective capacity before rationalization arrives: when you begin to reflect the truth, you do not yet know exactly what it is. That is the condition of being born with śraddhā.

Which is why he can say, at 12:48, “Immense potentiality of your growth lies in your śraddhā.” Not your sincerity, not your effort. Your capacity to reflect what is true before you can defend it. He names what nourishes it: good association, spiritual guidance, prayer, meditation, and above all the scriptures and satsaṅga. Faith is not summoned. It is fed.

Vīrya, and why forgiving someone is a feat of strength

As faith advances, Swamiji says at 13:30, you discover you have amazing strengths, and he means this at both the vital and the ethical level. The vital illustrations are almost playful: the athlete who puts the ball exactly where it should go, as controlled in throwing as in handling a pen, and the whole thing looking like a miracle when it is not one.

Then he raises the register, and this is the part of the lecture most likely to change how somebody behaves this week. “It requires strength to forgive a person.” It requires strength to bring out the good quality in all relationships, to adapt and adjust and persevere until people discover goodness in each other. If that strength is lacking, you are simply unable to do it. Forgiveness is reclassified here, out of the category of moral choice and into the category of capacity. You do not forgive because you decided to be good. You forgive because faith has made you strong enough to afford it.

Along the way he offers the popcorn, at 15:53, as evidence of a sustaining presence: God sustains the movement of the popcorn so that your teeth crush it instead of your tongue, nutrition distributed wherever it is needed, and he asks whether that is not a miracle. It is a characteristic move. The cosmic claim is grounded in something small enough to check.

Smṛti: your memory is not a record, it is a mood

The third means, at 16:28, is smṛti, and Swamiji is careful to say that the literal translation, memory, undersells it. It refers to the nature of mental involvement, to what the mind stays engrossed in. And he demonstrates it by describing how ordinary recollection actually behaves: in a good mood you remember good things of the past; when the mind is pressured by anxiety you remember all the negative things. When you are pleased with a person you remember what they meant to you, and when you are displeased the very sight of them brings up the bad. If faith and strength are thin, then at 17:17, “Only things you recollect that were negative ones.”

So the third rung is not a memory exercise. It follows from the first two. A mind with inner strength stops making a mountain of an anthill and, in his reversal, turns the mountain into a hand. Its recollection stops serving its grievances. And once it is not busy with trifles, it becomes engrossed in the three questions he sets out at 20:28: who am I, where am I, what am I. Brahman. Sustained by a thousand arms of divine compassion. Saccidānanda, existence, knowledge, bliss absolute.

Hanumān, Jāmbavān, and the traveler on the train

Two images carry the practical weight of the lecture, and they make the same point from opposite directions.

At 21:46 Swamiji turns to the Rāmāyaṇa. Hanumān, the personification of faith, has to cross the ocean with Sītā’s message, and the whole army is paralyzed because no one believes they can. Hanumān has all the power required, and he is sitting morosely with his head down between his knees. Jāmbavān the bear plays the role of the guru, and what he offers is not strength but recollection: Hanumān, even when you were a child, how many wonderful things you did. Don’t you remember? On hearing it, Hanumān grows into a gigantic body and crosses in a single bound. The dormant thing was never absent. It was unremembered, which is exactly the function of smṛti.

At 24:45 the same lesson arrives as comedy. A first-time traveler boards a train and keeps his entire luggage on his head, and it is hard work convincing him to set it down, because he cannot believe the train is carrying him. He is educated eventually into keeping the bundle nearby and letting the train take both him and his bundle. Swamiji’s application, at 24:39, is direct: “The whole world is moving, God is taking care of all problems.” The strain of carrying what is already being carried is the whole of what he means by weakness, and he says plainly that it is weakness, not circumstance, that loads the mind with worries.

He is careful not to promise anaesthesia. If you are injured in the hand or injured in the mind, you go on experiencing pain. What changes is that you do not lose yourself in it or sink into absolute negativity, because the moon behind the cloud emerges brighter than before.

Samādhi as your ordinary condition

By 32:03 he is on samādhi, and his framing is deliberately anti-exotic. The bulb, at 31:12, evolves the idea that its own small shining is all it is, when every bulb shines because of a deeper connection with an electrical field that is universal. To walk out of the bulb without losing the bulb’s shape or function is his image for the experience: I am the Eternal, I am a wave sustained by the ocean. He names this sahaja-samādhi, the spontaneous kind, and then immediately grounds it in method, because the way to it is concentration and meditation, japa, staying with one object until clarity develops and things previously not understood are suddenly revealed easily.

The claim he makes at 40:10 is the one to hold onto: “Samādhi is your constant reality.” He compares it to sleep, which comes to you day by day and asks no permission. You already get a sniff of it nightly, walking away from all your problems and waking to say you knew nothing. Samādhi is that, entered consciously.

He also disposes of a false dilemma that students reliably invent. Should I be in samādhi or should I be working? Should I assert that all is Brahman, or go after little things? There should be no contradiction, he answers. Attention given to practical reality should become so sharp that you stop losing time and energy on it. Dexterity of action comes automatically as the meditative movement becomes rich, and if it does not, that is diagnostic: you are not practicing, and you have not understood sādhana.

Prajñā: the caterpillar has been eating the wrong food

The fifth means is prajñā, and the image at 38:50 is the best in the lecture. An intellect under the domination of ego can flourish in an intellectual way, accumulating academic knowledge. Free it from the ego, and the ego itself turns humble and transparent, oozing divine humility. Then, he says, the intellect flourishes. It stops solving the problem of karma and death and what will happen to the world, and when it has no problem left to resolve, the magic happens.

The caterpillar has been fed on viṣayavāsanā, small thinking. Once the small thinking goes, it turns on its back, the whole body splits, and a butterfly comes out. Same creature, wholly transformed, and the transformation waited on a change of diet rather than a change of effort. “That’s called intuitive intellect. That’s the goal of all spiritual movement,” he says at 39:42. Established permanently in it, one is sthitaprajña; that state is jīvanmukta, liberated in life, and from there the movement is gradual ascent without the descent.

The closing image, at 40:48, is the reflected sun walking away from its vessel. As it ascends, it looks back at the many reflected suns in their many buckets and sends out messages of hope, joy, compassion, going on saying wow, wow, wow, until it discovers: I am the sun. And all the wah-wahs go away.

What decides the speed

Sūtra 1.21 arrives at 44:19 with no ceremony. Tīvra-saṃvegānām āsannaḥ. For those who move with intense momentum, the goal is near. Upāya means the means that lead to an end, and the five already described are the upāyas; what 1.21 adds is that vairāgya alongside them makes attainment fast.

Swamiji pairs vairāgya with abhyāsa, repeated practice of your japa, your prayer, whatever integral yoga plan you have determined to follow. And he warns against keeping a support past its usefulness: you were weak and you used a stick, you are getting better and you still want the stick, and the process of getting better slows down. His formula at 44:13 is two words in opposite directions: “Detach from the illusions, get more and more attached to God within you.”

Each of the two comes in three degrees, mṛdu, madhya, adhimātra. Mild, moderate, intense. He walks the permutations aloud, mild practice with intense dispassion, moderate practice with mild dispassion, and so on, and then asks the question that gives the lecture its sting: so many students come to a university, why is it that all do not attain the highest? Only those who are intense in both. Intense vairāgya and intense abhyāsa, so that the positive movement has gathered momentum and moves with intensity.

Then he stops, promising to detail it next time, and closes with oṃ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ.

Terms in this lecture

itareṣām — for the others. The word that makes 1.20 a practical sūtra.
bhava-pratyaya — the condition of those born already enlightened (1.19).
śraddhā — faith, understood as the purified intellect’s capacity to reflect truth.
vīrya — strength, vital and ethical; the capacity that makes forgiveness possible.
smṛti — memory, more exactly what the mind stays engrossed in.
samādhi — superconsciousness; sahaja-samādhi is its spontaneous form.
prajñā — intuitive intellect; one established in it is sthitaprajña.
jīvanmukta — liberated while living.
abhyāsa / vairāgya — repeated practice and dispassion, the pair 1.21 measures.
mṛdu / madhya / adhimātra — mild, moderate, intense.
viṣayavāsanā — the small thinking the caterpillar had been feeding on.

Questions to sit with

Of the five, which is thinnest in you: faith, strength, what your mind stays engrossed in?
Which bundle are you still holding on your head while the train carries you?
Where has a support you genuinely needed become a stick you have outgrown?
Name something you have not forgiven. Is it a decision you have not made, or strength you have not yet built?

Raja Yoga Sutras, Samādhi Pāda 1.20 and 1.21. Lecture 11 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, recorded Sunday, May 13, 2012, at the Yoga Research Foundation. The full archive of Swamiji’s teachings is free to access at yogaresearchfoundation.org.

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