Surrender, and the Five Afflictions It Works Against: Raja Yoga Sutras, Lecture 13

Patanjali has already told the aspirant what carries a practice forward. Practice and dispassion, held in balance, and held in some degree of intensity. Lecture 13 takes up the sutra that adds a third element to those two, and then the sutra that explains why the third one is needed at all. The first is Samadhi Pada, sutra 1.23, and it is four words long: īśvara-praṇidhānād vā — or by surrender to God. Swami Jyotirmayananda’s treatment of it is unusually practical, because his interest is not in the definition but in the gap between saying the word and doing the thing. He describes that gap with a small comedy. The first day one announces the surrender. The second day one says, God, I have surrendered to You, but please do not ask me to do that terrible thing. What closes the gap, in his account, is not a stronger declaration. It is integration. Surrender is a state the personality grows into, and it grows in step with two other things. The greater the degree of surrender, the greater one’s effectiveness in self-effort, and the more grace operates. Surrender, self-effort and grace are one movement described from three angles, and none of them advances alone. The second half of the lecture turns to sutra 1.24, which describes who God is: the special Self untouched by affliction, by action, by the fruits of action, and by the store where the seeds of action wait. The individual soul is touched by all four, and the four become the frame for the rest of the class. Swamiji names the five kleśas — the five afflictions that keep a soul in bondage — takes each in turn, and closes by naming the five qualities that replace them. The lecture opens and closes on the same note. A mind that has held these five for many lifetimes can hold their opposites instead. That is the whole claim, and everything between is the argument for it.

Passage index

The invocation, and why the body and the speech are part of the yoga

The class opens with the traditional adoration to Sage Patanjali, who is credited with three gifts: the scripture of yoga for purifying the citta, the mind stuff; the scripture of vaidyaka, Ayurvedic medicine, for purifying the body; and the science of grammar for purifying the speech. Swamiji does not treat those three as a courtesy. He reads them as a statement about resources. If the goal is the direct experience the whole path aims at, then one must be as physically sound as one can be, and must understand the body rather than ignore it — because a complaining body weighs the mind down and consumes the energy that was meant to move it forward. A non-complaining body is a practical requirement, not a vanity. Grammar receives the same treatment, and the reading is not literal. The purification of speech is not correct syntax. It is speech that emerges from the heart, carries a little of one’s good feeling, and touches the heart of the person hearing it. Speech that does not do that, he says, is gossip. So the three gifts describe a whole instrument — body, speech, and mind — rather than three separate disciplines to be ranked.

The practice this sutra attaches to

Before surrender is introduced, the lecture retraces where the aspirant already stands. The goal is samādhi, and it comes in two grades. The lower, samprajñāta, elevates consciousness genuinely, but the subtle impressions in the unconscious do not die away, and they bring one back into the world again and again. If the lower samadhi is practiced to its climax, the intellect becomes purified to the point where ego no longer interferes, and one slips into asamprajñāta samādhi, in which the mind has transcended everything relative and limited. Between the aspirant and that state stand two familiar terms, abhyāsa and vairāgya, and Swamiji’s emphasis is on their blending. He gives the recognisable failure: mild practice, very strong aspiration. One wants liberation quickly and is not willing to sit down daily. Both can be mild, moderate or intense, in any combination, which is why aspirants at nominally the same stage progress at such different rates. His prescription is an integral yoga plan brought into ordinary life — some physical exercise and prāṇāyāma, japa, meditation, devotional movement, and alongside them the art of performing one’s duties in a way that teaches patience, endurance, and the ability to wait and watch rather than complain. That last item is where the lecture’s most quoted line arrives. Difficult circumstances, handled without complaint, become austerity. “The only mantra I should allow your mind to repeat, even this will pass away.” He gives two images for what the passing leaves behind. Each time the moon emerges from a dark cloud it shines brighter — and if one doubts it, ask the moon. Each time a person emerges from an adverse situation, that person is wiser and stronger than before. The rhythm matters more than the quantity. Abrupt practice — a great deal one day, nothing the next — is what produces years of effort without movement. The test he offers is affective rather than quantitative: the practice has taken hold when the day one skips it feels poorer, and the day one keeps it feels enriched, with every duty handled more clearly.

Surrender as the syrup, not the substitute

Having set the discipline, Swamiji introduces the sutra’s addition. Whatever one practices must be blended with surrender to God. His comparison is domestic and deliberately light: a drink blended with something sweet is better than the same drink unsweetened. Surrender is the real syrup, and it sweetens everything one thinks and everything one does. The word blended is doing the work. Surrender does not replace the practice, and it is not a shortcut around the practice. It changes the quality of a practice that is already happening. Then comes the relation that is easy to state backwards. One might expect surrender to reduce self-effort. Swamiji says the opposite: the greater the degree of surrender, the greater one’s effectiveness in exercising self-effort, and therefore the more divine grace works for one. Surrender, self-effort and grace go together. A person who has genuinely handed something over does not become passive about it; the handing over is what removes the friction. The goal of surrender, stated plainly, is to empty oneself completely — empty thyself, I will fill thee. Kabir is brought in on the same point. When I was, You were not; when I found You, I was gone. The street of divine love is so narrow that there is room for either me or You, and no place for two.

The river, the sleep, and what dissolution actually feels like

The obvious objection to all of this is that it sounds like annihilation, and Swamiji meets it directly rather than softening it. He tells it as a river’s story. The river has been told the ocean is its destination and sets out excited, fed by tributaries, carrying gifts — some grass, some flowers — expecting to meet the other rivers at a table with the Ocean God presiding. None of that happens. The river enters the ocean and has no personality and no individuality left. He allows that this sounds pathetic. Then he offers the counter-image, and it is the strongest argument in the lecture because it is available to everyone nightly. Consider going to sleep. As long as one is aware of someone nearby, and reporting on the process — I am halfway asleep, now I am sixty per cent — one is not sleepy at all. Slipping into sleep is precisely the part one cannot witness. Only on waking does one say, I have been sleeping. In deep sleep there is no awareness of anyone, not even of one’s own personality. Total loss of everything. And how does one feel on waking from sound sleep? Bright, joyous, refreshed. So the question the mind normally never asks becomes askable: can I exist without the world, without time, without space? The sleep experience answers yes. The goal, he says, is the positive counterpart of that state. In sleep one is not enlightened; through enlightenment the ego awareness dissolves and a perpetual awareness of union takes its place. His final image for the enlightened person is a river that has met the ocean while part of it goes on flowing.

Three stages of surrender

Surrender is then broken into three stages, drawn from words attributed to Hanuman, and the three correspond to three levels at which a person can locate identity. Deha-buddhyā tu dāso’ham. While identified with the body and bodily realities, the appropriate attitude is that of an instrument in the divine hand — a servant, a doer of God’s will with no will of one’s own. Surrender at this level is developed by doing that will. Jīva-buddhyā tvadaṃśakaḥ. Raised to the level of the soul, one realises oneself to be a ray of God: sustained by God, and carrying the potential for divine virtues to develop. Devotion and meditation belong to this stage. Swamiji adds the reassurance the stage needs. God has trillions of rays and will not let a single one out of His sight. Every reflected sun in every jar of water is small, and every one keeps its link to the sun, and the sun cannot abandon it. Ātma-buddhyā tvamevāham. From the innermost point of view there is nothing but the Divine Self. The kingdom of heaven is within; you are gods. He notes that the religions converge here. The three are not a ladder one climbs and discards. Integral yoga, as he describes it, means holding all three at once: physically a servant, at the level of the soul a ray, at the deepest level not other than the Self.

Sutra 1.24, and the five afflictions

The next sutra answers the question the previous one assumed. Kleśa-karma-vipākāśayair aparāmṛṣṭaḥ puruṣa-viśeṣa īśvaraḥ. God is the special Self untouched by the afflictions, by action, by the fruits of action, and by the receptacle in which action is stored. Every individual soul is touched by all four, and the difference between the real sun and a reflected sun is offered as the measure of the distance. Kleśa means affliction, and it names the basis and source of misery. There are five. Avidyā, ignorance, comes first, and it is not a lack of information. It is the veil that makes a soul appear separate from what it actually is. The soul is essentially the Absolute Self; were it free of all limitations there would be nothing but the Divine Self. What separates the two is an abstract veil with no reality of its own — which does not stop it from enfolding an intellect that remains limited. The candle image explains why knowledge does not simply dissolve it. Ask a small candle in a dark night how much darkness there is, and the answer is two or three inches. Raise the flame to two hundred watts and ask again: the darkness reported is immense. The bigger the light, the greater one’s understanding of the ignorance. This is why, he says, scientists are humble — humility is part of the science, because one always knows the end has not been reached. Practically, ignorance shows up as an identity that keeps shifting. Walking, one is the body. Eating, the vital sheath is oneself. Desiring, mind and senses become the identity. Evaluating and rationalising, ego and intellect become it. When ego restricts the intellect, the identity is in crisis. An intellect entirely free of restriction turns into intuition, and intuition removes the veil.

Ego, and the pendulum it sets swinging

From ignorance arises asmitā, the sense of ego: this is me, these things are mine, held without any examination of what me and mine actually are. Millions come and go, each suffering from me and mine, and everything so claimed lies strewn about afterwards with nobody left to claim it. Because of ego the mind moves in two directions. When something is agreeable, the wish forms that it should stay, and that evaluation is recorded in the unconscious as rāga, an impression of liking. Repetition deepens the groove: one liked an experience, so one repeats it, and the impression thickens until the ego says it cannot live without the thing. Dveṣa, aversion, grows the same way and in the same soil. Swamiji points out the mystery in it — the things one likes are the very things that become the cause of great hatred. One does not hate strangers. In the morning one loves a person and by evening hates the same person. One is hungry and enjoys the food until an insistent host presses more of it. So the mind swings like a pendulum: drawing what it likes toward itself, pushing away what it does not. The days pass and the verdict on each one is set by which side dominated. A day when likings were satisfied was a happy day. The next, when aversion dominated, was miserable. One day of joy, another of sorrow, and life continues with an endless supply of tomorrows. Both, he says, are illusions. The happiness arising from rāga is not real happiness, because the mind has simply been trained — as a pet is trained to be happy when one person arrives and to bark when another leaves. Reducing or rising beyond both produces śama, serenity, which he calls the gateway to liberation and describes as the more natural state. A mind geared to listening to its impressions of attachment and aversion misses the simple thing: it is always sustained by God within. Sleep proves the mind can subside and leave one comfortable. His question is why that comfort should not be available at every moment, since the same support is there behind every experience.

The fear of death, and the fearlessness that makes people kind

The fifth affliction is abhiniveśa, the fear of death. The soul is eternal, but it has become identified with a mind that has gathered impressions of fear across many lives, so the fear is instinctive rather than reasoned. It hovers over everyone, day by day and hour by hour. His demonstration is comic and exact: a lizard drops onto your head and the whole body reacts before any thought occurs. Other forms of fear and insecurity blend into ordinary mental movement the same way. The remedy is fearlessness grounded in the sense that God is with one, and it is progressive rather than switch-like — proportional to how much faith has developed and how much inner experience of that presence one actually has. As fear reduces, the afflictions reduce, and the impressions of fear move out of the unconscious. What replaces them, he says, is an awareness of amazing strength within. The sense of insecurity, of helplessness, the pervasive low-grade fear — all of it had been reducing one’s awareness of oneself. When it dwindles there is a profound sigh of relief and inner joy. Then the observation that gives the section its weight. Fearlessness changes the personality: it makes a person kind and compassionate, because one no longer enjoys putting anybody in fear. Kindness, in this reading, is not an added virtue. It is what remains when the fear is gone.

Five afflictions, five antidotes

The lecture closes by naming what occupies a mind that is no longer occupied by the five. In place of ignorance, knowledge. In place of egoism, humility. In place of attachment, dispassion. In place of aversion, a mystic detachment — and here he is careful, because the word has to be pulled away from emotion. He means the detachment of neti neti, not this, not this: the way one must reject the whole dream in order to wake from it, applied to body, mind, intellect and ego alike. He also states the transformation in its positive form, which is more interesting than the negative. Attachment does not simply stop; it becomes everything is me, everything is the Self. Instead of being attached to one or two things, one is all. Instead of dispelling one or two things, one dispels all. And in place of ignorance, light: asato mā sad gamaya, tamaso mā jyotir gamaya — lead me from darkness to light. If that becomes the mantra, he says, one will hold a mind one cannot presently imagine. The same mind that sustained the five afflictions now carries the anti-affliction movement, and becomes increasingly aware of God within.

Terms

abhyāsa — sustained, repeated practice; in this lecture, a rhythm rather than a quantity
vairāgya — dispassion, detachment from the objects the mind reaches for
īśvara-praṇidhāna — surrender to God; the addition sutra 1.23 makes to the two above
samprajñāta samādhi — the lower samadhi, which elevates consciousness while subtle impressions remain
asamprajñāta samādhi — the highest state, in which the mind has transcended all that is relative and limited
citta — the mind stuff; what the scripture of yoga exists to purify
kleśa — affliction; the basis and source of misery, of which there are five
avidyā — ignorance; the veil that makes the soul appear separate from the Self
asmitā — the sense of ego, of me and mine, held without examination
rāga — recorded impressions of liking, which deepen with repetition
dveṣa — recorded impressions of aversion, which grow in the same soil as raga
abhiniveśa — the instinctive fear of death, gathered across many lives
śama — serenity; the state beyond raga and dvesha, called the gateway to liberation
jīva — the individual soul, touched by affliction and action, as God is not

For reflection

Which of the five afflictions has the loudest voice in an ordinary day, and what does it usually ask for?
Where in a current practice is the difference between a rhythm and a quantity actually being felt?
If fearlessness is what makes a person kind, what does an ordinary unkindness reveal about the fear underneath it?

Provenance

Raja Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Samadhi Pada, Sutras 1.23-1.24 — Lecture 13 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation. The complete lecture archive is free to all who wish to study it: yogaresearchfoundation.org

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