One Focus, Four Attitudes: The Remedy for Yoga's Obstacles

Last week’s class named the nine obstacles that Patanjali lists in sutra 30 of the Samadhi Pada. This one asks what they do to a person, and what can be done about them. It takes in three more sutras. Sutra 31 describes what follows when the obstacles take hold: pain, despair, trembling, and breath that will not settle. Sutra 32 gives a single remedy, a mind turned to one thing. Sutra 33 gives four attitudes toward four kinds of people, and with them the mind becomes clear. Before any of that, Swamiji lays a foundation that takes up the first quarter of an hour. He wants the listener to see that the brain and nervous system they were born with are not the limit of what they are. The mind you experience is a trickle of a cosmic mind, the way the current in your house is a trickle of the electricity of the world. So progress is never sealed by inheritance, and no one, in the language of the scriptures, is a hopeless case. From there he defines the goal, samadhi, through an image he returns to more than once: a bird that knows every leaf of its tree, spreads its wings, and flies, and can come back to the branch as if nothing had happened. The world is not destroyed by that flight. It is transcended. The obstacles come next, quickly, because he has covered them before. The fresh material is in the stories: a rat that believes it is driving a camel, a traveller who asks a wise man on a bench what kind of people live in this town, and a riverbank from which you watch the water go its own way. The class turns on one distinction. The obstacles of the breath and the nerves are handled one way, and the obstacles of the mind need something subtler.

Passage index

Patanjali’s threefold culture

The class opens with the traditional invocation to Patanjali, who is honoured for three scriptures: yoga for purifying the mind, Ayurveda for purifying the body, and grammar for purifying speech. Swamiji reads this as a threefold culture offered to every individual. A healthy body, a purified mind, and a tongue that is clean, meaning the way you express yourself, raised to a spiritual level. He then glosses the word yoga. It means union, and so does religion, from the Latin religare: you are somehow separated from God, and religion means joining back. The English word yoke comes from the same root. Mind, senses and intellect are yoked together like the horses of one chariot.

The brain you inherited is not the limit

The first chapter of the sutras, the Samadhi Pada, is focused on the highest goal, and Swamiji begins by asking what stands between an ordinary person and that goal. All ordinary experience runs through the nervous system. Mind flows through its wiring the way electricity flows through the wiring of a house and lights the bulbs. And just as no house receives the electricity of the whole universe, what you experience of the mind is only a trickle. Even before your brain was formed, a subtler plane of mind was at work arranging the elements to build it, suited to your karma. That is the ground of his first claim. “Your progress is not dependent upon the brain that you have inherited.” “You have the potentiality to bring immense change.” The scriptures, he notes, are full of extreme criminals turning into saints. If you accept being defined by your nervous system, he says bluntly, then accept that you will age and die and expect nothing more. But even a glorious life on earth is not the goal. “Real attainment is to step beyond your body, your nervous system, your mind, and discover you are the Light”, the cosmic Light, the absolute Self.

Samadhi and the bird above its tree

Samadhi means becoming so calm that you slip out of the mental structure, and Swamiji points out that everyone already does this every night. The mind is busy with the past and the future, and then suddenly you slip out of the whole thing, happily, without knowing where it happened, and later come back into the spider web. “Samādhi is to do the same with positive awareness.” The step back begins with a question. Who am I? Am I the ego, the mind, the senses? The ordinary way of speaking already implies the answer: when you say your mind is too heavy to reply, you are waiting for your mind to change, which means you are not the mind. When consciousness steps beyond the senses, the mind opens a window, and everything you thought you were is seen beyond. “Everything is transcended, not demolished.” The bird that knows every leaf flies and has completely transcended the tree, yet comes back to it as if nothing had happened. He calls this double consciousness. “Ocean is busy at the level of waves, but calm in the deeper level.” So movement toward God is not something to postpone until there is nothing else left to turn to. “movement towards God is not damaging your practical reality; it is enriching it”.

Dharana, dhyana and samadhi

The obstacles are obstacles to a specific practice, and Swamiji lays out its three stages. Dharana, concentration, is allowing a busy mind to be focused. Dhyana, meditation, is the next step: once the mind is focused, do nothing, and let it stay focused. “The fact is that focused state is very enjoyable.” But the joy is unfamiliar, and the mind cannot relax into it, like a poor man who has suddenly won a big lottery. So it has to be practised day by day, until the state feels natural. The third stage is samadhi, an expansion of consciousness that comes gradually. Each time it occurs, a bell rings in the heart: I am not confined to body, mind and senses, and there is a bigger me to explore. Samadhi is relative and progressive at first, and its highest form gives absolute enlightenment.

The obstacles, briefly

He goes through the nine quickly, since he has covered them, and pauses where there is something to add. For disease, the remedy is a yogic style of life: rising at a set time, exercises, pranayama, a rhythmic day. The body is not to be neglected. “It is the greatest temple. It is the greatest pilgrimage center.” Without inner work, even the marvellous pilgrimage centres give you only a photograph’s worth. “All the benefit you get is what camera gets it.” For dullness, the mind that asks why anyone would want liberation when the world is full of wonderful food and wonderful places, the answer is association. “Satsaṅga of course works most effectively in removing your dullness.”

The rat that drove the camel

Doubt dissolves, Swamiji says, when you begin to see how much of your life is carried by a support you never notice. “In day-to-day life, your ego plays the role of a rat.” The whole personality moves like a camel. A camel strays from a caravan resting in the desert. A rat comes out of the bushes, takes hold of the rope hanging from its neck, and pulls, and to its surprise the whole camel follows. The rat becomes very frisky; it is driving the camel, and the camel is happy to see the rat’s joy. Then they reach a little puddle of water, and the rat stops. To the rat it is an ocean. The camel says, “come, jump upon my back. Don’t tell anybody what you did.” That is the role the ego plays. The organising of living cells, the driving away of disease, all the deeper movements of the body are not done by the ego, which stands there announcing that it rules the body. A person who sees a watch lying on the ground has no doubt that someone made it, and yet looks at the intelligence embedded in every leaf and decides God does not exist. “What bankruptcy of human mind.”

Procrastination and false knowledge

The procrastinating nature, he says, is the greatest hurdle to success of any kind, ordinary or spiritual, and he quotes the Mahabharata: pramado vai mrityuh. “Procrastination is death.” The antidote is three letters, D I N: do it now. “Tomorrow is bringing you new breeze.” Why hold on to the old? False knowledge gets a longer treatment, because it is common. It is the idea that yoga will bring psychic powers to dazzle the people who once laughed at you. “Yoga is leading you to be in tune with God.” Think of the sun reflected in a jar of water: very limited, yet if it asked itself who it was, the answer would be the sun. To discover yourself one with God, “that is the miracle of miracles. That is the goal of yoga.” Such a person does affect the world, but the way spring affects a forest. “You become like the breeze of spring.” No one can photograph spring; its influence is subtle. The failure to reach a state of yoga, and to hold one, comes from a distracted mind that keeps shopping for quick enlightenment, practising for a month and then moving on. He mimics the attitude: “We are in advanced days, things must happen fast.” He closes this section with the five levels of mind he has described before, from the dull mudha mind through the distracted and partly distracted mind to the one-pointed mind and samadhi. A level you secure becomes your natural state. You may be agitated for a time, but you come back to it.

Sutra 31: pain, despair and unsteady breath

When the obstacles interrupt the movement of yoga, the sutra says, certain things accompany the distraction. Pain comes first, and everyone born is subject to it, in body and in mind. Then despair: what you desire you do not get, and the people you are attached to pass away. Swamiji names the three classic sources of trouble: from within, led by karma; from the world outside, other people, animals and circumstances; and from the forces of nature, hurricanes and eruptions. What the sutra adds is that the mind goes on experiencing stress even when nothing is happening. The nerves weaken, the body trembles, the breath becomes irregular. Breath is a gift of God that recharges you every moment, but under stress you cannot sit relaxed. You imagine unknown challenges and fight them, and your muscles tighten against an enemy who is not there. “That seems like a laughable matter, but that’s the situation.” So something has to be done day by day: japa, a prayer, a little meditation, a few exercises to relax. “All this will sweeten your day.” And for someone who does not care for sweets, he adds, it will pickle it.

Sutra 32: turn the mind to one

Sutra 32 gives the remedy for the obstacles that arise from the mind rather than from the nerves and the breath, and Swamiji makes the distinction explicitly. Obstacles of the nervous system and the breath are handled one way. Obstacles generated by mental mood need a subtler process, which the sutra calls eka tattva abhyasa, the practice of one principle. “The simple formula is to allow your mind to turn to one.” Not many things; one. “At the highest level it will be one truth, God. But in the beginning you don’t worry.” Choose a little flower. Or, if you are more involved with yoga, a divine form such as Rama, Krishna, Jesus or Buddha, presented to the mind along with your mantra. See that form shining within and think of nothing else, and you are overcoming all the obstacles in a profound way.

Sutra 33: the wise man on the bench

The last sutra of the class purifies the mind through four attitudes: friendliness toward those who are happy, compassion toward the afflicted, cheerfulness toward the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked. “They need to be brought into the garden of your mind.” Friendliness raises the obvious objection, that some people are not friendly. Swamiji answers with a parable. A wise man sits on a bench at a place visited by many tourists. One arrives from far away and asks what kind of people live there. The wise man asks what kind of people lived where he came from. Nasty people, he says, inimical, full of greed. “unfortunately, that’s what you are going to get.” A second traveller asks the same question and describes his own town as full of great, cultured, wonderful people. “So you’ll be surprised. You may find more wonderful people right here.” The parable is about expectation. “That’s your mind, how has it been set?” A mind backed by negative impressions may say it wants peace, but at a deeper level it expects trouble, and that is what it gets. A mind cultured by satsanga holds that God abides in everyone. “Every soul is a ray of God.” “Therefore, what can you expect? Everyone is your friend.” And even the worst people, Swamiji says, are touched by that.

Compassion, cheerfulness and indifference

The uncultured mind is tickled by the people below it, and wants to laugh at someone who has fallen in the mud. “That makes you very cruel and insensitive.” The remedy is to remember a mother’s heart for her child in trouble, and that you too have passed through many embodiments and many miserable situations. Compassion is not only a tenderness in the heart. It asks how the pain can be remedied, and Swamiji finds that in the word itself, karuna. “Karu—do something about it.” Cheerfulness is the response to hearing what great souls have done. When someone describes climbing Everest, you can be inspired, or you can say no one saw him there and he made it up. The second is the common reaction to the mahatmas. “Someone is pointing to something that you are going to get.” Toward the crude and the wicked, the attitude is indifference, which he calls tatastha vritti: the attitude of one standing on the bank of a river. “Let the water go its own way, you go your own way.” “The world is an ocean.” You stay on the bank and watch. Developed fully, these four fill the mind with divine impressions. Then you are the traveller who tells the wise man that everyone where he comes from is wonderful, and is told that he will find the same here, and more.

Terms

Samadhi Pada — the first chapter of the Yoga Sutras, focused on the highest goal, samadhi
dharana — concentration; bringing a busy mind to a focused state
dhyana — meditation; letting the focused mind stay focused, doing nothing
samadhi — superconsciousness; an expansion of consciousness beyond body, mind and senses
antaraya — an obstacle on the path of yoga; sutra 30 lists nine
styana — dullness; the mind that sees no reason to seek liberation
pramada — the procrastinating nature; in the Mahabharata, death itself
eka tattva abhyasa — the practice of one principle; the remedy of sutra 32
maitri — friendliness, toward those who are happy
karuna — compassion toward the afflicted, active enough to remedy their pain
tatastha vritti — the attitude of one on the riverbank; indifference toward the wicked
satsanga — good association; the company of truth, and the first remedy for dullness

For reflection

When you ask what kind of people surround you, how much of the answer did you bring with you?
Which part of your day is the rat pulling on the camel’s rope, sure that it is doing the driving?
What one thing could your mind turn to this week, so that it is not pulled in so many directions?

About this lecture

Raja Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Samadhi Pada, sutras 30 to 33. Lecture 18 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation. The complete archive of Swamiji’s lectures is free to all.

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

One Focus, Four Attitudes: The Remedy for Yoga’s Obstacles