Raja Yoga Sutras 17: The Nine Obstacles on the Path

Patanjali spends one sutra naming the nine things that stop a practice, and Swami Jyotirmayananda spends most of an hour on them. Before naming one, he removes the assumption that naming is the cure. You do not get rid of an obstacle because you have learned what it is called. Knowing is the beginning of the work, not the end. This is lecture 17 of the Raja Yoga Sutras series, covering sutras 27 through 30 of the Samadhi Pada. The first half gathers up what the practice rests on: abhyasa and vairagya, steady practice and dispassion, and the ladder that climbs through faith, strength, remembrance, samadhi, and finally prajna. The second half is the catalogue of obstacles, handled one at a time, each with an example plain enough to recognise in your own week. Between the two halves sits the material that gives the lecture its warmth. A river comes down a mountain, crosses the plains collecting everything that happens to it, and receives one instruction from its master that it cannot understand. An intellect that has been a crawling caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The name of God is read as the one thing that never becomes old, against a world where a child two hours born is already two hours old. The obstacles themselves are unglamorous, and that is the point of them. Disease, which Swamiji traces from held anger through the nadis into the body. Dullness, a mind that has already made up its mind. Doubt. Procrastination, which the Mahabharata calls death outright. Laziness. Lack of dispassion. False knowledge, including the meditator who mistakes a disturbed nervous system for a rising kundalini. And two subtler ones: failing to reach a state of yoga, and reaching it but failing to hold it. What keeps the list from being discouraging is the image Swamiji sets in front of it. A car built to travel only forward would be useless. Going back for the ticket you left behind is not a failure of the journey.

Passages

Words That Come from the Heart

The lecture opens with the traditional invocation to Patanjali, credited with three gifts: yoga for purifying the mind, the medical science for the body, and grammar for speech. The sutras concern only the first, and Swamiji then does something unexpected with the third. Grammar, read mystically, is not about sentence construction. “if your words don’t agree with your thoughts, it’s a grammatical error.” You have something to convey and it does not come out, sometimes because you cannot find the words and sometimes, he adds, because you deliberately do not want to. Against that he sets the ideal. “The ideal is that your words must originate from your heart.” Such words touch others before those others quite know why, and they are simple, sweet, and profound at once. It is a short passage, easy to pass over on the way to the sutras, and it quietly sets the standard for everything that follows.

What Strength Actually Is

The ladder Patanjali gives runs shraddha, virya, smriti, samadhi, prajna. Faith, strength, remembrance, absorption, wisdom. Swamiji lingers on the second rung because it is the one most often misread. The mind hears strength and turns to the body and its muscles. He does not dismiss that. But the strength the path needs shows up somewhere else entirely, in the moment when the mind is full of hatred and wants to say the worst thing available to it, and the person swallows it instead. That is one kind. A second kind does not need to swallow anything, because the understanding is deep enough that nothing was stirred. What he rules out is loud about itself. “Unreal strength: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Someone raises a finger, and your finger goes into their eye, and then comes the announcement: look how strong I am. Your finger was weak, mine is strong. Swamiji calls this cruel, and then names what he means by the real thing instead: the strength of Jesus, the strength of Buddha, the strength of love, forgiveness and compassion. The image that follows is worth keeping. The real muscles of a spiritual aspirant are made of compassion, forbearance, and magnanimity. Not metaphorically ornamental. Those are the tissues that do the lifting. He also refuses to let faith be a single event. At the mass level it looks like one step: a group, a sermon, everyone announcing that from tomorrow they have faith and are reborn. That is good, he says, and then: do not fool yourself. You arrived in the world with no idea who you were and learned to trust the first face you saw, then humanity, then creation, and eventually the Divine Mother and Father. It grows the way anything alive grows.

The Experiment That Always Failed

Before the mind can become spiritually greedy, which is Swamiji’s phrase for a mind that has begun wanting God the way it used to want other things, he accounts for what it wanted before. Across many embodiments, he says, you picked up at least a hundred sparks of love in each. To love and to be loved: that has been the experiment, and you allowed the body and mind complex to assemble and be dismantled again and again for it. The result is stated without drama. You did not find anyone who could love you absolutely, nor anyone you could love absolutely. The experiment failed, so you went from one body to another and ran it again. What changes here is not that the longing disappears. It is that the mind, now backed by faith and by that inner strength, finally has somewhere else to put it. It becomes open to instruction, takes guidance from a teacher, is fed by scripture, and finds a day spent on those things enriching in a way that a day spent turning over old agonies is not. A sharp observation is buried here. Once someone is told they have lived before, the mind wants to extend its grievance backwards. When did I first notice anger in my heart? Who were the people causing me such trouble, and where do they live now? The machinery of worry simply acquires more centuries to work with. What replaces it is not an argument but a simplification: you are in God’s hands.

The River and the One Instruction

Three attitudes develop in order, as a progression rather than a choice. To the extent you are identified with the body, you are the servant and God is the master, and the posture is readiness to do His will. Have your own ideas, he says, but keep the heart open. A baby in the house does every kind of thing, buzzing about and throwing objects, and the central fact of its day is still coming back to the mother. Then: you are a ray of God, so develop divine qualities however impossible they look, because a ray is not separate from its sun. And finally the highest, which is not an attitude toward God at all but a recognition. I am That. The river carries all three. It arises in the mountains with a great deal of tumbling that it is hardly aware of, and Swamiji calls that childhood, growing in the hands of God. Crossing the plains it acquires memory: the forests, the rocks it bumps against, the tributaries arriving with all types of muck, the aquatic creatures, the people on the banks singing and chatting. That, he says, is your life. And underneath all of it there is a movement toward the ocean that never stops. Then the master speaks to the river, and the instruction is two lines long. “He says, ‘O river, give all up.” And: “Then you will have all.'” The river cannot work it out. Give up the mountain, the forests, the creatures? I can give one or two things, but not all. And it does not solve the problem intellectually. It flows on, and there comes a time when it enters the ocean, and it has given all up, and it has absolute fulfillment. Swamiji then turns the story over, because a listener will hear only loss. Look back, he says. The river is still there, still coming from the mountain, still crossing the plains, still communing with the ocean. Which aspect were you looking at? That river is the enlightened personality: holding every practical reality, and deep down holding nothing.

The Name That Is Ever New

Sutra 27 gives God a name, and Swamiji reads pranava, Om, etymologically before he reads it devotionally. It means that which is ever new. The contrast he draws is ordinary and therefore difficult to argue with. Everything in the world is subject to age from the moment it appears. A child born two hours ago is described as two hours old. “Nothing remains new.” The name of God is the one thing that beckons the mind toward what age does not touch. From there the practical instruction. Om by itself is all-encompassing and needs a highly prepared mind, so it gets extended into an ishta mantra, a personal form. Om namah shivaya. Om shri ramaya namah. Om Jesus, Jesus Christ. Swamiji says it plainly: a Christian can choose a Hindu mantra, a Hindu a Christian one, no harm in that. God has countless attributes, and how you choose to see Him is genuinely your choice. He grounds the sound itself in anatomy. Om is formed between the only two terminals that speech has. With A the throat opens, with M the lips close. Everything a voice can do happens between those two points, and the mantra is repeated with the intention of becoming one with what it names. The river, he says, goes on repeating a mantra in order to become the ocean. Sutra 29 then states the result: by this practice the obstacles fall away and the knowledge of the inner Self unfolds. Which brings the lecture to its subject.

Knowing an Obstacle Is Not Removing It

Swamiji stops before the list and installs a piece of realism that does more work than any individual obstacle does. “that you don’t get rid of an obstacle simply because you have known about it.” Success in overcoming them is progressive, and sometimes you advance only to come back down. Then the image the lecture is really built around. People plan a trip, get into the car, rush toward the plane, and realise they have left the tickets behind. “Therefore, the car that you buy must move both ways, forward and backward.” Moving backward to collect what you need is not going backward in any meaningful sense. “It is designed for you to move ahead.” So do not expect a straight mathematical ascent, up and up while you check the watch to see how long until the highest achievement. Expect up and down, shaking this way and that. It is probably the most useful passage in the lecture for anyone who has concluded from a bad month that the practice is not working.

The Nine

*Vyadhi, disease.* Swamiji traces it in the direction most people do not. Anger, hatred and frustration held in the mind press on the nervous system, the vital forces stop moving harmoniously, and the subtle channels called nadis block in some places and overwork in others. Physical disease is downstream of that. He extends it socially: a contagious illness requires distance from people, but dullness and self-generated sadness are also transmitted, and you hand them to others without noticing. The remedies he names are japa and surrender. *Styana, dullness.* A mind that has already made up its mind. You want what you want, and anyone suggesting otherwise simply does not understand. His analogy is exact: a person can be so unhealthy that he cannot appreciate a talk on health. Satsanga, asana and pranayama work on it, and the first sign of progress is uncomfortable, because sensitivity means noticing impurities you could not see before. *Samshaya, doubt.* The intellect must give its blessing to what you are doing. When it does not, it mocks: you sit down for japa and it asks whether you have become a caveman, whether this is what people do in an age of science. Swamiji’s answer is not an argument but an image. A swimmer reaching for support puts a hand on a passing fish and knows at once it will not hold. Then the hand finds a pole. That difference between insubstantial and substantial is something the mind comes to recognise directly, and doubts dismantle level by level. He is blunt about the aspirant who claims to have none: the doubt is not absent, the mind has simply not yet accepted, and acceptance is not available on demand. A small tree has to grow into a big tree. Be positive, but maturely positive. *Pramada, procrastination. The example is a letter that needs a lot of thinking, so it waits until tomorrow, and the next day there are fifty more. The habit generalises until the mind’s standing answer is later, and then nothing is enjoyed because everything is still on the desk under the files. Swamiji gives it the harshest verdict in the lecture, quoting the Mahabharata. “Procrastination, putting things for tomorrow. When that develops in your mind, it is death. You’re not alive.”* Being alive, he says, is a sense of presence, living in the present. The countermeasure is three words used as a mantra: do it now. *Alasya, laziness.* Inertia in body and mind, close kin to the one before it. He treats it as a matter of daily practice and of diet in the widest sense, tamasic food and lifestyle giving way to sattvic ones. *Avirati, lack of dispassion.* The person is practising but without inspiration, telling themselves they are doing fine while not knowing what they are looking for, and quietly hoping for a psychic ability. Swamiji’s picture of it is a swan that has lost its memory and decided it belongs to a particular tree, hopping between branches and living on. What vairagya restores is the knowledge that you were never dependent. “If you have vairāgya, your soul is ready to fly, because we are not holding on to things or being held by the things of the world.” The practical world stays practical. Being in the ocean is wonderful as long as the head stays above the neck line, and miserable the moment it goes under and stays there. *Bhranti darshana, false knowledge. Two forms. The first is the fantasy of powers, and Swamiji is funny about it: imagine levitating five inches, and immediately calling the television stations and the journalists, going viral. That is not what yoga is offering. “Yoga is planning to make you Brahman, the Absolute.” Your imagination is what is keeping the target low. The second form is more serious because it can be dangerous. A sensation develops during practice, something like lightning moving up and down the spine, and the conclusion is that kundalini is rising and enlightenment is close. “The fact is, very soon you find you have become sick. Your prāṇas were disturbed.”* *Alabdha bhumikatva, failure to attain a state of yoga.* The states are rungs, and you can generally tell which one you stand on. The obstacle is never being able to say where you belong. *Anavasthitatva, failure to remain there.* The state has been recognised and will not hold. His image needs no gloss: each time you put your foot down it is so oily it slips out again.

The Five Levels of Mind

The lecture closes by naming the rungs, and by drawing a distinction that makes the scale usable. Mudha is the dull mind. Kshipta is the distracted mind. Vikshipta is partially distracted, and Swamiji says most good people live here. It is what the world recognises as culture, and it is genuinely good. Its one weakness is that it is not secure. “You can be very cultured, extremely polite, extremely gentle,” and then: “until you are provoked.” And then you carry a grudge for years, sometimes against your own children. Ekagrata is the focused mind, where real yoga begins. You can still drop into dullness or distraction, but you no longer settle there. Niruddha is the highest, where the mind has been transcended, and Swamiji describes it domestically, which is the surprise of it. “Your chair. Easy chair, comfortable chair that you are always in it. Eternal seat.” Movement continues even here, but not helplessly. It becomes play. The distinction holding all this together is between avastha and sthiti. An avastha arrives like a mood and leaves again, and it is not yours. A sthiti is where you are even when you are not trying. That is the only honest way to ask where you stand, and the lecture leaves the question open on purpose.

Terms

abhyasa — steady, repeated practice; the daily sadhana you plan into your time rather than wait to feel like.
vairagya — dispassion; not withdrawal from practical life but the settled knowledge that you are not dependent on it.
shraddha — faith, understood as something that grows in stages rather than arrives at once.
virya — strength; here, the capacity to hold back the harsh word and to transform a negative quality rather than express it.
smriti — remembrance of God, sustained until it becomes the mind’s resting activity.
samadhi — absorption; stepping outside the limits set by the nerves, the body and the brain.
prajna — intuitive wisdom, the height of the evolution Patanjali describes.
antaraya — an obstacle; the nine listed in sutra 30 that scatter the mind.
pranava — Om, read literally as that which is ever new.
ishta mantra — the personal form of the mantra, Om extended into whichever divine aspect suits the aspirant.
nadi — a subtle channel through which the vital forces move; blockage or overactivity here precedes physical disease.
sthiti — the level you actually occupy, present whether or not you are making an effort.
avastha — a state that visits like a mood and departs; not yet yours.
vikshipta — the partially distracted mind, which the world recognises as culture and which holds until it is provoked.

Three Questions

Which of the nine do you recognise most immediately in your own week, and what is the smallest thing that would move it?
Where in your practice have you taken a backward step as evidence of failure, when it may have been the car going back for the ticket?
Is the state you value most in yourself an avastha or a sthiti, and how would you know the difference?

Raja Yoga Sutras, Samadhi Pada, sutras 27 to 30. Lecture 17 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.