by Yogi Ananda Viraj (Eugene P. Kelly, Jr.)
The Yoga Path: A Poetic Rendering…of the Samadhi Pada (Book l) of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra
Where does the yoga path lead? We approach this question from many points of view, many backgrounds/ many worlds. Our approach to the question, how the question is heard, will deter mine our answer. What is it that hears this question? Is it the ears? Is it the mind? Is it any sort of thing at all? To hear this question is to situate it. To hear is to install in a tension of historical voices which determine what exactly this question seeks. In our haste to answer the question we hear only the question. We overlook that which hears and therefore makes the question the kind of question “we hear.” There are answers which swim to the surface; the sea of voices envelops the question determining it. Envelopment is constitution. Who are these voices? Where do they come from? More voices.
Where does the yoga path lead? Our impulse is to provide a direct answer from memory. “The yoga path leads to enlightenment.” Have we been lead by the question here or by the answer? Yoga is said to be the restriction of mental modifications. When restriction has been brought about then the seer abides in its own form. At other times the seer takes the form of the mental modifications. These modifications are five in number and can be promotive of more mental modifications or they can work to inhibit promotion. This inhibiting leads to restriction which is the condition necessary for the seer to abide in its own form. The yoga path would seem to lead to the seer abiding in its own form. An answer which says little concerning the “where” in the question.
We asks “Where?” Is where a place? It does not sound as if “where” has much to do with the “own-form” of a seer. The restriction of the mental modifications is not accomplished without practice and detachment. Practice aims at establishing the conditions necessary for the seer to abide in its own form. Therefore practice aims at restriction. Practice is made firm when it when it has lived for some length of time, that is, when it has become a lifestyle. To interrupt practice is to make it tenuous. To make it firm one must give to it the attention it deserves. Does the yoga path lead to practice? Is practice the yoga path? It seems as though practice is a way, a path. It is the way to restriction. But is restriction where the yoga path leads? The seer must abide in its own form. This requires restriction. Restriction is the elimination of mental modifications. One must restrict knowledge, misconception, conceptualization, sleep, and memory. Desire, want, and need give birth to these five. Desire is not other than these. Are we to live without these to go where the yoga path leads? Does restriction imply annihilation?
To desire is to attach subject to object and therefore to keep the two apart. To have is to have apart from myself. To steal, to hurt, to lie, to have is to create the distance between consciousness and its object. This creation is also maintenance. We keep them apart. Attachment separates. To detach is to bring together. To detach is to annihilate only the distance between subject and object. To close this abyss is for the mind to be identical with that which objected, that which stood against the subject, the object. To join through detachment is to stand without distance.
When detachment is realized one is masterful. This authority is the authority that annihilates the abyss and therefore no longer thirsts for what is or what could be. Authority culminates in disregard. One is simply other to pleasure, pain, and confusion. Detachment also leads. Restriction is the other to the five modifications that are desire.
To annihilate is to do so always in the now. One arrives at the annihilation of the “apart from myself” by thought holding, by watching the subtle which demands total attention, by being a self without other, and by ecstasy. These are only on the way. These too lead but are not the “where” where the yoga path leads. What is left after total arrival? Propensity. The impulse to return to the five modifications, the “other” to restriction. We have imprinted the call back from the “where.” What draws us back again and again is inclination. Consciousness pure and simple to knowledge, misconception, memory, etc., the path is up and down. Simple consciousness without knowledge, without known, is pure awareness. This where is no place in time or space and yet it is not different than where and when we are, an anonymous here and now. A here without there and a now without then.
The normal attentiveness leads to obsession with the modifications and life as an abstraction, a bodiless condition.
To take the yoga path is never to “know” where it leads. Faith is not either than consciousness itself. Strength, remembrance, concentration, and wisdom serve to help live practice and detachment. The alternative is dissolution in the five modifications with obsessive drives and an idealized disembodied life of sensorial aridity.
Where does the yoga path lead? Who or what answers the question? Who walks the path? Is it one who is intense and sharp witted? If so, the where is here. Then there are the others, the hesitant, the unsure, and the strong. But for the intense they find themselves already on the way.
Who walks the path? To know the answer is to be on the wrong path. Do “I” walk? Do I place myself on the path? Devotion is a placing. One is placed; that which is whole and pure does the placing. The path and the walker are not different in devotion. The one who walks has never been touched by the past and will not be by that to come. The solitary walker is beyond the distance of I and that. What can be apart from a whole? This is truly a special consciousness, this authentic one without an other.
Who walks the path? It is not I. And yet, it is not that. Who walks? Does the one who walks need to know? If the one who walks is not other than the “where,” and not other than the path itself, what is there outside of this consciousness? This is omniscience.
Who gave us the path to walk? Was there a beginning to the yoga path? The one who walks, walks now, always. Was there a time other than now for one without a then? This one has always been the teacher, even to the earliest of those who searched for the path.
In the search one not only looks but listens. One listens for the sound of the path, a sound that carries one within. The one who walks is united with this original sound, the primal roar. This sound is multiplied and divided to become the many. To repeat this sound-point and imaginatively hold the meaning of this “one” is to incarnate the unified field of the path-walker. From this imaginative repetition, the intentional whisper, comes the inward turn to consciousness and the removal of the obstacles which prevent the realization of the path.
When the body is ill, dull, or lazy the path is obstructed. When the intentions are for objects, when erroneous views are held and delusion results, when carelessness is incarnate, when doubt is a bodily reality, when the mind is unsteady, and when a stage-of-the-walk is not achieved the path is lost to the view of the seer. Its own-form is obscured. These nine obstructions place the path in darkness, generate the five modifications, and foster accompaniments. Suffering, sadness or despair, bodily instability, inhalation and exhalation of a compulsive order are the correlates of the nine obstacles, their accompaniments. To lose sight of the way calls for a refocusing and restriction. To restrict here is to cancel the obstacles and so their correlates.
To remember the call to focus is to realize the path has been obscured. One removes the accompaniments by practice of unitive awareness. To hold to a “that” removes. This is the practice of the way. This is a step toward purification.
The path is situational; the path is others when one is on the way to where the yoga path leads. Friendliness must accompany one when walking with the joyful, compassion when with the suffering, happiness when with the noble, and indifference when with the less than honorable. Life, when alone or with, is always life with the other. The yoga path, when one is on its way, is community. The cultivation of the proper situational attitudes when with those also on the way leads to purification, clarification.
The path is not exclusively the other. The path is also the breath. To inhale and exhale deliberately when walking the path is also to clarify. The path is sensation. Clarification is sensorial stability as well. The mental state steadies with attentiveness to sense activity. Neurological intensifications are also staying on the way. The serenity and luminosity of neural play is the path too. To be beyond passionate attachment is to focus upon something which lies beyond. This too is way. When knowledge rests on dream things or sleep states, this is way. The path is all-inclusive. Anything desired can be on the way with meditation.
The bodily feel of one who has mastered this focused walking is multidimensional. The reciprocal bodily play of the atomic and the galactic is a neurological capability of the master. When the modifications have dwindled and the breath-mind is crystal like, there is fusion. Taking the form of knower, knowing, or known the breath-mind rests. The mind becomes its content. It is accomplished, it is the path.
The path, as it is walked, becomes empty. Knowledge as imaginative construction through word and intention is a fusion-feeling. The breath-mind, or perhaps mantra-world, becomes through word and intention. This clarity with thought is on the path to -the where, where yoga leads. By purification of remembrance only the intended fusion is illuminated. The identity in cognition has become as if emptied of itself. There is only the illumined, it is the breath-mind.
The path includes the interior landscape as well. For the breath-mind to become the subtle as interior is also to be clarified, pure, stable. When this is empty of identity the inner illumination is alone, not a presence to. It is, as it were, empty of itself. The path now terminates in itself. The body is anonymously alive and totally animated. No discernible is present. Focusing has brought us to the edge of the where.
We have been led by the focus. When clarity has arrived by way of the focus, the one who has been on the yogic way becomes the self-pure. There is nothing on the other side of clarity. We are not now looking through something clear. We are clarity. This is the upholding of the way of anonymous animation. This is the cosmic norm. This is wisdom. This wisdom has no object or specific. Nothing heard, nothing thought has generated it. The path is now clear and empty of all conventional designations or nominal play. This wisdom is the wisdom of that which is never known. The path is the norm itself, the way up and down.
The path is now propensity. The path is always the way of up and down as absolutes. When one is up one is only up, walking the non-identifiable way. When one is down one walks the way of conventional discrimination in self-nature. The way as up and down is the way of reciprocity. One is either walking the path or the path and walker have merged in anonymous freedom, in selfless independence. In the latter, propensity is hostile to the former.
This inhibits the manifestation of the obstacles. However, focus is not the where. Focus is on the way. The where is other, even to propensity.
The great emptiness is restriction. Then the seer abides in its own form. The seer is always, here, alone without a second, a non-identifiable awareness. Focus dies in the seers own form. Isolation is anonymity. What can be other to selflessness? The path itself is its own dissolution. We will never know where the path leads, but we will always be on it, when we are.