Book report: Patanjali's Yoga Sutras

The Yoga Sutras feel poignant in many of the ways I hoped to elevate my practice and my mental wellbeing. Mastering the mind has been a battle we face as humans, growing up I think many of us indeed feel this cognitive dissonance but don’t realize it is a shared burden that we all face. The Sutras seem to be the first book that not only outright names these tribulations faced by humans but presents actionable steps rather than dancing around in platitudes, dogma and allegory, in the form of the eight limbs of yoga.

It should be noted that I do believe that these religious allegories do present ideas of piety in a way that has been optimized for mass consumption across age and class with the goal of salivation with the traditional heaven, hell and purgatory being euphemism for the type of existence one might find themselves in based on their karma, sins, good deeds and thought patterns. The Sutras differ in genre more than in aim: where the salvation traditions hand you a mythology, Patanjali hands you a manual.

Pantajali often uses water in various energetic states and turbidity as a metaphor for the mind. The lucky among us seem to arrive at the still, clear state without the arduous grappling, their calm grounded in faith, family, and community; the path is legible to them at scale, and they are spared the overabundance of self-reflection that troubles the rest.

For those without the substrate of spirituality particularly those gifted autodidacts and scholars attempt to find a spiritual facsimile to fill this void by holding onto history and logic like a hand unable to release a high current wire pulling them to the benthic. Searching for meaning and a rational reason why so many atrocities, pain and suffering has led to them being the terminal node of a graph that is a product of the very atrocities that we condemn.

To confer between banalities with fellows equally devoid of spirituality, or to oscillate these thoughts in solitude, can curdle into apathy, into misanthropy, or into something closer to psychosis. We tend to resolve the pressure one of two ways: crushed under the gravity of wretchedness, or capitulating to a power greater than ourselves and taking shelter in a prescribed path.

The details of this path may differ between religions and traditions, but the message they converge on is the same. The rational mind must recognize that sometimes these traditions can be co-opted by bad actors or may not serve the current time period.

Salvation found in the practice of yoga on and off must be done in perpetuity but the state of existence it blissful, finding the mindfulness to remain unperturbed from things that do not serve us, crafting a body and mind that we enjoy being in allows us to lift up those around us, and amplify the love in the world.