Beginners yoga – an explanation
Yoga in its definition of the structure of the world has many things in common with Sankhya, but it differs indeed from Sankhya in admitting the existence of God. Of course the God’s concept in Yoga, as happened in Nyaya, has passed through different stages: from the primitive one, indifferent presence, God has become, under the influence of theistic tides, an active assistant of liberation. The assimilation with Shiva of the popular religion confers him little by little all the ownerships of Ishvara, the Supreme almighty Being.
Another notable difference between Yoga and Sankhya is that the liberation, according to Yoga, is not obtained only from knowledge, but with a discipline that frees the citta (synonymous in this system of buddhi) from the hold of the past and from its tendencies.
 |
Yoga has therefore very little to add to the theoretical scheme of the Sankhya. Its presupposition is rather practical: to educate to an exercise that produces the complete and definitive quiescence of all the modifications and functions of the mind (cittavrttinirodha). It is also a methodus mystica that passes through three ways: cleaning, intellectual, and unifying. In the citta (mind) five modes or stages are alternated: right knowledge (pramana), wrong or deceptive knowledge, as when one takes a shell for a silver piece, imagination (vikalpa), that is attribution of real value to inconsistent things, sleep (nidra), and memory (smrti).
 |
With exercise it is necessary to arrest these modifications of the mind making silent the infections (klesa) that feed them and distract us (ignorance, egoism, passion, hate, attachment to existence); there must be a progressive emptying with appropriate means of moral discipline: abstention from harming living creatures, respect of truth, desistance from theft, refusal to possess anything that doesn’t serve to the pure maintenance, purity of spirit and body, indifference to all that happens, asceticism, study of sacred texts and devotion toward God. All of this constitutes the two first moments of the eightfold Yoga routine known as yama and niyama.
 |
Next is prescribed the use of postures suitable for meditation, the control of breath (pranayama), which is a must for the control of thought and the subtraction of the senses from every influence of objects, so that their function is reduced to a simple perception without participation of the I (pratyahara).
The desired emptying of the mind finally articulates through three essential moments: dharana, effort to assemble the mind on an object or on an idea, dhyana, continued attention on the same and samadhi, absolute concentration, so that every sense of duality disappears between contemplated object and contemplating.
Only in this way it is possible to arrive to a state of enlightened awareness in which nevertheless the intellect more and more disappears, and even the spontaneous images that can come into the mind are arrested or suppressed. In such a manner it is possible to reach the culminating point: consciousness of the essential difference between the metapsychical self and the empirical self, and the realization of the supreme state of asamprajnata or nirodha-samadhi, where the absolute arrest of the mental functions is reached. It is not possible to go further.
Comments
Tell us what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!