white magician has to deal with helping on harmonious relations between
man and man. The white magician must be patient. The black magician may
quite well be harsh. The white magician must be compassionate;
compassion widens out his nature, and he is trying to make his
consciousness include the whole of humanity. But not so the black
magician. He can afford to ignore compassion.
A white magician may strive for power. But when he is striving for
power, he seeks it that he may serve humanity and become more useful to
mankind, a more effective servant in the helping of the world. But not
so the brother of the dark side. When he strives for power, he seeks if
for himself, so that he may use it against the whole world. He may be
harsh and cruel. He wants to be isolated; and harshness and cruelty
tend to isolate him. He wants power; and holding that power for
himself, he can put himself temporarily, as it were, against the Divine
Will in evolution.
The end of the one is Nirvana, where all separation has ceased. The end
of the other is Avichi—the uttermost isolation—the kaivalya of the
black magician. Both are yogis, both follow the science of yoga, and
each gets the result of the law he has followed: one the kaivalya of
Nirvana, the other the kaivalya of Avichi.
Composition of States of the Mind
Let us pass now to the “states of the mind” as they are called. The
word which is used for the states of the mind by Patanjali is Vritti.
This admirably constructed language Sanskrit gives you in that very
word its own meaning. Vrittis means the “being” of the mind; the ways
in which mind can exist; the modes of the mind; the modes of mental
existence; the ways of existing. That is the literal meaning of this
word. A subsidiary meaning is a “turning around,” a “moving in a
circle”. You have to stop, in Yoga, every mode of existing in which the
mind manifests itself. In order to guide you towards the power of
stopping them—for you cannot stop them till you understand them—you are
told that these modes of mind are fivefold in their nature. They are
pentads. The Sutra, as usually translated, says “the Vrittis are
fivefold (panchatayyah),” but pentad is a more accurate rendering of
the word pancha-tayyah, in the original, than fivefold. The word pentad
at once recalls to you the way in which the chemist speaks of a monad,
triad, heptad, when he deals with elements. The elements with which the
chemist is dealing are related to the unit-element in different ways.
Some elements are related to it in one way only, and are called monads;
others are related in two ways, and are called duads, and so on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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