The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: The Book of the Spiritual ManPatañjali
Religion
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: The Book of the Spiritual Man
Patañjali
Yoga -- Early works to 1800
18. Things seen have as their property manifestation, action, inertia.
They form the basis of the elements and the sense-powers. They make for
experience and for liberation.
Here is a whole philosophy of life. Things seen, the total of the
phenomena, possess as their property, manifestation, action, inertia:
the qualities of force and matter in combination. These, in their
grosser form, make the material world; in their finer, more subjective
form, they make the psychical world, the world of sense-impressions and
mind-images. And through this totality of the phenomenal, the soul
gains experience, and is prepared for liberation. In other words, the
whole outer world exists for the purposes of the soul, and finds in
this its true reason for being.
19. The grades or layers of the Three Potencies are the defined, the
undefined, that with distinctive mark, that without distinctive mark.
Or, as we might say, there are two strata of the physical, and two
strata of the psychical realms. In each, there is the side of form, and
the side of force. The form side of the physical is here called the
defined. The force side of the physical is the undefined, that which
has no boundaries. So in the psychical; there is the form side; that
with distinctive marks, such as the characteristic features of
mind-images; and there is the force side, without distinctive marks,
such as the forces of desire or fear, which may flow now to this
mind-image, now to that.
20. The Seer is pure vision. Though pure, he looks out through the
vesture of the mind.
The Seer, as always, is the spiritual man whose deepest consciousness
is pure vision, the pure life of the eternal. But the spiritual man, as
yet unseeing in his proper person, looks out on the world through the
eyes of the psychical man, by whom he is enfolded and enmeshed. The
task is, to set this prisoner free, to clear the dust of ages from this
buried temple.
21. The very essence of things seen is, that they exist for the Seer.
The things of outer life, not only material things, but the psychic man
also, exist in very deed for the purposes of the Seer, the Soul, the
spiritual man Disaster comes, when the psychical man sets up, so to
speak, on his own account, trying to live for himself alone, and taking
material things to solace his loneliness.
22. Though fallen away from him who has reached the goal, things seen
have not alto fallen away, since they still exist for others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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