The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: The Book of the Spiritual Man — John Shaqi
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
In the eternal Now, both past and future are consummated.
Bjorklund, the Swedish philosopher, has well stated the same truth:
“Neither past nor future can exist to God; He lives undividedly,
without limitations, and needs not, as man, to plot out his existence
in a series of moments. Eternity then is not identical with unending
time; it is a different form of existence, related to time as the
perfect to the imperfect … Man as an entity for himself must have the
natural limitations for the part. Conceived by God, man is eternal in
the divine sense, but conceived, by himself, man’s eternal life is
clothed in the limitations we call time. The eternal is a constant
present without beginning or end, without past or future.”
13. These properties, whether manifest or latent, are of the nature of
the Three Potencies.
The Three Potencies are the three manifested modifications of the one
primal material, which stands opposite to perceiving consciousness.
These Three Potencies are called Substance, Force, Darkness; or viewed
rather for their moral colouring, Goodness, Passion, Inertness. Every
material manifestation is a projection of substance into the empty
space of darkness. Every mental state is either good, or passional, or
inert. So, whether subjective or objective, latent or manifest, all
things that present themselves to the perceiving consciousness are
compounded of these three. This is a fundamental doctrine of the
Sankhya system.
14. The external manifestation of an object takes place when the
transformations ore in the same phase.
We should be inclined to express the same law by saying, for example,
that a sound is audible, when it consists of vibrations within the
compass of the auditory nerve; that an object is visible, when either
directly or by reflection, it sends forth luminiferous vibrations
within the compass of the retina and the optic nerve. Vibrations below
or above that compass make no impression at all, and the object remains
invisible; as, for example, a kettle of boiling water in a dark room,
though the kettle is sending forth heat vibrations closely akin to
light.
So, when the vibrations of the object and those of the perceptive power
are in the same phase, the external manifestation of the object takes
place.
There seems to be a further suggestion that the appearance of an object
in the “present,” or its remaining hid in the “past,” or “future,” is
likewise a question of phase, and, just as the range of vibrations
perceived might be increased by the development of finer senses, so the
perception of things past, and things to come, may be easy from a
higher point of view.
15. The paths of material things and of states of consciousness are
distinct, as is manifest from the fact that the same object may produce
different impressions in different minds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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