Yoga as philosophy and religionDasgupta, Surendranath
Religion
Yoga as philosophy and religion
Dasgupta, Surendranath
Hindu philosophy; Patañjali; Yoga
Now we have said before, that each unit of change or evolution is
measured by this unit of time _kshaṇa_ or moment; or rather the units of
change are expressed in terms of these moments or _kshaṇas_. Of course
in our ordinary consciousness these moments of change cannot be grasped,
but they can be reasonably inferred. For at the end of a certain period
we observe a change in a thing; now this change, though it becomes
appreciable to us after a long while, was still going on every moment,
so, in this way, the succession of evolution or change cannot be
distinguished from the moments coming one after another. Thus the
_Yoga-sūtra_ says in IV. 33: “Succession involving a course of changes
is associated with the moments.” Succession as change of moments is
grasped only by a course of changes. A cloth which has not passed
through a course of changes through a series of moments cannot be found
old all at once at any time. Even a new cloth kept with good care
becomes old after a time. This is what is called the termination of a
course of changes and by it the succession of a course of changes can be
grasped. Even before a thing is old there can be inferred a sequence of
the subtlest, subtler, subtle, grossest, grosser and gross changes
(_Tattvavaiśāradī_, IV. 33).[25]
Now as we have seen that the unit of time is indistinguishable from the
unit of change or evolution, and as these moments are not co-existing
but one follows the other, we see that there is no past or future
existing as a continuous before or past, and after or future. It is the
present that really exists as the manifested moment; the past has been
conserved as sublatent and the future as the latent. So the past and
future exist in the present, the former as one which has already had its
manifestation and is thus conserved in the fact of the manifestation of
the present. For the manifestation of the present as such could not have
taken place until the past had already been manifested; so the
manifestation of the present is a concrete product involving within
itself the manifestation of the past; in a similar way it may be said
that the manifestation of the present contains within itself the seed or
the unmanifested state of the future, for if this had not been the case,
the future never could have happened. So we see that the whole world
undergoes a change at one unit point of time, and not only that but it
conserves within itself all the past and future history of cosmic
evolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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