All states are modifications of the three guṇas; in each one of them the functions of all the three guṇas are seen, contrary to one another. These contraries are observable in their developed forms, for the guṇas are seen to abide in various proportions and compose all our mental states. Thus a Yogin who wishes to be released from pain once for all is very sensitive and anxious to avoid even our so-called pleasures. The wise are like the eye-ball. As a thread of wool thrown into the eye pains by merely touching it, but not when it comes into contact with any other organ, so the Yogin is as tender as the eye-ball, when others are insensible of pain. Ordinary persons, however, who have again and again suffered pains as the consequence of their own karma, and who again seek them after having given them up, are all round pierced through as it were by nescience, their minds become full of afflictions, variegated by the eternal residua of the passions. They follow in the wake of the “I” and the “Mine” in relation to things that should be left apart, pursuing threefold pain in repeated births, due to external and internal causes. The Yogin seeing himself and the world of living beings surrounded by the eternal flow of pain, turns for refuge to right knowledge, cause of the destruction of all pains (_Vyāsa-bhāshya_, II. 15). Thinking of the mind and body and the objects of the external world as the true self and feeling affected by their change is avidyā (false knowledge). The modifications that this avidyā suffers may be summarised under four heads. I. The ego, which, as described above, springs from the identification of the buddhi with the purusha. II. From this ego springs attachment (_rāga_) which is the inclination towards pleasure and consequently towards the means necessary for attaining it in a person who has previously experienced pleasures and remembers them. II. Repulsion from pain also springs from the ego and is of the nature of anxiety for its removal; anger at pain and the means which produces pain, remains in the mind in consequence of the feeling of pain, in the case of him who has felt and remembers pain. IV. Love of life also springs from the ego. This feeling exists in all persons and appears in a positive aspect in the form “would that I were never to cease.” This is due to the painful experience of death in some previous existence, which abides in us as a residual potency (_vāsanā_) and causes the instincts of self-preservation, fear of death and love of life. These modifications including avidyā are called the five kleśas or afflictions.