Notes on a talk on The Yoga Sutra by Patanjali by Michael Stone at Centre of Gravity, 2010
My interest in this practice has always been about waking up with other people—as a culture and as a society. I’ve never been too interested in formal communities. I’ve participated in my life in some spiritual combines and they always make me feel like my halo is too rusty to receive full signal broadcasts. So it’s so nice to understand sangha as the small events that happen as we become friends and learn about each other’s practices. And start to see the way these practices are refined in a life, and not just by mastering one particular technique.
Whether you’re in a formal community that has a temple, or you practice Yoga postures in a commercial Yoga studio, we often don’t get a chance to see the way practice comes alive in someone’s seeing and thinking and walking down the infinite street that they used to call home. We often just see someone’s mind-altering back bends or circus acts of balancing, but refining those skills doesn’t necessarily affect the other parts of our lives. What we would like is a meditation practice, a physical practice, an art practice, a talking practice, and a listening practice that are all interdependent, and also connected to this world. And these practices don’t need to be hemmed in by old languages that are stuffed with lists of rights and wrongs. Christians invented physics, but we don’t call it Christian physics. Muslims created algebra, but we don’t call it Muslim algebra. Maybe there’s a way we can practice where our value system is dependent on every moment we find ourselves in. Maybe we can stop leaning back into the cozy arm chairs of Yoga or Buddhist ethics, or other received wisdoms, and respond to each moment in a way that comes out of a lifetime of practice and long term devotion to something other than what our culture keeps serving up, whether from its instantly nostalgic yesterdays or from today’s hit list. I hope this is what we are doing together.
Samadhi
The name of the first chapter in The Yoga Sutra is samadhi. The word samadhi literally means integration, it’s the coming together of subject and object. It’s interesting because most of the time we think of samadhi as the goal of yoga, but here it appears as a concentration practice. Samadhi is not something that happens to you, a glorified utopia that arrives as a reward for following the rules. Traditionally, the teacher lays out the five ethical principles, the yamas, and then leads you through the asanas and sitting practice, with the unspoken promise that one day your prince will come. Pattahbi Jois used to say that the first four limbs of Yoga are practiced, while the last four limbs just happen. I had a teacher from France who compared the first four limbs to the four corners of the Eiffel Tower. The others spring up out of the good foundation. But that’s not how Patanjali lays it down. She describes samadhi as a state where the self actually softens, and how this is completely tied into how we do our relationships. Ethics, and our relations with other people, come out of samadhi. Through integration we realize (and become) interdependence, and that leads us towards taking action in the world. And that action leads us into integration. We’re not practicing so that we can arrive somewhere, so that we can park our car in the samadhi garage, instead, we’re engaged in this moment, as it’s happening right now.
Crisis
In the mid-nineties I had a yoga crisis. I was unemployed and all I did was practice postures, striking a pose until I couldn’t any longer. I began to wonder what was the point of all these bendings and stretchings. I decided to quit practicing because I felt I had wasted my life for seven years. As part of my farewell tour, I booked a ticket to India where I planned to divide a year of study between Pattahbi Jois and Mr. Iyengaar. Just before leaving I found out that Jois was going to be teaching a workshop in Boulder, Colorado. I thought that before I go spent six months with a man who supposedly doesn’t speak English, I should go to Boulder and practice with him.
He was teaching the second series for two weeks. The first two days of practice were kind of interesting, but I had sort of retired, so I wasn’t really engaged. Working out on the mat next to mine was Richard Freeman, and of course he has a beautiful, elegant practice that he might as well have been doing on Saturn, that’s how far away it felt. But slowly, I started to watch him, the way he was with his dog, or with his son Gabriel who was very small at the time, and his wife Mary. I asked if I could talk to him about this crisis I was having. He took me to his house and made dinner and we sat at the kitchen table. He asked, “Well, what’s your practice?” I said, “Eight limbs of yoga.” He said, “How do you practice them?” I replied, “Well, I’m fairly ethical, I meditate a little bit, and I do yoga postures.” He said, “Yes, excellent. And how do you practice the fifth limb?” “I know what it is,” I assured him, “it’s pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses.” “Yes,” he said, “but how do you practice it?”
I couldn’t answer, and suddenly a light went on and I realized that these eight limbs are not something that belongs in a book or a schoolyard whisper, and they don’t simply flower out of one another, but that each is a technique. In the same way that each link on the Buddha’s eightfold path is a task. The eight limbs are something that you do. I had always thought of samadhi as something that just happens to you one day. I had a fuzzy idea of what might occur, I’d be walking around a familiar neighborhood suddenly grown unfamiliar and then shazam. Samadhi. I remember trying to dodge the Boston rain when a bus steamed past with an advertisement for a Bali vacation sprayed across its length and a captioned phone number 1-800-Get Samadhi. The tagline read: “Don’t put it off another lifetime!” I think for most of us, samadhi is not a technique that you refine, like learning an arpeggio, the idea is that if you practice long enough the sky will open and then you’re there, you’re in samadhi. I mention this because I think it’s important that samadhi is something that you actually do in your meditation practice.
Let’s have a look at how Patanjali writes about it. She’s trying to teach you how to work with your mind, and she does it in a way that’s very skillful and doesn’t allow you to idealize samadhi as a goal of practice. Though it might appear that way at first glance because it’s the eighth and final limb, and because Indians love lists.
“As the patterning of consciousness subsides, a transparent way of seeing, called coalescence, saturates consciousness; like a jewel, it reflects equally whatever lies before it—whether subject, object, or act of perceiving. So long as conceptual or linguistic knowledge pervades this transparency it is called coalescence with thought.”
Relax
Maybe I should say something about the word samapatti, which means coalescence. Samadhi means integration, but samapatti literally means to fall together. What’s interesting, if there are eight stages of samadhi, then why doesn’t she call each stage a version of samadhi? Why introduce this other word samapatti to talk about the different stages of samadhi? And the reason is, samadhi talks about the ways that subject and object come together, and etymologically, the word samapatti can also be translated as coincidence, and it refers to the fact that when you do the practice of coming back over and over again to the breath, to sensations in the body, or to sound, you create the conditions for concentration to arise. Rather than thinking about concentration as something you work really hard at by counting your breath, and not letting in any thoughts and getting tight around one thing, Patanjali seems to be suggesting that the first stages of samadhi happen like coincidence. All you can do is set up the conditions for concentration to happen, you don’t undertake heroic bouts of concentration where you’re trying to get somewhere. If you meditate in order to get somewhere, in a few hours or days your body will start yelling at you because it’s too tight. The way we actually get deeper into states of samapatti is by relaxing. That’s how you get from one state of concentration to another. That’s why Patanjali introduces this new word, samapatti, or coincidence, rather than continuing to use the word samadhi which sets up more of a linear understanding of concentration.
“At the next stage called coalescence beyond thought, objects seem to be coloured by memory, now formless, only their essential nature shines forth.”
In the sixth limb of yoga, dharana, which is mindfulness practice, we pick an object, and Patanjali says anything will do, you just come back to it over and over. If something becomes predominant during meditation, like a sensation or a thought, you notice it, then you come back to your breathing.
Seventh Limb
In dhyana, the seventh limb, we let the mind focus on anything that becomes predominant. If a sound is there, and it’s interesting, you don’t go off with it, but you notice it, and the noticing becomes the object of meditation. When something else comes up, you notice that. If you get too far into it by thinking about it, or have too many associations, then you come back to your breathing and start again. The move from the sixth limb to the seventh is that we can let anything become the predominant element in meditation. I think we all know this. When you first start practicing your work is just coming back to the breath. Then after a while you notice it’s OK to have a thought, or to hear a sound, because you’re noticing it without a lot of reactivity. This sets the stage for an atmosphere of concentration, samadhi, where you come back to an object and notice it quite effortlessly.
Patanjali says that in these deepening states of quiet, you can notice sensations with thinking, and without much language, with and without memory. You can try this on your own with feelings. Imagine feeling a feeling, without attaching memory to it. The practice invites you to see how you attach a back story or something historical to something that’s actually arising now. This story actually prevents the present from arising, it insulates you from what’s happening, and prevents you from knowing it. And then the feeling itself passes away, but you’re still obsessed about some memory you have about it, even though it is not even there. And then you think you’re back in the past, but you’re not even back in the past, because you’re here, thinking you’re back in the past. Which you can’t ever go back into. And there’s no you that can even go back there. Because the you that you think can go back, is the you that arises in this moment that is in relationship to a past that happened to another you. Which was just another story within a story, which is all that you are.
“Subtle objects can be traced back to their origin in undifferentiated nature.” In other words, everything we notice appears and vanishes, but we don’t know what it comes out of and we don’t know what it falls back into. Nowadays neuropsychology has been frustrated by this so much that they’ve had to admit that the mind and the brain are not the same thing. Why? Because they can’t find where the stuff of the mind comes out of and goes back into. It’s impossible to know. All the feelings you had today, where do they go? We don’t know. Sensations appear and disappear and we don’t know where they go. They likely arise from something undifferentiated, they show up differentiated, and then they become undifferentiated. But unlike previous teachings in Indian philosophy, in Patanjali’s model these sensations don’t go back to some state of Pure Nature or a God realm we can never visit. It’s not really important, because if you try to focus on where they go, you wind up following a trail of storytelling which starts smelling like theology.
Perhaps this is the psychology of the creation story, wanting to find the beginning of it all, building billion dollar tunnels in Switzerland to bang things together so that we can find the origin in our future. And if they do, they’ll discover that underneath their string theories lie still another beginning. There will be dancing in the halls of physics because they’ve found something, and then the frustration hangover will begin, because there will have to be another search for what is underneath, or beside, or beyond that.
Why not begin, as old Brecht asked, not with the good old things, but the bad new ones?
Patanjali writes that you can notice an object by reflecting it, but you can also notice that the nature of the object is reflection free. The reflection is something we’re bringing to it. This sounds like esoteric or high level meditation, but try this in your own life when you are actually feeling something. And try to feel without even reflecting on it. For those of you who are meditators, when you feel something let that be the object of your meditation, and then the next thing that comes up becomes the object of your concentration, and then you have a meditative state of mind rather than a stiffness in what’s meditation and what’s not meditation. Practice is about cultivating a quality of awareness. Whoa.
Coalescence
There are four kinds of samapatti, or coalescence: with thought, without thought, reflecting and not reflecting. These are states of concentration that plant seeds in the grooves of your mind, the body and the body politic. So when you’re meditating and sadness arises, the first way you open to it is with thought, then to the feeling of sadness without thought, and usually you won’t go any further. You might throw a personal ticker tape parade because you managed to feel sadness without a thought, call up a few friends and have the t-shirt made up. And then go right on and feel sadness with and without reflection, knowing that the reflection is the self. You can plunge into the moment-by-moment noticing, and see the way that the feeling of sadness becomes “my” sadness. And then you can notice how the sadness itself doesn’t contain you in it, it’s not really related to you, it’s only a feeling. You can start to look into a moment, to pry apart the layers, to surround it in quietness so that you can really feel your feelings. Meditators use stillness the way scientists use microscopes, it’s a way to inquire very deeply into the nature of things, using the framework of the body. This is the way you become your own authority, because you are invited to see for yourself.
You can use any object for these meditations: a sound, a light, a thought, a feeling. And with these objects you can experience the four kinds of coalescence. For instance, you can feel sadness without referring it back to a self, and feel a sadness that is free of reflection.
Samskara
Not so esoteric, is it? These attentions bear the seeds of latent impressions called the samskaras. That means when you can notice sadness with thought, there’s a story attached to the sadness. Experiencing your sadness like that is an action, karma, that plants a pattern in your neurobiology so that the next time that you notice that sadness, you’ll attach that story to it. OK? But he’s saying more here about neuroplasticity because it’s not fixed. If you notice something without thought you plant a new groove in the mind-body process. You can then trust that even if we experience things that we’ve been traumatized about, we can start to develop trust in our own body that maybe we haven’t trusted, that we can feel something with thought and without thought, referring to a self, and eventually not referring to a self. It’s a profound form of healing, not just an acrobatics of concentration for people in caves.
I just want to add one more thing. When you do this in the mind and in the body, you’re also doing it in the fabric of the culture. When you have the capacity to stop reacting to internal states that you despise outside yourself, that moment plants a cultural pattern that allows for the possibility of more people working with their potential for craving and grasping. This is a profound form of activism. You might sit here and wonder how is what we are doing active in society? There’s a great story about Chogyam Trungpa clearing every head in a San Francisco ballroom with a talk until someone asks, “How is this a form of social action?” He replies, “There’s a hundred people in this room and no one’s done anything bad for a whole hour!” There are chronic cultural momentums within us but when we don’t act on them we’re actually changing patterns in the civilizational matrix.
Should we use the word “witnessing?” I don’t like the word witnessing because it sounds like the witness is apart from what is being seen and this isn’t an accurate description of what it feels like to be in concentration. It’s totally visceral and absorbing, that’s why I like to talk about feeling the breath. When someone is in this stage of concentration and they start to see how thoughts arise, in relation to something, one of the techniques a teacher will offer is to ask, “Where in your body do you feel the thoughts are coming from?” This is really cool. Someone is starting to see that they can feel without a lot of stories about their feelings, and then we bring them back to the body, to locate themselves again. The practice allows you to start to see thoughts as they begin. Usually we catch thoughts when they’re nearly spent. But in meditation we can slow that process down and see the thought as it begins to form. The only way you can really do that is to be totally in the body. People often describe different parts of their body where they can actually feel the thoughts start to arise. It’s really great. This is not about standing back as a neutral observer. The reason it’s called samadhi is because the subject and object are really close together, very intimate.
In the third stage you notice that thoughts are self referential, and this causes them to evaporate. As soon as you notice it, then it doesn’t work anymore. I want to recommend a Shambhala press book by Richard Shankman called The Experience of Samadhi. It presents competing views of what samadhi is and features interviews with leading teachers in the United States who teach concentration practices. They all disagree with each other and he doesn’t try to make everything work.
I enjoyed the interview with Thanissaro Bhikkhu. He talks about his teacher Maha Boowa who makes a useful distinction between people who find it naturally easy to get the mind into concentration and those who have to analyze their way in. With this latter group if they don’t really understand what’s happening in their minds, they’re not able to let go. He’s not saying this is bad, I would say most of us who are fairly psychological, unless we understand the map, it’s a little hard to let go. “For those sorts of people I would encourage analyzing the breath, looking at how they’re conceiving the breath, their perception of the breath, and how their perception of the breath, shapes their process of breathing.” So he’s saying use the way you’re looking at your breath, to get closer to your breath. That might sound like a lot of mental activity, but it connects the meditator with the breath. It makes them curious about the breath and the breathing process, they’re not going to connect with anything unless they understand it and it captures their imagination. But then there are people who are happy to be with their practice and be quiet. So you have to tailor your instructions to the individual. “For those who find it easy to get very concentrated, the danger is that they haven’t had to work for it, so it’s not really a skill. They’ll have days when for no reason at all they can’t do it, and if they haven’t figured out the ins and outs of their mind, they can feel totally lost on those days. These are the people who tend not to analyze things much at all. And they have to be pushed, sometimes against their will, to ask the questions that will give them more insight into what they’re doing.”
This really strikes a chord for me because once in a while somebody who doesn’t really look at their mind in an existential way, and I think this is mostly people who don’t have a melancholy disposition, or who haven’t become therapists or artists, it’s always a challenge to talk to them about why they should practice because they look into their mind, they see it as a mind, they sit down and they can feel peaceful, they can feel frustrated when they’re not peaceful, but their goal is just to kind of stay peaceful. And they don’t look at themselves in terms of what they’re processing or how they’re representing their experience back to themselves, they don’t always see that whole process. It’s very challenging to get those people to talk about what their motivation is for practice. So I think that they’re the people who don’t know why they’re practicing, except that everyone around them is practicing, and that the books all say you should practice. I think that’s what is being touched on here. And maybe one of the ways is to be creative in our instruction so meditators get really curious about one small part of what they’re doing. I really like here how he talks about getting someone to be curious about how they’re breathing. There’s so many different ways to do that and I just want to point out that this is what Patanjali just did, earlier in the chapter. He talks about the inhale, the exhale, getting curious about the pause at the top of the inhale and the bottom of the exhale, changing the objects of meditation. This is all to get you interested not in the object, but in your mind. In the life of awareness.
“In the lucidity of coalesced, reflection-free contemplation, the nature of the self becomes clear.” This is not capital s Self. In Sanskrit you can’t even do a capital. Patanjali writes: the nature of self form becomes clear. Isn’t that interesting? That when you see the way you’re treating an object, that what you actually start to see is not the object but the way you create a self. It becomes clear. Does Patanjali say the self stops? No. She just says it becomes clear.
“The wisdom that arises in that lucidity is unerring. Unlike insights acquired through interference or teachings, this wisdom has as its object the actual distinction between pure awareness and consciousness.” Between the fluctuations of consciousness and awareness is a mirror that doesn’t take the shape of what it’s watching. But be careful, she’s not saying that awareness is something, she’s using language to say that the citta vrrtis (fluctuations of consciousness) that give rise to what we think of as a self is a form of consciousness that can be seen. She’s using the term awareness to talk about how the self is seen. And then she has to spend the whole next chapter trying to get out of that, because she’s almost setting up a (self) witness. But she’s not saying that the self goes away, or that awareness is a thing.
“It generates latent impressions that prevent the activation of other impressions.” So when you see that the self is just a frame, it creates new cognitive patterns that undercut the usual patterns that kept creating a self. It happens in that moment, in that situation, but not forever. Just in that moment. “When even these cease to arise and the patterning of consciousness is completely stilled, integration bears no further seeds.” In other words, there can be a moment where we can see something so clearly without creating a self that thee is no new pattern made. This is what neuro psychology loves, this is what they’re measuring on MRIs, meditators who can get so concentrated that areas of the brain that are planting patterns go quiet. It’s so exciting to see this on a screen. Or you could go on a retreat and save the nine million dollars of MRI studies. I want to point out a couple of things. Patanjali stops here. She leaves us hanging because we’ve known from the beginning of the chapter that there are more levels of samadhi, and the chapter is called samadhi, but she doesn’t go any deeper. The next chapter starts by defining what a self is, and then she teaches ethics, and she doesn’t introduce any meditation practices until she’s talked about relationships, because she sees the self as a relational construction. She doesn’t go further in talking about how to work with this constructed self in meditation, until she introduces the yamas. The yamas offer five principles of clarifying our relationships. Ethical principles. Which is really interesting. That she’s actually taking the last stages of concentration and adding to them, because in a way you could say that concentration is morally neutral, so she doesn’t go any further, then starts tying ethical practices into concentration.
Her methodology, by cutting the chapter here, then splicing in something totally different for the first half of the second chapter, and then bringing back concentration again, is worth reflecting on, not just as a technique of logic, but in our own lives. I used to know a French racing car driver and he studied Zen meditation to be a better racing car driver, and athletes also, but for Patanjali to go further in talking about concentration she starts talking about morality, which is quite fascinating.
She talks about ethics or right action and only then takes us through the four stages of samadhi.
Traditionally, the teacher says there are five ethical principles, practice them and then one day something is going to happen. Pattahbi Jois used to say: the first four limbs you do, and the last four limbs just happen. I had a teacher from France who said that the first four limbs are the four corners of the Eiffel Tower. The others spring up out of the good foundation. I love the sound of that. You do the first four, you do asana practice, not hurting anyone, and then out of that deep states of meditation appear. But actually that’s not how Patanjali talks. She goes straight from talking about samadhi where the self actually softens and then goes straight into talking about how that’s totally tied into how we do our relationships. Then she talks about ethics as coming out of samadhi. Rather than ethics as getting you to samadhi.