So we are going to talk a little about the yoga system and its purpose. The yoga system is meant for the purpose of complete and perfect self-realization. There are many paths or processes of yoga and they award different levels of realization. The most well-known, probably the most well-known yoga system that people in the West are more familiar with is the process of Hatha Yoga. Hatha Yoga actually only constitutes one part, a small part of the Astanga Yoga system. This is where anga, ‘anga’ means like, limb and asta means eight, the eight limbs of yoga, and they were eight categories of activity that were performed for the explicit purpose of coming to the platform of complete self-realization.
The most common text, yoga text, that is used by practitioners of yoga and the most widely accepted is of course the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali. Patanjali although he is considered the father of the yoga system by many, in reality is not actually the father because we see in far more ancient scriptures and yoga texts a complete description of the same Astanga Yoga system. One example would be in the very famous Bhagavat Purana. The Bhagavat Purana was compiled by Srila Vyasadev more than five thousand years ago, and it is made up of about eighteen thousand verses divided into twelve books, or cantos.
In the Eleventh Canto there is a very detailed description of this Astanga Yoga process and what purpose it is actually meant to serve. So while we do acknowledge that Patanjali is considered the father of the yoga system, this system existed eons before he made his appearance on this earth.
The Yoga Sutra is being translated by myriads of people and unfortunately there are numerous different ideas being promoted by different translators, and many of them that are appearing in this modern era, meaning over the last perhaps, twenty years, do not deal with or support the very earliest commentaries on the Yoga Sutra.
The earliest commentator of Yoga Sutra, his name was Vyasadev. This is not Veda Vyasa who was here over five thousand years ago, but it is a more recent Vyasadev, and he was the first commentator and then he was followed by four other famous commentators and they all supported a common understanding or appreciation of the work of Patanjali which tends to differ a great deal from the translations or the ideas that have been promoted by more modern translators. One example would be in relation to the term purusa. This purusa means the actual person who resides, the living being, who resides within the body, and in many modern commentaries this purusa is said to be all powerful and omniscient, omnipotent but forgetful of our natural position. This idea is actually not supported at all by Patanjali nor is it supported by any of the original Vedic texts. It is an idea that is very foreign to the original Vedic teaching.
One of the things we must understand from the onset is that everybody comes to yoga, or to any other thing, for that matter, with a particular mindset. Everybody will be viewing things through a prism. You know the term ‘prism’? Why a prism? What's a prism?
PERSON IN AUDIENCE: It breaks up light.
Yeah, it breaks up light into a spectrum of different colors, and so there is going to be this tendency whether we recognise it or not, that we are going to have a perspective. An example can be given like, say you are in a room, and they have a light bulb and you’ve got windows where light comes in. If I take some red cellophane and I put it on all of the windows, and I cover the light bulb also with red cellophane, then you take somebody that has never been in that house before, and they go into this room, where everything is filtered through this red filter. The reality is that most people will not be able to actually tell you what are the colors of things in the room, because everything is filtered through this red spectrum. If people look at wood, they know instinctively because of their experience, “Oh, that's wood. Wood is going to be brown, so that's probably brown,” but if it comes to carpet, wallpaper, color of furniture, things they are unfamiliar with, they are going to have a hard time ascertaining exactly what that color is.
So in a very similar manner, one of the important features of the whole yoga philosophy, there must be this recognition of the fact that we are, I will use the word polluted or contaminated. That our consciousness is attempting to see things in a certain way that is determined by our desires, our mindset, our state of consciousness.
One of the really important principles of yoga, is the need for a guru. A guru is, or should be, a person who is situated on the topmost platform of spiritual realization. They have attained actual self-realization, having attentively and submissively heard from a self-realized spiritual master themself, and having undertaken or undergone the processes associated with the particular yoga path that they are following. They will have come to this platform of realization, of self-realization, where they actually see everything in a way that ordinary people do not see.
This fact that our consciousness is contaminated or polluted and is deeply influencing how we are thinking about things and how we are seeing things, is something that must be recognised and in this state a person may be very scholarly, and be able to read Sanskrit, has a good grasp of Sanskrit grammar, it does not mean that they are qualified to teach, or that they are qualified to translate. Being able to read a book doesn't mean that you will be able to understand it. The ability to read should not be equated with the ability to comprehend. And in a similar manner, a person may be able to read a Sanskrit text and comprehend on a certain level what the words are, but they may not be able to actually fully appreciate the real meaning of what is being communicated, primarily because they are seeing things through a specific filter.
