Sutras 1.21 - 1.22. The Rate of Development. Spiritual Flow, Personal Power, Inner Human Core

The following several sutras of Patanjali are dedicated to one’s developmental rate:

तीव्रसंवेगानामासन्नः ॥ २१॥

1.21. tīvra-saṃvegānām-āsannaḥ 

tīvra – utmost, extreme, ultimate;

saṃvegānām - intention;

āsannaḥ – near, proximate;

that is, taking into account the previous line that says that prajna is preceded by shraddha, virya, smritiand samadhi, this one can be understood and translated in the following way:

1.21. Near under ultimate intention.

That is, the distance (probably, the temporal)between enlightenment (prajna) and its preceding stages shall not be big if a person is ultimate in his totality. It is clear by intuition: comprehension mayoccur only if you are totally engaged in pondering over the problem. This very principle can be applied to any other kind of development – quality transformations may only result from efforts that are thorough enough. Spiritual practice is not something that can be done “in the course of” and “together with” etc. It’s like V.Suvorov had it in his work “Aquarium” – “You cannothave you muscles built by lifting an iron twice a day».

Samadhi, Assemblage Point and Gestalt Psychology

There is an interesting point of view that was published on the vKontakte page [a social network that is popular is CIS states – translator’s note] dedicated to Yoga Sutras that I mentioned in one of my winter posts, by the author of the said public who calls himself Igor Aleksandrovitch. I quote:

“Here is an interesting interpretation of the term "samādhi":

By the way, the most felicitous and accurate variant of translating the Yoga term samaadhi is by using Castaneda’s phrase “the assemblage point”, since Samadhi does mean the “assemblage” (this term in this very meaning can be found in texts dedicated to manufacture of chariots). From etymological point it looks the following way: the prefix sam- means “co-“, "jointly-", the prefix aa- means "to-", "at-" (i.e. it reveals the idea of attaching, fixing, bringing in correspondence), while the root dhaa- (with –i as a suffix) means "to put down”, “to place/make stand”. Thus “Samadhi” literally means putting together and attaching to each other some odd parts that were previously independent, uncoordinated or disharmonious.

Igor Aleksandrovitch”.

As one may easily see, the drawn clarification of the Samadhi term comes in perfect line with my explanation of Samadhi as the act of cognition (see here). Indeed, even in English there are such phrases as “I have FIXED the problem”,“I have PUT two and two TOGETHER” And they as if reflect that very experience of instantaneous comprehension of the problem that comes after long preliminary considerations (Dharana and Dhyana). However, the equivalence between the term Samadhi and Castaneda’s ‘assemblage point’ is not that obvious, despite the similarity between the words. Let us sort this issue out.

Sutra 1.16. The Gunas: Psychological Interpretation

So, as we have already mentioned earlier, the shloka 1.16 of the Yoga Sutras links the practice of vairagya to the category of gunas.

तत्परं पुरुषख्यातेर्गुणवैतृष्णयम् ॥१६॥

1.16 tatparaṃ puruṣakhyāterguṇavaitṛṣṇayam

First of all let us outline the translation of the shloka.

tat - that. In this case this word denotes the vairagya from the previous line

paraṃ – highest, at the utmost

puruṣa - Purusha, a man, Me

khyāteh - knowledge, comprehension

guṇa - guna

vai-tṛṣṇayam – this word contains the root trishna already known to us and the prefix vai that the Monier-Williams dictionary translates as “to be deprived of”.

Let us draw the initial variant of the translation:

1.16 the utmost (vairagya) comes when Purusha is comprehended by means of disengagement from gunas.

Such variant of translation comes in line with the text logic. Indeed, if we assume that Patanjali has determined vairagya as dis-trishning/disengagement (sorry for this self citation J) from emotions in relation to the observed objects, the utmost vairagya shall be the one that comes to disengagement from some primary experiences that are the gunas. In such translation version the gunas should be correlated with some psychological states. Let us do this and in such a way UNDERSTAND the meaning of this phrase and the hence ensuing psycho-practices.