01 Introduction To Pata Njali Yoga

PATANJALI'S YOGA APHORISMS INTRODUCTION

We are the outcome and manifestation of an absolute condition, back of our present relative condition, and are going forward, to return to that absolute. There cannot be good without evil, nor evil without good. To live in a world where it is all good and no evil is what Sanskrit logicians call a "dream in the air". Every motion is in a circle. This idea explains the ethical theory that you must not hate, and must love. With hate and love; they must come back to the source. Therefore do not hate anybody, because that hatred which comes out from you, must, in the long run, come back to you. If you love, that love will come back to you, completing the circle. It is as certain as can be, that every bit of hatred that goes out of the heart of a man comes back to him in full force, nothing can stop it; similarly every impulse of love comes back to him. Law is uniform. is the law of nature, it also applies to thought. Thought will dissolve and go back to its origin. Whether we will it or not, we shall have to return to our origin which is called God or Absolute. We all came from God, and we are all bound to go back to God. Call that by any name you like, God, Absolute, or Nature, the fact remains the same. "From whom all this universe comes out, in whom all that is born lives, and to whom all returns." This is one fact that is certain. Nature works on the same plan; what is being worked out in one sphere is repeated in millions of spheres. Is going back to God the higher state, or not? The philosophers of the Yoga school emphatically answer that it is. They say that man's present state is a degeneration. There is not one religion on the face of the earth which says that man is an improvement. The idea is that his beginning is perfect and pure, that he degenerates until he cannot degenerate further, and that there must come a time when he shoots upward again to complete the circle. The circle must be described. However low he may go, he must ultimately take the upward bend and go back to the original source, which is God. Man comes from God in the beginning, in the middle he becomes man, and in the end he goes back to God. This is the method of putting it in the dualistic form. The monistic form is that man is God, and goes back to Him again.

Our present so much horror and misery That which corrupts and degenerates cannot be the highest state. Every soul must disintegrate to become God. So it follows that the sooner we get out of this state we call "man" the better for us. The sooner we are through, the better. Always remember man-state is not the highest state. Much higher states of existence beyond reasoning. Really beyond the intellect first state of religious life is to be found. Step beyond thought and intellect and all reasoning, made the first step towards God; and that is the beginning of life. What is commonly called life is but an embryo state. What proof is there that the state beyond thought and reasoning is the highest state? In the first place, all great men of the world, much greater than those that only talk, men who moved the world, men who never thought of any selfish ends whatever, declared this life is but a little stage on the way towards Infinity which is beyond. In the second place, they not only say so, but show the way to every one, explain their methods, that all can follow in their steps. In the third place, there is no other way left. There is no other explanation. All Indian thought takes its stand, and dares to seek, and succeeds in finding something higher than reason, where alone the explanation of the present state is to be found. This is the value of the study of something that will take us beyond the world. "Thou art our father, and wilt take us to the other shore of this ocean of ignorance." That is the science of religion, nothing else.