Project Gutenberg's The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, by Charles Johnston

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Title: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Author: Charles Johnston

Posting Date: March 28, 2010 [EBook #2526]
Release Date: February, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YOGA SUTRAS OF PATANJALI ***

Produced by J. C. Byers and Dringbloom.

THE YOGA SUTRAS OF PATANJALI
"The Book of the Spiritual Man"

An Interpretation By

Charles Johnston

Bengal Civil Service, Retired;
Indian Civil Service, Sanskrit Prizeman;
Dublin University, Sanskrit Prizeman

INTRODUCTION TO BOOK I

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are in themselves exceedingly brief, less
than ten pages of large type in the original. Yet they contain the
essence of practical wisdom, set forth in admirable order and detail.
The theme, if the present interpreter be right, is the great regeneration,
the birth of the spiritual from the psychical man: the same theme
which Paul so wisely and eloquently set forth in writing to his disciples
in Corinth, the theme of all mystics in all lands.

We think of ourselves as living a purely physical life, in these material
bodies of ours. In reality, we have gone far indeed from pure physical
life; for ages, our life has been psychical, we have been centred and
immersed in the psychic nature. Some of the schools of India say that
the psychic nature is, as it were, a looking-glass, wherein are mirrored
the things seen by the physical eyes, and heard by the physical ears.
But this is a magic mirror; the images remain, and take a certain life
of their own. Thus within the psychic realm of our life there grows up
an imaged world wherein we dwell; a world of the images of things
seen and heard, and therefore a world of memories; a world also of
hopes and desires, of fears and regrets. Mental life grows up among
these images, built on a measuring and comparing, on the massing of
images together into general ideas; on the abstraction of new notions
and images from these; till a new world is built up wit