Osho and Patanjali

I have read Osho’s book about Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras probably around four times now. It’s called The Science of the Soul. A lot of real and metaphorical ink has been spilled over the Yoga Sutras. Osho says that Patanjali was the Einstein of the spiritual path. Yet today, scholars dispute the time of his life by plus of minus 500 years! (400 BCE to 600 CE). Patanjali, as I see him, lies squarely in the river of the thought of the sages of the Indian culture.

They were so logical. They did not have all of the different developed modern scientific tools of epistemological analysis, so they were limited in what they could achieve, and sometimes mistaken about what was natural law versus cultural habit, but many of the areas where they turned their gaze were revealed in a way that increased accessibility for whole new groups of people.

For example, our alphabet, based on the one supposedly developed by the Phoenicians, has a random order. The Devanagiri script, descendent of that used for Sanscrit, is completely logically ordered. The first letter is the one whose sound is furthest back in the throat, and it moves forward from there.

Patanjali, like the modern scientists of the mind, used introspection as his main tool to create his science of liberation. Despite the work of Freud, Jung, Adler and their colleagues and professional descendants, Western culture has no communally shared answers to the big questions and problems of personal loss. Patanjali however, in the spirit of the Rishis of the earliest Vedic culture (1500 – 500 BCE) gave simple instruction on how to attain liberation from the feelings of loss and failure that accompany most thoughtful people who are subject to the human condition.

The instructions, Patanjali noted in his first sentence, are not for everyone. Osho says that Patanjali acknowledged that if you were not completely fed up with your mental state, completely devoid of hope that things would ever improve, you would not likely be interested in his method of liberation. I reached this state, or at least close enough to think that I know what it means, about a year ago. That’s why I keep rereading Osho’s book, and have also sought out other commentators on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

So, once you come to terms with the fact that you don’t have and never will have hope for peace of mind by any method based on logic, science, psychology, love, or money, open the Yoga Sutras. There you will read: Now, the discipline of yoga.

Grr. Discipline. I have never had any. People think I do, but I don’t. Or at least I never did. The arthritis attack forced me to get a little. I actually make my bed now, almost every day. Why not? I’m going to have to straighten the blankets before I lie down to sleep. Why not just do it in the morning? That’s discipline for it’s own sake. I live alone, so it’s very rare that anyone will see my messy bed. This, believe it or not, is a huge step forward in my personal practice of discipline.

Now, the discipline of yoga. Osho says that you have to have basic discipline in your life, eating and sleeping at regular times, or you will never get anywhere with your yoga practice. OK. Again, the arthritis forced me to change some of my ways.

I’m certainly not disciplined in any complete sense. If I were, my Failure Analysis book would be much further along than it is. Oh well. Maybe as I study and meditate more and more times on the second sutra, I will want more discipline so that I can proceed along the path to liberation from my own permanently troubled mind. The second sutra? Yoga is the cessation of mind.

This has always been problematic. The mind is kindof necessary, like the ego, to get through life. So what does this really mean? My current understanding is that it means that the mind, and ego for that matter, get demoted to servant, so that the true self can be the master.

The rest of Patanjali’s masterpiece is about how to make that happen. The bottom line is that we move our sense of who we are from our feelings, thoughts, and sensory input to the witness, the seer, the personal soul whose real existence is embedded in and inseparable from the consciousness of the eternal divine essence.