GENERAL INTRODUCTION:- No-one knows anything about Patanjali, thr author of the Yoga Suttras. There is as much guesswork as evidence. Some say he was a grammarian, & some say he was a great yogi. In any case, the text ascribed to him is called Yoga Suttras. Suttras are terse expressions that are almost totally unintalligible & allow for any number of interpretations. They are not well laid out, well planned essays on yoga, but ungrammatical expressions. Sometimes either the subjct, object or predicate is missing. (Maybe they were the notes kept by the students, or which the master himself had perpared.) therefore to understand the Sutras it becomes necessary to have a commentator, otherwise the uninitiated will find them difficult to understand. If you pick up any standard English-Sanskrit dictionary & look up the word yoga, will find a whole page full of meanings. Therefore, when a great master gives brief notes, using words like yoga, citta & vrtti, we are as far from understanding the meaning as any other student is, or was. However, I prefer to look at all these things without a commentary. A commentary on any book is already polluted, becouse it passes througt the brain of the author. So if one is a serious student of yoga, wanting to understand things without being prejudiced by what others have said or thought about it, one should go straight to the text of Yoga Suttras, buy a Sanskrit-English dictionry & try out commbinations & computationsof words. (You might even discover extraordinary meanings to these Yoga Suttras—which is a very nice thing to do, for a research scholar!). Communication:- When you & I become one in a mystic way ‘communication’ happens. This happens very often between lovers, mother & child, or very close friends. We have all communicated like this with someone or other—but we think it is accidental. We are strangers to this communication, becaues we neglect those few occasions and they slip through our fingers. For instance, when a boy looks at a girl & smiles there is communication toking place, telepathy taking place—a fantastic thing going on there! We don’t take any notice of it, we have codified & pigeon-holed all this. We are all looking for mental telepathy, but we have completely neglected the study of natural phenomena. We are running something that looks like natural phenomens.In this world counterfeit things sometimes have greater value than the original. Here is a nice story to illustrate this: It is said that a wandering yogi & his disciple were having a discussion, during the course of which the master said, “In this world nobody cares for the genuine article—everybody runs after the imitation.” The disciple said, “Sorry Master, for this once I don’t agree with you.” The Masterdidn’t argue, because no one helps another by argument. Conveying:- Conveying is useless & sometimes harmful, because when I convey an idea we are on the same wave-length; but yet you hear those words and the words have different meanings to you. The original idea or object is completely lost. It is only then that problems arise. We cannot solve a problem before it arises, in anticipation. For instance a little girl of ten cannot understand what labour pain means. You can explain with all your scientific knowledge, but it still means nothing. And therefore when yoga is explained thus, “Your ego will merge into Cosmic Consciousness,” you are worried You think, “I’II get lost, & who wants to get lost? I want to be my miserable self for all time to come. Oh, will my husband still be my husband?” You are trapped in our own utter silliness, because there is no communication. You don’t understand the meaning of these words, you only hear what they sound like. ************************************************ There is one more consideration before you go on to study the Sutras. Is it a technique to be practised in your daily life? Does it demand exertion, effort? Or is it something (as the Zen practioners might say) spontaneosuly arises in you without effort, technique or trouble? Again, neither/ nor. It is neither a technique (a method involving effort) nor an accidental happening (where you lie down on your couch, & as you are about to fall asleep……!!). There is a middle way where you neither sleep, nor are you awake. You neither exerting, nor are you totally relaxed. (Where wakefulness meets slumber, where day meets night & where night meets day are times regarded as auspicious for meditation & for prayers. Where the two meet, you cannot say it is either day or night.) But the beauty is that it is neither this nor that: neither exertion, nor total relaxation.