Raja Yoga

They are the ladder the book climbs, from conduct to the state beyond thought. Yama and niyama come first: not injuring, truthfulness, not stealing, chastity, accepting no gifts, then cleanliness, contentment, austerity, study and surrender to God. Then asana, a steady seat with the spine straight, and pranayama, control of the body's energies. Pratyahara withdraws the mind from the senses, dharana holds it on one point, dhyana is unbroken meditation, and samadhi completes it.

Prana is the energy behind every force in the universe, from gravitation and motion to nerve currents and thought itself. Indian philosophy, Vivekananda explains, sees the world as made of two things: akasha, the matter of everything, and prana, the force that shapes it. Breath is only the most accessible movement of prana in a body, like the flywheel that sets a whole engine running, so pranayama begins with breathing but aims at the energy itself.

Yoga, in Patanjali's opening definition, is stopping the mind-stuff (chitta) from taking forms (vrittis). Every perception, thought and feeling is such a form, a shape the mind takes in response to something. While they keep rising, the self is seen only through them and seems to be them. When concentration stills them, the seer, as the next aphorism puts it, rests in its own unchanged state.

Yes, the book says: the superconscious, the third of three levels of the mind. The lowest is instinct, the unconscious action that makes a hand strike a mosquito without thinking. Above it is reason, conscious thought, which can go only so far. Above that, reached in samadhi, is a perception of facts no instinct or reasoning can reach. Each level grows out of the one below, so the highest is meant to complete reason, not overturn it.

The Kundalini, 'the coiled one', is the energy the yogis place coiled up at the base of the spine, in a centre called the Muladhara. Vivekananda reads it as the store of a person's residual energy. Pranayama aims to rouse it and send it up the Sushumna, a channel inside the spinal column, closed in ordinary people. As it rises from centre to centre, he writes, layer after layer of the mind opens.

Kaivalya means aloneness or independence: the soul knowing itself as entirely separate from nature, mind included. In the Sankhya picture Patanjali uses, nature does all the acting and the soul, the Purusha, only witnesses, but ignorance makes the soul take nature's changes for its own. Discrimination between the two ends that confusion. The soul is then free, and nothing that happens in body or mind binds it again.