Book Update and Patanajali, The Yoga Sutras (III.16)
A brief report on the progress of the book. In the process of writing the previous series of postings on Annie Besant’s Man and His Bodies, I came across the several books by Arthur E. Powell on these bodies: The Etheric Double, The Astral Body, The Mental Body, and The Causal Body and the Ego. These books greatly expanded my understanding of the idea of vehicles of consciousness that Besant had written about--to the point that in order to complete the assignment I gave myself in the previous posting, I would have had to write the whole of the new book.
Powell’s books also provided me with a framework for The Multidimensional Human. I’ve been working on the outline for the last four weeks or so.
In the process of digging through old journals for material, I came across a set of essays that I wrote in 2002 on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. I had just finished reading the translation by B. K. S Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanajali.
The essays concerned the famous passages in the third chapter (Vibhuti Pada) on the siddhis, or yogic powers (sutras 16 to 56). I believed that years of exploring altered states of consciousness from out of body experiences and lucid dreams to the mystical and transcendent states produced by meditation or listening to certain kinds of music gave me some special insight into the siddhis.
I wrote these essays for myself, to help me understand better how what Patanjali had expressed in the Yoga Sutras, which were composed nearly 2000 years ago, applied to my own experiences.
I sometimes wondered whether I would ever publish them, but couldn’t conceive of how I could fit them into a book. Posting them here seems like the best way to make them available to anyone interested--all the more so since they have to do with the ways in which the ancient yogis pursued the development of our multidimensional humanity.
Here’s the first, pertaining to chapter III, sutra 16:
This sutra has to do with the knowledge “of past and future.” The preceding sutras in this chapter speak about various approaches to meditation. They seem to me to make clear that clairvoyantly seeing the past or predicting the future are not what is meant here.
Patanjali means the ability to infer the probable past of probable future of a person, object, situation, or possibly even a state of consciousness, by seeing them as processes. By "seeing them as processes," I mean recognizing the particular form that transformation is taking in any of these things.
Charles talks about a number of levels of perception: immersion in experience, perception of experience as an event, perception of patterns of events, perception of the archetypal nature of such patterns, intuitive perception of the shape of an archetype from within (like being in a maze and feeling your way through), intuitive perception of the form of that shape (like seeing the maze from above), perception of the process unfolding in that form, and perception of the transformation of energy operating within that process. Charles calls the level of perception of the energy transformation seeing things from the soul’s perspective.
In a similar way, Patanjali talks about different levels of meditation, starting with avidya (ignorance) and mounting through ever higher and more comprehensive levels of perception.
At the levels of form, process, or energy transformation, it would be possible to perceive where any person, object, situation, or state of consciousness probably originated (seeing the past) and determine where it will in all likelihood end up (seeing the future). In the case of many archetypal processes, the origins and outcome would not be that difficult for a yogi to perceive. But such perceptions would seem like miracles (siddhis) to anyone caught up in any of the lower levels (immersion, event, pattern, archetype, and shape). To the yogi, such perceptions would simply be by-products of longtime yogic meditation practices.
Powell’s books also provided me with a framework for The Multidimensional Human. I’ve been working on the outline for the last four weeks or so.
In the process of digging through old journals for material, I came across a set of essays that I wrote in 2002 on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. I had just finished reading the translation by B. K. S Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanajali.
The essays concerned the famous passages in the third chapter (Vibhuti Pada) on the siddhis, or yogic powers (sutras 16 to 56). I believed that years of exploring altered states of consciousness from out of body experiences and lucid dreams to the mystical and transcendent states produced by meditation or listening to certain kinds of music gave me some special insight into the siddhis.
I wrote these essays for myself, to help me understand better how what Patanjali had expressed in the Yoga Sutras, which were composed nearly 2000 years ago, applied to my own experiences.
I sometimes wondered whether I would ever publish them, but couldn’t conceive of how I could fit them into a book. Posting them here seems like the best way to make them available to anyone interested--all the more so since they have to do with the ways in which the ancient yogis pursued the development of our multidimensional humanity.
Here’s the first, pertaining to chapter III, sutra 16:
This sutra has to do with the knowledge “of past and future.” The preceding sutras in this chapter speak about various approaches to meditation. They seem to me to make clear that clairvoyantly seeing the past or predicting the future are not what is meant here.
Patanjali means the ability to infer the probable past of probable future of a person, object, situation, or possibly even a state of consciousness, by seeing them as processes. By "seeing them as processes," I mean recognizing the particular form that transformation is taking in any of these things.
Charles talks about a number of levels of perception: immersion in experience, perception of experience as an event, perception of patterns of events, perception of the archetypal nature of such patterns, intuitive perception of the shape of an archetype from within (like being in a maze and feeling your way through), intuitive perception of the form of that shape (like seeing the maze from above), perception of the process unfolding in that form, and perception of the transformation of energy operating within that process. Charles calls the level of perception of the energy transformation seeing things from the soul’s perspective.
In a similar way, Patanjali talks about different levels of meditation, starting with avidya (ignorance) and mounting through ever higher and more comprehensive levels of perception.
At the levels of form, process, or energy transformation, it would be possible to perceive where any person, object, situation, or state of consciousness probably originated (seeing the past) and determine where it will in all likelihood end up (seeing the future). In the case of many archetypal processes, the origins and outcome would not be that difficult for a yogi to perceive. But such perceptions would seem like miracles (siddhis) to anyone caught up in any of the lower levels (immersion, event, pattern, archetype, and shape). To the yogi, such perceptions would simply be by-products of longtime yogic meditation practices.
