Patanjali

This weekend was tough. In teacher training, we were discussing the yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which were probably written three or four thousand years ago. We used the version with commentary by Swami Satchidananda; commentary is very important, because the sutras are extremely short. The purpose of the sutras is basically to explain what yoga is, and how to use it to attain samadhi (or liberation from the current human state without having to be reborn a zillion times).

So much of the first book made so much sense to me, but was still really troubling. Patanjali says that nothing that we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste is real, and his rule of thumb is that if it changes, it's an illusion. This seems to be exactly what Descartes was going for in his First Meditation, except Patanjali takes it further. Everything changes except the inner self. And he says there's a self so far in there that it doesn't change- rather, the purpose of life is the building up of this inner self, and the bliss of samadhi is when that self gets to join with all the other inner selves who have achieved samadhi, and that joining is god. Phew. The first book also says that things in life that seem at first pleasurable often are actually painful. Well, yeah. You love someone, you get married, and eventually it will be painful for one partner to lose the other partner, and that's best case scenario. When people are too attached, he says, even when things are going well you're scared that they won't be tomorrow. How do you deal with this pain and at the same time get close to your true self? Non-attachment.

So, non-attachment to stuff I can understand. When my bike got stolen last summer I realized how attached I'd become to it, and it hurt when it was taken away. Stuff just isn't worth being attached to because it's all temporary. But Patanjali says to avoid attaching to people as well, both to avoid pain and to avoid clinging to this life. This, I'm having problems with.

One of the other teacher trainees (who is a beautiful, very enlightened woman) said that she thinks of it like this: if she would experience a crushing amount of grief on the loss of a person in her life, then maybe she is stifling the growth and life of that person. So, holding them too close. Smothering them with her attachment.

Our guru was careful to point out that non-attachment doesn't mean indifference. I'm struggling to find the meaning of it for myself, though. I'm not sure if this is an attitude I want to adopt or even want to think about too much, but I feel like it's something that I need to consider, especially given how scared I've been over the last year that something would happen to the hubby.