Subject of this seminar: "Samadhi and Sadhana Pada" - Chapters 3 and 4
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras are the classical work of the Yoga School of thought, one of the Six Darśanas studied in the Bhakti Tirtha course. They focus on how to attain direct experience and realization of the puruṣa, or the individual self. As the classical treatise on the Vedic understanding of the mind and consciousness and on techniques of meditation and self-realization, it has exerted immense influence over the religious practices of Hinduism in India and, more recently, in the West. For Vaiṣṇavas, the Yoga Sūtras are especially helpful in understanding the first two chapters of Bhakti-rasāmṛita-sindhu.
You are in a prison without a beginning and you can’t get out of it until you choose to get rid of your ignorance. The three gunas bind you to your ignorance. Maya really isn’t binding you. You are really bound by your own ignorance and you are conditioned by your material desires. Then you act on those desires, and you get the karma for that. So you take birth again.
