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.
This course completes the first two chapters – Samādhi Pada (Meditative Absorption) and Sādhana Pada (Practice).
This is the great festival of the ego, as it thinks, ‘I am better than you. Don’t you know who I am? I will smash you. You will know who I am!’ Because of this kind of thinking, we remain disturbed. In fact, most of the disturbance in our mind is because somebody didn’t say what I wanted to hear or do what I wanted them to do, or behave as per my wish. Most of the time we are disturbed because of our own egoism.
