A chanting version of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras
adapted from I.K. Taimni's book The Science of Yoga
by Janardhana Jarvis
Yoga is the inhibition of the changing states of mind, painful or not painful.
They are right knowledge and wrong knowledge, fancy, sleep and memory.
Then the seer is established in himself In other states he wanders with the mind.
Companions on the road are practice and renunciation.
Practice long, without a break, with reverent devotion.
Samadhi is attained by faith and energy and memory and high intelligence,
or by self-surrender to the Teacher of the Ancients, designated OM.
Nine obstacles: disease, depression, doubt and carelessness and laziness and
worldly-mindedness, delusion, non-achievement of a stage and instability:
remove by constant practice of one truth or principle.
Be friendly meeting happiness, compassionate to misery,
encouraging to virtue and indifferent to vice.
Make the mind transparent like a jewel on a colored surface.
Ignorance and egoism, likes and dislikes and possessive attitudes
cause all the miseries in life.
Ignorance, the source of those named after it, is taking the impermanent as permanent,
the impure as the pure, the painful as the pleasant and the not-self as the self.
To those who have discrimination all is misery, first noble truth the Buddha taught.
Avoid the misery to come. Avoid the union of the seer with the seen.
The seer is pure consciousness but seems to see by agent of the mind.
By practice and renunciation, on destruction of impurity,
then dawns a guiding light which grows into awareness of reality.
Self-restraints and fixed observances and posture, pranayama, sense withdrawal,
concentration, contemplation and samadhi are the eight component limbs of yoga.
Vows of self-restraint prohibit violence and theft, unchastity,
untruthful speech and greed.
These five great vows, unqualified by circumstance, extend to every stage.
Purity, contentment and austerity, self-inquiry and self-surrender constitute observances.
When improper thoughts disturb the mind then ponder on the opposites.
Master steady, easy posture by restraining movement, contemplating equilibrium.
Regulate the breath to calm the mind;
in pranayama breath becomes prolonged and subtle.
Sense withdrawal is the imitation by the senses of the mind.
Concentration is confinement of the mind.
Uninterrupted flow is contemplation.
Contemplation without self-awareness is samadhi.
OM.
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