Literal translation: “Emerging pushed-out seed-sprouts (old thoughts/patterns), each an instant interrupted in time, to a connected flow of instances around the bend (to new vistas)”

Meaning: “Leave disconnected seeds of thoughts, emotions, and habits outside of you when they approach. The ensuing silence takes you around the bend in the river of life to instances of awareness that flow as a new transformation.”

A chant in English: “Keep disconnected seeds of old mind-habits away; let your stillness turn to a new sprouting flow that transforms you.”

Definition: This sutra begins the parinama section of Chapter 3-A: Sutras 3.9-3.15. Parinama means “transformation.” In 3.9-3.15, Patanjali explains in more depth how samyama happens.

In addition, he repeats one of his main themes, about thoughts coming from outside a person like burnt seeds (Sutra 1.18), and how samadhi can be with seed or without seed. In this present sutra, he is saying, simply, that if you can keep the old “seeds” of thought—which also include memory, emotion, desire, and old habits of thinking—away from your awareness, then you will experience a great silence, the no-thought of a clear mind. And that leads to a transformation from disconnected thoughts to a flow of being aware, further explained in the next several sutras.

Comment: The word he uses for “transformation” is parinama. It has deep, ancient roots that can mean, more literally, “change around the bend of the river.”

This is not a new phrase for Patanjali. He uses it in Sutra 2.15 to explain the shifts of spiritual periods in a person’s life. Given Patanjali’s love of nature metaphors, parinama may have had a poetic resonance for him in addition to mere “transformation.” Legend says he lived in a lushly forested area of India where small boats of commerce moved beneath hills, along rivers bending this way and that, sometimes in shade, then suddenly bending around a bluff into sun.

In this bend, suggests Patanjali, is a pregnant silence of mind. Iyengar compares it to the stillness of a pause between breaths.* He suggests trying a similar breath exercise that sometimes can yield a sight of this utter stillness. In this breath practice, you take a deep inhalation, pause, exhale long, pause, and then repeat. The purpose of the pauses is to look into them, to really see and feel the peace, silence, and stillness between breathing in and out, a betweenness where no thought, memory, emotion, or desire interrupts. There you can surf over the great ocean of being on the raft of silence.

The meaning and use of the word samskara in this sutra often is debated. Swami Kriyananda, a disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda, goes as far as to say in his translation, “No one really seems to know what this sutra means.”

But there is a way to understand it that makes perfect sense in the actual deep experience of this transformation. That key is to know in human consciousness what your attention span is like in its ending and beginning.

As described in the introduction to this chapter and in Sutra 3.2, an attention span is a bubble of thought that comes and goes in about 5-20 seconds. After each span is done, a new one begins. In typical humans, in normal human life, when the old thought bubble ends and the new one starts, it begins with a samskara—an old habit of thought, feeling, or action that is part of one’s personality. For example, if you’re focusing on an important task, you may simply start each new span by using a samskara or habit of “remember what you just now were thinking.” You may be so used to doing this for years that you will not even notice the changeover unless you examine it during meditation.

Or, for example, as often happens in normal work or private life, you next may have a distracted thought. Perhaps, after the end of one bubble of awareness and at the beginning of the next, you experience a samskara of a feeling of boredom. And that feeling of boredom may make you switch to a a more pleasant memory. Or you may simply think of something only vaguely connected to the previous thought, or even entirely irrelevant. Samskaras dwell in our subconscious, our basement of personality, as it were, as little stored whirlwinds, and occasionally some big and painful ones. In samadhi meditation, old samskara habits surrounding focus get pushed out of dissolved; new habits for maintaining and strengthening the clear mind take their place. Sutra 3.10 next highlights creating new samskara habits.

Comment on Authorship: On an entirely different note is a textual examination of the writing of the Yoga Sutras. Feuerstein suggests that here in Sutra 3.9, Patanjali returns as author of the text.* As mentioned in the “Introduction” to Chapter 2-B, Feuerstein is the most noticeable of translators suggesting that the Astanga yoga materials of Chapter 2-B and 3-A were later insertions. I suggest that either Feuerstein is right or, possibly, that Patanjali himself inserted the Astanga sutras from his own much earlier and less experienced writing of them.

Feuerstein suggests that this sutra, 3.9, represents the next page, the next step, after Patanjali’s Sutra 2.27. Stylistically, the language and depth of concepts in 3.9 and beyond it are similar to those in 2.27 and earlier. In addition, the emphasis on samyama or the Triple Discipline suddenly is gone, and a new one develops: parinama or transformation.

In addition, comments in 2.28-3.8—the Astanga sutras—are, more often, repetitions of material covered in the non-Astanga sutras. Thus it seems possible that in its earliest version, the Yoga Sutras may have had a direct and continuous flow from 2.27 to 3.9 with no Astanga Yoga between them.

In other words, in form, content, and style, Astanga sutras 2.28-3.8 seem different. They may be a scholarly and stylistic interruption. As a result, if someone other than Patanjali inserted these sutras (or he wrote them at a much younger age, then inserted them later), it means that Patanjali’s original thinking jumped from finishing the Kriya “Action” yoga chapter with Sutra 2.27, and then began writing an explanation of the meaning of samyama in Sutra 3.9.

This is not to diminish the importance of the Astanga sutras, however. On the one hand, they may seem simpler to understand in a quick, external reading, especially the first five limbs. However, they, like the rest of the Yoga Sutras, are rooted in rich, complex, and ancient meanings from the earliest Vedas.

For this reason, as well as for the excellent advice in the Astanga sutras, they are important in establishing good spiritual practices. The Astanga sutras, as previously noted, are rather similar to Buddha’s Eightfold Path and the Jain Five Vows. All three sets probably were drawn from even more ancient Vedic oral yoga traditions. For several hundred years, starting soon before Buddha’s life through Patanjali’s and later, yoga was a way of life for many spiritual seekers throughout India, deeply influencing and helping to create a new Upanishad vision of Hinduism, the new Buddhism and Jainism, and, eventually, the yoga of Pantanjali that spread through much of Southeast Asia. All of these movements’ yoga guidelines are classic texts in the world’s spiritual and religious literature.*

Literal translation: “That (‘Transformation’ from Sutra 3.9) = tranquil, forthcoming flow seeds of the intervals of awareness”

Meaning: “Around the bend you’ll find calm, flowing waters coming from new seeds of your awareness.”

Definition: The word samskarat (“forthcoming flow seeds” or “new seeds of good habits”) carries an additional ancient meaning: “singing doings.” In meditation, “singing doings” are your mental, intuitive, or felt “songs” you “sing”—activities of a flowing, natural pattern—some of them even hourly or by the minute, others daily, weekly, or yearly. They are new habits, reminders, labels, or actions you develop to help you remember and return to your tranquil flow.

The old, often disruptive and distracting tunes that lead you down your old rabbit holes now are becoming part of your past, replaced by new ones in greater harmony and balance. The new habits, these new singing doings, help you reestablish and maintain your flow—the course of your boat as you go around the bend of parinama.

For example, good samskara habits can prompt you at some points at the beginning of new attention spans with reminders like “Remember what you were doing” or “keep flowing.” You may hear such words or simply intuitively think or feel the thought. As you become used to the flow or more deeply into it, you will automatically—without word or even memory of a gap, learn to keep flowing. Other samskara habits may pop up during the flow if appropriate, such as the name of something you are discovering so you will have its name in your head—like jotting down a note. Or perhaps you will create a visual symbol of the meaning or structure of something you encounter in the flow.

Comment: Patanjali, in this parinama transformation section, is working once again with his two major divisions of samadhi—with seed and without seed. If your samadhi and samyama focus on a specific object or subject, or still are flowing in a lower level, then you have a “with seed” experience. You stay with—and in—your focus point that creates the flow, but you experience, on the side, in peripheral vision or sensing, the attributes of the object or subject.

The result is what might be called a three-way with-seed focus: (a) the willpower of doing samyama focus (b) on an object or subject (c) with collateral peripheral sensing of the object or subject’s attributes. Further, your new habits may on occasion label the experiences, sensings, or reminders to keep focusing, even as you are doing so.

Also worth noting is that prasanta or “tranquility” is, in Sanskrit, not just a lack of busyness or a nonactive state. Rather, it is a condition of deep, strong restfulness and calm, that of the “Sat” or “Peace” in the three parts of the Satchidananda of Peace, Consciousness-Strength, and Bliss. This kind of tranquility is a tangible personal sphere of subtle sensation in which your whole body, if you allow it, can take a gentle, aware, electric rest.

Literal translation: “Many mental objects vs. one-pointedness, decay (of first), now rise of daylight (from second) = mind in samadhi new vista”

Meaning: “You move from interrupted instances of awareness to single-pointed focus. The former decays and you rise into new light: a mind integrated into the pure freedom of samadhi as a new vision in your life.”

A chant in English: “Leave scattered distractions while meditating. Use a single focus as you move around the river’s bend into true freedom.”

Definition: Here Patanjali simply confirms that as your interrupted and discontinuous bubbles of thought gradually subside into a clear mind, your one-pointedness and consequent samadhi will rise. What he is offering in this sutra is a place of peace in the previous Wild Wilderness of dancing, crowding thoughts, memories, emotions, desires, and physical habits. They may have seemed nearly uncontrollable.

What should your single-pointed focus be? If you simply go with the flow, literally, you may find yourself wandering off, gently or dramatically, into one or more of the supernatural powers he discusses in Chapter 3-B. Or you might end up taking an ever-deeper dive into your own body, its properties, and its energies. These, too, sometimes may appear to be in the realm of the “supernatural powers” (see Chapter 3-B).

If you wish to focus, in samyama, on one or more specific traditional spiritual practices, Patanjali already has offered many suggestions in Chapter 1 (and two more in Chapter 2-A): about thirty in all. Whatever you decide to use, your samyama one-pointed focus, gradually or quickly, will move you into a transformation around the bend into the light and calm that await you.

Comment: What are the thirty possible spiritual practices from Chapters 1 and 2-A? The list—also at the very beginning of this book—is below. You may choose one or several, combine them, or experiment to see what works best for you. If you are using samyama flow on them, they likely will work quickly and establish themselves in you as frequently as you want with regular use:

Mental Focuses
1.2, 1.6-11, & 1.18-19: Calming the waves of thought/memory/emotion/desire
1.12-16: Avoiding waves of thought/memory/emotion/desire
1.17 (two focuses): Logic or insight
1.20 (two focuses): Remembering or higher intuition (gnosis)
1.35, 1.37 (two focuses): A physical or mental object
1.38 (two focuses): On a dream or a memory of blank dreamless sleep
1.43-45 (three focuses): On label-free outer, inner, or unformed objects

Psychological or “Feelings” Focuses
1.17: Joy
1.20 (two focuses): Assurance or eager energy
1.21: Cheerful strong will
1.33 (four focuses): Empathy, compassion, rejoicing, and seeing all sides
2.1, 2.38, & 2.43 (one focus): Burning away psychological impurities

Spiritual Focuses
1.16-17: Knowing your True Self (Atman, Spark of God)
1.20: Samadhi (absorption)
1.23-1.25: Yoking with the External/Transcendent Presence (God)
1.36: Seeing a spiritual Light
1.39: Practices from other religions/spirituality

Physical-Body Focuses
Sutras 1.27-29: Humming/chanting
1.34: Breath
2.1, 2.38, & 2.43 (one focus): Warming or heating exercise

Literal translation: “There, repeatedly, the subsiding and rising awareness the same in the mind = one-pointedness transformation”

Meaning: “When, repeatedly, through each minute of time, your subsiding focus and the next rising one are the same, you are achieving the one-pointedness transformation.”

A chant in English: “When your clear mind flows from one span of attention to the next, you are transformed.”

Definition: Several interesting differences in other translations exist, but the majority agree that this sutra describes the experience of continuous flow. What often is left unmentioned in most translations, however, is a description of the bubble-like transience of awareness through the seconds.

One bubble of consciousness floats through us for perhaps five to twelve seconds; then a very brief instant of unconsciousness occurs. And then a new bubble begins. Each bubble is our “attention span.” (See Sutra 3.2 for a more detailed explanation of this.) Here Patanjali is implying that in people’s normal worldly awareness, each bubble may become a new content shift, whether a thought, memory, emotion, desire, or physical habit-action. But in parinama or transformation, he emphasizes, each bubble repeats its content with little or no break: either the with-seed one-pointed focus on a subject or object, or the seedless clear, pure, joy of samadhi.

Comment: Your own flowing samadhi likely will start out short, then grow longer and stronger with practice. At first, it may last for just two bubbles, perhaps a few dozen. Eventually, with practice, you’ll maintain it far longer, even hours at a time as needed, before you return to more normal mental processing. You also will strengthen your ability to concentrate on anything or anyone, and your attention span gradually will become longer, too.

Literal translation: “Similarly, in objects and senses, as basic forms through time to a final state, so, too, your transforming light explained”

Meaning: “Your transforming light around the bend—your new one-pointedness—develops just like your sense impressions and objects around you do—from initial possibilities through steps in time to final perfections.”

A chant in English: “Your new light of single focus grows just like all life, step by step, from mere possibility to final polish.”

Definition: Patanjali’s main intention—as is normal in his sutras—is to offer his practical advice from experience. He mentions dharma, the universal flow of reality through time. He is saying, simply, that your practice of one-pointedness will march through time, through sensory objects, and through subtle (inner) objects in a normal, universal process. This includes growing, learning, and becoming ever better at focusing. All this is natural, good, and part of the increase of parinama or “transformation around the bend.”

Comment: Unfortunately, most translations do not emphasize the practical nature of this sutra. Instead, they make of it a sweeping philosophical principle. It is, indeed, more than that. However, it’s worth noting that the law of dharma is what we might in modern or Western philosophy call “fate” in the workings of the universe. It operates from a cosmic scale down to the submicroscopic.

In ancient Eastern philosophies, dharma or cosmic law has been defined in several ways. One is the basic four or five elements of nature. Another is the three Hindu gunas. A third is the divisions of shakti energy. Other explanations exist, too.

All of these are basic essences. Dharma and its combinations of energies has been a feature throughout Western philosophy, as well. In many cultures in the West, the four elements of nature (earth, fire, water, and air) were the prehistoric basis of science. In addition, the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, Greek geometrician Euclid, and later Jewish scholars had their song-scale, geometric, and word-sound essences. Plato’s philosophy of divine forms helped shape Christianity and Islam.

In medieval times, Christian saint and scholar St. Augustine developed similar concepts of three tiers of existence (heaven, earth, and hell), and St. Aquinas his five “proofs” or qualities of God. In modern times, Immanuel Kant postulated his twelve essential “categories” of the mind, phenomenologist Martin Heidegger argued for five types of “transcendence,” and later philosophers tended to name just one or two main human essences, such as some form of will, as the purest form of existence or humanity.

Contemporary physicists’ “string theory” also says that all matter and energy is formed, at its most basic, of vibrating threads. These basic energies are said to divide endlessly into infinite variations that become the energies and matter that we know.

But why does Patanjali need to bring up a concept like dharma—the flow of cosmic law—in this sutra? Dharma was, in his time (and still is) a very important and well-known idea in Hinduism and Buddhism. These two religions debate it as much, perhaps, as Western religions still argue about the concept of fate. Are we bound to our dharma or fate? Patanjali’s practical answer is, “yes and no.” You have the freedom of practicing one-pointedness and experiencing samadhi or transformation. When you do, this moves you to new levels or types of experience—one might say to “new fates” or, at least, to new levels of awareness of your fate.

Literal translation: “Calmed past, arising present, potential future waters—from basic forms and flows in the substance of Nature”

Meaning: “Your one-pointedness will develop from a calmed past, new-risen present, and potential future one-pointed, just like all energy forms flow with the basic pure essence of Nature.”

A chant in English: “Follow your one-pointedness into a perfection in the river of the future.”

Definition: Your own one-pointedness can place you in a conscious flow that is born of the same essence of flow found in ongoing Nature. The center of your new awareness will remain the same: one-pointedness. But the outer “clothing” of it will keep shifting and changing in the usual expected flows of the world of basic essence, their individualized forms, and the resulting material expressions of them. In other words, life is a flow. And you can learn to see it from the perspective of being part of the flow in your own flow of awareness.

On the one hand, in its purest, most intense experience, the transformation or parinama to a pure samadhi-based awareness is of an ultimate consciousness that is beyond essence and matter. However, in most human forms of samadhi, the world of matter, and even of ideas and feelings that come and go around you, will change from moment to moment. Though your center focus will be on one-pointedness, your peripheral awareness will know these shifting conditions, too.

Comment: These two sutras—3.13-3.14—establish a spiritual connection with ancient Chinese Taoism (Lao Tzu, 400s BCE) and its emphasis on living in the Now. The connection is not necessarily historical. But both traditions speak of the same type of spiritual experience in this regard. Taoists believe in merging their awareness with that of the Tao (the Dao), which in modern times often is referred to as the (cosmic) Flow, and with the Qi or Energy of the universe.

Taoism developed centuries before Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras. Trade routes between India and China were common. Patanjali, as a scholar, may have known some of the primary practices or texts of Taoism simply by talking with merchants and the occasional wise men travelling with them. In any case, Sutras 3.13-3.14 offer detail about staying in the Now in order to maintain the flow of samadhi.

In the 400s CE, after Patanjali wrote his sutras, Zen Buddhists developed similar ideas in Japan. They taught students to stay anchored in the present moment in order to find or maintain satori. The word satori comes from the root word satoru, “to know,” meaning to have a direct experience of kensho or “one’s essence.”

“Mindfulness” is another concept of “Nowness.” Modern Buddhism, especially the Japanese and Chinese Zen version of it, has aided a worldwide mindfulness movement recognized by many psychologists and trainers. In addition, the psychedelic literature of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass—see his book Be Here Now), and others has encouraged a popularized version of Nowness that continues and grows through those who have had spiritual psychedelic trips.

In popularized forms of mindfulness, one maintains awareness of just exactly what is happening in the instant. This enables personal functioning to improve, no matter what you choose to do.

However, noteworthy is that to do this successfully in a spiritually meditative manner, you should not look backward from the Now at all you have just experienced, second by minute. In that direction lies bathing in—and even merging with—the world of matter, personal emotion and thought, and essence. Rather, your focus should be on the leading edge of consciousness going forward. In this regard, it is like discovering that the best way to listen to music is to follow the leading edge of the sound, not dwelling on what you have just heard.

As a series of flowing instants needing repeated attention for transformation

Literal translation: “Regular stride of time (or interval of attention span) differences = transformation-around-the-bend differences, cause of”

Meaning: “The regular intervals of your attention span, each a unique unfolding, is the cause of your new daylight of varied, one-pointed transformation.”

A chant in English: “In your transformation using one-pointedness, new bubbles are fine.”

Definition: This sutra continues explaining how the human attention span affects the transformation you are experiencing. While attention-span bubbles or seconds are alike in that all people have such bubbles, their contents will have different results in your one-pointed flow that now is becoming a central part of your consciousness. These differences in content exist between people, and they also exist between different times, places, and trains of thought and feeling.

Comment: One strong example of a difference within a person is between a series of bubbles that are very intellectual or logical at one time, but at another are very emotionally or physically oriented. Learning to switch in the middle of a train of intellectual or logic bubbles might lead to a new awareness or discovery of a logical thought, while switching to one-pointedness in the midst of a series of emotional or physical bubbles might take one into a new discovery of physical sensation.

But this example is, itself, highly simplified. Much depends on the person’s needs, past, and comfort level. In developing one-pointedness, you are, in effect, turning on a new switch—as if you’ve been thinking and feeling in a room dimly lit by a window on a cloudy day, but then you suddenly have a bright illumination of everything around you from a high-strength ceiling light. In the perfect flow state, you stay with the one-pointedness and experience whatever else happens as a peripheral event. In reality, though, in your early phases of getting used to one-pointedness, the new peripheral event may take you off the track into a new bubble series of thoughts or feelings, or the surprise of the new vision may itself knock you into yet a different series of thoughts. And this continues to happen, often when you least expect it, even when you become an advanced meditator but are not in the midst of active meditation.

All of these potential distractions are why continual learning helps maintain your one-pointed attention. It will hold you in a new transformation that continues, no matter what you experience and perceive through peripheral awareness.

This is the end of Chapter 3-A, the last three limbs of Astanga Yoga. Chapter 3-B, the side effects or powers of yoga, begins next with Sutra 3.16.

Sanskrit Text: Patanjali, c. 400 BCE-400 CE

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