The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali with Leanne Whitney

Thinking Allowed Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Hello and welcome, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today, we'll be exploring the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, one of the classic texts of Indian culture and worldwide spirituality. With me is Dr. Leanne Whitney, who is the author of Consciousness in Jung and Patanjali. She also teaches yoga philosophy to yoga teachers in Southern, California, and she is a transformational coach. Welcome, Leanne. Thanks, Jeff. Nice to be here. Pleasure to be with you. Let's start, if we can, with an experience that you yourself had, that you wrote about, which I think is really related to the essence of the Yoga Sutras and the experience of absolute oneness and certainty. Yes, I had what is known in the religious studies literature as a pure consciousness event. It happened out of the middle of nowhere. I was actually in a yoga asana room at the time of the event, but it wasn't that I was seeking or I wasn't in a meditative posture. It wasn't something I was looking for, but in a flash, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that all is one and self-knowing, self-luminous, pure consciousness. Self-luminous, pure consciousness, consciousness without an object. Consciousness without an object, that's right. And how long did it last? Probably a fraction of a second. A fraction of a second, and I guess what you're suggesting here is it changed your life. Radically. It radically changed my life. It almost, I want to say, just metaphorically, fried some nerve endings in my psyche. There was no way to go back. No way to go back. And it happened without any particular planning or expectation on your part. It just happened like that. Yeah, nothing, because I didn't even know they existed. So actually, I attempted to live with that experience for two years before ever speaking about it to anybody, because it was so out of my realm of understanding. Again, I was in a yoga asana room. I had started reading texts immediately. I picked up the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was like a solve, a brilliant solve to me at that time. But to actually articulate and speak to anybody about it, it took me like two years. Well, was it difficult integrating that experience? I presume it led you to pursue your doctoral work in depth psychology. It has led me to all of my work in consciousness studies. Absolutely, yes. And was it difficult to integrate? Yes, it was difficult to integrate. But in a way, that experience is what many yogis strive for. That's true. It is. It is. Even though striving is something that can inhibit its actual happening. But yes, they do. They do. But just to set the stage, I mean, here I am, a Caucasian woman in California. Again, I was in a yoga asana room at the time, but I had absolutely no idea about something like this. So the radical shift from coming up in a culture that believes in duality, subject-object consciousness, radical is an understatement. Well, let's talk now about the Yoga Sutras, because the experience that you had is actually delineated pretty well in these writings. I think Patanjali is a genius for his time and for all times, actually, because what he, it's a methodology. His text is 195 lines. It's very concise, and it's actually a methodology of experience. But it's a science of knowledge. When we really read between the lines, what he's getting at is a science of how we know the world. And we need that today more, perhaps, than they needed it in his day and age. What the Yoga Sutras are suggesting is that there's a prescription. It's almost like a recipe for conducting an experiment. You go through steps, one through thirty, and if you do the experiment properly, you will achieve a certain result. That's right. And the main through line is to still the mind. That's, to Patanjali, yoga is the stilling of the mind. Then union is experienced. Yoga actually means union. That's right. To yoke, to unite, union. Yes, it does. So Sanskrit is a language that is part of the, in fact, one of the earliest of the Indo-European languages. So we have many words in English that can be traced back to Sanskrit, such as you pointed out, yoke. That's right. Yoke and yoga. Yes, a very ancient language, and it's a scientific language, too. It has wholeness embedded in it, if you will. Yeah, some people say there are more descriptions for the nuances of consciousness in Sanskrit, much the way perhaps the Eskimo language would describe snow. That's right. Consciousness actually is very different to the Eastern liberatory psychologies and philosophies than it is here. Yeah. We tend to associate, in the West, we tend to associate consciousness with thought forms. But for Patanjali and for yoga scholars, consciousness is all there is. It's reality. But then we can also look at consciousness that is enmeshed with the modifications of the mind, with the thought forms. So they absolutely discriminate. So the thought forms, one might say, are the contents of consciousness. That's right. That's a great way to put it, the contents of consciousness, yes. But consciousness might itself, pure consciousness, without any object, not even itself as an object, I suppose. It can actually never be an object to itself. And the fascinating thing about working with Patanjali's methodology is, it's not the relative world and the absolute. Like, it's not pure consciousness and then this other world that is total degradation. They're actually embedded in each other. So the experience of pure consciousness as the absolute, as eternal, as self-illuminating, becomes possible in this world. It's not happening in another world. That's why Patanjali can be seen as a non-dualist. A lot of times he's read as a dualist, but he can be read as a non-dualist. Well, let's talk about what we know about this individual. Like, when and where did he live? They believe around 200 to 500 of the current era. But history in Indian culture is not documented a lot of times. So some people place him a lot earlier than that. But the general consensus is around 200 to 500 of the current era. And I think it's fair to say, since we have drawings, inscriptions, showing people in a yoga posture, going back to the ancient pre-Hindu civilizations of Mahanjo-Daro and Harappa in India, that the actual practice of yoga, which Patanjali is describing, goes back thousands of years before him. Absolutely. It's intimated there. It grew up through generations of seers and scholars, and he put it into written form. And so, if we date him between two and five hundred in the common era, or A.D., as some people would say, that means he came after the Buddha, after the Vedic period, and after the Upanishads. That's right. He came after all of that. So there was a very elaborate philosophy of Hindu and Vedantic thinking at that point. Very, very big. And basically, in Patanjali's text, you can, there's flavors of all of those strands and streams in his text, for sure. But what he does, which is unique, is to write, not so much in philosophical terms, but as a pragmatist, saying, this is what you need to do to achieve certain states. It's very pragmatic. It's epistemological, if you will. It's a teaching tool. It's what they would call upayic. Absolutely. You have to actually distill his philosophy, his metaphysics, out of the text. The text is meant for students as a methodology for the practice, and therefore the fulfillment of yoga. Mm-hmm. And in writing that text, he expected people to be practitioners, not just scholars. Oh, I would say absolutely, because that text can only be understood from practice. Now, it is one of probably the most famous texts around the globe, as far as philosophical texts go. It's a very, very scholarly and important text, and people do look at it from the scholarship perspective, but the understanding really must happen psychologically, physically, directly. It's not about philosophical speculation, so to speak. And I suppose it's fair to say a hundred, two hundred years ago, scholars of the Orient, as they called it, felt that, you know, this is a very esoteric field, and, you know, the practice of yoga is really not for Westerners. It's for people who were born in that culture. But today, I mean, here in this city, Las Vegas, there must be, I'm going to estimate a hundred yoga studios. And where I live in Los Angeles, there's probably a couple hundred. Yes, it's blown up, absolutely, certainly in Euro-American culture, Australia as well. It has a lot of universalizing potential. So, I feel like the time is really ripe for it to flourish, although it's not. Yoga, as done in the West, is not always understood in the deep philosophical terms that Patanjali was bringing forward. Well, I know that's the case, because my mother was a yoga teacher, and as far as, and she taught yoga for 30 years, but she never took an interest in the philosophy. As far as she was concerned, it was all physical exercise. Yeah, and asana, hatha yoga, is definitely its own faction of yoga, if you will. But, hatha yoga also has the aim of self-realization, just as Patanjali's classical yoga does, and a lot of times that gets lost in translation here in the West. Now, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my recollection is that, like many different spiritual disciplines, the yoga sutras start out by telling you that there are certain kinds of behaviors you just got to avoid. Yes, the yoga sutras actually start out with the word atha, now, which is also brilliant, because it means the present moment, and that is a topic all on its own. But yes, Patanjali has an eightfold path, and the first item on that eightfold path is about restraints, and it's non-violence. Truthfulness, non-stealing, non-greed, non-possessiveness. There's an ethical basis to it, absolutely. Mm-hmm, and I gather that the science behind all of that, it's not so much to make people good people, although that's always a nice side effect, but it's because these activities cause mental agitation. They do, and when we look at it from the perspective of pure consciousness, pure consciousness is that, pure. So, it's a way of, it's a methodology of purification, because we're looking for alignment. We're looking to align our vehicle of perception with the pure consciousness. Now, in an earlier interview, you and I discussed the depth psychology of Carl Jung, and Carl Jung emphasized in his thinking the concept of the self, which is also an important concept in the Yoga Sutras. That's right, and Jung believed that he actually had the same self, so to speak, as the Brahmanical tradition. So, basically, Patanjali's classical yoga, as you've been mentioning, is immersed in Hindu culture. It's a Brahmanical tradition. Brahman in that culture is oftentimes referred to as the self. It's referred to as the absolute. It's referred to as God, pure consciousness bliss, or truth consciousness bliss. So, there's a lot of translations for it, but what is very different between the self of the Brahmanical tradition and the Jungian self is, in the East, there's no metaphysical splitting of opposites. Pure consciousness does not have an opposite. It's non-dual. Whereas, the Jungian self, there's both conscious and unconscious components. So, they don't actually map, although Jung thought that they did, or he wanted them to. Well, I recall when I was an undergraduate in college, I took a course on the philosophies of India, and one of the greatest insights of Indian philosophy, as I was taught back then, and I think it came from the Upanishads, is this equation, Brahman equals Atman. That's right. So, Brahman, again, one of the definitions, actually, I don't think I just said it, being consciousness bliss, but pure consciousness. It's also translated as a pure consciousness. So, the Atman is the localized expression of that. Patanjali uses the term Purusha, but the Atman and Brahman are, that's right, singular and not separate. In other words, if I go deep enough within myself and get in touch with who I really am inside, I would discover the whole universe. The essence. That's right. The essence. Right. And again, it's embedded. It's not something separate. It is actually in us, as us, in us. The preposition is kind of hard there. Yeah. So, this is a major point of divergence between Western theologies, where God is outside of us, and we are the creation of God, as opposed to God being inside of us, and we strive to realize God within us. That's right, within us and also as us. It's almost in-out breaks down, even at a certain point. It's the evolution of consciousness, the transformation of the contents, if you will. We're it. We're it. Mm-hmm. I know many years ago, Ram Dass, a famous Westerner, Richard Alpert, who became a spiritual guru, kept saying that, you know, you can't strive for it, because you have to let go of all striving. The striving is an ego activity, and it can never, if you get stuck in that egoness of striving, you can't achieve anything. That's right, and that's why Patanjali's methodology needs the correct application of effort, and that's crucial, because it can be read from the point of view of a striving mind. But absolutely, there is a correct application of effort in order for the methodology to do its magic, if you will. Which reminds me of an old Woody Allen movie, when he's walking with his guru in California. I think it was Annie Hall, and he's with the guru, and the guru says, don't try so hard, and he says, I'm trying not to try. Yeah, and that reminds me of a point, that understanding Patanjali's text will confound anybody who's trying, from the thinking perspective, to understand it. Now it's going to get all meshed into the thought forms, and the whole point of his text is, you've got to relax those thought forms to even understand what I'm trying to show you. Mm-hmm. Well, I gather from your book, The Consciousness in Jung and Patanjali, that actually, the technical language of Patanjali is quite precise and quite detailed regarding consciousness, its contents, various states of consciousness that one moves through in the process of yoga. I would say it's very detailed in one particular point, right at the top, which is, I call them orientation A and orientation B. When pure consciousness is established in its true nature, that's orientation A, or orientation B. At other times, it's assuming the modifications of the mind, and to me, that discrimination, he brings it up within the first four lines of his text, boom, there it is, and then he takes us through many different methodologies, to be very, very precise on the drawing, it's the involution, the total involution of thought forms. So his samadhi, it's an absorption, it's an absorption, where the busy mind was getting us activated and separated from pure consciousness, all those thought forms are absorbed back into the source. Now, I recall the metaphor of when the mind is quiet, it's like the surface of a lake that's all still, and it reflects perfectly the reality around it. Right, right. So that when we can quiet our mind to that level, we merge with everything. That's right. Because pure consciousness is not a thought form, once those thoughts are stilled, pure consciousness has no alternative but to reflect itself in the stillness of the mind. That's what's so interesting about this psychology and this methodology, there is no alternative. So the ego death, in other words, it's not a real death, it's the thought forms that we've, you know, convoluted around this separate self, they disperse, get absorbed back into the source out of which they came, and then the source is there, shining. Mm-hmm. Now, in your case, though you had that experience, it lasted for a fraction of a second, it changed your life, it was, I presume, one might say, sort of early in your yoga practice, so early that you weren't even familiar with the philosophy. So true, Jeff, yes, it was. I had been doing asana quite consistently for about seven months at that time, but had yet to touch any of the philosophical background. I was a Western American woman doing asana. I did find peace from it. As hundreds of thousands of women do, and men. Yes, and I was definitely finding peace from it and, you know, relaxation of my body and anxiety, but I had no clue, no clue of the philosophical underpinning, none. But I would imagine, in a situation like that, that it's one thing to have the experience for a fraction of a second, as powerful as it was, it's another thing to enter into kind of stable relationship with that experience. That's right. It's very true. Now, there was a stability in the sense that my mind never went back into, let's say, a dualistic worldview. However, the ability to hold that yoke, if you will, takes time, because even though my mind understood, had a full understanding of that moment, if you will, in the sense that, yes, pure consciousness is the totality that's absolute, my mind was still busy. Yeah. So, definitely a process of continuing, or actually discovering Patanjali's text, and then doing the methodology myself. So we talked about the methodology, we talked about the first of the eight limbs of yoga, which are all the things you don't want to do. You have to give up a host of bad habits, or bad ethical behaviors. And, as I recall, the second limb is about acquiring new good habits. They are observances. They're observances. So, purity is one. Let's see if I can remember them all. Contentment is one. Self-surrender. Self-surrender is one. Self-study is one. And then, also, withdrawal of the senses. Yeah. In other words, you want to become a really good person, not just someone who's given up bad habits. I think it's a development of, purity is the best word for it. It really is, because it's authentic nature, and that just bubbles spontaneously from us. It's not manufactured. You know, we speak of the persona in Western psychology. Patanjali doesn't really have a word for that, but we tend, a lot of times, to wear a mask, you know, in our culture, for sure. And, the distance between the mask and then the reality of what's inside, there's taint in there. And so, this purification process is about getting that, removing that taint, and removing the persona. So, it's just essence that shines forward. And then, I understand breathing exercises are crucial. That's true. Are we going to go through the eight limbs? Yes. Well, the next limb, so we have the self-restraints, the observances, then there's the asana, the postures, and then pranayama, the breathing, is the fourth limb of Patanjali's eight limbs. Yes. And regulation of breath. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Which is, you could say, a science in and of itself. Absolutely. It is a science in and of itself. That's right. And then, correct me if I'm wrong, I think the remaining three limbs of yoga are different stages of meditation. Yes, there's still, I think, sense withdrawal comes after pranayama, and then we have concentration, meditation, and absorption. And those three last limbs are more internal than the previous five. So, it's describing a, when we talk about eight limbs, these are eight procedures one needs to totally embody in order to become a yogi. Absolutely. And they don't necessarily have to be linear. It can be, you know, circular or circuitous. Yeah. We can do them all at the same time, so you don't have to master truthfulness. But it's really, it's really crucial to understand why he chooses what he does. Well, the interesting thing to me about the Yoga Sutras is that, in contrast to Western approaches, like Jungian individuation that we talked about earlier, there's no dream analysis, there's no free association, there's no working with subconscious material, or trying to have a catharsis, or dealing with repressed memories and traumas. None of that. Not explicitly. There is actually a sutra around dreams that actually you can use inquisition into dreams as one of your yoking methodologies. He definitely mentions that. As far as the repressed material, what's interesting is, you actually, or we, any of us, can't actually transition from orientation B to orientation A without healing that material. So, it's more, it's not as overt. Because he's so, you know, 195 lines, he doesn't give us a lot of material. But it is absolutely implied, because he speaks to anxiety. He gives markers, in other words. There's one sutra where he gives markers, and he says there's anxiety, stress, breathing disturbances. So, he's telling us without overtly saying, hey, you know. But it is associated with the repressed material, for sure. Now, just so that our viewers are clear, you mentioned orientation A, orientation B, and I'd like to go over that again, because it gets to the heart of what you're talking about it, and it's sort of subtle. It is subtle. So, right at the beginning of his text, and in the second line, he says, yoga is the stilling of the mind. And then his next line is, and then the seer is established in its own true nature. I, just for purposes of ease, have called that orientation A. And his next line, he says, at other times, the seer is enmeshed with the modifications of the mind stuff, and I call that orientation B. The modifications of the mind, meaning here I am in my skin, in this room, in this house, in this city, and in this country, with all that that implies. Yes, but more particularly, he's really trying to get at the heart of the monkey mind in our own psychology. So, it's correct cognition, errors, imagination, fantasy, memory, sleep. He really, he points to how the, he calls them britties, the swirling activity of the mind, and he points to different ideas that we can have about how the monkey mind gets stimulated. So, monkey mind is a kind of a pejorative term, I suppose. But, it probably describes most people, most of the time, including me. That's right. Well, our minds are very, very active and very busy. Absolutely. Well, it seems to me that the mind is conditioned in some way, or maybe even designed to help us to meet our needs, as we perceive them. Our needs for food, shelter, clothing, companionship, and so on. The mind is always you know, sussing out what are strategies. That's right. And I, the mind does have an instinctual basis for Patanjali. And, you know, this is where there's a lot of scholarship around this text. Does, does the material world still have existence to Patanjali, once the modifications of the mind are at rest? Mm-hmm. If we, I believe, if we look at it from the fact that it has an instinctual basis, he's really pointing us towards that secondary reflection and thought process. Right? Life is, life is instinctual. She's coming forward. I say she. I'm giving her a feminine terminology. Mata, mother, right? She's coming forward in manifestation. And, by the way, Patanjali does as well. He ends his sutra in the feminine gender. He puts consciousness in the feminine gender at the end of his text. Mm-hmm. So, she's coming through instinctually. Yeah. And the mind is instinct, has an instinctual basis for him. But he's really wanting to help us tame that secondary thought process that we have on top of. Was he saying that the inner woman needs to be tamed? I don't think so, actually. I think he's saying free, free the feminine. The power, the power for him ends in language of the feminine gender. He's saying, he's saying free it, that all those constraints you have in your mind, you're dampening, you're dampening it. Well, you know, the Hindu culture is so very, very vast. There are so many different traditions from southern India and northern India and one of the terms for the feminine in the Sanskrit language is in relationship to the goddess Shakti, which is a term of power. And I seem to recall that she appears in the Yoga Sutras. Yes, that's right. She does at the very end. Mm-hmm. That's, that's exactly the phrasing that I'm talking about. That's what I thought. Yeah. Yeah. So, in that sense, the feminine is, is very powerful. Absolutely. And, and, and for me, the takeaway in this present time, given the power in the external, in the power structures, in the, the discord that we see in the world, this text becomes really powerful to read from that point of view, because he has pure consciousness sitting in the power of its own nature, which is the feminine, which means for any of us who don't want to participate, let's say, in the mask, in the falsity of a constructed world, and are interested in authentic nature, this text almost gives us hope, if you will, that if, if the power of pure consciousness sits in its true nature, it has power. Yeah. So, when we think about the, the classical texts of Hinduism, the Yoga Sutras, I think you described it as one of the six major texts. The three main texts, let's say the, there's the, the Upanishads, well, the Mahabharata is very important. The great epic poem. That's right. Of which the Bhagavad Gita is part. That's right, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras. I think the Brahma Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, those are definitely three of the main texts, for sure. And Patanjali's text, or Yoga philosophy, is one of the six Orthodox Hindu philosophies. It came later than most of the others. So, that we just mentioned, yes. And you also point out that it sort of bridges the Sankhya period with the Vedantic period, and, and the Sankhya period was kind of dualistic in its thought. It was dual. It uses a dualistic, Sankhya uses a dualistic metaphysics, and Patanjali carries on that tradition and also uses a dualistic metaphysics. However, Patanjali's dualism can be seen as falsifiable. Whereas in Sankhya, once Purusha and Prakriti, those are the metaphysics of the symptoms, symptoms of the system, pure consciousness and matter, Prakriti being matter, once those are totally differentiated in in Sankhya, there's, there's no relationship. So, it ends in a very strong dualistic framework. Patanjali's text does not have to be read that way. Yeah, but you also made the point earlier that Patanjali was not writing as a metaphysician or, or a philosopher. It wasn't necessary to understand philosophically all the fine details of the text. They exist to help people in their actual practice. That's, his text existed for a practice. Absolutely. And that's what I gather makes it really unique amongst the classical Hindu texts. It does. It does make it unique. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, this has been a great exploration, Dr. Leanne Whitney, and I very much appreciate your willingness to share your own personal experience and how it relates to this important text and, and how it, your own experience really drove you to discover the deeper meaning in the text. Yes, absolutely it did. Thank you so much for being with me. Thank you, Jeff. And thank you for being with us. Thank you.