The Power of Observation

3.20 By self-control on the form of a body, by suspending perceptibility and separating effulgence therefrom, there arises invisibility and inaudibilty

Another day, another blog post about a shiddhi.  No matter, we only have about ten more of them to go.  Most commentaries on the Yoga Sutras tend to group all of them into one large group and brush them off as hyperbole.  I think there is something to them however. While I do not think this sutra literally means that one will literally develop the power to become invisible or to sneak around like a light footed ninja, there is something profound to be said about the self reflective person.

Where do you fall on the introvert/extrovert spectrum?  In the healing world, there is a common misconception that people that fall farther on the introvertive side tend to be better listeners.  From my experience, introverts have just as much chatter as the extroverts. The main difference is that the chatter is mental instead of verbal.  The process of Yoga tends to turn the introvert and extrovert into an observer. It’s not that a person is going to become an introvert per se, it’s that they will spend more time observing the world around them and spend less time trying to convey their thoughts to others in a haphazard way.  Really, what is most conversation about?  

What I have noticed in my own meditative practices is that while becoming more of an observer, I talk less and become less noticeable.  Oddly, I never really knew how hard my feet hit the pavement while I was walking. In a way, I became more invisible in my daily life because I chose to and that is what this sutra is about in my opinion.

Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto!

3.19 By self-control on any mark of a body, the wisdom of the mind activating that body arises.

Im my honest, humble and awesome opinion, Mr Robot was one of the best TV series of the 2010’s.  I think it perfectly sums up the Zeitgeist of the last decade perfectly. The combination of hacking culture and anti-corporate sentiment that followed the 2009 market crash is weaved into a story that is ultimately about a man with a severe personality disorder.  Should I do a spoiler warning here? Fine, SPOILER ALERT. The last episode of Mr. Robot ultimately shows how the whole thing was made up in the main characters, Elliot Anderson’s mind. At the very end, there is a scene where one of the dominant, and ultimately made up personalities takes a seat in a theater next to the other personalities (a metaphor for Elliot’s mind) and the camera pans out through the light of the movie screen to show him finally relinquishes control.  In total there are four aspects of Elliots personality present in the theater. The Father figure ultimately represents the protector. The child is part of his innocence. His mother represents the tormentor archetype and Elliot in a hoodie represents the mastermind, or the intellectual vigilante hacker Elliot created to escape his mundane life.

The overlying coincidence that I found fascinating with the four personalities in Elliot's head is that it mirrors the four aspects of the mind that I mentioned in previous articles.  I’m not going to go into that again since I covered it at length, but the parallels are interesting. It’s not to say that we all have four distinct personalities that live separate from each other in our minds, it’s more like the mind can be divided up into many different parts which become whole after intense meditation.  

Sutra 3.19 is the second in a line of sutras beginning to get into what are known as shiddies, or yogic powers.  Many gurus has spoken about these at length and some take them literally. I personally do not. This sutra is sometimes believed to show that an advanced Yogi can have the power to regenerate body parts like a chameleon who had its tail cut off.  There are some stories from India of such feats being accomplished, but you know that saying: pics or it didn’t happen. What I take this sutra to mean is that when the four factors of the mind are cleansed, you see the body for what it truly is, which is a mass of energy.  This is not fake, I have seen it for myself and it’s a hard thing to convey in words to those who have not experienced it first hand. That is the point of yoga though, right? To do each of the practices and see the objective truth through subjective eyes. 

Living in the Past

3.18 By self-control on the perception of mental impressions, knowledge of previous lives arises.

The concepts of past lives and Yoga are inseparable.  I generally get a lot of skeptical responses when I talk to people about them, but when I go into the deeper meaning of why Yogis believe in past lives, I can at least bring someone to a neutral point of view.  In any case, if you are reading this blog, you probably already believe in the concept of past lives, but lets have a refresher on the subject.

Before I get deeper into the subject, I have a confession: I get annoyed with people that over focus on the concept if previous lives.  As an astrologer, I can do readings that focus on previous lives, but it’s somewhat of a self defeating action. Yoga is clear about this subject: focusing on past lives is a distraction from purifying awareness that exists only in the now.  How much time do people spend worrying about the future or trying to relive the past. A great example is the many issues the new Star Wars trilogy is suffering from. The franchise is stuck between trying to please people who are stuck in the past and the ones who want something new and exciting to sink their teeth into, but I digress.

Living and dying are just part of a larger set of cycles.  The first and most basic cycle is the breath. This is why yogis place so much emphasis on pranayama, or breath control.  If you can control the most basic cycle, everything else will fall into place. I read somewhere, and forgive me for not knowing the exact source, that yogis believe the average human will take 66,000 breaths in their entire lifetime, so if the breath is slowed, it will extend life.  The next cycle is the daily cycle of waking and sleeping. When we sleep, the consciousness withdraws itself into the spine until we wake. The last cycle is death and rebirth. Through all this, the conscious mind continues to store and record data. Do you ever wonder why people are born with natural talents that cannot be explained?  The yogi would say that it was a talent developed in a past life, brought into this life. So, this sutra is saying that once the consciousness is purified, all the old memories stored deep in the mind, even those of past lives, will become apparent.

Thanks for nothing Starbucks!

3.17 The sound of a word, the idea behind the word, and the object the idea signifies are often taken as being one thing and may be mistaken for one another. By self-control over their distinctions, understanding of all languages of all creatures arises.

I swear, every time that I go to Starbucks, they screw up my order.  Even when I go to the same one and they can remember my name, they never seem to get the order right.  How hard can it be to put together a one pump pre-warmed no whip mocha with sprinkles on one layer under another layer of sugar with a slightly heated chia foam filler?  I hope you got the sarcasm in that, but it does serve to prove a larger point in this sutra.

Communication between humans is a complicated thing.  Not only do we have words themselves, but we also have ideas and meaning behind the words.  Certain words mean different things in one context, but could mean something completely different in another.  The way we say a word can convey different meanings or ideas. Now with digital communications being such a part of our lives, we add emojis and memes to communication to convey feeling.  Still, even with all this innovation, things get lost in translation all the time. According to Yoga, this is only a natural result of how the consciousness interprets data. So, with that being said, let’s deconstruct this rather complicated sutra one part at a time.

The ultimate goal of yoga is to become one with the pure source consciousness be working to remove all impressions from the subconscious mind, however, the same untainted consciousness is the root of all communication and has a particular order.  Under what I will refer to as the Source Consciousness from here on out, is the first level of though, where all ideas originate. In Yoga, we all share this same plane of thought, meaning that no thought that you have is your own, you just had access to a thought at any particular time according to your karma.  After the layer of thought, also called the Causal Plane, the idea reaches the next level called the Astral Plane. In this form the thought has emotional impressions attached to it, which then forms the basis of how an individual will convey the word on the final physical plane. It makes a lot of sense in practice, I mean, how else can you explain why people see the same object, but then form completely different opinions on the same object?  So that is what the first part of the sutra is saying: We take these three levels and confuse them as being one, when in reality, there are three. It all just happens so fast that unless you have trained the mind through meditation, you would never know it. Once you understand the process, you understand everything.

Controlling Time

3.16 By self-control over these three-fold changes (of property, character and condition), knowledge of the past and the future arises.

Guess what? You can control the flow of time! Not only does yoga tell you about the nature of time, but it gives you a guide on how you can influence its passage.  The thing about Yoga, is that it does not give a direct step by step guide on how to accomplish this. Quit the contrary, it’s very general on HOW to do it. If you want to know all kinds of Yogic techniques, go pick yourself up a copy of “The Spiritual Science of Kriya Yoga” by Goswami Kriyanda.  Those are basically the ones that I have used, combined with Advanced Yoga Practices and the Self Realization Fellowship lessons. The bottom line here is that you need to experiment and find out what works best for you. There are thousands of yogic practises out there and any one guru that tells you they have THE ONE way to do it is selling you a line of bullshit.

Now back to the core of this sutra: What are the three fold changes of property charter and condition?  Now don’t get lost on my here, this is a technical sutra, but it’s not as difficult as you might think. The property of any object refers to it’s pancha mahabhuta, or element: fire, earth, air, water, space.  Now before you go and say that I am summoning Captain Planet, realize that before we had elemental chemistry, the ancient practices divided up chemistry into these five properties.  The character of a particular object refers to the Guna, which I wrote about at length in chapter 2. The condition of the object simply refers to how the mind perceives it, or what point that object is relative to your perspective.

If you are a detail junkie, then Yoga is probably not the area of study for you. I would suggest going and checking out Jyotish, or Vedic Astrology.  There are thousands of aspects to any one particular person’s birth chart. The whole point of Yoga is to get over all those details and reach a state of one pointed consciousness called samadhi.  Once you are at that level, the passage of time becomes irrelevant because you have realized the true nature of time itself. We truly exist as timeless consciousness beings trapped within time itself, working to free ourselves of it.  Pretty trippy, huh?

The Key to Time Travel

3.15 The succession of these changes in that entity is the cause of its modification.

I love having a thirst for knowledge and I am a huge science nerd, as long as it does not involve too much math.  The bigger the mystery, the more I want to dig my curiosity in to it and try to understand it. While material science uses eternal equipment to bring phenomena into out perspective, yoga, uses out perspective to bring an existing idea into our realization.  Pivoting back to the nature of time and the rocks I routinely encountered on my trips ino Sedona, we start to explore how our minds perceive time according to Yoga.

My favorite explanation was given by the great guru Paramahansa Yogananda.  He sais that life is nothing more than a movie screen where our consciousness perceives a series of pictures in consecutive order.  We react emotionally to the movie depending on how our brains are wired to accept the stimulus. This wiring is a result of past experiences that become emotionally imprinted in our subconscious mind during out lifetime or previous lifetimes.   Vedic Astrology is the study of the subconscious mind and how these imprinted pattern will come to fruition in linear time. So, going back to this example, think of the subconscious mind as a reel of film wound up in our head. We can only see what is on the reel of film when it’s unwound and put in front of a light and presented to our eyes.  The pictures on the screen evoke an emotional reaction, which then prompts us to act. The passage of time is basically each frame going in sequence.

The unique aspect of consciousness is that we can go back in time and view a frame in our memory.  When scientists speak of time travel, we think of machines that will take us back to a particular point in time, yet we can roll the time real back in our minds.  In a sense, we are already capable of time travel. Now, with modern technology recording everything, we can go back many years and see an event and form our own reaction to it. 

A Trip to VOC

3.14 The object is that which preserves the latent characteristic, the rising characteristic or the yet-to-be-named characteristic that establishes one entity as specific.

I was recently at the Sedona Vedic Astrology Conference and I was attending a class being taught by Andrew Foss.  In this class, he talked about the concept of kala, or time, being the great destroyer. What provides us with a constant of time outside of our minds?  Well, of course there are clocks on everything: on our phones, in our cars and in the lower left hand corner of our computer screens (Upper right for you Macintosh heathens).  The concept of the passage of time is relative to the motion we perceive in relation to other objects as we move through space.

 On the way into Sedona along highway 89a, I have regularly passed through a cool town called The Village of Oak Creek.  It’s a shame that most people pass this place by and go right into Sedona. Personally, I think it’s more scenic with the 1500 foot cliffs of the Colorado Plateau in the background.  It’s common to see tourists craning their necks to get a good view of the rocks as they drive down the freeway. As they drive, the visual impressions are getting recorded into their conscious mind along with any emotional impressions they get from seeing the red rocks for the first time.  It’s interesting how the human mind works with novelty though. I be pretentious if I said that the rocks have the same effect on me as they did the first time I saw them. Now I mainly get mad rubberneckers blocking off traffic as I try to get to where I want to go. 

 My point here is that these rocks have been there for a long time, much longer than any of our miniscule concepts of time could perceive with any real appreciation.   The rocks are also just that: rocks. We attribute their beauty to the emotional effect they have in our brain, forgetting that they will be ground into the red sand hikers take for granted as they hike up their peaks.  The one only true constant in time itself is perception according to this Sutra.

What Is It Like To Be “Unchangeable”?

3.13 In this state, it passes beyond the changes of inherent characteristics, properties and the conditional modifications of object or sensory recognition.

One of the greatest questions in Yoga is:  What is left of me when I no longer have my identity?  Good question. Everything that we have, our values, thoughts and personality are vested in our identity with the world.  How is a person going to get by without an identity? The answer to the question is: You don’t. You will always have your identity in the world because even if you have given up your identity internally, the world will always associate you with what IT thinks is your identity.  If you are male, the world will still be there to tell you what a proper male is. Your parents view of who you are is not going to change. To your government, you will always be “taxpayer number 1234567”

A lot of the teaching of Paramahansa Yogananda is revolved around the concept of life as a movie and the people merely spectators.  In modern times, we associate this with movies like the Matrix, where we are all part of some computer program. As times change, so the definitions and symbolism of our projected world.  Nevertheless, the concept of internal non-identification will stay the same.

So when you have reached a state of non attachment to  thought in your mind, you essentially become unchangeable by new triggers of thought.  The largest problem practitioners will find is that they still have existing karma to resolve, so the idea of being in a world that actively promotes attachment seems ridiculous.  This is where one of the greatest talents a modern yogi can develop will come into effect. It’s the ability to play your role in life with detachment. The coming of the unchangeable state will be like a bolt of the blue out of nowhere.  As your universe changes inside if you, the rest of the world will still function the same. Therefore, weather you are a wife, husband, father, mother, poor or rich, you will still have to play out your role, knowing that after death it will not be reprized.

Sutra 3.12 A Thought Is A Thought

"The mind becomes one-pointed when the subsiding and rising thought-waves are exactly similar."

We are born, raised and later put into a world with an identity that is often not of our own making.  When we go through life believing that we must live within the same boundaries of thought established for us by society, our experiences and our parents, we never learn how truly free we can be.  Have you looked around recently and seen how many self help books there are?  Many of them state the solution to life is “living your own story” or “conscious narrative construction”.  This is because when we are free from the constraints of though, we can write our own story.  What Sutra 3.12 is telling us, is to take it a step further and realize that all of the stories and narratives in our mind are nothing more than a collection of symbolisms by which our minds uses to make sense of the world.

In earlier Sutras, I talked about the nature of vritti nahrhotah, which is the Sanskrit term used to describe the cessation of thought waves in the mind, which results in a state of meditation.  This state is stillness of the mind and reveals the true nature of all thought.  People go through life identifying themselves with their thoughts and falsely believe them to be their core.  Do you know where you thoughts come from?  Are your thoughts a part of a larger political philosophy?  Do you regularly attend church and get thoughts delivered to you through sermons?  Even as you read this blog post, the letters form words and the words have symbolism associated with them, so if you are one of those people that reads aloud to yourself in your mind, you are witnessing thoughts generated in real time.

As one becomes cognizant to that nature of thought, you must be careful not to start passing judgment on thoughts themselves.  You have been working all this time to detach yourself from your thoughts, passing judgment on them at this point will lead you back into the land of samskaras.  I have heard in some circles that we are responsible for the nature of our own thoughts, and we then pass judgment on ourselves thinking that thoughts from previous lifetimes or one relayed to us through different mediums are a direct assessment of our character.  You have to  act on a thought before it become part of your true nature and then it may still not be so.   In Vedic Astrology, we can see this very fatalism play itself out in the birth chart, which is nothing more than a map of samskaras and probable outcomes.  As we work through ourselves with the Yogic method, we naturally diminish this probability.

Book 3 Sutra 11 - Navigating the Mindfield

"The contemplative transformation of this is equalmindedness, witnessing the rise and destruction of distraction as well as one-pointedness itself."

The Yogic path unfolds in unique, subjective ways.  In my experience doing Yoga, it is a non-linear path that has many twists and turns.  The Yoga Sutras mentions various stages of consciousness and in this Sutra, we are talking about the transition from Samyama to Samadhi.  Remember that Samyama is the balancing of meditation and concentration.  That odd contradiction of combining letting things go while focusing on them at the same time.  "That's Impossible!" you might think, but no it's not.  It's the inevitable result of practice.  Every state of consciousness obtained eventually becomes habit and looses it's meaning.  Samadhi is the permanent state of effortless Samyama.

Any state of realization reached in Yoga needs effort to maintain, and even then, it may not be in the practitioners best interest to stay there.  Really it depends on our Karma and what we have left to accomplish on our particular paths.  At some point in any incarnation cycle during the process of enlightenment, it's normal for a person who has reached a state of Samadhi to desire seclusion from the world.  You can see this in Vedic Astrology as well when you analyze the twelfth house.  For instance, a person who has the South Node of the Moon in the twelfth house has probably lead a life of seclusion in the past and now has to work in this life to finish past Karmas.    

I myself reached a point where I wanted to be secluded, locking myself away for hours at a time for meditative practice.  After obtaining a state of Samadhi, I had to engage re-engage with the world.  The need for self introspection must  be balanced with action.  Is it possible to take action in the world without accruing any Karma?  I would say no, that is just the nature of reality.  You can, however, take action in the world from a balanced state of being, acting with detachment from results.  Intuition eventual becomes the guiding force of action, and when that intuition is in sync with universal consciousness, everything will naturally work out.

Book 3 Sutra 10 - Dispite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage!

 "From sublimation of this union comes the peaceful flow of unbroken unitive cognition."

When you think of purity of thought, what comes to mind?  When we are children, most of what we think is "pure" come from external conditioning.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have the ten commandments.  In Islam, the Five Pillars represent a form or purity.  Earlier in the Sutras, I wrote about the Yamas and Niyamas, which are the do's and don't of Yoga.  Those are all great for beginners, but we are now on book three.  Time to throw those concepts away!

"What, why would I do that" you ask?  Everything a Yogi does, EVERYTHING, is a means to an end, that end being Moksha.  The natural state of the universal cycle runs in three phases: creation, preservation and destruction.  The Yogi's worship the deity Kali, the name given to the dissolution principle.  Yoga is ultimately about taking things away, not adding things.  If this sounds like a contradiction, it is.  It's the only way to express something in linear thought that exists outside of time.  So we start with a basic framework, build ourselves up within it, then tear it down again to approach the same subject with a larger framework.

This Sutra is speaking about the state of consciousness when thought is no longer initiated by external stimuli.  It's a hard feeling to describe, but when you feel it, you will know it.  This is where the guidance of a Guru or community of fellow practitioners can help.  Now you are running on pure intuitive experience balanced with untainted logic.  Just realize that when you reach a new level of understanding, you are going from a smaller construct into a larger one.  Constructs need to be consistently dissolved until they no longer exist.  So like Smashing Pumpkins lyric from Bullet with Butterfly Wings said "Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage!", you move from a smaller cage into a larger cage.  Don't worry, at some point, you will leave the zoo.

Book 3 Sutra 9 - Sponge Bob Brain Pants

"The significant aspect is the union of the mind with the moment of absorption, when the outgoing thought disappears and the absorptive experience appears."

I'm a person who gets distracted easily.  While I was growing up, you would be hard pressed to get me to sit in one place for more than a few minutes before my mind would begin to wander.  The way that my mind processes information is called "divergent thinking", or I tend to process things from a larger, abstract concept, then fill in the pieces later.  The traditional education system was more of a detriment to my development than helpful in any way I can remember.  Honestly, I spent most of High School skipping class because I did not see the value in the information presented to me.  Looking back all those years, I can say that I was right. 

I think that is why I took to Yoga and Vedic Astrology so well.  There is so much information in Astrology to process, that I will never get through it all.  I find something new to discover every year.  Studying the Yoga Sutras allowed me to delve into the abstract in ways I could never imagine possible.  It absorbed me, which is the subject of this sutra.

Have you ever gotten so absorbed in an activity or experience that you lose all track of time and space?  People who have studied this state of mind have called it being in flow or having a "Zen" moment.  If you are one of the lucky ones that can have this feeling while earning a living simultaneously, then consider yourself lucky! 

I call this state of mind "Sponge Bob Brain Pants".  When you get so absorbed in what you are meditating on, you lose all track of the outside world.  This is what a Yogi can truly define as meditation.  The senses no longer disturbing the mind with sensory input.  Does this mean that you actively go deaf or bling?  No, not at all. Think of the senses as just being in active, like when you are eating an apple, you are not paying attention to how your socks are fitting.  Your brain is a sponge, absorbed in a state of timeless being, but still not asleep.  Now is the time that we start repairing active samskaras and move on toward moksha!

Book 3 Sutra 8 - The Tree In My Garden

"Even that is external to the seedless realization"

The analogy of the tree is used a lot through the Yoga Sutras.  Specifically, it is used to illustrate how Karma unfolds in the mind, then manifests into our lives.  Karma stores itself in the Chakras as "seeds" and will ripen when the right circumstances occur.  The Vedic Astrology birth chart shows the timing of the fruition of the seeds, Yoga is the tool we use to stop them for sprouting.  We have a lot of seeds planted in us, some will spout small plants, others will develop into gigantic trees, blocking us as we move along the path.  In this Sutra, the seedless realization is referring to Samyama.  In this state of awareness, no new seeds are planted, leaving us to tend the garden we already have within ourselves. 

How do seeds get planted in the first place?  It all happens when our senses trigger reactions to event.  Most karmic events in life will pass us by without notice.  Simple things like the food we decide to eat, the colors we choose to wear and people we choose to associate with happen at a deep level of awareness.  It makes a lot of sense.  If we had to actively monitor and consciously participate in every function of our being, we would never have time to do anything else.  Nature throws us a bone and takes care of these things for us.  In some circumstances though, these simple choices can cause us a lot of pain when then are interfered with by deep routed patterns.

For example, I was in a horrible car accident many years ago.  To make a long story short, I was feeling sick and the next day I had to perform a critical function at work,  I spent the whole night tossing and turning, thinking about how much sleep I could get in order to be fully alert and functional the next day.  I ended up taking a lot of cold medicine, thinking that it would help me sleep more.  The next day, I left for work, feeling sick and still woozy from all the cold medicine I took, and ended up getting into a bad accident.  From that day forward, I developed a fear of not sleeping.  Everything revolving around that event and set the tone for many years, changing my behavior in ways that I am still working on today.

Samyama has helped me start to get over the events surrounding those days.  That accident is the tree that has sprouted in my consciousness.  Seeing the event for what it was put me on the path of being able to tend to my own inner garden.  

Book 3 Sutra 6 - The Scribbler

"The application of mastery is by stages"

Now that we have gone through the first two books, we are getting into the territory of esoteric experience.  What do I mean by that?  Sometime the words we choose to write and speak cannot convey the true intuitive meaning of a Yogic principal, so the best any writer will have is the use of analogies.  This is why we see so many religious texts take on a narrative form.  How can you best give the sense of feeling other than to put it into a story? 

In Sutra 3.6, the concept we are dealing with is called Sanyama.   Sanyama is the result of stillness of the mind combined with mediation.   Yoga, is and will always be about finding some sort of balance.  We live in a world of dualities and our thoughts whisk us between opposing modalities, in essence, tricking into believing that we are following a linear path.  In yoga, the linear path runs straight down the middle, working to balance opposites.  Sanyama is the balance between meditation and concentration. 

In my experience, everything in the Yoga Sutras is a means to an end. When I first started to meditate, I was fixated on perfection.  Trying to get the room at the perfect temperature, trying to keep all the noise out by wearing ear plugs, working on getting my meditation posture in the best alignment and so on.  I got to a point that I was so focused on perfection, that my routine was doing more harm than good, so I stopped formal meditation all together.  For years, it went on like this until I was bashed over the head by the power of the middle ground. 

The irony of Sanyama is that the Yogi is simultaneously concentrating and letting go, which leads to and effortless understanding on how to interact with any object of meditation.  It's a tool for universal understanding that is used to dig out our subconscious proclivities called Samskaras.  I had to learn to find the perfection in imperfection and found that both are just boundaries we draw in our mind.  Did you color in the lines when you were a kid?  I never did, so I was called a "scribbler".  Looking back, I just realized that I was drawing my own boundaries and not living in the box society puts us in as we grow.  Try coloring outside the lines, it will do you some good.

What Is the Age of Aquarius?

I'm sure you have heard the Fifth Dimension song "The Age of Aquarius".  I get asked on my Periscope broadcasts all the time about what this means and how it works.  It's really not as complicated as it might sound, but the idea has been perverted by hippie and new age culture beyond the astrological intent.  

Personally, I take issue with New Age and Counter Culture and what it has done to pervert and misrepresent astrology and eastern traditions.  First, take a look at what Yoga has become in the United States.  Yoga was never about poses in its purest form.  If you have read my other blog posts on the fundamental text of Yoga, the Yoga Sutras, poses are never directly referenced.  They were added about one thousand years later as a method of loosening up the body to prolong meditation.  The same thing has happened with astrology.  From what I have surmised, people think that the "Age of Aquarius" will usher in an era of utopian society by which all of the world problems will be solved and we will live in love peace and harmony.  Umm, no.

A fundamental misconception of astrology is that humanity can somehow reach the pinnacle of mass group consciousness from that of unawareness in just a few years and by of effort.  Tell that to the Heaven’s Gate cult that committed mass suicide, believing that they would be taken up into a space ship flying behind the Hailbob comet.  Frist, and I can't say this enough, beware of any belief system that sets up exclusivity.  This has caused so much damage in human history, and now I see it being used by New Age spirituality to push agendas and cults of personality.  Nothi

Ok, so, what does this mean from an astrological point of view?  In astrology, the three outer planets, and yes, Pluto is a planet, connect us to group consciousness.  By using these outer planets and their relationship to each other, I can make predictions of the context of world events.  For instance, every rebellion has is causes, but fundamentally they are the same.  Right now planetary configurations are close to what they were during the French and American Revolution, with a little bit of 1968 mixed in.  Rebellion against the established order is the context of the day, and all major global events play out in this framework.  Uranus is the plane that rules the sign of Aquarius in western astrology and links us with the first echelon of group consciousness, which is the way that information and communication is distributed.  Uranus rules rebellion, sudden change, astrology, bolts of creativity from the blue and electronics.  So in actuality, the Age of Aquarius shows that the way information is shared and distributed will change to a flat model vs. a hierarchical model.  The way I see it, knowledge will be freely exchanged between parties without the need to filter it through distorted mediums such as government and propagandized press.  This will lead to greater understanding on a person to person basis.  It's all about the internet and how it impacts human perception.  

Do you see how the old world is dying?  What does that mean?  In my opinion, the keepers of the knowledge are doing whatever they can to sow the seeds of conflict, thereby distracting us from what is going on.  Many so called rebellions are fabricated events meant to stoke the fear of the masses.  It's not sustainable and people are waking up to the lies.  With it comes a host of people that are trying to control the information for themselves.  New media stars, conspiracy theorist on the internet, you name it.  When the system breaks, it takes a while to settle into a new norm.  My advice to you to only control what is in your direct scope of influence.  Help a neighbor carry in the groceries, volunteer, or just be kind to the people you meet.  The world will always be full of drama, you can count on that.

Book 3 Sutra 5 - Squeezing the Water Balloon

3.5 By mastery comes wisdom.

Hard work pays off, especially in Yoga.  When we try to become masters of our mind, the wisdom associated with higher states of awareness is the outcome of our efforts.  I like to look at the concept of mastery as developing a new habit.  

Wisdom is the ability to see a situation in a new light outside of our perspective and be able to take correct action.  As stated in the first two books of the Yoga Sutras, our perspectives are tainted with the “colorings” associated with thoughts.  In turn, these coloring make up our perspectives, which we use to make judgments about the world around us.

Have you ever gotten “stuck in a rut”?  Do particular situations play out the same way over and over again and you don't know why? That is why the thought categorization process in Book one is so important.  You notice that you use fantasy as a refuge from uncomfortable situations arising in your life.  This could take the form of drugs, video games, television, social media or books.  Fantasy is one of the five forms of thought we need to avoid, but it's not going to have the same effect on one person as it may on others.  The plan is to see new situations from different perspectives and then make changes accordingly. 

It's a never ending cycle: evaluate, adjust and then reevaluate.  We get wiser with each new cycle, but keep in mind that cycles tend to repeat themselves in different context.  I my practice, I have found it's impossible to know how high I have climbed because whatever I adjust to becomes a new normal.  Then I notice something else I need to work on and the cycle start over again.  I keep on climbing though knowing that there will always be a need to return to the fundamentals.  Just when you think you have one situation resolved, new ones pop up, like squeezing a water balloon. 

Book 3 Sutra 4 - Enlightenment with Moe, Larry and Curly

3.4 The three appearing together are self-control.

This is going to be a fun blog post and not just because The Three Stooges are the greatest comic trio in history.  I'm referring to the three stooges of out being: the conciseness, the mind and objects of attachment.  These three are intertwined and take a long time for use to sort out.  Eventually we do, but we have to do through all kinds of comic high-jinks to get there.  

Our consciousness, like it has been said in previous Sutras, is nothing more than pure awareness, without anything else for it to reference, it just exists on it's own.  This kind of reminds me of Larry. Does the guy really do anything other than get slapped around a lot?  

Next we have the objects of attachment, which lead us in all kinds of different directions.  In reality and at their most basic form, this is what has control of our everyday consciousness.   Moe seems to be the leader of the group.  He tells them where to go, what to do and how to act, but the whole gag is that he doesn't really know he is doing.

Finally, we have the mind.  It goes where it is told.  It does what we think it wants to do, but in reality, it is following the directions of the sensory objects aka Moe.  When we meditate, we have to separate Moe and Curly so that Curly is not getting slapped around by Moe so much.

Getting to the point of this Sutra, we need to get these three facets of our being to work together instead of against each other.  The Stooges get themselves out the situations they are in eventually.  Our free will, which become stronger as we practice, is the ultimate director of the film staring Moe, Larry and Curly.  The director has to yell "cut!" at some point, and the three actors come off the stage and realize they were in a film the whole time.  We are participants in a film, metaphorically speaking, and at any time, we can stop the fighting of these three facets of the mind and awaken into greater awareness. 

Book 3, Sutra 3 - More Tribbles!

3.3 That same meditation when there is only consciousness of the object of meditation and not of the mind is realization.

Let's get into some deep philosophy.  When I mean deep, I'm talking the middle of the ocean with lead weights on your feet deep. Getting deeper into meditation has one purpose, and that is to realize that the mind, body and thoughts are separate from pure awareness.  Yoga is the process of stripping things away one by one until there is only one thing left.  What is left is always going to be pure awareness, but what can get murky is what exactly does this Sutra mean by "object of meditation"?

I struggled with this concept when I first began my yoga practice and it is still a little fuzzy to my today.  So, using the concept of "fuzzy" as an example, I'm going to break it down for you Star Trek style, by using the tribble.

If we were to meditation on specifically a tribble, we see that it is just a fluffy bunch of cute reproducing fur. They're great until they start multiplying out of control and get all up in your star ship.  What happens if we meditate on a tribble? The meditator notices the qualities such as the fuzziness, what it looks like and the cute purring noises it makes.  These are all sensory qualities that our mind associates with the object.  The next level is how does the tribble make us feel? I laugh a lot when I see "The Trouble with Tribbles".  

All of these feelings and sensory perceptions mask the true nature of an object.  During the process of meditation, the Yogi works to strip these away, so nothing but the pure essence of the object remains.  Yogis use mantras, idols, candles as objects of meditation as well. It gets confusing trying to figure out what can be used as an object of meditation. It takes practice and dedication, but in the end it really does not matter.  Whatever you settle on will get you to the end of the road, so use a tribble in the mean time,

Book 3 Sutra 2

3.2 Unbroken continuation of that mental ability is meditation.

I personally love this part of the Yoga Sutras.  It's time to get down into the basics of what meditation really is.  In this Sutra and may more to follow, we see the state of mind that is needed in order to gain and maintain the technical state of meditation.

I use the term "technical state of meditation" because the term is so broadly used in western society.  What do we consider meditation? Some of us like to use imagdy, some like to star into a candle, some visualize and others consider running as a form of meditation.  Don't run and meditation, you will break you ankle or worse, maybe fall into a hive of killer bees.  We have them here in Arizona, and they don't like anything, but they really geek out on meditating runners that fall into their hives.

So when when all the thoughts have been categorized and we begin to break our conscious associations with them, it state of meditation is like riding a bike.  I like to describe it as a state between wake and sleep, relaxation and focus.  Try as I may to explain it, true yogic meditation is something that needs to "bee" experienced.  Now that you have laughed so hard at my pun you fell off the sofa and on to the floor, give it a try.  See if you can stop your thoughts.  I'm sure your can't, and that is ok.  The active process of stopping your thoughts is, in actually a passive process of paying attention to them in order to get rid of them.  

Book 3 Sutras 1 - Staying on Point

3.1 One-pointedness is steadfastness of the mind.

Time to wade back into the pool of the Yoga Sutras.  It's been a little while since I have written about them, but writing on the first two books had proven to be such a large undertaking, that I needed a break until I starting Book Three.  With that being said, I can think of a better way to dive in then the the first Sutra of Book 3

Book 3 is more about the results of practice then actual practice itself. Book one is an intro, with book two being methodology.  In this Sutra, one pointedness referrers to the ability of the mind to concentrate on on particular object.  This is referred to as Bindu, which translates loosely to dot or point.  

Goswami Kriyananda gave a good description of this phenomenon in his commentaries.  If we look a triangle, it represents the simplest polygon that can occupy three dimensional space.  Then, the line is a representation of two dimensional space.  Finally, the dot is a representation of one dimension, a single point in space. So, when we meditate, out focus starts to go from larger perceptions to a more focused state of mind.  That focus is what Yogis use to reach the state of enlightenment.  

The process of this is explained further in the book.  Once the mind is clear, this one-pointedness is the natural result.  It filters into out daily lives as well, giving us the ability to focus on one task fully at a time without being distracted.  I honestly think that people are not capable of actual multitasking, but instead change focus from one activity to another, even if they put the previous activity on hold while their mind moves on.  We are expected to function this way in our modern technological society.  Let's face it, we can only do so much at one time!