2.44 By study comes communion with the Lord in the Form most admired.

Jhana Yoga is the art of realization through intellectual study of the scriptures. I tend to fall into this category myself. Intellectual study, however, is just one path that a Yogi can take to enlightenment. I have seen videos of young Bhrmanistic priests being trained in India. The use hand movements in association with syllables in the scriptures to help memorize them. Memorization of the scriptures leads to a greater understanding of their meaning.

Scripture is written in Sanskrit. The power of Sanskrit lies in is phonics and not necessarily in it's literal meaning. In past posts, I have written about the power of chanting mantra. All Yogic scripture is a mantra. Hypothetically speaking, you could chant the Yoga Sutras from beginning to end and use it as a mantra. Sacred books, such as the Bhagava Gita are chanted in the form of song, and the title translates to Song of the Soul.

So how does this work? Intellectualism has it's limits. Spirituality is something that is intuitively understood and is hard to put into words. The point of intellectualism is, if you have the zeal to bury your nose in scriptural and occult study, you will get to the point where your brain will see the redundancies in information study, hopefully to turn to intuition to process the information. Taking higher knowledge and putting it into words is the only way we have to communicate it's meaning, but it loses it's meaning when put into words. Using finite symbolism such as language to convey concepts beyond symbolism is impossible, but you have to start somewhere.