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Zusammenfassung von The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Name: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Rating: 4.7 (314 reviews)
Author: Translated and commentated on by Sri Swami Satchidananda

Translated and commentated on by Sri Swami Satchidananda

Timeless Teachings for Mind, Body, and Emotional Harmony

4.7 (314 Bewertungen)

25 Min.

Themen

Eastern Philosophy Meaningful Living Spirituality Happiness

Inhaltsübersicht

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
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What’s in it for me? Learn the true meaning of yoga.

When you hear the word “yoga,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? If you’re from the modern West, it’s probably an image of someone stretching.

But if you dig into yoga’s ancient Eastern roots, you’ll find that it’s much more than just a form of physical exercise. Dating back thousands of years, it’s a spiritual philosophy and practice that promises self-transformation and encompasses a wide range of topics: mind and body, morality and ethics, and metaphysics and psychology, to name just a few.

As a philosophy, yoga can seem a little esoteric at times. But as a practice, it’s pretty down-to-earth. It lays out a straightforward, step-by-step path to achieving inner peace and happiness, teaching you how to overcome the obstacles you’ll encounter along the way.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why the reality of the self is not what it seems;
why the ego is at the root of suffering; and
how the practice of yoga is meant to help you overcome that suffering.

Sri Swami Satchidananda interprets the Yoga Sutras in a way that makes them open to people of any spiritual background.

Sometime between 500 BC and 300 AD, an Indian spiritual teacher named Patañjali described the core principles of yoga in a series of 196 aphorisms, which are called sutras in Sanskrit. The result became known as the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali.

This is one of the main ancient texts about yoga, so if you want to learn about yogic philosophy and practice, it’s a natural place to start. There’s just one problem: the way it’s written.

Each sutra is a short, dense, often cryptic sentence or sentence fragment. Many don’t even have clear subjects and predicates. Some believe that’s because they’re just shorthand notes Patañjali’s students jotted down as reminders of what he said in lectures. As a result, the sutras require thoughtful translation and interpretation.

Enter twentieth-century Indian yoga master Sri Swami Satchidananda.

The key message here is: Sri Swami Satchidananda interprets the Yoga Sutras in a way that makes them open to people of any spiritual background.

As a young adult, Satchidananda studied agriculture, science, and technology, but he grew dissatisfied and eventually gave them up to devote himself to yoga. For years, he regarded the Yoga Sutras as the guiding text of his spiritual journey. In the late 1970s, after becoming an internationally renowned yoga master, he decided to write his own translation and interpretation of the Sutras in order to bring it to a religiously diverse modern audience.

Now, the Sutras are considered a Hindu scripture, but Satchidananda didn’t identify himself as belonging to Hinduism or any particular religion. He saw yoga as just one of many ways of expressing, understanding, and applying the same basic truths contained in other religions and spiritual philosophies, such as Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Consider the word yoga itself. In Sanskrit, “yoga” means “union.” In practicing yoga, you’re trying to achieve union – which raises an obvious question: Union with what? Like the world’s many different spiritual traditions, Satchidananda calls it many different names: God, Puruṣa, Atman, Īśvara, the Seer, and the cosmic mind, among others. But to him, the name isn’t the important thing; it’s the underlying truth that matters.

And what is that truth? Well, ultimately, it surpasses the limits of language, but it’s the idea that there’s some sort of spirit, substance, principle, consciousness, being, or force lying beyond and manifesting itself within the material universe.

Call it what you will. The point is to recognize it, connect to it, and let its power transform you.

The practice of yoga produces results that you can verify for yourself through experience.

If you have a purely scientific outlook, you might be put off by all this talk of God, the cosmic mind, or whatever else some yogi wants to call the mysterious something supposedly underlying the universe.

But consider this: If a scientist told you that everything is ultimately just energy manifesting itself in various ways, would the idea of something underlying the universe seem more reasonable?

The philosophy of yoga teaches you to stop identifying yourself with external things – including your mind and body.

At this point, you might be eager to jump straight into the practice of yoga. After all, that’s what it’s all about, at the end of the day.

But to understand the practice of yoga on an intellectual level, it helps to know the philosophy behind it. Now, depending on your background and sensibilities, that philosophy might seem a bit arcane – but don’t get hung up on it. Think of it like a ladder: it’s useful for getting to the top of something, but once you arrive where you want to go, you can leave it behind.

The True Self is spirit, and the same spirit is inside everyone and everything.

Think about it like a math equation: Subtract your body, your mind, and everything else that’s external to you – things like your job, wealth, gender, and so on. What remains? Well, there’s just you. To put it more philosophically, all that’s left is the pure “I,” cleansed of all false identifications with everything that’s not your self – that is, non-self. Let’s call this pure “I” the True Self.

This applies to every other person, too. Shorn of false identifications, each of them is also just a pure “I.” For them, that’s the True Self as well.

As Prakṛti, the mind is a distorted, egoistic reflection of Puruṣa.

“But wait,” a skeptic might object. “That still doesn’t answer the question, ‘What is the True Self?’ Sure, it can be given other names, like ‘spirit,’ and it’s the same spirit in everything and everyone – but what exactly is it?”

Good question – and the very fact that you might feel a need to ask it poses a problem in itself. If the True Self exists, how can you even be wondering what it is? After all, if you are the True Self, then presumably no one should know what it is better than you! So why the mystery? And why do people normally identify themselves with things that aren’t the True Self?

Ignorance of the True Self leads to egoism and suffering.

Okay, so let’s recap: there’s the mind, which is like the surface of a lake. There’s the True Self, which is reflected on that surface. And then there are things like negative thoughts and emotions making the surface distorted. As a result, the mind produces the ego, which is a distorted reflection of the True Self.

Now, if you look at the surface of the lake – in other words, if you look at your own mind – what do you see? Who’s there? “Well, it’s me,” you might say. But it’s not really you. It’s the ego, rather than the True Self.

Practicing yoga makes your mind calm and clear so you can behold the True Self.

So how do you transcend your ego and escape your suffering?

Well, it’s simple – at least in theory: make the turbulent, tainted “mental water” of your mind calm and clear. Then you’ll see the truth: an accurate reflection of your True Self. Replaced by this reflection, your ego will then disappear from your mind, along with your egoism and the suffering it produces.

Yogic practice contains a variety of physical and mental exercises that help you reach a spiritual state called Samādhi.

The moral and ethical principles of the yamas and niyamas might seem easy to follow. For instance, unless you’re a pathological shoplifter, stealing doesn’t seem that hard to avoid.

But this is a simplistic, overly literal understanding of what it means to steal. Stealing is more than just running off with an item from a store. It’s taking away anything that doesn’t or shouldn’t belong to you, misusing it, or keeping it to yourself.

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Worum geht es in The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali?

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1978) is a classic text on yogic philosophy and practice. Written in ancient Sanskrit, it explains the core metaphysical, spiritual, psychological, moral, and ethical ideas of yoga. It also lays out the principles of how to practice yoga, so you can put those ideas into action and use them to achieve lasting happiness and inner peace.

Wer The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali lesen sollte

Seekers of wisdom, happiness, and peace
Followers of Eastern spiritual traditions
Anyone interested in those traditions

Über den Autor

Patañjali was an ancient Indian spiritual teacher – or possibly the name of, or given to, a number of teachers. He lived sometime between 500 BC and 300 AD, and his Sutras form one of the foundational texts of yoga.

Sri Swami Satchidananda was a twentieth-century Indian yoga master, teacher, and popularizer who helped to bring yogic ideas and practices to a modern Western audience.

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