reading

table of contents

acknowledgements

1. quick-start guide

2. introductory notes

2.1 restoring embodiment: a manifesto for a changing tradition

2.2 on the method of “remixing”

2.3 loosening the tyranny of certainty

3. threads: the complete remix of the yoga sūtra-s of patañjali

3.1 the book of integration

3.2 the book of practices

3.3 the book of wonders

3.4 the book of overflowing

4. pāda one: integration

4.1 the book of integration

4.2 openings: the evolutionary democracy of yoga

4.3 looking closer: to join or not to join?

4.4 considering “consciousness”, “awareness”, “perception”

4.5 thread 1.16 vs. phenomenology

4.6 on “yoga creationism” and the eternality of consciousness

4.7 hard dualism as an outcome of the novelty of introspection

4.8 hard dualism as a failure of ambivalence

4.9 healing the presumptuousness of consciousness, healing the inner family tree

4.10 evolution through hacking

4.11 meditation on the qualia (guṇa-s) of existence

4.12 from infanticide to deconstruction: exploring the origins and legacy of the nivṛtti and nirguṇa impulses

4.13 further reverie on śūnya and zero

4.14 my revisions of key patañjalian views

4.15 my choices: the book of integration

4.16 the song of integration

5. pāda two: practices

5.1 the book of practices

5.2 practice begins with other

5.3 mother, other, world

5.4 eight limbs therapeutic redux

5.5 some notes on the yamas: the language of learning the other

5.6 love

5.7 niyamas: the language of learning the self

5.8 the beginning of āsana

5.9 aligning breath in space

5.10 prāṇāyama relaxes the self-other divide

5.11 pratyāhāra in the sensual world

5.12 embodied meditation

5.13 good-enough mother, good-enough practice

5.14 my choices: the book of practices

5.15 the song of practices

6. pāda three: wonders

6.1 the book of wonders

6.2 meditation, magic, magical thinking and existential radiance

6.3 on the other hand: magic resists the banal

6.4 what is meditation for?

6.5 epoché

6.6 karma as feedback

6.7 piercing the ādhyātmikā bubble

6.8 my choices: the book of wonders

6.9 the song of wonders

7. pāda four: overflowing

7.1 the book of overflowing

7.2 overflow and the intersubjective

7.3 against isolation and the extraction urge

7.4 lubricating the threshold between polarities: a samādhi on saṃdhi

7.5 reverie on “cleave”

7.6 left to right: the psychogenic triptych of perception, consciousness, and awareness

7.7 my choices: the book of overflowing

7.8 the song of overflowing

8. coda

8.1 how do we learn and continue to learn?

8.2 the love of not-knowing

8.3 homo accipiens

8.4 a brief review, and notes for future study on the neuroscience of yoga and meditation

8.5 how I got here

8.6 saving breath for what is to come

bibliography

source texts for Patañjali

Note: section 7.3 (“against isolation and the extraction urge”) contains passages reworked from the opening chapter of yoga 2.0: shamanic echoes (Petrie and Remski, 2010).

acknowledgements

Special thanks to: John Bemrose, Anne Cloutier, Rita Dertkin, Lindsay Gamester, Sarahjane MacDonald, Simone Moir, Michael Stone and my parents, David and Jill, for encouragement and feedback; to the students of the original Advanced Yoga Philosophy programme at the old Renaissance Yoga and Āyurveda building in Cabbagetown for fostering an environment of philosophical and emotional adventurousness; to the staff of Yoga Festival Toronto for showing me contemporary yoga culture in its highest empathy-gear; to Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, for blazing a path of critical inquiry in modern yoga discourse; to Jason Hirsch, for illuminating the homeodynamic/homeostatic distinction; to Luciano Iacobelli, for his thoughts on the “afterlife”; to For Life in Kensington Market, for bringing me food and epoché; to Miles Sherts, for the sauna, swimming hole, introduction to conscious communication, and the love of Skymeadow Retreat through the years; to Jody Kelly, for excellent discussion and proofing; to Cathleen Hoskins for polymath insight, grammatical acumen, additional proofing, the “failure of ambivalence”, and for musing with me on the word “cleave”; to my partner, Alix Bemrose, for her enthusiastic, incisive, and expectant third-trimester editing.

I’d also like to thank my ad hoc editorial committee of online correspondents, who over the past three years have engaged many of these ideas with positive vigour. They have helped to nurture an open-source era of yoga philosophy: Frank Jude Boccio (who triggered a deeper look at “śūnya”), Shyam Dodge, Carol Horton, Priya Thomas, Julian Marc Walker, and many others. The frontispiece quotation from the late Dr. Feuerstein, which I believe describes the “multitude” within our discourse, is from the March/April 1990 issue of Yoga Journal.

This book is dedicated firstly to Scott Petrie, with whom I began to explore the heart of these subjects, and without whom this text would never have emerged. But also to my newborn son Jacob. I finish this book just as you emerge from the womb. I leave a part of myself behind in these pages, as I move forward with you.

1. quick-start guide

This book is many books at once. It is a “remix” of an ancient book. It is a meditation on how we translate things from different times and different cultures. It is a sharp critique of some old ideas that I believe no longer serve contemporary yoga. It is an invitation to yoga culture to begin to fully use the philosophical, psychotherapeutic, literary, and scientific tools of our age to enhance our self-inquiry and socio-political awareness. These threads are loosely woven together with the unfinished poetry of my life and how I have practiced so far. A brief road map might be helpful. I’ll describe the original text first, and then how I’ve structured my presentation of it, and my reflections on it.

Patañjali’s original text consists of 196 aphorisms that are notoriously difficult to translate, as is evident to anyone who reads multiple translations. The terse sayings are loosely organized into four chapters called pāda-s. Pāda means “foot”, and as a chapter heading, it implies, according to some oral traditions, the amount of knowledge that can be transferred during a comfortable walking conversation with a friend. Given the complexity of the first pāda — the book of integration, in my language — we can say one thing absolutely for sure about the ancients: they walked a lot, and took their time. Solvitur ambulando, said Diogenes of Sinope (an original mad yogi if ever there was one): “The question is resolved by walking.”

The concerns of the book as a whole are woven through each of the four pāda-s, but they are also thematically distinct. The first pāda (which I unfold in Part 4) lays out the heart of the system’s metaphysics. It announces the goal of practice — to unbind the patterned tensions of conscious and unconscious life through states of self-reflective meditation. It names the experiential patterns that it claims can be sweetened to the point of stable peace through diligent and relaxed practice, and lists the attitudes purported to help in this process. But then, with little instruction or preparation, the text leaps directly into a description of advanced meditative techniques, along with how they can alter the path of one’s life and the very nature of one’s consciousness. Many oral traditions tell students that because this first chapter lays out a superstructure of the yogic path in terms of an absolute beginning and end, it is meant for the most “advanced” readers who have already practiced (or somehow magically intuited) the various techniques that would guide them. Accordingly, I often advise the beginning student to bite first into the meat of pāda two, which focuses on the practical evolutionary methods that we most identify with yoga — ethics, attitudes, posture, breath, sensory refinement, and meditation — and how to feel and measure their results.

Pāda two (unfolded in Part 5), which I’m calling the book of practices, lays out the famed eight-limbed path in detail. For those of us who learn by doing, this is the place to start: brief but clear instructions on social ethics and internal attitudes, bodily poise, breathwork, sensory freedom, and the three general levels of contemplation. If you start here, the metaphysical speculations of pāda-s one, three, and four can be seen as supplemental and artistic reveries upon what may be possible when we sink into the complex peace of interdependence, and are able to focus ourselves with a minimum of internal conflict.

Pāda three (unfolded in Part 6), the book of wonders, makes sparkling correlations between areas of focused study and the natural insights that may flow from them. For example: There is an intuitive relationship between internal light, atoms, hidden things, and things that are far away. Meditating on the sun gives insight into the earth. In my presentation, this book presents meditation as an enhancement of our creative impulse.

The last pāda (unfolded in Part 7), the book of overflowing, presents meditation as an enhancement of our existential impulse. It plunges into questions of memory and change, then soars into the stratosphere of particle physics, to finally resolve into a relaxed vision of death as part of our continued learning:

Under a clearing sky, the desire for knowledge wanes. Within you, gravity, urge, and resolution integrate. You can see the flow of time behind you, and you know how it happened. Immersed in integrated relationship, consciousness sees itself evolving.

How have I organized my presentation? How might you want to navigate it?

There are eight Parts to threads of yoga, counting this one. If you’d like to quickly engage with what a decade of practice and consideration has done to Patañjali-s old book through my hands, you can skip immediately to Part 3 —“threads: the complete remix of the yoga sūtra-s of Patañjali”. This section consists of my entire prose “translation” of the yoga sūtra-s. I’ve presented the work firstly in prose to normalize it for a contemporary audience, so that it can be read without prejudice as we would read any other text we happen upon.

After encountering the complete text, you may want to rewind to “Introductory Notes” (Part 2), for some background on the origins of this remix, along with general thoughts on “what yoga needs now”, and the problems and opportunities of translation. Or, it might feel more useful for you to jump ahead into any of the core Parts of 4 through 7. Near the end of each of these Parts is a section called “my choices”, which describes how each original sūtra evolved into my “thread” through a process of comparative and creative translation. Those who have prior familiarity with Patañjali might find these sections provide a good orientation for the issues I wade into in more contemplative sections. Those without prior familiarity might find them a tad technical.

Distinct from the prose presentation of the full remix in Part 3, each of the core Parts on the chapters (4 through 7) includes two textually and visually distinct presentations of the pāda in question. Each Part opens with a traditional setting in which the aphorisms are numbered, and ends with a setting of the pāda as a contemporary poem, with line breaks. Most students of Patañjali agree that the aphorisms themselves only “sink in” through numerous repetitions. For me, content that is repeated in different forms seems to integrate more quickly. I also believe aesthetic flexibility promotes philosophical flexibility. To me, an integrated presentation on yoga should yoke or unite the techniques of form (creativity breaks neurotic patterns) with the aims of content (yoga heals neurotic patterns). If we’re going to write books about yoga, I think, we have to look carefully at the technology of writing and typesetting as an opportunity to reflect and perhaps release yoga’s creative promise.

Between the visually distinct versions of the pādas and the “choices” commentary, I’ve inserted personal contemplations and reveries on the many themes broached by Patañjali, as well as on our historical and current interactions with his worldview. These sections are rather eccentric. Some offer broad praise to the old text, and many are highly critical of it. This ambivalence is consistent with my general feeling towards the original: it is a marvelous document with serious flaws. In my opinion, grappling equally with both its gifts and its weaknesses will help contemporary yoga practice grow and evolve as a living culture. Part 8, the “Coda”, focuses in a more upbeat way on the feelings and questions that I hope will provoke further inquiry.

I’d like to say a few words about two key terms I use throughout this book. “Intersubjectivity” is the philosophical and psychological acknowledgement that experience and meaning are co-created through human relationship. It is an advancement from the “isolated mind” moods of earlier philosophies (Descartes), early psychologies (Freud), and most of Western science prior to quantum theory — all of which presume clear boundaries between the observer and the observed, the “I” and the “you”. Intersubjectivity posits that although we often feel separated from each other in private bubbles of meaning, our fundamental condition is one of togetherness and unconscious empathy, in which we intuit that the interior lives of those we are with are similar to our own, that the “you” I encounter is another “I” looking back at a “you”, who is myself. It is a crucial term to my presentation because Patañjali-s path is lonely to a fault, and rarely considers the impact of relationship upon psychic health. I read all of the possibilities and flaws of his system through this principle.

Another key term is “flesh”. This is the common English translation of la chair, a concept introduced by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) to enhance dialogue around the problem of the word “body”, which conveys a sense of separation from the world of which it is made and with which it is continuous. “Flesh” is anything but inert or unintelligent. “Flesh” feels, emotes, surges towards its goals, and even thinks. Replacing “body” for the most part with “flesh” also allows me to reduce reliance on the body’s traditional foil: the “mind”. Wherever possible, I have eliminated “mind” as an enclosed category discretely sequestered from “body”, replacing it with “thought” or “thinking”, which can both be felt activities of “flesh”. If there is one thing that yoga has definitely shown contemporary practitioners, it is that it makes no sense to separate “mind” from “body”. While multiple streams of inquiry are now breathlessly searching for the “mind-body connection”, many yoga practitioners carry the feeling that this “connection” does not need to be found or forged — it was simply never missing. I propose that we might go further in our discourse, and altogether resist the binary language that provokes us to believe that this flesh we share can be carved up into categories and parts. Perhaps we can begin to mend our alienation by amending the language that seems to make it solid. Perhaps we don’t need to search for the connection between things. We need to see that we are always-already living it.

2. introductory notes

2.1 restoring embodiment: a manifesto for a changing tradition

The legacy of yoga has been resurrected in our time through the innate pleasure of our flesh. The simplest techniques of breathing, spinal elongation, and joint fluidity have given countless flesh-alienated postmoderns a renewed sense of vitality, purpose, grounding, and connection. As media, technology, and hyper-urbanization abstract us from bodily experience, the reach of modern postural yoga has pulled our tissues into the daylight. And although there is considerable stretchy-pants spectacle involved, evoking complicated feelings about how the flesh should look or move, most practitioners know that yoga’s real gift is that of internal sensitivity leading to internal resolution. In modern yoga we are given a physical culture that rewrites the meaning of flesh from the inside out. If the breath isn’t relaxed, we know we’re not quite there. If thought has not stilled and focused into the waves of present sensation, we know there’s more (or less) work to do. Further: if the pleasure of musculo-skeletal alignment and warmed circulation does not somehow sweeten our interpersonal relationships, lend resilient courage to daily life, and inspire us towards social and ecological justice, we know we’re missing something. Through modern postural yoga we have remembered that our flesh innately wants to rejoice, connect, and serve — and that it does not lie.

This yoga renaissance is quietly rewriting a central theme of its parent tradition. The flesh has rarely if ever been considered as its own hero in older yoga cultures. At best, the flesh has been seen as a vessel for an unseen higher essence, and therefore an instrument for its own transcendence, as per the many Tantric and Nātha yoga lineages. Less positively, the flesh has been seen as the definitive proof of separation from the embrace of “divinity”, as in the bhakti yoga lineages. And perhaps the most negative view of all — the flesh as the repulsive devolution of consciousness and an obstacle to the recovery of self-knowledge (rather than the source of it) — has been the hallmark of ascetic views that in no way reflect our present values, yet echo stubbornly through our discourse and unspoken sentiments. The yoga sūtra-s of Patañjali fall squarely into this ascetic mood: compiled from the sayings of renunciates of many stripes who at the dawn of urbanization fled their families and social roles to tiny forest ashrams, where, with great austerity, they attempted to tame the unruly and desirous flesh towards their goal of transcendent epiphany.

Patañjali says little about the value of embodied sensation as he collates the wisdom of his harsh age. He says little about interpersonal love, and nothing of children or the environment. He presents an internalizing and subtractive path, in which ethics are a means towards social disentanglement, and the flesh has learning value to the extent we are disgusted by it (sūtra 2.40). In other words, Patañjali teaches exactly against the present zeitgeist of yoga culture. And yet the yoga sūtras is presented, largely uncritically, as a core text in most yoga education programmes throughout the world today.

The prominence of the old book may have more to do with its modern publishing history and the rise of global-yoga-guru-culture than to its fame within the broader tradition. Globetrotting Swami Vivekananda published the sūtra-s (as part of his seminal work Rāja Yoga) to popular acclaim in 1896, and vigorously promoted its transcendental message with his other-worldly charisma. But now, over a century later, why is it still better known to global yoga culture than arguably more famous and utilitarian yoga texts? Consider the Yoga Yājñavalkya, 12 chapters delivered in the much more digestible (and perhaps equitable) form of a dialogue between a husband and wife philosopher-duo. This text declares jīvātma paramātma saṃyogaḥ: “yoga is the union of the individual to the whole.” Or — the Yoga Vaśiṣṭha, a beloved text of 32,000 verses, consisting of a dialogue between the sage Vaśiṣṭha and Prince Rāma, who has returned disillusioned from his youthful world travels and is basically told by the old existentialist: “Good for you! Melancholia is the beginning of true growth.”

Has interest in the broader literature of yoga simply paled in the shadow of Patañjali-s austere monolith? Do we associate impenetrable brevity with ultimate truth? Are the opacity of the aphorisms ideal for agenda-driven cross-cultural misprision, insofar as we can project upon them anything we like? Or, more problematically, does our adherence to a minimalist ascetic text conceal a hidden wish to console our complex interpersonal suffering through social withdrawal and meditative narcissism? I would suggest we’re already accomplishing this consolation through consumerism, including the consumeristic aspects of contemporary yoga culture, and perhaps Patañjali-s original message of social disengagement subconsciously supports this.

But we are also powerfully enthralled by Patañjali-s unwavering attention to mental processes, not to mention the non-sectarian, do-it-yourself feel of the old text. There is something mystically attractive about an Axial Age description of thought and psychological patterning presented with such resonant authority. My experience is that many who encounter the aphorisms have the immediate sense that they arise out of a non-distractedness that our world and culture can rarely offer. They seem to suspend us in a mood of extended contemplation and confident stillness. One of the primary attractions of the text, regardless of its philosophical merits, is that it highlights the relative crudeness of our speed, our data-saturation, our ennui, our vulnerability to alienation and the banal. And in a world of limitless words, the economy of these aphorisms shines like the edge of a blade.

It is Patañjali-s close and precise attention that I wish to translate here, while leaving his metaphysics and asceticism behind. Philosophy will change through discourse: all tenets are temporary and unstable. What does not change is the quality of attention that makes our changing discourse evolutionary, as opposed to supplementary. I offer this text and commentary as an alternative speculation on what Patañjali-s attention and incision might offer us today, within a far different social-philosophical context than his own. A context in which renunciate withdrawal will not heal our interpersonal pain nor speak to our social diseases. A context in which we desperately need to be reminded of our embodiment, and grounded in ecological awareness. A context in which the magic of bodily pleasure that got us practicing in the first place becomes the basis for reaching out with love into the world that made us, has always held us, and which we never wish to leave.

2.2 on the method of “remixing”

threads of yoga is an experimental translation, insofar as trans means “to cross over or beyond”, and latus means “to carry”. To “translate” is to carry something over, and beyond.

The sounds of the word “translation” evoke their own meanings. Trans cues “trance”. Latere means “the hidden”, but comes into English as “lateral”. Thus: “to translate” might also be to carry something hidden, over and beyond, yet beside us, while entranced.

Sūtra means “thread”. Any translator of the yoga sūtra-s is carrying threads across time and culture, through revolutions of sentiment, thought, and technology, to be woven on new looms, into new cloth. Perhaps, in this metaphor, the warp-threads are the vertically constant frames of language, culture, audience, place, purpose, bias. And the weft-threads are our multiple responses, of varying colour and tension, shuttling across to bind the cloth. The warp is circumstance, the weft is creativity.

threads is not a direct translation from the Sanskrit. Even if I were a Sanskrit scholar, I’m sure I would be juggling too many sources of input and interference to ever hope for a 1:1 rendering into English. I’m enthralled by the old text itself and its aura, by dozens of previous translations and commentaries, fragments of oral tradition I have heard through the years, a thousand conversations with colleagues and strangers, vast cultural and historical divides, the new forests of contemporary psychology and neuroscience, and the strange, luminous fruit of my own practice. Thus, I’ve called it a “remix”.

The purpose of a remix is equal parts homage, adventure, reclamation, and pleasure. It collects the raw beats of the past and brands them, transparently, with the pulse of the present. In a “yoga 2.0” idiom (Petrie and Remski, 2010), this pulse asserts that relationship is more important than meditative bliss, metaphysics distracts from presence, consciousness is evolving new questions, and yoga is always changing, because its practitioners are.

I have purposefully entangled the threads of Patañjali-s efforts with my own reverie, criticism, and commentary to tarnish the presumption of objectivity that haloes most presentations of canonical texts. My choice in this work is to be honest about the fact that any translation of anything is a subjective re-creation — a remix. I also intend for the weaving of root-text and reverie to reflect the dialectic of personal growth so important to the ethos of yoga. In my experience, learning does not spring whole from the past, but is rather created in experiential dialogue between other (what one hears), and self (what one wishes to echo, or add), and others (those who discourse with you). It builds like a story, which is why I’ve included parts of my own story here. The learning arc of a story pitches and rolls, at times unfocused and disorderly, yet bending towards coherence upon some unreachable horizon.

Through the entanglements and multiple views of a reader-centred text, I have also sought to undermine my authorial voice, and to place my own (sometimes very strong) opinions into a dialogical context. Yoga philosophy has opened me up because it invited me to experience and discern for myself what is evolutionarily helpful. Because the yoga tradition has no central authority, I feel its authors should presume none, and consciously share power with readers and listeners. If writing is to convey meaning about yoga, it should be writing that is co-created and shared. Dialogue eschews the comprehensive, and, continuing late into the night by flickering candles, elevates the elliptical.

The oral nature of the original yoga sūtra-s haunts my process, and me. Their compression, pulsing metre, and grammatical minimalism served as a kind of mnemonic shorthand for legions of (textually) illiterate practitioners who recited them trance-like throughout the generations, perhaps pausing between each section for impromptu commentary around the campfire. (I was brought up in a traditional Catholic environment: the pulse of plainchant may be the genetic root of my fascination.) Contemporary contact with the sūtra-s has mainly been broadcast through the flattened affect of typography, which by its static nature overdetermines its message, invites criticism but not dialogue, and stares vacantly at the lonely reader like an epitaph. The ossified text is like the Baudrillardian object: always already laughing at your incomprehension.

I’ve heard many oral tradition teachers say that the sūtra-s should never have been written down, because writing destroys both memory and the intimacy of oral instruction. And yet they are written: elsewhere, and now here. The question cannot be whether we should limit textual representations of important ideas, but whether we can leverage more indeterminate and therefore creative meaning into the representations we cast. For me, this invites adventurousness with the materiality of writing.

As I mentioned in the “quick-start guide”, I have given the textuality of my remix a fluid mood, presenting it in prose form, in sentence form with contemporary poetic line-breaks, in its conventional mode of one aphorism per line, as well as aphorism-plus-commentary interlaced. I hope this visual flexibility helps to hint at the oral and performative quality of the aphorisms, and to loosen the feelings of calcification that often accrue to “important books”. My thought was that if this book is visually variegated, as the oral tradition is variegated in accent, tone, projection, aural ambience, digression, and anecdote, perhaps it can actually begin to do the very yoga it describes: to disrupt and reprogram both conscious and unconscious patterning with moments of perceptual wonderment and unexpected integration.

Part of my method in this book is carried over from my earlier life in contemporary poetry, in which the elements of meaning — typographical marks and sounds — are played with like paint instead of being enslaved to symbolic systems that presume to offer precise definitions. My writing career began amongst “language” poets, who used sounds and typography as gestures, pointers, placeholders, objects of play and comedy, and pivots of irony. They taught me to juggle words and locate meaning within the air, rather than pinning it to where they fell. (You might feel this process resonate in the sections called “my choices” in which I cycle through the word-options offered by previous translators and my own reverie.) Language poetry taught me what I later went on to learn through chanting mantras: language is continually overflowing its consensus meanings. They reminded me of what I had learned thirty years before from my toddling brother as I watched sounds and words blossom from the space between his head and heart: language is much more than a descriptive tool. Language is a fountain (a font) of primal urge and emotion. It is the aural trace of the endless play of our internal voices. When we use it playfully, it co-creates with us. But when we domesticate it to a conceptual purpose, our most serious grammar and richest vocabularies become very fragile nets through which most of the world escapes. The philosopher who wishes to think newly must contend with the limitations of language, as Wittgenstein shows. Or they must defy the limitations with creativity, as we see in the neologisms of Heidegger. For there are more things both revealed and concealed in our language alone, to paraphrase the Bard, than are dreamt of in all our philosophies.

My central goal is to bring the yoga sūtra-s back into relationship with us as yogis, creative readers, and closet philosophers. This first requires a kind of de-familiarization, which chips away at the banal authority of the canonical. Whenever I encounter a book that seems to project authority or canonicity, I feel entranced but disconnected: I am both mystified and blasé. It’s not unlike the feeling I have towards my iPhone: it is beautiful, seems complete, and yet I haven’t a clue how it works, and I become resigned to my ignorance. Somehow it shoves me towards melancholic withdrawal from its closed perfection.

Demystifying Patañjali is like unlocking the phone and open-sourcing its code so that everyone can play with it, altering its values, and perhaps its very purpose. It changes from a product into an object of relationship. The tone is not declarative, and the feeling is one of “never-finished”. We have moved from an “exegetical” mode, in which our goal is to render old ideas with faith and reverence, to a “hermeneutic” mode, in which we are reflecting as much upon the old ideas as we are upon how we respond to them, and how we use them in the present tense. Leaving exegesis behind, we move away from an implicit endorsement of the artifact (the original yoga sūtra-s, in this case) as a “perfect” or “complete” system, and recognize its innovative value as a collection of tools that we will use differently from our forebears, because we are building different things. Exegesis says, “Our goal is to faithfully reconstruct the eternally-relevant meaning of this old book, so that we can follow its holy intentions perfectly.” Hermeneutics says, “Our goal is to understand what this text may have said to its audience at the time, and to investigate how it’s been interpreted and used through the generations, and to explore our many responses to it now as we continue to grow in its light and shadow.”

The hermeneutic flow from de-familiarization to open-source and demystification tends to have an embodying effect. We can feel it when our reading overwhelms linguistic habit or cognitive faculty, which is the goal of most contemporary poetry. When we read the unexpected, there is a bodily response. We gasp, sit a little straighter, or hug the page close to our hearts. I think that this is the primary learning response that we crave. It is fueled by newness.

I’m publishing this work in a venerable yogic tradition: solo — i.e., without the help of a formal publishing company and its marketing and distribution networks. I’d like to see if this remix has enough juice to naturally wick to wherever the discourse is dry. I’d like to see if this book can circulate the way I imagine yoga itself once did, before the age of academic validation or consumer branding: by word-of-mouth and from heart to heart. By using print-on-demand technology, I will also be able to amend this text according to the feedback and criticism I receive, and release new editions with relative ease.

Such points return me to my main theme. In my experience, the discourse on Patañjali has seemed vertically-controlled, set-in-stone, theological, overly reverential, and penitentially nostalgic for an inaccessible time and place. That the vertical influence continues is not a surprise: the aphorisms can easily project a paternal certitude that consoles the postmodern heart. Nor is it surprising in terms of content: as I will show, Patañjali presents a transcendent, hard-dualist escape route for the despairing. His onward-and-upward path encourages dissociation from place, things, and people: hardly what is needed in a culture of disembodied hyper-individualism wrecking havoc on the environment. What we really yearn for are new strategies for nurturing the intersubjective: the recognition that by honouring and mirroring each other’s unique needs and stories and internal lives, we come to know who we are. We see these strategies developing in contemporary yoga culture around the world, wherever it manages to resist consumerism: ecological stewardship, community-building, non-violent communication, the yoga of relationship. We value horizontal networks of knowledge. It seems only natural that such a progressive culture would begin to revise and even rewrite its oldest books.

I have been asked: “Why use or even refer to the original at all? Clearly, you are simply creating a new philosophy.” Perhaps. Though more accurately: I am blending philosophy, psychotherapy, literary theory, anthropology, and aesthetics. (I am specifically indebted to the legacy of psychoanalysis for my notions around the childhood-developmental and psycho-evolutionary stages displayed in yoga’s history.) In any case, I rely on the original because like a parent it has been a touchstone of my individuation process. It gazes at me, and through me. Its aphoristic form carries mesmerizing power. Patañjali-s relentless focus upon the structural problems of consciousness remains the root yogic concern, and this unwavering gaze will continue to inspire generations. This project has shown me more clearly what the old book contained, and how this scans against what I have come to value, through practicing both with and against it. As the excellent philosopher he was, I think Patañjali would approve: I have tried to wrestle his truths down to the ground of my own.

The diversity of my sources mirrors the mode in which most of us come into contact with Patañjali today. In fragments, for the most part. Favoured quotations flash through yoga teacher training manuals and across social media, and under the e-mail signature lines of professional practitioner-teachers. Now, the teachings of yoga. . . . The postures of meditation should be stable and filled with ease. . . . Suffering that has not yet come can be avoided. . . . It is a fragmentary text yielding fragmentary memes. The aphorisms seem to proclaim personal revelation, but in an open sense, as though they should be obvious to everyone. The vague quoting gives me the same feeling I get when walking by an old vinyl record shop, watching hipsters pore over obscure discs that radiate an eccentric and seductive authenticity. The experience of encountering bits of Patañjali is like hearing the hooks of several compelling songs and wanting to splice them together on top of a private rhythm. As anyone who goes to DJ shows has felt, the friction-point of where the hooks join is the heart of the dance. What will he lay down next, into this mix?

As postmoderns we are natural bricoleurs, naturally improvisational. We don’t assume anything to be complete in itself, but rather that hints of completeness will emerge, temporarily, through shuffling and recombination. The best teachers are aware of the responsibility of remixing, because they know they have picked and chosen according to chance exposure and personal preference. The aphorisms of one zeitgeist meld seamlessly into the aphorisms of another: Patañjali, zen, mindfulness language, the Tao.

The best teachers can also see that the aphorism is energetically confusable with the branding tag-line, and they work to allow experience rather than fashion to be the glue that coheres their vision. The best teachers avoid scratching the discs as they transition from one to the other.

I’ve been told by orthodox practitioners that I would never really understand Patañjali unless I spent a decade studying it line by line with a qualified master. They’re right: I would never understand the text that way, i.e., through a single lens. But I’m afraid that what I’ve seen in my fellow practitioners who are also devotees to one guru or another is that the strict student-teacher approach is as much motivated by an attraction to the social control of the learning group as it is by the yearning to receive a “complete account”. Feeling that you have the inside track on the sutra-s seems always to be accompanied by feeling that you are unconditionally loved by your chosen authority figure. But do postmoderns feel unconditional love? Do we even want it? Do postmoderns centralize authority? Or do we crowdsource it?

Ironically, the impulse to bricolage in this text may be inspired by Patañjali himself or, more broadly, by the general production modes of ancient texts as they crystallize out of their watery orality. As Edwin Bryant (2009) and Georg Feuerstein (1989) suggest, Patañjali is collating the loops and hooks of several generations into a non-denominational heartbeat, nodding with equal appreciation towards the Jains, the Sāṃkhyans, and the bhakti-s of his day. He’s spinning the discs, splicing and cutting, and we dance.

It is thematically appropriate that this project was born intersubjectively. It emerged in dialogue with my friend Scott Petrie, in a barn on a mountain in Vermont, during a month when all of our eccentric learning through the years seemed pulled through benign gravity into our hearts. We read, debated, deconstructed, and reassembled each aphorism countless times. We found ourselves re-animating this gleaming artifact of our adopted tradition with our uncertain breath. It felt like we proved to ourselves the treasured thesis: nothing true and useful emerges alone, but through relationship. Our intention was guided by an old oral translation of sūtra: “tool (tra) for the enhancement of the good (sū)”.

2.3

Patañjali-s old book stimulates a subtle tension from the very first page: the desire for a complete answer to life. The sūtra-s begin with an implicit promise: the core problem of human life will be resolved. Instantly, a feeling of other-worldly authority pervades the text. For many of us, reading further involves a seamless seduction into this other world. What happens there? How is it different from our own? How much older and more serene? How much wiser are these words than those we hear within?

Meanwhile, the quiet integrations of any and every moment can slip like grains of sand through our fingers. Every breath contains a pause. The heart beats without effort. You watch tall grasses reveal patterns of wind. Food melts in your mouth. An emotion rips through the flesh, erasing your name. A preverbal child gazes at you and you remember the open sky. Your lover looks downcast, and your chest splits. Before sleeping, you float for an instant, suspended between gravity and space.

The power of Patañjali-s aphoristic voice vibrates deeply. But it would be a mistake to confuse elliptical charisma for truth. Perhaps he has the answers to life, and perhaps he doesn’t. Ultimacy is the enemy of evolution: the paint is never dry. Of the very origins of the universe, the earliest poem of yoga culture, the Ṛg veda, offers: “Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it? Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation? He who surveys it in the highest heaven, he surely knows — or maybe he does not!” (Pannikar, 58). This much older view puts all metaphysical speculation into perspective, and keeps mystery as palpable as the unfindable edge between your fingers and this page. Holding and enjoying uncertainty keep all threads of thought and sentiment active, changeable, responsive — in a word: dangling.

One way of embracing Patañjali-s tone of certainty might be to remember that it is not only inherent to the impersonal compression of the aphoristic form, but may also be derived from that kind of teetering confidence we detect in our most artistic and adventurous thinkers. The greatest themes are often very anxious creations. We risk everything as we conceive of the whole.

On the other hand, we might also remember that the author is actually no-one to us. So little is known of the historical Patañjali that current scholarship can’t even establish whether he is a single writer, or a collective pseudonym for several generations of seekers, echoing their aphorisms back and forth through time. Most commentators use the name Patañjali as though they were referring to a single enlightened sage who is giving a single enlightened discourse. (I’m guilty of this as well, because using the name makes for better flow, and I appreciate the drama of the personification. But really I don’t think of Patañjali as a person, but as a community and its system.) The power of a text that is assumed to have come from an actual realized person is considerable. It makes it seem as though Someone really knows the truth, and one had better listen to him. This of course adds tension to the process of translation, as we become pious with concern about what “he” intended by a particularly obscure aphorism. But can intention really be discerned in a crowdsourced collection of sayings? There’s definitely something about our psyches that makes it easier for us to accept and endorse the words of an individual than the words of a collective. But acceptance and endorsement is not our task: inquiry and creativity are. Perhaps remembering that Patañjali carries the voices of many will encourage us to add our own voices to the broad margins of his sparse pages.