Patanjali's Yoga Sutras

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Literal translation: “Their objects [those of the senses] with yoking to them broken by ceasing the similar mental impressions within = pratyahara or controlling sensing”

Meaning: “Your senses normally ‘yoke’ or join with objects in the real world. Clearing your mental impressions interrupts this otherwise automatic yoking of senses with material things. This is called pratyahara: abstraction and supervision of sensory life.”

A chant in English: “Clear your mind so you can control your sensory life like you can your thoughts.”

Definition: Most translations call pratyahara “sense withdrawal.” However, a slightly more accurate phrase might be “sense abstraction” or “sense management.” You make your sensory impressions become of no greater or lesser importance than random thoughts, memories, and emotions that may pass through you.

This is accomplished, says this sutra, not by fighting against or shutting off each sense impression. Instead, according to this fifth limb of Astanga yoga, you clear your mind of sensory impressions in meditation, just as you would clear it—during meditation—of mental ideas, memories, and emotions. The well-cleared mind is one that can resist not just internal thinking but also external sensory input. The world remains present to you, but only through peripheral awareness, at most.

Some medieval translations—in tune, once again, with ascetic practices—suggest that you withdraw your sense organs from the world forever by living in a cave or simple dwelling with the most rudimentary of surroundings. But much harder—and more accurately, what this sutra really says—is to manage your senses wherever you may be. “Yoga” means “yoking”: it is imbedded in this sutra in the Sanskrit “asamprayoge.” The entire word says that you “unyoke” your awareness from the sensory world by clearing your mental field in meditation.

This unhooking from automatic sensory life is a significant turn in the development of a meditator. The Reverend Jaganath Carrera says, “Many seekers...find [it] is often the first step that leads from belief…to faith…and to self-transformation.” This is a sea change from a rational, intellectual belief about meditation to a dawning experience of the inner clear mind.

In its increasing clarity, you then gradually slow your constant, automatic yoking with sense objects. Vyasa says that as a queen bee flies from one hive to another and is followed by all the worker bees, so the mind, calming itself, brings calm to all the buzzing of the sensory organs. The mind no longer constantly amplifies sights, sounds, smells, etc. by attaching mental meanings and emotional responses to them. Instead, you gain the ability to be aware of sense impressions as simple data that you may choose to remember or ignore.

Comment: This change in focus is a central part of the type of meditation called mindfulness. In mindfulness, you become calm and clear during the mind’s constant reactions to everything, and you gradually replace these responses with an ever more simple, pure awareness of the moment. In doing so, you then give yourself a choice: you can think about what your senses report, or you can let the data pass. You don’t banish reality; rather, you clear it of unnecessary connections. In mindfulness, when you are doing the dishes, you simply do the dishes. Likewise, in pratyahara or sense control, you do the dishes without developing a thought, memory, or emotion about each dish or motion of your hands: you simply just do the dishes, aware of the act(s), but not adding thoughts, memories, or emotions.

Sensory impressions are not wrong or bad. They are an undeniable part of life that even the most developed mystics must attend to at times. They are necessary if you plan to continue living on earth. Whether you are a hermit in a cave, a householder with a family, or a professional with a job, there are multiple tasks each day that you must assume: keeping your utensils and home clean, talking, making decisions. With pratyahara—sense control, or management of your mind field—you learn to act mindfully with a clear head. You develop this ability first in meditation or in small, daily commitments to mindfulness; then you spread it through more of each day, your life, and yourself.

Literal translation: “From this [Sutra 2.54], paramount subjugation of any sense organ”

Meaning: “Sutra 2.54 results eventually in the highest obedience of your senses.”

Definition: This sutra continues the one before it by saying that successful pratyahara or management of the senses gives you highest control of them. It does not mean that you snuff them out. You handle them. Gradually you gain the power to clear them away within you whenever needed.

Comment: The ancient Hindu Katha Upanishad offers an excellent metaphor for this: your True Self is the chariot master, your mind the reins, and the senses are your horses straining to race around the arena of sense objects in the world. You gradually learn not just to control where the horses go but also whether they run, walk, or even rest in a contented state, simply standing and just being present.

Similarly in the West, regarding the senses, Plato developed a metaphor of the charioteer controlling two horses. One horse has reason and morality. It must control the other one, said Plato, which possesses spontaneous passion and desire.*

On a nonmeditation level, another name for such control is “delayed gratification.” This psychological act uses reason (e.g., one of Plato’s horses) to put off experiencing a particular sense delight until a later time. The idea isn’t necessarily to get rid of thoughts and feelings, but rather to disconnect them from automatic reactions and reorient them as your spiritual self needs them.

A Western example of pratyahara occurs in the biblical story of Jesus of Nazareth’s beginning ministry in Israel. First he went into the desert to fast and pray for forty days. Soon after, he joined a wedding party in Cana, probably taking part in its feasting, drinking of wine, and perhaps even its group dancing, just as would have been expected of all guests. But he was not lost in sensual gratification (even as some of the guests quite likely were). Rather, he probably retained the lessons of his desert meditations about the senses. From a clear mind, likely, he let his sense impressions flow like water, neither forbidding them nor becoming trapped in them or attaching unnecessary thoughts, memories, and emotions to them.

- Ch. 3-A (TBA), the final 3 Limbs of Astanga yoga, begins with Sutra 3.1. -

Sanskrit Text: Patanjali, c. 400 BCE-400 CE

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See also Meditationary.org, a Meditation Dictionary; and BodyMeditation.org, Introducing Yoga Meditation.

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