Subject of this seminar: "Samadhi and Sadhana Pada" - Chapters 3 and 4
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras are the classical work of the Yoga School of thought, one of the Six Darśanas studied in the Bhakti Tirtha course. They focus on how to attain direct experience and realization of the puruṣa, or the individual self. As the classical treatise on the Vedic understanding of the mind and consciousness and on techniques of meditation and self-realization, it has exerted immense influence over the religious practices of Hinduism in India and, more recently, in the West. For Vaiṣṇavas, the Yoga Sūtras are especially helpful in understanding the first two chapters of Bhakti-rasāmṛita-sindhu.
The mind has the nature of not being in the present. It is always in the past or future. The characteristic of the senses is that they can only function in the present. The nose cannot smell a fragrance that is coming tomorrow or that was there yesterday. We can only hear through our ears what is being spoken now. If you can hook your your sense onto something it likes, the mind goes along with that sense into the present moment. This is the easiest way to bring the mind into the present state.
