When You Control Your Mind, Nothing Can Bind You
Sutra 2: Yogaś Citta Vṛtti Nirodhaḥ — The Restraint of the Modification of the Mind-Stuff Is Yoga.
If you control your mind, you have controlled everything. Then there is nothing in this world to bind you.
What a gut punch.
The last lines of the Swami’s commentary on Patanjali’s second sutra (which is considered to be the most important one) hit hard. If we take them literally, it means true freedom is only ever a moment away.
That’s tough to hear if, like me, you’ve spent a lot of time in your life blaming one thing or another for your problems. For example:
“The housing market is so inflated, I’m never going to be able to afford a house. Those damn boomers took away my chance at being financially free.”
However accurate that might ultimately be in terms of economics, I’m certainly not doing anything to actually achieve financial freedom by whining about it to other millennials in the same situation. Here’s another:
“I’d love to meditate and become peaceful, but I have kids and work and dishes and dogs and a hundred other things that require my time so sitting down for 5 minutes a day isn’t for me yet…maybe once everyone is through college.”
Don’t we all tend to think in this linear fashion? Once I’ve finished X, then Y. But yogic philosophy challenges us to think differently about cause and effect. If you take the past and future as ultimately illusory (always non-real and composed merely on composite projections of our minds) the most palpable chance you truly have to be free is only ever to be found in the here and now. And it only takes a moment to arrive there.
Obviously, in practice, creating freedom in the being takes longer than a moment. A skilled meditation teacher might teach you to observe the thoughts with only a few minutes of instruction. You can drop into that attentive experience at a ‘moments’ notice. But there is truly as aspect of sustainability and patience to consider.
Once you’ve noticed the thoughts, then what? What if they keep coming faster and faster? What if you’re trying to ‘control your mind’ in the midst of crisis? Can you keep your mind ‘settled and undisturbed’ with a toddler screaming in the backseat of your car? What if bullets are whizzing overhead as you crawl through barbed wire at boot camp?
Here’s the second of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras:
योगश्चित्तवृत्तिनिरोध
yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ
yo-gash chit-ta vrit-ti ni-ro-dha-ha
The restraint of the modification of the mind-stuff is Yoga.
There are at least two ways to read that translation.
Learning to calm and quiet the mind is the practice of yoga.
When the mind is calm and quiet, that is Yoga.
Remember that yoga is a word used to signify the discipline and practice of these things, but also to describe the state of “union” that occurs once the mind is quiet. So if there’s a ‘union’ involved, what is united with what?
The way you choose to think (or not think) about this probably depends mainly on your religious or philosophical leanings. Here’s a way to at least rationalize the meaning of yoga, taken as the state of union that occurs after the quieting of the mind:
Q: When the thoughts and mental chatter are not prevalent, what remains?
A: Attention itself (the space in which those things are experienced)
Q: When the attention is not distracted by thoughts and mental chatter, what does it perceive?
A: The present moment (the space which that attention perceives)
So we have this state of awareness we can take as the “goal” of yoga practice. But when we “arrive” there, can we stay?
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and state that I think noticing this profound idea of “freedom lies in the present moment” is not all that hard — and maybe that’s why many of us completely miss it during day to day life. It’s like seeing your own nose without a mirror…you quite literally can always ‘see’ it as you look around the world, but we actually filter it out of our conscious awareness in order to pay better attention to all the things that “matter”. The nose is always there, so we take it for granted, or forget about it entirely.
The present moment is also always there, and truly that’s where everything of real consequence is happening. But our perception of it becomes obscured by the cloud of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that arise within that space of perception (citta vritti — the fluctuations of the mind). So to return to that direct experience of here and now, we have to let those undulations subside.
Notice I didn’t say: “we have to make the mind stop”. You’ll usually find a nice little debate in yoga/meditation circles around the idea of “cessation”. Traditionally, the experience of Nirvana or Samadhi (complete and total bliss) is referenced as coming after a yogi has achieved cessation of thought…when the mind is completely blank so that there is nothing obscuring the direct perception of the here and now, or the Divine, depending who you ask.
But Sri Swami Satchitananda is specific in his choice of words for translating this Sutra. He writes: “the restraint of the modification of the mind-stuff is Yoga.”
This implies that it’s not completely eradicated. A force that is restrained is not one that has disappeared. A reactive dog kept on a leash might appear calm and peaceful, but the moment that restraint is lifted, it will likely dash away from its owner and seek out whatever stimulus calls first.
So I return to the idea of sustainability with this restraint. You cannot keep your dog always on a leash. Eventually you’ll have to let them off otherwise you’ll be a cruel owner indeed, and your dog will always want to escape.
Most people provide their dogs (and their minds) the faux-freedom of being “off-leash” only in certain contexts, such as within the safety of the four walls of home (or known ideas and concepts). There is quite a challenge in training your dog to stay nearby without needing a leash. The first time you unclip the collar at the beach or park, perhaps by chance the dog is still preoccupied with you and doesn’t notice that it can run off if it so chooses. You might think freedom has been achieved in just that one act. But inevitably a seagull or another dog comes by and they will chase it.
The question is not: “can you arrive?” it’s “can you stay?”
The practice of asana in the yogic path is aligned to provide us a format for developing resilience in our bodies and minds when oriented towards these ends.
Arriving in warrior 3 is not hard. Staying there for 1 minute? That’s hard.
Taking your dog off the leash at the park with no one around is not hard. Walking them leash-less down a city sidewalk with trash, people, and pigeons? That’s hard.
Taking a few breaths in the morning before anyone else is up is not hard. Taking a few breaths with your kid screaming at you from the back of your car? That’s hard.
But we aren’t going through all this sweat, trial, and trouble just to be able to do easy stuff.
For me, the key recognition for approaching this Sutra is that “restraining the mind-stuff” requires repeated effort, and patience.
Once you’ve interrupted the stream of thoughts and arrive in the present moment, the real work has begun. Can you stay there until the undulations fully subside? Can you learn to stay there without trying? Remember that once you’ve thought “Ok, I’m here practicing yoga or meditating to be present…” you are distracted by thought once again.
We tend to think that because we are doing something that there ought to be an output correlated to that action. We are accustomed to these cycles of cause and effect, and have more or less constructed our worldview based on them. Do this, become wealthy. Think this, become happy.
Yoga challenges us to invert that paradigm.
The metaphor most often used to expound on these instruction is that of a still body of water.
When a rock is thrown into a body of still water, there’s the instant that the rock pierces the surface, and then there are the ripples that expand outward from that place. The ripples remain moving through the water well after the moment the rock disturbed its stillness. So it is with the mind.
Imagine trying to grab those ripples and stop them somehow, or even trying to smooth out the surface with your hand. You won’t succeed in calming the water. In fact, you’ll only perpetuate its disturbance, creating more and more ripples.
That’s the mentality that derails most of us on the early steps of this yogic journey. In this heavily individualistic iteration of western thought, we are generally taught that we are the authors of our own fates in every sense, or that we ought not to want something not created by our own hand. If we are to become enlightened, it’s by discovering the right combination of this, that, and working hard…
Additives!
What we need instead is subtraction.
Removing the debris from the water allows us to see through it more clearly. That’s where the first two limbs of yoga, the observances (yamas and niyamas) are presented. We won’t go into those yet, but for now, just picture stirring matcha or cocoa into hot water. You agitate the water in cycles to keep the powder mixed in well. Once you let it sit still, over time, the majority of the powder settles to the bottom.
If the cup is not very deep, even a little swirl or swish will call that settled debris up to the surface. If only from Dr. Dre, we all know the euphemism “still waters run deep” — right? In the simplest sense, the practice of yoga is working to deepen the steadiness of your mind thoroughly so that the inevitable disturbances (rocks, winds, jumping fish) arise and subside just as quickly.
Since those things are outside of yourself, there’s nothing you can do to control them.
There will be turbulent times when your mind is slapped continuously and sloshed to-and-fro.
But if we’ve committed to the work yoga presents us of purifying that mind-stuff, the waters remain clear throughout the disturbance, beginning always to return to stillness and clarity the moment those intrusions subside.
The restraint of the modification of the mind-stuff is Yoga.