Perhaps one of the most widely known definitions of yoga is found in the 1,800-year-old
Yoga-Sutra by the sage Patanjali. It reads "yoga is the restriction
of the fluctuation of consciousness" (yogash-citti-vrtti-nirodhah).
If you haven't studied classical yoga, as the system Patanjali outlines in this
manual is usually called, you might wonder what he is talking about. In plain
English he is saying that yoga is really nothing more than a method for calming
your mind. Why you want to do this and how you accomplish it is what the Yoga-Sutra
is basically all about.
Unlike today's more celebrated practice of Hatha Yoga, which is a resolutely
body-based approach to self-knowledge and self-realization, classical yoga focuses
on citta (pronounced chit-ta), which variously denotes "attending,
observing, thinking, imagining, reflecting, intelligence, reason," and
is probably best rendered as "consciousness." I suppose each of us
has an intuition about the nature of consciousness – after all, were
all conscious beings – but no doubt we would have a difficult time, if
pressed, to say what consciousness is exactly. For Patanjali, citta
is the result of a confluence, or as he says "correlation", between
two eternal – and eternally separate – principles, the person
(purusha) and nature (prakrti). The person is our authentic
self, the immaterial, omniscient, never-changing, joyful witness, or "seer"
of the play of the material, insentient, forever- changing nature, or the "seen."
Nature includes not only the physical world around us, but also the "contents"
of our own consciousness, all the thoughts, emotions, memories and whatnot that
define what we think of as our personality. Nature has a twofold purpose: to
provide us with experience and lead us, ultimately, to emancipation.
