Raja Yoga (the Yoga Sūtras with commentary) — trans. Swami Vivekananda (1896)

All these various sorts of impressions have one source, ignorance. We have first to learn what ignorance is. All of us think that " I am the body," and not the Self, the pure, the effulgent, the ever blissful, and that is ignorance. We think of man, and see man as body. This is the great delusion.

6. Egoism is the identification of the seer •sirith the instrument of seeing.

The seer is really the Self, the pure one, the ever holy, the infinite, the immortal. That is the Self of man. And what are the instruments ? The Chitta, or mindstuff, the Buddhi, determinative faculty, the Manas, or mind, and the Indriyani, or sense organs. These are the instruments for him to see the external world, and the identification of the Self with the instruments is what is called the ignorance of egoism. We say " I am the mind, I am thought ; I am angry, or I am happy." How can we be angry, and how can we hate ? We should identify ourselves with the Self; that cannot change. If it is unchangeable, how can it be one moment happy, and one moment unhappy ? It is formless, infinite, omnipresent. What can change it ? Beyond all law. What can affect it ? Nothing in the universe can produce an effect on it, yet, through ignorance, we identify ourselves with the mind-stuff, and think we feel pleasure or pain.

7. Attachment is that which dwells on pleasure.

We find pleasure in certain things, and the mind, hke a current, flows towards them, and that, following the pleasure centre, as it were, is attachment. We are never attached to anyone in whom we do not find pleasure. We find pleasure in very queer things sometimes, l)ut the definition is just the same ; wherever we find pleasure, there we are attached.

8. Aversion is that which dwells on pain.

That which gives us pain we immediately seek to get away from.

9. Flowing through its own nature, and established even in the learned, is the clinging to life.

This clinging to life you see manifested in every animal, and upon it many attempts have been made to build the theory of a future life, because men like their lives so much that they desire a future life also. Of course it goes without saying that this argument is without much value, but the most curious part of it is that, in Western Countries, the idea tliat this clinging to life indicates a possibility of a future life applies only to men, but does not include animals. In India this clinging to life has been one of the arguments to prove past experience and existence. For instance, if it be true that all our knowledge has come from experience, then it is sure that that which we never experienced we cannot imagine.

or understand. As soon as chickens are hatched they begin to pick up food. Many times it has been seen where ducks have been hatched by hens, that, as soon as they came out of the eggs, they flew to water, and the mother thought they would be drowned. If experience be the only source of knowledge, where did these chickens learn to pick up food, or the duckhngs that the water was their natural element ? If you say it is instinct, it means nothing — it is simply giving a word, but is no explanation. What is this instinct ? We have many instincts in ourselves. For instance, most of you ladies play the piano, and remember, when you first learned, how carefully you had to put your fingers on the black and the white keys, one after the other, but now, after long years of practice, you can talk with your friends, and your hand goes on just the same. It has become instinct. So with every work we do ; by practice it becomes instinct, it becomes automatic, but so far as we know, all the cases which we now regard as automatic, are degenerated reason. In the language of the Yogi, instinct is involved reason. Discrimination becomes involved, and gets to be automatic Samskaras. Therefore it is perfectly logical to think that all we call instinct in this world is simply involved reason. As reason cannot come without experience, all instinct is, therefore, the result of past experience. Chickens fear the hawk, and ducklings love the water, and these are both the result of past experience. Then the question is whether that experience belongs to a particular soul, or to the body