Raja Yoga (the Yoga Sūtras with commentary) — trans. Swami Vivekananda (1896)
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The translator’s English as printed (Swami Vivekananda). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
1^2 R\]\ YOGA.
simply, whether this experience which comes to the duck is the duck's forefathers' experience, or the duck's own experience. Modern scientific men hold that it belongs to the body, but the Yogis hold that it is the experience of the mind, transmitted through the body. This is called the theory of reincarnation. We have seen that all our knowledge, whether w^e call it perception or reason, or instinct, must come through that one channel called experience, and all that we now call instinct is the result of past experience, degenerated into instinct, and that instinct regenerates into reason again. So on throughout the universe, and upon this has been built one of the chief arguments for reincarnation, in India, The recurring experiences of various fears, in course of time, produce this clinging to life. That is why the child is instinctively afraid, because the past experience of pain is there. Even in the most learned men, who know that this body will go, and who say " never mind ; we have hundreds of bodies ; the soul cannot die " — even in them, with all their intellectual convictions, we still find this clinging on to life. What is this clinging to life ? We have seen that it has become instinctive. In the psychological language of the Yogis it has become Samskaras. The Samskaras, fine and hidden, are sleeping in the Chitta. All these past experiences of death, all that which we call instinct, is experience become subconscious. It lives in the Chitta, and is not inactive, but is working underneath. These Chitta Vrittis, these mind-waves, which are gross, we can appreciate and
YOGA APHORISMS
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