Patanjali is known as the father of modern yoga – not because he invented yoga, which was already there in various forms, but because he assimilated it into a system. Shiva, the Adiyogi or first yogi, transmitted yoga to the Saptarishis, or the seven sages, many thousands of years ago. Adiyogi had the highest understanding of human nature, but he didn’t put anything in writing. He was too wild to be a scholar. Patanjali came much later and saw that it was getting too diversified and complex for anyone to understand in any meaningful way. So he assimilated and included all aspects of yoga into a certain format, as the Yoga Sutras.
Formulas for realisation
“Sutra” literally means “a thread”. Or in modern language, we can say it is like a formula. Anyone who knows the English alphabet, even a kindergarten child, can say E=mc², but there is an enormous amount of science behind that little formula, which most people do not understand. The sutras are like this. Out of ignorance, people have taken these sutras and are just trying to implement it as it is. The thread is vital but that is not a goal by itself. There can never be a garland without the thread but no one ever wears a garland for the sake of the thread. It was for each master to put his own kind of flowers, or beads, or pearls, or diamonds, or whatever he likes in the garland.
The Yoga Sutras are a tremendous document about life and the most uninteresting book on the planet. It is the driest and dullest book you can read. Patanjali does not teach any practice in them. He did this intentionally, and his mastery over language and composition was such that he wrote it in a way that no scholar would be interested because the idea is, this is a formula to open up life. If people like the poetry and literary part of it, all kinds of people will read it and misinterpret it.
The sutra will mean something only to a person who is exploring his consciousness and is in a certain level of experience. Each sutra is a method. If just one sutra becomes a reality within you, it will explode you into a completely new dimension of experience; you don’t have to read all two hundred sutras.
“…and now, Yoga”
If you look at Patanjali, as an enlightened being, he can’t be more enlightened than someone else. There is no such thing. Realisation is realisation. But as a man and above all as an intellect, the breadth of his understanding of life is so big that today’s scholars argue that everything he did cannot be one man’s work, many people must have worked on it. But it is one man’s work. He is probably one of the greatest intellects ever on this planet.
Just to give you some sense of what kind of a man he is, he starts the Yoga Sutras– such a great document of life – in a strange way: the first chapter of the Yoga Sutrasis just half a sentence, not even a full sentence.
The sentence is like this, “…and now, Yoga” What do you make out of it? Intellectually, it doesn’t make any sense, but experientially what it is saying is, if you still think that building a new house or finding a new wife or getting your daughter married will settle your life, it is not yet time for yoga. If you have seen money, power, wealth and pleasure, you have tasted everything in your life and you have realised that nothing is going to fulfill you ultimately and work in the real sense, if you have gotten that point, it is time for yoga.
All the nonsense that the whole world is involved in, Patanjali just brushes it aside with half a sentence. This is why the first sutra is “…and now, Yoga.” That means, you know nothing works and you do not have a clue about what the hell this is. The pain of ignorance is tearing you apart. Now, yoga. Now there is a way to know.
(Sadhguru is a Yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. He is also the founder of Conscious Planet – Save Soil)
