Yoga Sutras Week 4 *Bonus Blog* - The Mechanism of Wisdom

 Fresh Sutra translation Inspiration 

1:1 Life is a continuous discovery. An endlessly self-revealing wonder show. 

1:2 To stay in awe of the mystery of the great unfolding is to stay in the heart. Remain still, remain present, remain open. Don’t be quick to wrap conceptual structures around what you are experiencing. Stay childlike, not childish, but childlike. Cease to take a point of view. Cease to get stuck in belief structures. Stay awake to it all. 

1:3 If you do this, you will be resting in your Self nature and life will be splendorous. 

1:48 From within this space, wisdom will dawn like light. It will arise from within you if you can remain neutral in your Self. The moment you give yourself over to a particular point of view, you have become somewhat separated from and unavailable to the great wisdom. If you can stay open, neutral and keep your mind clean, then things will start to show themselves. If you can fall back into your Self, Life will start to reveal itself to you and teach you things.

We just keep looping these Sutras. 

They go in. Eternally. Deeper and deeper they go - if we allow them. If we short-circuit our mental shield, which simply wants to pick the information, store it and say “done. I know that now” - that one, that troublemaker. The one that creates a shield of pre-knowing between us and what's actually happening. It is a shield of Maya that precludes us from seeing things as they actually are and instead we see through a haze of our own colouring, pre-thought, prejudice, and pre-knowledge. Instead, we know how to take these Sutras into our bodies and into the energy of ourselves. We feel ourselves deeply and receptively enough and we can pick up wisdom from Life directly. 

Life is self-revealing

Patanjali says that this process of self-discovery is Yoga. Through Yoga, you are going to explore what it really means to be alive, but in order to do that, you are going to have to fall back inside yourself in order to meet Life from your depth. 

Fall away from the temporal, ever-changing field of your mind and chemistry. 

Fall back from the speculations of your intellect - this storehouse of beliefs and impressions. 

Fall back from that.

You have accumulated it all - it’s all secondary to you. It’s not native, you’ve just picked it up along the way - fall back.

Fall back into what you actually are. It’s splendid. It’s so splendid. Live from that splendour - live from that innate radiance inside yourself, rather than from all the self-doubt and egoic games. Just live from your splendour. It’s a different place to live from. When you fall back into that space, Life is self-revealing. 

In every moment, it reveals to itself everything that it needs to know. Through your faith, you will wake to a wisdom and a relationship to Life you never knew you had. You will be able to respond to everything that arises. You are already equipped to meet everything that comes and goes in the field of your experience.. Life is ready for Life. 

We all know how it feels to be riddled with self-doubt and trying to map out every ramification of everything using the mind. Surviving with just temporary relief from self-contraction, relying on guesswork.

Patanjali is pointing us towards a different way to live.

The Mechanism of Wisdom Inside (and how to activate it).

We are learning how to trust a different mechanism now. Patanjali is saying there is a sure-fire place to go to, every time. The process of that surrender, of course, is not bulletproof every time; we need to learn to fall back into an inner stillness where we are no longer invested in the outcome of our experience. That’s the condition for wisdom. 

If we want to move to the choiceless space of the wisdom of Life itself, which is already active in the Heart of our being, the condition for this access is to drop our demand for how things should be. We learn to drop the mentation, the guesswork which we know is going nowhere, and fall back into the certainty of our own inner stillness and out of there comes the response. This is the most daring way to live - this is wisdom.

The tendency for us all is that we go outwards on a reflex. We go out with the mind in reaction to what is happening around us. The wisdom mechanism is to simply fall the other way. We are training ourselves to fall back before going forward. Fall back first, then move forward from there.

Sometimes we realise we have already gone out without falling back, we are already ahead of ourselves. It’s not too late, even then, to fall back to your Self. Your Self is always abiding, always here and always available. This is consultation with the Divine and the making of a Yogic life. 

Nothing is in the way

Sometimes we have things that are engulfing a lot of our attention; they may be in the mind or the body. They are examples of karma arising and offloading in our field of awareness. This is purification, and we have to move through this. Remember:

Whatever you have going on is not in your way - it is not something that you have to fix in order to move forward. 

The key is to fall back into what you actually are and see that you are not what is unfolding on the surface. These things are not in the way of your splendour, your truth, or your love. It is just that you are being faced with something that is currently wanting to be worked out, but that is currently entangled in a field of non-acceptance. 

The resolution for the unresolved is always going to be acceptance from the space of splendour whilst coexisting with the unresolved matter. 

That then feeds love into the unresolved parts of us, and everything subsides in love, in time. Then the mind wants to know “How long will it take?” but that question is part of the bondage of the self-contraction that is keeping things unresolved. Things come for a time, and they stay for as long as they need.

Eventually, in time, they give way to that which is bigger than them, what is deeper than them. Surround them with an ocean of love and splendour and they will dissolve back into that ocean. 

You resolve everything inside yourself. Everything happens in you.