Patangali Yog Sutra

No pain, no gain

The next sutra is Tehladaparitapaphalaha punyapunyahetutvat meaning “impressions give you pleasure and pain as the fruits of virtues and vices”.

When the impressions are good, they bring you joy, but when they are not, they bring you suffering. It all depends on whether you have done something good or something bad. Good karma accumulates and brings you joy.

If a person is happy it is because they have done some good in the past. If they are miserable, then it is obvious they have done something bad. Patanjali connects happiness and misery to an act of the past.

Patanjali says meditation is the way out of all that. Meditation helps you wash everything out.

If you look into the pleasures or joy that you get in life from birth they all come with a tax. You have to pay a tax for that and that is sorrow.

In the next sutra Patanjali says: Parinamatapasamskaradukhairgunavruttivirodhachcha dukhameva sarvam vivekinaha, which means “The result of an event, anxious wait for an event, feverishness to achieve and the impressions of these events cause sorrow and more so when things happen to the contrary. Therefore, for an intelligent one, everything is indeed considered as painful”.

Every event causes some pain. Even if the event is pleasant, when it ends, there is a little pain. The greater the joy, the greater the pain too. Right? Parinama, the effect or the result of an event, brings you pain.

The longing or waiting for a pleasurable event is again pain. Memory of a pleasure too brings pain. Longing for something too causes pain. Then when you get it, the fear of losing it too is painful.

For a viveki or an intelligent one, the one who is awakened, he sees the whole incident as painful. There is nothing that is not painful. You say love is beautiful, but love is also painful. Bodies can get close, but still there is no satisfaction. Often the male takes the female body and the female takes a male body in the next life. That is what craving or longing does to a person. The mind is more prominent. That is why in every male you find a female and in every female you find a male. This is because there is some impression from the past.

The soul is not just satisfied by the physical body coming closer. It wants something more. It wants to merge, vanish and disappear. This is what you call love.

Love also creates tremendous amount of pain. Separation is pain. Trying to please creates pain. You want to know the mind of the other person in and out. How can you, when you do not even know your own mind? You want to know somebody else’s mind! It is impossible to know anybody else’s mind just by their words and movements of their lips and tongue.

There is a saying that the tongue has no bone. It is not steady. It says something today and tomorrow it may say something else. You cannot trust your tongue. You can trust anything in the world. You experience some good feeling, love, you feel wonderful and joyful and suddenly it is not there the next moment and it is painful.

Pain seems to exist in everything. What do you do? When you realise that everything is pain, then how do you go about it? What do you do? You have to do something to stop this pain. How will you do it? The next sutra will study that.