IN SEARCH OF THE INNERMOST INDIVIDUAL SELF

Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary with Insights from the Traditional Commentators (New York: North Point Press, 2009) ("Worldly experience means perceiving the seen, and liberation means perceiving the real nature of the seer.  Ignorance is the cause of the conjunction between the seer and the seen, and true knowledge dispels ignorance and is therefore the cause of liberation."  "Strictly speaking, continues Vyasa, true knowledge is not the real cause of liberation, because when ignorance does not exist, bondage does not exist, and so technically it is the absence of ignorance that corresponds to liberation.  It is because knowledge removes ignorance that it is said to be the cause of liberation, but it is actually the indirect cause of liberation.  Vijnanabhiksu points out that true knowledge, or discrimination, operates right up until the immediate moment prior to liberation.  He reminds his readers that discrimination is still a product of the material intelligence, but full liberation involves complete separation between purusa and buddhi.  This is the difference between sabija and nirbiga samadhis."  Id. at 229-230.  "Vyasa elaborates n the four types of karma alluded to by Patanjali here and divides them into four categories (a widespread schema that surfaces in Buddhist teachings).  Black, krsna, karma predictably consists of evil acts performed by the wicked.  Black and white karma is the performance of both evil and pious acts.  It is everyday action in the external world determined by how one acts towards others,  The actions of ordinary people are mixed: People certainly often perform good deeds, but the drive toward self-preservation and gratification invariably sooner or later involves causing harm to others on some level.  Thus most people perform both black and white karma.  Hariharananda points out, by way of example, that in tilling the soil, many creatures are killed, and in saving wealth for oneself, others are denied." "Purely white, sukla, karma is internal; it is not determined by actions toward others in the external world and thus generative of karma, but is the product of the mind alone.  Vyasa specifies that it consists of the performance of austerity, study, and meditation, which are more or less the ingredients of kriya yoga.  Finally, that which is neither white nor black pertains to the yogi or sannyasi, total renunciant, whose klesas are destroyed and who is finishing up his last birth,  Having renounced all the fruits of activity, such a person does not receive either black or white karma."  Id. at at 416.  From the backcover:  "Written almost two millenia ago, Patanjali's great work focuses on how to attain direct experience and realization of the purusa: the innermost individual self, or soul.  As the classical treatise on the Hindu understanding of mind and consciousness and on the technique of meditation, it has exerted immense influence over the religious practices of Hinduism in India and, more recently, in the West.").