The  Sutras-Pure

 CHAPTER FOUR 

The Threads - Explained

 CHAPTER FIVE
More About Union

Chapter One Content

There is Only One Story 

Illusion Free Yoga

 Yoga is Union

 Sri Patanjali's Yoga Sutras

The Antiquity of Yoga

Who Does Yoga?

The Available Translations

The Writer

A Parable

 A Full Way of Life

 The Eight Limbs of Practice

The Right Way

 Understanding Yoga

 From Parable to Reality 

 Yoga Goals and Purposes

The Word Yoga

Yoga and Religions in India

This Book

Appendices:

Bibliography

The Full Book

 The Reason for the Book

 This book exists to play its small role in preserving the 2000 year old taproot philosophy and practice upon which all yoga teaching rests, and make it accessible to more people.  

The current wave of modernization and commercialization of Yoga teaching veils the core teachings that have brought millions to more effective, happy, harmonious, and fulfilling lives.  The Yoga Sutras are the source of those teachings and their underlying Truths.  Few today even know of their existence. 

This is not  a new translation:  more translations than are useful currently exist.   It instead helps bring greater accuracy, consistency, and clarity of understanding, by integrating the scholarly and deeply caring work of six of the best modern translators.  

Although the book deliberately uses current and familiar language, great care was taken to carry the original meanings forward, unaltered and uncorrupted.

Translation of Sanskrit for this book only became necessary where significant and difficult to resolve differences existed among those six translations.  Such differences naturally enter translations, because the translators have varying life experiences, different gurus who led them to their knowledge, personal leanings, understandings of Sanskrit words, religious orientations, and evolved levels of consciousness. 

The Union Threads

The Yoga Sutras (Union Threads) consist of 196 aphorisms describing the philosophy and practice of yoga. An Indian Saint, known only as Patanjali, wrote them at about 2250 years ago, at an interesting time in Yoga history.  Yoga had existed for more than1500 years prior to that writing, as the ever-evolving philosophy of Union.  Union is the philosophy of bringing the individual self's awareness back to the existence of the primal Self (divinity, godhead, Absolute, God, or something else), so that the two levels of consciousness yoke into a singular harmony.

By the time Sri Patanjali lived, the original Union philosophy had evolved into the fuller Samkhya philosophy of Union.  Seekers of the spirituality that Samkhya promised were asking that their teachers show them how to enact the pure philosophy in their daily lives:   knowing the philosophy was not enough to ease their  longing, reduce their suffering, or help them travel their path.  Kriya (Action) Yoga was just evolving to fill that need when  Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras. His writing decribes the marriage of Samkhya philosophy and Kriya Yoga, philosophy and action practice. 

The nonreligious teachings of the Union philosophy spread from their early philosophical base in India through the religions of the wider world. They began their movement  from the northwest portion of the Indian continent at about 4000 years ago, moving into Asia in the form of the Vedic religion, and were carried along the western route through Persia  by the believers in Mithras.  At the same time, the pure Samkhya philosophy continued to evolve in India, moving toward the destiny of its marriage to Kriya Yoga.  

The teachings  exist today within virtually all the religions of the modern world,  but  their cultural orientations, practices, and interpretations often disguise the commonality.