Patanjalis Yoga and Modern Science Towar

S.R.
Joye
Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science
Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science:

Towards An
Integral Modelof Consciousness
"Science is the Yoga of the West."

Thomas Berry
December 2011
By Shelli Renee Joye, B.S.E.E., M.A.
PARA 7255 01 Yoga Sutras of Patajali

Professor Jim Ryan
December 2011
2011 by S.R. Joye/var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_7/321053267.docx
S.R. Joye
Abstract
While reflecting on how very much we as a species are seeking an understanding of
consciousness, we yet find minimal interest among the communities of 21st century scientists to
explore areas of congruence between their maps of physical science and the maps of
consciousness laid down by contemplative saints and mystics over many centuries.
Almost two thousand years ago, the Indian sage Patajali, an inheritor of several of these
maps, and a noted master navigator of consciousness, composed an integrated set of aphorisms
that describe in great detail the structure and dynamics of consciousness within the human being.
More than simply a description, however, Patajali's Yoga Stra provides a theory-practice
continuum which includes "... effective definitions, explanations and descriptions of key
concepts and terms relating to theoria and praxis in Yoga."1
Among world cultures, Patajali's collected observations of experience creates a set of
charts for navigation within the ocean of consciousness, much in the same way as the rutters,
written compilations of collected sailing experiences shared among Portuguese mariners, were
used to cross oceans to new worlds prior to the development of scientifically calibrated nautical
charts in the 14th and 15th centuries. The rutters contained not only sketches, charts, and maps
from first hand accounts and direct observation, and but also a wealth of sailing tips, such as
dangers to avoid, steering directions, and other practical instruction.
As G. Feurstein says, " ... these models were originally and primarily maps for meditative
introspection intended to guide the yogin in his exploration of the terra incognita of the mind. ...
1 Ian Whicher, The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana: A Reconsideration of Classical Yoga, (New
York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 42.
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These 'maps' are records of internal experiences rather than purely theoretical constructions.
They are descriptive rather than explanatory."2
Unfortunately, contemplatives throughout the ages have seldom had sufficient knowledge
nor interest in science with which to model their experiential discoveries in the languages of
modern science, while rarely have scientists found time, interest or the motivation (under tacit
threat of ridicule or censure) to attempt to lay out any model of consciousness using scientific
concepts and mathematical tools.
This paper is an attempt to sketch a pragmatic map of consciousness for a modern technodigital culture by describing Patajali's model of the structure and dynamics of consciousness in
the languages of science. The model will be shown to be supported by recently hypothesized
theories of consciousness put forward by the Cambridge molecular biologist Johnjoe McFadden3,
the New Zealand neurobiologist Susan Pockett,4 and the Stanford physicist Frank Heile.5
The model presents human consciousness as operating in two distinct modes: 1.) as a
fluctuating process of time-based organic memory and symbolic reasoning within the constraints of
the physical neuronal systems, and 2.) as a nexus of electromagnetic energy flux aligned axially
2 Georg Feurstein, The Philosophy of Classical Yoga, (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1980), 117.
3 Johnjoe McFadden, Synchronous Firing and Its Influence on the Brain's Electromagnetic
Field: Evidence for an Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness, Journal of
Consciousness Studies, vol. 9, no. 4 (2002): 23.
4 Susan Pockett, The Nature of Consciousness: A Hypothesis, (Nebraska: Writers Press, 2000),
7.
5 Frank Heile, "Time, Nonduality and Symbolic versus Primary Consciousness," (Lecture
presented at the Science and Nonduality Conference, San Rafael, CA, October 21, 2011).
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within and radiating outward from resonant cavities within the human body. I will describe how
this model parallels and is supported by Patajali's description of 1.) the human mindstuff (citta)
and its relation to 2.) radiant consciousness (purusa).
Dr. Frank Heile's recent description of the bi-modal nature of consciousness is also relevant
here. His theory of two categorically different operating modes of consciousness, Symbolic and
Primary, implies two seemingly independent categories of awareness co-existing within the
individual human consciousness.
Heile's "Symbolic consciousness," which in this paper we relate to Patajali's citta-vrtti
, is
newer ("30 to 100 thousand years old"6), relatively low bandwidth, largely serial processing, and is
the component of consciousness that is the "voice" of language, both audibly expressed and
silently voiced.
This Symbolic consciousness (citta-vrtti)
is at the heart of cognition, all of the senses from
touch to vision, the sense of "I-ness", and the Ego. Among contemporary people this citta-vrtti
has come to dominate consciousness, and as a result communication with the purus a has largely
been lost, except during sleep, intoxication, encounter with the sublime, contemplation, and other
non-verbal modes of consciousness. Through the rise of Western culture's increasingly verbal and
digital technology the Symbolic has prevailed, ballooned, and has hijacked human attention away
from Primary consciousness. Thus citta-vrtti
can generally be found dominant during waking
states primarily in the lingual area of the left cerebral hemisphere in modern homo sapiens.
On the other hand, what Heile calls the "Primary consciousness," Patajali's purus a, is an
ancient, wideband spectrum of energy, a matrix of flux that is always perceiving and parallel
processing in the very heart of the "now" of the eternal present .
6 Heile., Slide 10.
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Experience of purusa consciousness is the gateway to Kaivalya, described in the final

sutra (YS IV.34.), where Kaivalya is variously translated as "the power of pure consciousness
settles in its own pure nature" (Satchidananda), "Enlightenment" (Shearer), "the Power of
Knowledge in its own Nature" (Vivekananda).7
Unfortunately, connection with this Primary purusa consciousness has been almost
completely lost by contemporary people. Masked by the dominance of verbalized abstraction and
language processing activities of a hyper active citta-vrtti
consciousness, the "thinking mind" has
become the "dominant 1%" of consciousness.
In approaching this study of Patajali's model, rather than following the more traditional
methods of analysis based primarily upon exegesis of the Sanskrit text and discussion of previous
commentaries, I will follow a methodology as taught by Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri8 during my
graduate studies at the California Institute of Asian Studies, using Chaudhuri's integral approach to
construct a multi-faceted model to better reflect the structures and dynamics of consciousness as
elaborated in the Yoga Stra.
Dr. Chaudhuri spoke of the need for a less academic, more "integral" approach to any
particular area of knowledge. He urged a multi-disciplinary approach to any object of study,
beginning from several starting points and approaching the heart of the matter from different
perspectives, often from seemingly unconnected, disparate specialties.
7 Salvatore Zambito, The Unadorned Thread of Yoga: The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali in English A compilation of English Translations, (Washington: The Yoga-Sutras Institute Press, 1992),
413.
8 Haridas Chaudhuri, The Philosophy of Integralism, (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir,

1954), 108.
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Chaudhuri's integral approach foreshadows the contemporary emphasis in "data-mining," a

wide-ranging search for correspondences, correlations, and coincidences among widely diverse
data sets or areas of knowledge in an effort to "connect the dots" between elements of knowledge
that have been heretofore disconnected and often assumed to be mutually exclusive. But the most
important element, he insisted, should be an element of introspection, an "experiential dimension"
of inquiry inclusive of the observer within the observation, first-hand introspection as championed
by William James over a century ago.
This paper uses Chaudhuri's integral approach in an attempt to discover connections
between maps of science and the amazing maps of consciousness handed down from past
generations of contemplative explorers and compiled by the 2nd century sage Patajali into the
Yoga Stra. It includes relevant first-person experiential sections as well as material from diverse
scientific disciplines including physics, radio communication theory, mathematics, and physiology.
Notes: Throughout this paper italicized words will indicate transliteration of the Sanskrit;
the letters "emf" will be used as abbreviations for the "Electromagnetic Field";
translations of stras in this paper are my own except where quoted and cited.
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Table of Contents
Abstract....................................................................................... 2
Charts, Tables, and Figures.....................................................................8
Experiential Precursors.................................................................9
Early Experience Leading to the Beach at Little Sur Creek..................................9
Midnight Experience at Hamilton's Pool, Austin, Texas......................................11
Midnight Experience in the Lower East Side, New York City..............................14
Consequences of Three Experiences................................................................19
Patajali's Yoga Stra: A Map of Human Consciousness.................20

I. Samdhi-Pda: Tuning the Mind and Levels of Consciousness...............................22
Objective of Yoga Practice: Quieting the Mind To Bring About Samdhi.............22
Nirodhah : How to Quiet the Mind.......................................................................29
Samprajata Samdhi: Ecstasy or Consciousness With Seed Object.................30
Asamprajata Samdhi: Enstasis or Consciousness Without An Object.............30
II. Sdhana-Pda: The Eightfold Path of Tuning Consciousness to Attain Samdhi....32
III. Vibhti-Pda: Dhran, Dhyna, and the Siddhi Powers of Consciousness......33
IV. Kaivalya-Pda: Multimind, Liberation, and Aloneness (Oneness)........................35
Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science............................................43

Symbolic versus Primary Consciousness: Two Conscious Beings in The Brain......43
The Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness.............................................45
The Science of Yoga: The Consciousness of Energy Fields....................................46
Purua And Prakti : The Two Domains of Pure Energy..........................................47
Psyche and the Calculus of Reasoning..................................................................49
The Fourier Transform, the Psyche and the Human Brain...............51

Electrophysiology and the Psyche.........................................................................52
Physiology of the Brain: The Ventricular Horns.....................................................55
Traditional Contemplative Observations: Fixing Spirit in its Original Cavity..........57
Summary and Implications..........................................................58

Domains and Ranges of Human Consciousness....................................................58
The Two Domains: Conscious Personality and Purua as the Self.........................61
Yoga as Reunion with the Self............................................................................... 62
Darshan as Purua Radiance in the Physical World...............................................63
Bibliography............................................................................... 64
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Charts, Tables, and Figures
Chart 1 - Yoga Sutra Book I...........................................................................................................24
Table 1 - Alternate translations of nirodhah in Yoga Stra I.2......................................................26

Table 2 - Therefore, Two Consciousness Entities..........................................................................44
Figure 1 Computer projection of electromagnetic heart torus field...........................................52

Figure 2 - Horn antenna.................................................................................................................54
Figure 3 - Lateral view of the ventricular cavities within the human brain..................................55
Figure 4 - Ventricular cavity two views......................................................................................56
Figure 5 - Encephalogram from front, revealing horns of ventricular cavity................................58
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Experiential Precursors
This paper describes in significant detail an approach to providing a modern scientific
foundation for the nature of consciousness as mapped in the Yoga Stra, a compilation of
observations from generations of serious explorers of consciousness within the context of ancient
India, and compiled by Patajali in the 2nd century C.E. Motivation to undertake this study has
been forming in my own thoughts for forty years as a direct result of my own early introspective
explorations of consciousness. In light of Chaudhuri's inclusion of the element of introspection
as an important part in the integral methodology, three of these experiential precursors are herein
presented.
Early Experience Leading to the Beach at Little Sur Creek
Born into a practicing Roman Catholic family, I first attended a convent school in London,
developing, early in my life, a firm conviction of the presence of God in a vastly mysterious universe.
Walking to school one sunny morning at the age of seven, as I was crossing a wooden
bridge over a small country creek, I had my first intensely-remembered numinous experience.
The sunlight reflecting off of the rippling waters, the sound of the breeze among the leaves of the
oaks, and the deep blue sky above, all seemed to focus through my senses into my heart, igniting
a blaze of intensity accompanied by a sense of wonder, awe, and an immensity of love so all
consuming that I had to stop walking in my astonishment, only too soon pulled back into the
world of my schoolmates as we continued on our way.
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At the age of twelve, I obtained a pamphlet with the title "How to Hypnotize Your
Friends." One chapter advised the hypnotist-in-training to sit in a darkened room at night while
gazing steadily at a single candle flame in order to develop an "empty mind", an important power
of the psyche required (or so said the book) on the way to becoming a competent hypnotist. For
many months I pursued this exercise; in retrospect, it was the beginning of a lifetime of
contemplative practice and exploration of consciousness.
Several years later, I entered college on a physics scholarship, switched to a mathematics
program during the second year, and in 1969 earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical
engineering, specializing in communication technology and signal synthesis and detection.
Two years earlier, however, I found myself on a California beach south of Big Sur, where
Little Sur Creek meets the Pacific Ocean, under a clear, starry, moonless sky, having taken for
the first time a strong dose of LSD. That night of ocean, star, and energy experiences opened my
eyes to the vastness of regions far beyond my recently forged scientific perspectives. This led
directly to a lifelong yearning to re-enter those worlds and to explore those ranges of
consciousness and high peaks of sheer experience into which I had been briefly thrust by
psychedelics.
Almost all that I could remember afterwards of this intense episode were the physical
effects that had occurred at onset of "rupture of plane", a feeling of electrical currents flowing in
the area of my teeth and electrical snapping somewhere on a horizontal plane inside my head and
through the back of my neck. Trying to remember the ensuing experiences was as impossible as
recalling a vastly complex dream sequence, but I took away a deep conviction that "there",
wherever I had been, and however I had arrived "there", be it somewhere or perhaps somewhen,
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was an ocean of experience that could be tuned into, but that normally was so filtered out from
awareness as to be completely concealed from everyday waking consciousness.
Midnight Experience at Hamilton's Pool, Austin, Texas
The next summer, my worldview again experienced a major paradigm shift. It came with
the appearance of a strange light that I saw in the Texas hill country near Austin. This occurred
near Hamilton's Pool, a small grotto fed by a creek along an ancient crack in the earth called the
Balcones Fault. Fed by a small waterfall, and about 300 yards across, the pool was deep and
dark, almost a perfect circle. It was around midnight, and we had come to rest and swim after a
week of final exams. The night was quiet except for the chirping of insects and bullfrogs. A thick
pale covering of moon-backlit clouds concealed the stars. We arrived around 11:00 pm from
Austin, having succumbed to a late evening urge to go swimming in the countryside to celebrate
the end of the semester. For more than an hour we sat at the edge of the pool, leaning against a
large sun-warmed boulder, talking quietly, often lapsing into silence.
The first sign of something out of the ordinary came with an abrupt cessation of the
crickets' chirping, replaced by the quieter sound of a small waterfall, splashing into the pool from
an overhanging rim directly across from where we sat. Soon even the intermittent bullfrog
croaking stopped, amplifying the night silence broken only by the regular sound of the waterfall.
After an interminable time even our thoughts faded away. A barely perceptible glow
seemed to flicker far down the creek which drained Hamilton's Pool into the Pedernales River.
The light seemed to be growing and fading in a slow pulsating rhythm. The glowing moved
closer, sometimes fading, but then growing brighter in a slow pulsating rhythm, continually
moving toward us, into our view, yet obscured in the distance by the intervening trees of the
forest. The glowing light at last moved out from the greater darkness of the night foliage,
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following the bed of the stream from the pool. Slowly, almost majestically, the flickering sphere
circled the rim of the overhanging cliff which surrounded two-thirds of the grotto. When the
glowing sphere reached the falls, it slowly dipped toward the falls, bobbing and weaving in a
strange, almost rhythmical pattern near the falling water, as if it were some gigantic moth in the
night. Eventually it resumed its circuitous path along the sheltering rim, moving along the shore
toward our side of the pool.
At last it came to the rock by the shore, against which we rested in suspended judgment.
It paused in it's movement, and, hovering twenty to thirty feet over the rock, above our heads, it
appeared as if a galaxy of stars had coalesced within a spherical space the size of a beach ball,
with thousands of points of light tracing straight-line paths in seemingly random patterns,
circumscribed within a spherical boundary about a meter in diameter.
For what seemed an eternity it remained above us, until at last it resumed its
circumnavigation of the grotto, moving once again toward the creek draining the pool, then
following the creek, bobbing and weaving on its way back into the forest and the swamps from
which it had apparently come.
What I felt and perceived during that time in the presence of, and then beneath, this
apparition I can only attribute as being "angelic", I can scarcely remember, let alone begin to
describe. I heard peculiar sounds, and feelings arose that I had never before imagined, all
overshadowed with astonishment, awe, amazement, and fear. I knew it had radically changed my
view of our planet and my life. Here, thirty miles or more from the nearest "civilization", in the
silence of a simple Texas countryside, the unknown had revealed itself in all innocence. That this
apparition, this light being, was aware, that it saw us and paused awhile above us, there was no
doubt.
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For days we discussed the apparition at length. We wondered if it should be reported, and
if so, to whom. I realized, in the light of this experience, my entire view of the world had gone
through an upheaval. Having been freshly trained as a scientist and engineer, an empirical
materialist of the age of physics and machine theories, my paradigms of the world were too
newly molded to have settled into inflexibility. I remember my most vivid impressions of physics
centered around a book by Feynman9, in which he challenged his students to visualize the
electromagnetic energies passing through the very lecture hall, the colors and forms swirling,
merging and patterning one another as the passed through our bodies and minds, linking us to
other galaxies and to each other. As remarkable as this book was, it still maintained the sterile
vision of a dead universe, a matrix of beautiful yet non-living energies. The light in the forest had
kindled my awareness of these energies as living, aware, conscious in ways my previously
limited, filtered awareness did not allow.
I returned to my studies of electricity, electronics and physics with a new perspective and
found that I was seeing things in ways that I could not easily share with my classmates who all
seemed to be mindlessly adopting the "Universe is (mostly) dead matter and random motion"
paradigm. I began to experience a growing awareness that the very electricity flowing within the
building walls must be alive in some real way, that the light energy flowing from light bulbs, the
frequencies carrying radio and television signals, the entire electromagnetic spectrum
surrounding all of us must consist of living fields, in some dimension of consciousness, and that
electrophysics itself could, and perhaps should, be a subfield of biology. Most significant of all
was the growing awareness of the complex centrated flows of radiant energy emanating from and
coursing throughout my physical body.
9 Richard Feynman, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Volume 1, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1964.
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As a result of my experiences at Little Sur Creek, I began practicing silent meditation

with renewed focus. Later that summer I acquired a book on contemplation, The Psychedelic
Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead10 compiled by Leary, Metzner,
and Alpert. I was intrigued to learn of the various states of experiential states that could be
reached during death transition, or through taking psychedelic drugs, or through various forms of
contemplative practices. It was the idea of contemplative practice leading to altered states that
most intrigued me. I soon discovered a wealth of relevant knowledge and instruction in the
writings of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, further catalyzed by practicing hatha yoga
and studying with Swami Satchidananda, who had recently arrived from India.
Midnight Experience in the Lower East Side, New York City
The experiences of Little Sur Creek in 1967 and the encounter at Hamilton's Pool in 1968
greatly spurred on my regular practice of meditation, hatha yoga, and fasting exercises. I stopped
eating meat entirely, and went on frequent water fasts, losing 30 pounds during the spring of
1969. Initially, I would first do physical exercises and hatha yoga, followed by what seemed to
be a long 10 minutes trying to meditate, watching my breathing and trying to quiet my mind, to
free it from memory impulses, interior verbalization, and other impulsive mental distractions.
While at the beginning the 10 minutes was an arduous exercise, over the next few months was I
able to increase the time well beyond this.
In 1971 I was living in a two room flat on the fifth floor of a five story "walk-up" in the
Lower East Side in New York (Avenue 'A' and E. 6th Street). While the neighborhood was full
of Indian vegetarian restaurants and other businesses, being above most of the commotion of the
10 Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual
Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. (New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 1964).
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city kept my environment quiet at night. One late evening in my flat, during a shoulder stand
posture (sarvgsana) as part of my hatha yoga meditation , I heard a singular loud, high
pitched sound in my head. To my surprised, I found that as I focused conscious attention on this
sound it substantially increased in volume! Amazingly, I found I was able to repeat this
sequence, making the sound grow louder or software simply by choosing to focus upon or to
ignore the sound-point, which seemed to be located in the upper left-hand region of my brain.
After the initial "bright" sound discovery, additional "points" of sound of distinctly
different pitch began to arise in other locations in my cranium. That entire night I could not
sleep; while listening to the sounds they would variously increase in volume according to the
degree that I would be able to direct my attention toward them. I noticed, however, that as soon
as I would begin consciously thinking "about them" or "thinking in words" or "let my attention
stray" they would subside, vanish, or be obscured and I would "lose touch" with these sounds.
But by quickly searching for them again (I noticed myself struggling to regain an inner silence),
they could be coaxed out of the silence and their beacon-like tones could be located, focused
upon, and thereby would increase in volume once more in what was clearly a feedback loop
effect, a sort of reverberation. To my amazement, the tones were not unlike the cricket sounds
heard in the Austin hill country at night that had seemed to become audible only as we became
silent.
I could scarcely believe what was happening. I found that by trying to ignore a
particularly dominant bright sound and trying to focus on a fainter, more obscure sound ("further
away from" or "behind" the first) the second sound would immediately grow louder in volume
and become easier to focus upon using this inner focal-sense mechanism. Here was direct cause
and effect, albeit in an internal domain, of consciousness among some kind of living experiential
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fields of energy dynamics. All that night I lay awake in the dark, moving from sound to sound
within my head, as they rose and fell almost with a volition of their own. I experienced strong
emotional oscillations between exaltation verging on disbelief, and terror at visions of creating a
brain damaging hemorrhage.
In engineering school, I had come to understand vibration as a single vibration or tone,
yet this was not a single tone, a single frequency as I had come to understand, but a myriad sea of
tones faintly making up the background of the perceived, sensed audio range, like those
aforementioned "peepers" in the forest at night. As I stated earlier, it was at specific points in
space within my cranium, that from time to time a tone would arise with exponential sharpness
high above the background level, and become a bright tone of pure frequency, like a beacon,
upon which if I were able to focus for any sustained few moments, would become markedly
louder with an accompanying intense tactile sensation.
During the course of what seemed a very long night my body grew hot and sweated
profusely, soaking the sheets in what must have been a fever of some kind. I went through what
seemed to be a long period of deep fear, suspecting that I had somehow damaged my nervous
system, though since then I never experienced a headache or discomfort of any kind in within my
cranium. Sometime in the early morning hours I fell asleep and when I awoke, to my relief, my
mind was back to "normal" in its inner cognition, thinking, verbalizing, chatting away merrily
once more, though it now lived with a memory and realization that something singularly strange
had occurred, something I had never been prepared for and which I had never encountered in
books nor in life experiences.
I continued to practice hatha yoga but spent increasingly long periods in simple quiet
meditation, contacting these resonant inner sounds in my dark room late at night, and often while
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falling asleep. My earlier studies in physics and electrical engineering led me to notice how these
perceived/felt sounds seemed to be highly specific sinusoidal tones, focused, it seemed, on
various single frequencies, fundamental tones, and few weaker harmonic frequencies.
For a time, I conjectured that they were merely mechanical resonances within the
physical structures of my inner ear, and I did some research on tinnitus. In my engineering office
in the World Trade Center (I worked on the 64th floor as a lighting designer for the Port
Authority), sometimes, and often with great surprise, I would experience one of the sounds flare
up in my cranium when I approached certain electronic equipment, computer screens, or even
certain vending machines, and I found myself internally verbalizing, with some humor,
"incoming".
During meditation periods I noticed that by concentrating awareness within different
physical/spatial locations within my body, such as the heart or the throat, different sounds would
arise in different locations and patterns, though the sounds were most clear and pronounced in
the cranial area. I conjectured that they might be of an electromagnetic nature, possibly the
resonance of a neuronal plexus within my nervous system with electromagnetic modulations of
our Earth's electromagnetic energy fields, or in the case of vending machines, some internal
electrical radiation from their circuitry.
At the same time I became interested in anatomy, especially the anatomical structures of
the brain and central nervous system, as well as the endocrine system. Living in New York City, I
had access to medical bookstores where I was able to obtain excellent medical books with
technical illustrations and x-ray photographs which I used to visualize as specifically as possible
those internal areas, usually corresponding with the Indian chakra system, while meditating in
the dark.
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Over several years this process, concentrating and visualizing within areas of my body
and focusing on the sound tones as they would arise, became a main source of meditative
practice for me, and the inner sounds tones grew ever more richly complex and sometimes louder
in volume, and began to produce distinct tactile sensations of flow, unlike the sensations felt in
the external senses of touch, vision and hearing.
On weekends I would also search for books for guidance in silent meditation, and in the
process discovered Patajali's Yoga Sutras. My first copy was a translation with commentaries
by Professor Ernest E. Wood (b.1883),11 and I was impressed that his education had been in the
"hard" sciences - chemistry, physics and geology - and only later had he become interested in
yoga and meditation. Wood's translations of the Sutras seemed to me to be the perfect manual
for the type of meditative exploration that had become my passion, but after several months I
found a different translation of Yoga Sutras by I.K Taimni (b. 1898), a professor of chemistry.12
To my surprise, many of the translations and commentaries differed markedly between the two
books. This led me to attempt an understanding of each word in the context of my own
experiences and practices.
During subsequent years I continued trying to understand the Patajali Yoga Stra, but
have also spent a great deal of time searching religious and mystical literature, both Christian as
well as Far Eastern, for the slightest reference to inner sounds and externally perceived balls of
light. The most specific references I have found are in the Northern Indian school of "Nada
Yoga", the yoga of the "Inner Sounds", as well as in a Sikh school of contemplation called
11 Ernest E. Wood. Practical Yoga: Ancient and Modern. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1948).
12 I.K. Taimni. The Science of Yoga: The Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali in Sanskrit with
Transliteration in English and Commentary. (India: The Theosophical Publishing House,
1961).
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"Naam". I also found references to these phenomena in the writings of various Christian
mystics.
Consequences of Three Experiences
As a direct consequence of these three major direct experiences, I was led to a deeper
study of psychology, religion, and Indian philosophies of meditation, in particularly Patajali's
Yoga Sutras.
I left New York for San Francisco to study at the California Institute of Asian Studies,
which had the unique reputation of valuing experiential knowledge equally with academic
knowledge among both faculty and students. While there, I studied Sanskrit and Vedanta, as well
as various contemplative practices, and encountered for the fist time the writings of Sri
Aurobindo, Heidegger, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin This allowed me to develop a broader
understanding of the connections between various traditional practices of contemplative
technique and modern attempts to map the interior worlds of the experience using metaphysics
and language of science.
I have struggled for decades to explore and to understand this vast ocean of consciousness
that is open to contemplatives and "psychonauts,"13 and have tried to map this universe of
consciousness from the view of hard science, using the language of mathematics, physics, and
communications engineering. Using words and languages (being, as they are, poor tools for
describing abstractions), I will attempt to construct a model of this invisible ocean within which
13 Psychonaut: (from the Greek (psych "soul/spirit/mind")

and (nats "sailor/navigator") a sailor of the mind/soul) refers both to a
methodology for describing and explaining the subjective effects of altered states of
consciousness, including those induced by mind altering substances, and to a
research paradigm in which the researcher voluntarily immerses him/herself into an altered
state by means of such techniques, as a means to explore human experience and existence.
Ref. Jan Dirk Blom, A Dictionary of Hallucinations, (New York: Springer, 2010), 434.
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we are all enmeshed and modeled in the framework presented by Patajali, using science and
mathematics to approach the phenomena of a re-emergence of an ocean of cosmic consciousness
that is appearing within human beings on this planet.
Patajali's Yoga Stra: A Map of Human

Consciousness
In Patajali's Yoga Stra, dating back to the second-third century CE,14 we find an
elaborate map of human consciousness, as well as explicit methods for traveling among the
various regions described in that map.
In the Yoga Sutra we find the collective experiential wisdom distilled over the lifetimes of
generations of Indian sages, and that which has been compiled with a stamp of authenticity. That
there is a great deal of real, enduring, and practical validity to Patajali's map can be inferred by
the many translations and written commentaries that have sprung up beginning with Vysa's, as
early as the seventh century CE.
In a series of terse sutras (mnemonic threads, from the root siv, to sew; similar to the
"steps" in the modern "Twelve-Step Program" that began AA in 1939), Patajali constructs a
pragmatic model for human access to states of awareness rarely found in human experience. The
descriptions of these states and dimensions of consciousness, and the instruction given for
maneuvering among them are the outgrowth of direct observation contributed from age to age
through a long lineage of contemplative seekers in India (and of course in virtually all other
cultures), and obviously of significant interest to Patajali .
The key word yoga is written in the Devangar script as follows:
14 Whicher., 5.
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21
This word often translated "yoke, to link, to unite."15 The word yoga is understood in numerous
ways in the West, typically as a form of exercise consisting of extreme body stretching poses.
But a contemporary yoga scholar says that when the word "is used by itself without any
qualification, it refers to the path of meditation, particularly as outlined in the Yoga Sutras - the
Aphorisms on Yoga - and the term yogi, a practitioner of this type of meditational yoga."16
But the word yoga is also synonymous with samdhi in the Yoga Stra, in which is given
detailed instruction on an experiential, introspective approach to navigating the flow of sentient
energy within the human psycho-cognitive mental subsystem, and numerous ways of controlling,
redirecting, and modifying mental activities to establish transcendent17 links, unions, and
communions with alternate states of conscious awareness.
The Yoga Stra is divided into four sets of aphorisms, four chapters, parts, or Pda,
described by Whicher18 as:
1.Samdhi-Pda, the chapter on ecstasy/enstasy comprised of 51 stras;
2.
Sdhana-Pda, the chapter on the "path" or "practice" of Yoga made up of 55 stras;
15 Zambito., 10.
16 Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Stras of Patajali: A new edition, translation, and commentary
with insights from the traditional commentators, (New York: North Point Press, 2009), xvii.
17 Author's note: "Transcendent" as used in this paper is to be contrasted with "ordinary

everyday waking" consciousness: a state or condition of awareness beyond verbal-emotional
ego boundaries; numinous; sublime; inexpressible; elaborated by Patanjali in his descriptive
injunctions defining the various stages and states of samadhi and kaivalya.
18 Whicher., 44.
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22
3.
Vibhti-Pda, the chapter on the "powers" in Yoga, also totaling 55 stras; and
4.
Kaivalya-Pda, the chapter on the liberated state of "aloneness" consisting of 34 stras.

Found within these four chapters is a comprehensive yet skillfully presented description of
a structure of consciousness and a teaching of methods for navigating this ocean of

consciousness. The short Sanskrit verses convey information which not only build methodically
upon previous stras but often prefigure their appearance in one or more future sutras which
then recollect, amplify, and extend their meaning.
I. Samdhi-Pda: Tuning the Mind and Levels of Consciousness

A chart of this first chapter is given on the next page showing the relationships of some of the
sutras that are found in Samdhi-Pda
Objective of Yoga Practice: Quieting the Mind To Bring About
Samdhi
A model of human consciousness is methodically described by Patajali, constructed
using many concepts also found to be basic components from the older Smkhya19 philosophy.
For example, the separation of the cosmic universe into "prakrti and purusa,"
which can be
translated in numerous ways but commonly as "matter and spirit", are one of these components.
But it is that unitive state of consciousness termed samdhi that is the clear objective
identified as the goal of practicing this yoga, wherein human consciousness through mastery of
the fluctuations of the mental vrttis,
is able to return to a full (or fuller) identity with the pure
19 Ibid., 6.
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23
spirit, the purus a, also described as "one's true Self"20, verifiably realizable through following the
exercises described within the Yoga Stra.
20 Ibid., 204.
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Chart 1 - Yoga Sutra Book I
24
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25
This concept of samdhi, discussed at length in the Yoga Stra, finds parallels in the
experiential metaphysics of other cultures in such terms as "the uncreated light" (Hesychasm),
"Nirvana" (Hinayana Buddhism), "the Void" (Tibetan Buddhism), and even earlier in the
"ecstasy (-)" of Plotinus.
If we take the view that successful practice of Patajali's yoga leads not only to a
liberation of purusa from prakrti,
but a freeing up of purusa that allows movement into
progressively deeper states of samdhi, it is even more important to realize that this is not an
escape from the mind, but an evolution of consciousness both within the individual and
collectively within the species, and that operationally this is an entirely new functioning of
purusa within prakrti,
a new way of thinking, as such, a new mode of consciousness.
The Yoga Stra is often summarized in a relatively simplistic translation by focusing upon
the second Stra, YS I.2, Yoga-citta-vrtti-nirodhah
.
Yoga is the stilling of the changing states of the mind."21
Alternate translations are presented in Table 1, most taken from an excellent compilation by
Salvatore Zambito.22 The English translation of nirodhah is emphasized in the Table, and the
choices reveal preference for a somewhat heavy handed aggression in the English (suppression,
subjugation, inhibition, restriction, restraint) as if the citta (translated variously as mind, mindstuff, thinking principle, thought-waves, consciousness, mind-field) were somehow an
21 Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary.
(New York: North Point Press, 2009), 10.
22 Zambito., 12.
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26
insurrection needing to be put down with the firm authoritative commands to "suppress",
"restrain", "inhibit", and "halt" the mind.
Translation of YS I.2
Translator
"Yoga is the control (nirodhah, regulation, channeling, mastery, Jnaneshvara

integration, coordination, stilling, quieting, setting aside) of the
modifications (gross and subtle thought patterns) of the mind
field."
Date
Published
2004
"The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga."
Satchidananda
1990
"Yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness."
Feuerstein
1989
"Yoga is the cessation of the waves (arising in) (or) activities of

the mind-stuff."
Arya
1974
"Yoga is the control of thought-waves in the mind."
Prabhavananda
1969
"Yoga is the inhibition of the modifications of the mind."
Taimni
1961
"Yoga is restraining the mind-stuff (Chitta) from taking

various forms (vrittis)."
Vivekananda
1955
"This Union (or Yoga) is achieved through the subjugation of

the psychic nature, and restraint of the citta (or mind)."
Baily
1955
"Yoga is the control of the ideas of the mind."
Wood
1948
"Yoga is the suppression of the transformations of the thinking

principle."
Dvivedi
1930
Table 1 - Alternate translations of nirodhah in Yoga Stra I.2.
Along with Bryant, who translates nirodhah as "stilling", Jnaneshvara, an American

disciple of Rammurti Mishra, comes in with the second least aggressive translation in the table
with "control". My own translation would be "Yoga is the attenuation of activities of the mental
subsystems." Here the word attenuation implies a less aggressive exercise, the application of
knowledge and skill gained through practice in modulating the various subsystems of the human
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27
mental processes. Thinking in words, remembering, conceptualizing, allowing ideas to arise and
develop; all these normal activities and skills of what we call mind must be attenuated, turned
down, allowed to taper off, so that awareness is allowed to enter into a new state.
The internal silence opened up through the successful quieting and detaching from the
normal operations of mind allows awareness to flow into alternate configurations opening up
new modes of sensory and cognitive perception. In fact the word "quieting" might be a good
translation for nirodhah , and it is not a coincidence that it also appears as a major concept in the
early Christian contemplative practice of hesychia, , "stillness, quiet, silence" found in the
writings of Evagrius Pontikos23 and other eremites in Egypt as early as the 4th century CE. For
example: "Antony said, 'He who sits alone and is quiet has escaped from three wars: hearing,
speaking, and seeing."24 In the 14th century CE a monk on Mt. Athos in the Mediterranean,
Gregory Palamas, wrote extensively on the practice of inner silence and defended this
contemplative practice against a Calabrian priest who attacked hesychasts as "navel gazers," and
abandoners of the material world and its responsibilities.
Stra I.2 of the Yoga Stra, taken alone, without appreciating its context within the entire
collection, has similarly led to criticism for appealing to what seems to be an abandonment of the
material world and its responsibilities, the popular "escape from reality" epithet. More recent
views have rescued Patajali from this criticism in favor of an objective being seen as a
23 Jean-Yves LeLoup, Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition. (New Jersey:
Paulist Press, 2003), 108.
24 Benedicta Ward, The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, (London:
Penguin Books, 2003), 8.
S.R. Joye
28
harmonious mixing, a synergy of purusa and prakrti,

rather than as simply an escape from
prakrti.
This more positive view sees yoga as being a set of practices leading to the direct
experience of a more highly and effectively integrated purusa/prakr
ti relationship than is found
in the workings of the ordinary everyday humdrum human psyche. Figure 1 is a schematic chart
of the fundamental teachings of the Yoga Stra, though greatly simplified. It describes the first
eighteen sutras (after the formal opening of the first chapter) in flow diagram form.
In this yoga, the objective is to train the mind (or more precisely to tame citta, which has
three components: buddhi, ahamkara, and manas; that is, intelligence, I-ness, and other mental
cognitive operations) to enter into a great silence, to remain as dormant as possible, and to train
physical body systems to idle their lowest levels. What is the objective in shutting down these
normal waking-state active cognitive mental systems? In that quiescent state, the energy of
consciousness thus freed will activate and energize new modes of consciousness, to the point of
crossing the threshold into the primary consciousness of the purusa of Smkhya. This leads us to
the third sutra, YS I.3,
"Tatra sthitau yatno-'bhysah ||13||" or "Then the Seer [Self] abides in His own Nature.25"
At this point Patajali tells us that this Seer (or Self) then wakes up and "abides in His
own Nature." With the additional energy available from the suspension of normal mental
25 Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patajali, (Virginia: Integral Yoga Publications,
1990), 15.
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activities, a threshold is crossed into the pure self-resonant, self-reflecting Self , or as Eliot says
in the closing stanza of The Four Quartets:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.26
Nirodhah : How to Quiet the Mind
In subsequent sutras, Patajali teaches how progress can be made in controlling the mind
to reach nirodhah (cessation or attenuation of the fluctuations of the vrttis)
which then opens up
access to the samdhi states. For "shutting down the mind", the student is advised to rely upon
and to cultivate two primary tools: practice and detachment (YS I.12), "Abhysa-vairgybhy
tan-nirodhah " :
The state of nirodhah has been attained with crossing a threshold into samdhi and might
be likened to rebooting the mind (manas) with a new operating system with more capabilities
and fewer limitations. Commentators have advised that it is only with long and sustained
practice (abhysa) and detachment (vairgya) do the first glimpses or tastes of samdhi dawn on
the practitioner; however, eventually the fluctuations of cognitive mind and memory, the many
types of vrttis,
subside and are replaced with an opening up to the purusa and the contemplative
has an initial experience of samdhi.
26 T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets: Little Gidding, (Florida: Harcourt Inc., 1943), 54.
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But simply attaining an initial samdhi experience is not the final goal, as the practitioner
is taught that there are two major categories of samdhi, and there is a certain sequence in which
these samdhis develop and are typically experienced in the unfolding of contemplative prior to
full knowledge by identity of purusa by purusa is achieved. The initial samdhi experience is
typically samprajata samdhi.
Samprajata Samdhi: Ecstasy or Consciousness With Seed Object
The movement from ordinary human consciousness to identity with purusa requires,
according to Patajali, a distinct range or continuum of states of samdhi that are to be mastered,
categorized broadly in two ontological regions: on the one hand, the continuum of sabija
samdhis, translated as "ecstasy", or "with seed" of "samprajata samdhi." During these states,
the fluctuations or cittavrttis
(verbal cognation, arising trains of memory, emotional impulse, etc)
having been attenuated (through much practice and detachment, YS I.12), the contemplative is
able to practice one-pointed attention (sayamah ) on a single categorical element, a bija
("seed"), whether it be a sound, a mantra, the symbolic figure of a yantra, a visualization, or loci
within the human body).
Asamprajata Samdhi: Enstasis or Consciousness Without An
Object
The first samdhi states involve experience of resonant merging with purusa while
simultaneously focusing on a bounded "seed" object, of which there are many possible. This is
the realm of prayer recitation, mantra, crystal gazing, and visual focus on images or internal
areas of the body. Beyond these regions-with-objects are those more rarified states of
consciousness-without-an-object, "asamprajata samdhi", nirbija samdhi (samdhi "without
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31
seed"), or as translated by Eliade,27 the state of "enstasis," out of time. This state is attained only
when one learns how to let go completely of all seeds and to remain in such a state for some
duration fully detached from all seed objects of perceptive cognition. This is the region of
consciousness called asamprajata samdhi or enstasis.
The word "enstasis" can be translated "standing within", and contrasted with "ecstasis", or
"standing out of." In the ecstatic samprajata samdhi one is in a sense looking outward from the
standpoint of the "seer", while by contrast in the enstatic asamprajata samdhi one is looking
inward toward the center, the heart of the "seer" which then becomes self-reflectingly resonant.
Of the second category of samdhi it is logical to say that nothing can readily be said since
to arrive there we must go by way of silencing the mental/mnemonic activities. We must reorient
consciousness from its normal operational activities in the tangential timespace domain of
prakrti as if in a ninety degree shift into a focused radial indwelling of purus a. Having
withdrawn energy from all normal mental functioning as a prerequisite to reaching this state, any
memory which might have been recorded therein is accordingly nonexistent.
This is not to say that there is no conscious experience associated with the state of
asamprajata samdhi, but simply that in returning from the experience, as in returning from the
state of dream sleep, no well formed memories have been recorded, such that the contemplative
cannot even be sure he had attained asamprajata samdhi. How then does the practitioner know
that asamprajata samdhi has been experienced? Whicher says, "upon returning from
asamprajata to the waking state, the yogin observes the time that has elapsed and thereby infers
that the state of nirodha has indeed occurred ... there is no memory carried over from the
'experience' in asamprajata."
27 Mircea Eliade, Yoga:Imortality and Freedom, (Princeton: Princton University , 1954), 69.
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Certainly there is a paradox here, for defying logic we find the many many words that
have been written over the centuries about this deepest region of samdhi. These are certainly to
be found in the accounts recorded in the Vedas and Upanishads and other texts and poems from
many other cultures, all attempting to impart knowledge of a transcendent consciousness, the
pure purusa,
the Absolute, nirguna brahman, or kaivalya.
II. Sdhana-Pda: The Eightfold Path of Tuning Consciousness to Attain

Samdhi
Pda II of the Yoga Sutra gives instruction for quieting the citta noise fluctuations and
practices leading to knowledge of how to quiet the mind as preparation for tuning
consciousness into the more cosmic bandwidths of samdhi. These sutras describes the widely
practiced ashtanga-yoga or eightfold path. It is often the only instruction taught in Western yoga
classes, which have tended to focus exclusively on the physical hatha yoga (only one of eight
practices described in the ashtanga yoga of this chapter).
Before states of samdhi can be experienced on a regular basis, the individual must come
to terms with numerous kleas, variously called "afflictions", "habits", "impediments". These
klesas all tend to keep the mind jumping and noisy, unable to experience the subsidence of
activity into the states of quiescence necessary for shifting into the various states of samdhi
(described previously) and cosmic resonance with of purusa with Purusa.
The most critical skill of yoga, attenuating the noise fluctuations of the mental
subsystems (Yoga-citta-vrtti-nirodhah
) is required for attaining the various dimensions of

samdhi that were discussed at the very beginning of the Yoga Stra. The states of sustained
quiescence required are far beyond any silence normally experienced in waking consciousness
and require practice leading to mastery of skills generally undeveloped in human beings. Thus
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33
this chapter describes in detail various exercises for reaching those realms of suspension in
which purus a can be detected, contacted, and allowed to radiate.
This second chapter of the Yoga Stra opens with its summary, the most important Stra
in the chapter, YS II.1., Tapah svdhyy-evarapran idhnni kriy-yogah .
Practice, self-study, and submission to a personal God is action (kriy) yoga.
The following Stras in this chapter describe different types of yogic practices to quiet
the personality in general and the various mental subsystems in particular. It is no good to learn
to quiet the mind initially only to have addictive impulses, memories, even creative thoughts
continually arising to break the silence that is sought. Instructions in this chapter range from
encouraging hatha yoga, to liturgical worship to develop a personal relationship with God, to
breathing exercises, all helping the practitioner find inner quiet and assurance that the silence
will not be broken for the required sustained period in order to bring about experience of another
mode of consciousness beyond the linear, beyond the temporal, into the eternal radiance of
purusa.
Due to constraints of this paper however we will not explore further the rich details
found in this chapter.
III. Vibhti-Pda: Dhran, Dhyna, and the Siddhi Powers of

Consciousness
Pda III of the Yoga Sutra assumes that the material in the previous chapter, Pda II, has
been mastered. In this third chapter Patajali focuses first specifically upon instructions for
entering into samdhi, which is followed by an enumeration of various powers that may be
experienced. Here again, the first Stra of the chapter is the most important, describing a key
S.R. Joye
34
skill required to be exercised in learning to manipulate consciousness in order to move into

samdhi, that of dhrana, the practice of holding the "stuff" of consciousness steadily within one
place, within a fixed set of multi-dimensional boundaries:
YS III.1.,Dea-bandhah cittasya dhran
Focusing citta consciousness within a specific place is called dhran .
Dhran is already highly developed in the Western educational systems. It is the skill of being
able to concentrate the attention of consciousness in one place (dea), the more focused the
better. Accordingly one would think that adepts at electronic gaming might have this skill in a
highly developed form. However it is not enough to be able to gather consciousness to focus
within a bounded area momentarily, the next step is to "hold" that focus steadily without being
diverted by distractions, and to learn to be able to sustain this laser-like focus unwaveringly for a
protracted period of time, which is the subject of the next important sutra, YS III.2., defining the
fundamental practice of contemplation with the word dhyna, a word that has been translated
into Chinese as Chn ()and in Japanese as Zen:
Stra III.2., Tatra pratyaya-
ikatnat dhynam
Here the content of awareness held in a single stream is called dhyna.
The skill and practice of holding the citta consciousness steadily and continuously in the same
place is here defined as dhyna. The focus of the sequence dhran dhyna can be various: a mantra
S.R. Joye
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(voiced or internally audible sutra or prayer), a yantra (usually a visual, painted diagram), a concept,
an inner sensation, etc. In advanced practice the object is actually not an object at all and the adept
learns to focus on "consciousness-without-an-object", a sort of void of objects.
The key here is to be able to sustain this bounded focus of consciousness within such a
particular region for a sufficient length of time and intensity of focus so as to ignite transition into the
state called samdhi, which is the subject of the next sutra. An analogy might be seen in using a
magnifying glass lens to focus the rays of the sun on an object in order to ignite the object into flame.
In focusing with the glass lens, the object is usually a leaf or a twig, whereas in focusing
consciousness the object is a repeated prayer (mantra), image (yantra), concept (such as love, death,
detachment), external point (candle flame, cloud), or internal bodily location or sensation.
Success in this dhran dhyna sequence is obtained with a shift or threshold crossing of
consciousness into a state of samdhi, as described in the third sutra of this chapter:
Stra III.3.,
Tadeva-artha-mtra-nirbhsa svarpa-nyam-iva-samdhih or
"Samadhi is when that same dhyna shines forth as the object alone and
[the mind] is devoid of its own [reflective] nature."28
The rest of the third chapter describes numerous siddhis or "powers" that have been
found possible to exercise and observed by contemplatives in exploring the domains of
consciousness opened up through entry into the ocean purusa through achieving samdhi,
including such things as communication with other centers of consciousness (telepathy),
becoming invisible to others, remote seeing, inner light and various powers (siddhis).
28 Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patajali: A new edition, translation, and commentary
with insights from traditional commentators, (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 306.
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IV. Kaivalya-Pda: Multimind, Liberation, and Aloneness (Oneness)

The fourth chapter or Pda IV of the Yoga Sutra gives instructions for navigating the
seas of consciousness into which samdhi has led the practitioner and are likely not meant to be
useful nor understood by the pre-samdhi beginning practitioner of kriy yoga.
The chapter begins with a Stra, IV.1. which describes five primary ways in which an individual
finds his/her way into these states:
YS IV.1. Janma-os adhi-mantra-tapas-samdhi-jh siddhayah

The supernatural powers (siddhis) arise from birth, drugs, mantras, austerity,or samadhi
A few rare saints and mystics are born with their minds already attuned to such states.
Others are able to enter the radiant states of consciousness through ingestion of drugs (osadhi)
such as the ancient soma described in the Vedas, or the ergot of the Delphic oracle, or more
modern etheogens such as psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, ayahuasca vine, cannabis, peyote, or a
range of new modern laboratory manufactured psychotropics such as LSD, DMT, MDMA
("Ecstasy") and other "designer drugs."
The repetition of short rhythmical prayers or mantras has also been found to be
efficacious in quieting the mind such that the Self or purusa can shine forth with a consciousness
unimpeded by routine mental functioning. A fourth way mentioned is tapas or austerities such as
fasting, intense physical exercises, hatha yoga, or holtropic breathwork such as pranayama.
Finally it is samdhi, the primary technique taught in the Yoga-Sutra , that is recommended (in a
subsequent stra) as the most reliable, repeatable, controllable technique for entering these wider
realms of consciousness.
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The next five Stras seem to have been widely mistranslated by many commentators
beginning as early as Vysa.
An important misunderstanding must be clarified right away. This is the
erroneous assumption, originated by Vysa and naively followed by virtually all
subsequent exegetes and translators, that the initial aphorisms (1-6) treat of a
specific para-normal feat, viz., the ability to create 'artificial' consciousnesses.29
For example the contemporary Swami Hariharananda Aranya says of the second sutra in
this final chapter, that it is in reply to the following question: "When the Yogin constructs many
bodies, have they only one mind or many minds?"30 The contemporary Swami Satchidananda is
closer to the mark in his translation: "A Yogi's egoity alone is the cause of [the other artifically]
created minds."31
Similarly we take the position that Patajali in this final chapter is not suddenly
explaining powers of magic (such as creating other bodies or other minds within other bodies).
Patajali already dealt with the powers or siddhis, quite thoroughly enumerating them in the third
chapter. Here however he is dealing specifically with the dynamics of consciousness as it affects
and can be perceived, manipulated, and coaxingly controlled within the conscious field of the
adept who has attained to repeatable experiences within various states of samdhi. We thus
assume the fourth chapter to be elaborating a map and handbook of the metaphysical dynamics
of consciousness for the advanced yogi.
29
Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga-Sutra of Patajali: A New Translation and Commentary,

(Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1979), 125.
30 Hariharnanda ranya, Yoga Philosophy of Patajali, (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1983), 350.
31 Zambito., 253.
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Thus the second Stra, IV.2. describes the process in which various distinct alternate
centers of citt consciousness arise:
YS IV.2. Jty-antara-parin mah prakrty-prt
The birth of these new centers of consciousness results from

an effulgent flow of radiation concrescing in timespace.
These various centers are pure Purusa transforming into prakrtic centers. Each can be viewed
as a precipitating nexus of swirling effulgences of purus a powered consciousness energy coalescing
into variously involved centers of citt, their emanating resonances masking any perception of the
initial source, Purusa.
Each center is a unique frequency spectrum resonating in timespace, a
standalone nexus of consciousness.
Following the model presented in stra IV.2., we can imagine the early cosmic universe
coalescing its initial homogeneous unity into separate stellar formations until a threshold was crossed
and ignition occurred, and light flared forth. But this model of the macrocosm applies equally well to
the microcosm, so above, so below, and accordingly we can also imagine this process occurring
within the domain of each single human being.
It is this energy resonating as new centers (stars of the universe, but also more specifically, of
the adept) within the electrophysical mental structure, citt , that is mistakenly assumed to be the real
center, or "I", only because their source, Purusa,
is masked by citta-vrtti.
It may be helpful to visualize these centers as semi-independent personalities or sub-minds,
each one having its own sense of "I-ness" for a limited period of time when activated. However they
mask the effulgent Purusa consciousness and are mistaken (in fact mistake themselves) for being the
primary personality. These various centers wheel into the driver's seat of consciousness, often to our
overall surprise and that of our friends.

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There is the self-depreciative center, the angry center, the alcoholic center, the food addicted
center, the lust-for-power center, the kind-to-animals center, the sexual center. The typical human
being lives in what often seems to be a revolving round-robin of these sub-personalities, a multi-mind
or committee of centers of consciousness each with their own nexus of memories and coping skills
and often exhibiting distinct personalities.
The third Stra, IV.3. explains that these concrescing centers of consciousness arise and
are activated through a characteristic property of matter (prakrti)
that is a tendency to gather in
regions when obstructions are lowered (a process like a farmer removing obstacles to irrigation
flows):
YS IV.3. Nimittam-aprayojaka prakrtn-varan
a-bhedastu tatah ks etrikavat.

The process that results in an outflow into the centers of consciousness can be likened to
a farmer removing a sluice gate so as to allow water to irrigate his rice field so rice can
grow there.
In addition to being an observation adding a structural element to the model of

consciousness, this sutra clearly infers a method, a praxis, for attenuating many of these other
centers simply by learning to modify, to control, and possibly close the "sluice gates," thus
withhold the waters of consciousness from irrigating those centers that form due to the various
thoughts, memories, impulses and other saskras that continually arise, making it normally so
difficult to enter the quiescence of samdhi.
The fourth sutra, below, describes how these newly emergent centers or vortexes of citt
consciousness, sprouted and activated from klea caused saskras, are perceived as "standing
alone," newborn centers of infant separate selfhood due to asmit, the quality of "I-am"-ness.
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Yoga Stra IV.4.,
40
Nirmn a-cittnya-asmit-mtrt.
These multiple centers of consciousness spring from asmit.
These distracting sub personalities or centers of citt are caused by self-centered asmit
itself, a mistaken sense of "I-ness," and the yogic trick is to learn how to attenuate the operation
of these sub personalities for a sufficiently prolonged period of time in order for the purusa to
begin to shine forth. It is only in the highest asamprajata samdhi, discussed near the end of
this chapter, that such states (active multiple sub-centers of consciousness) are not continually
rising up and wresting control over our primary consciousness thus making us believe they are
our true Self when they are not.
Jumping ahead to sutra IV.20. we find a statement of the problem of having multiple
centers of consciousness active.
YS IV.20., Eka samaye chobhaynavadhran am
Radiant purusa consciousness and citta-vritti centers of consciousness
cannot be simultaneously tuned.
Sutra IV.25. describes how to overcome this problem, and the threshold across which the
states of radiance in samdhi in which perception of purus a unfold.
YS IV.25., Viesa-darinah
tmabhva-bhvan-nivrttih

Perceiving the distinction among the many centres of consciousness the attraction of
the whirl of the vrittis comes to a complete cessation.
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Having gained the ability to "see" the distinction, at this point the adept enters the state of
consciousness which is beyond words, certainly, but also "burns up" many of the sources of the
sub centers of consciousness with their distracting and debilitating activities, and makes it easier
to maintain communication directly with the purusa in the future.
Experience in this new domain can lead eventually to Dharmamegha samadhi as
described in Sutra IV.29.:
YS IV.29. Prasakhyne-'py-akusdasya sarvath vivekakhyteh dharma-meghas-samdhih
Dharma-Megha-Samadhi arises in one "who is able to maintain a constant state
of detachment (Vairgya) even toward the most exalted state of enlightenment".32
Taimni here translates vivekakhyateh as somewhat synonymous with Paravairgya, while it also
translates more as discriminatory discernment or the wisdom of identifying vision. This leads to
victory over the klesa affictions and karma and to Sutra IV.31.
YS IV.31. Tad sarva-varan a-malpetasya jnasya-nantyt jeyamalpam
Then with quiet mind and covers removed
the infinities of knowledge shine forth.
32 Taimni., 431.
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This reminds us of a poem, The Dark Night by the 16th century Spanish contemplative
mystic St. John of the Cross which uses his "house" as a metaphor for his mind with all of its
rooms and activities:
Onedarknight,
firedwithlove'surgentlongings
ah,thesheergrace!
Iwentoutunseen,
myhousebeingnowallstilled.33
And finally, at the very end of the Yoga Sutra, we come to Sutra IV.34. which begins with
the word purus a, and indicates the attainment of kaivalya, absolute liberation of purusa,
independence, a state where purusa is finally established in its own nature.

YS IV.34. Purusa-artha-nyn
gun n-pratiprasavah kaivalya svarpa-pratis t h v citiaktiriti
The gunas having been reversed, the freedom of the pure consciousness power of
purusa is obtained and this is called Kaivalya.
But even here words fail and the experience itself can not easily be expressed. In the words of
the Professor of Chemistry and Yoga scholar I.K. Taimni:
It should be noted that this is not a description of the content of Consciousness in
the state of Kaivalya. As has been pointed out before, no one living in the world
of the unreal can understand or describe the Reality of which the Yogi becomes
aware on attaining Kaivalya.34
33Kierran Kavanaugh, Trans., Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, (Washington, D.C.:
Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), 108.
34 Taimni., 443-444.
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Having described in brief some of the more important sutras and the most fundamental
teachings in the model of contemplative yoga and samdhi, it is now time to articulate this model
in the language of modern science.
We will not go further in this paper into the wealth of additional details revealed by
Patajali concerning practice and pitfalls of yogic technique, all leading to the various samdhis.
Nor will we discuss the elaborate structural theories of the kleas, those afflictions or
impediments to progress that spring up like weeds in our path, nor the saskras, those leftover
easily sprouted seed residues from previous struggle with kleas, nor cultivation of the various
siddhis with descriptions of the many "psychic powers". Instead we will simply focus on the two
states of consciousness thus far presented in the opening Sutras of Samdhi-Pda:
1.The state of citta-vrtti
in which all of the processing systems of the mind are switched
on and processing full blast.
2.
The state of samdhi, where as completely as possible all of the mental processes
have been attenuated, turned down, and the mind-in-the-brain computer-like
biomaterial system is sufficiently silent to allow the radiant purus a to begin to
glow increasingly into various stages of ecstasy/enstasy, the realms of the
samdhi state.
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Symbolic versus Primary Consciousness: Two Conscious Beings in The

Brain
The Stanford physicist Frank Heile35 has proposed a theory that there are two streams of
consciousness in our brain, one which he calls "Primary consciousness" and the other "Symbolic
consciousness." He says that "Humans have two different internal representations of the world,"
two conscious beings in the brain. Our hypothesis in this paper is that one of these conscious
beings can be seen to correspond to purusa and the other to prakrti,
in the form of citta -vrttis.
Symbolic Consciousness is comprised of the verbal language and sequential time-based

processing representational systems (memory, logic of comparison and choice, etc.) while the
Primary Consciousness operates in a "massively parallel processing" mode perpendicular to
time, the now. 36 A table of his comparisons is shown in Table 2 - "Therefore, Two
Consciousness Entities."
Primary Consciousness
Ancient (many millions of years)
Primates and many other animals have this
consciousness.
Massively parallel processing (senses as
inputs & internal representations)
High Bandwidth
Intuitive, spatial, concrete thought, music,
art, athletics
Emotions are from the primary system
Difficult to report the contents of
consciousness without using the symbolic
consciousness.
It is the entity that perceives the "blind
Symbolic Consciousness
New (30 to 100 thousand years old)
This consciousness seems to be (almost?)
uniquely human.
Largely serial processing (the "voice"
always talking in your head)
Low Bandwidth
Language, logic, temporal sequences,
abstract thought, science
Emotions are felt in the body
Easily "reportable"; thus it is the most
obvious consciousness and is often mistaken
as the only consciousness.
It is the entity that is blind to the "blind
35 Heile., 5.
36 Heile., 10.
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sight" object
sight" object
Subconscious + Id
Ego
Does most of the work.
Takes most of the credit.
45
Table 2 - Therefore, Two Consciousness Entities37
I propose that we make the assumption that the Heile model and the Patajali model are
mapping the two domains of the same territory.
Heile's Model
Symbolic Consciousness
Primary Consciousness
Patajali Model
=
=
citta-vrtti
samdhi
We can use these relationships as a bridge to a new model of consciousness using the
languages of science to articulate more clearly the introspective knowledge imparted in the
Sanskrit Yoga-sutra of Patajali.
The Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness

But there is yet another link we can make between Patajali's yoga and a modern
approach to consciousness. In the 2002 publication The Nature of Consciousness: A Hypothesis,
the New Zealand neurophysiologist, Dr. S. Pocket states, "consciousness is identical with certain
spatiotemporal patterns in the electromagnetic field." That same year Dr. J. McFadden, a
researcher in molecular genetics at the University of Surrey, published an article "The Conscious
Electromagnetic Information (Cemi) Field Theory" in which he states categorically:
The brain's electromagnetic field represents an integrated electromagnetic field
representation of distributed neuronal information and has dynamics that closely
map to those expected for a correlate of consciousness. I propose that the brain's
37 Ibid.
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electromagnetic information field is the physical substrate of conscious

awareness.38
However both McFadden and Pocket reveal what might be a shared tacit assumption due
to similar backgrounds in modern genetics and biological research, in their common supposition
that this electromagnetic component of consciousness is an epiphenomenon of neurons firing in
the brain. This is a widespread unchallenged assumption in the hard sciences, i.e. that physical
neuron structures evolved first, and were the forerunners out of which consciousness then arose,
hence whenever we experience "consciousness," it is due as a direct result from the electrical
firing of neurons in the brain.
The Science of Yoga: The Consciousness of Energy Fields

But what if it is the electromagnetic field of consciousness itself that is the evolutionary
driver, and that it is the brain and the neurons that have risen from the emf field. Let us assume
that this field of consciousness may indeed by identified with Patajali's purusa,
and that it is out
of this field that the neuronal and brain structures subsequently arise, and that their activity
generates what Patajali calls the vrttis,
all of the myriad fluctuations of cortical brain subsystem
programs in full operation, shielding and masking the original purusa beneath the incessantly
chattering vrttis.
As we have seen from the very first sutra, it is learning to control these vrttis
in the
Symbolic Consciousness that enables us to reach the powerful states of samdhi in the Symbolic
Consciousness. This is the concern of the Yoga Sutra, giving us a model and a range of
techniques that allow us to grasp and manipulate the controls, operate and programs, and upgrade
38
Johnjoe McFadden, Synchronous Firing and Its Influence on the Brain's Electromagnetic
Field: Evidence for an Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness. Journal of
Consciousness Studies, vol. 9, no. 4 (2002): 23.
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our psychic software so that we can tune the mind to new dimensions beyond the limits of
habitual socially-conditioned and time-bound daily waking ranges of consciousness.
Purua And Prakti : The Two Domains of Pure Energy

Purus a and prakrti in the Yoga Sutra are the two poles of cosmic existence as described in
the Smkhya philosophy. In mathematics and in physics it has been established that pure energy
also expresses itself between two poles: the one pole the so called 'solid' configuration wherein
energy is semi-locked into lattice like configurations, and the other pole, the 'radiant'
configuration of energy radiating with many more degrees of freedom than the solid pole. These
two poles associated are associated with two dimensions or domains, the timespace domain, and
the frequency domain, both of which have been firmly modeled by interconnecting mathematical
functions that are the basis of our 21st century digital electromagnetic communication
technologies.
In radio engineering these two poles or two domains of energy, time (td) and frequency
(fd), are of essential importance in the field of both information theory and signal
communication. On the first page of the his standard textbook on electronic network information
theory, Kuo states:
In describing signals, we use the two universal languages of electrical engineering
time and frequency. Strictly speaking, a signal is a function of time. However,
the signal can be described equally well in terms of spectral or frequency
information. As between any two languages, such as French and German,
translation is needed to render information given in one language comprehensible
in the other. Between time and frequency, the translation is effected by the
Fourier series and the Fourier integral.39
39 Kuo., p.1.
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Using Fourier analysis and the Fourier transform, signals can not only be described either
in the time domain or the frequency domain, but they can be converted between the two
domains, and it can thus be said that they are two different aspects of one and the same thing,
energy signals with information content, but potentially existing in either one, or both, of two
very different dimensions.
We will consider this third bridge of potentiality linking Patajali's Model into another
language of modern science. The power inherent in the mathematical transforms of the Fourier40
series cannot be underestimated, bridging as they do the timespace domain (td) and the frequency
domain (fd) repeatedly and reliably in our own hands every time we operate digital devices. Why
would not Nature use these very same mathematical functions to process signals of
consciousness and transformations of conscious energy in (and around) our human bodies?
Accordingly let us assume the second mapping as follows:
Fourier's Model
Heile's Model
Patajali Model
Time Domain
(td)
Symbolic
Consciousness
citta-vrtti
Frequency Domain
(fd)
Primary
Consciousness
samdhi
What would this new relationship imply for the tangential timespace domain of prakrti
and the radial indwelling of purusa?
We discover here a purely mathematical model that may
perfectly mirror the relationship between purusa and prakrti.
40 Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, a French mathematical physicist, discovered these equations
while serving Napoleon Bonaparte as Governor of Lower Egypt in 1799 while theorizing on
the flow of heat; he is also credited with first describing the greenhouse effect.
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At the one pole we have the citta-vrtti

of Symbolic Consciousness, seen as the
otherwise radiant energy of purusa as it flows unaware, trapped, and captured within the many
neuronal biomechanical cognitive systems of mind-in-the-brain. Its presence is masked and
shielded by the combined noise of all the memory storage, search, and retrieval activity, logic
and associated subroutines, cognitive comparisons, sensory input processes, and more that is
involved in citta-vrtti
processing of sequential information in a time-based domain (td)
By contrast, in the purusa we have Primary Consciousness, that which was before, and
that into which we return at the end of time, at which point we cross a threshold into the
Frequency Domain (fd). which is timeless and spaceless and therefore omnipresence, an ever
present origin that transcends both time and space.
In the mathematics of information theory, it is the Fourier transform that is the workhorse
providing the direct connection interface between the time domain (td) and the frequency domain (fd).
For example, signal processing chips in cell phones are encoded with what are called Fast Fourier
Transform algorithms, equations hard-coded in silicon, which transform audio voice speech
frequency patterns in the time-space domain into frequency spectrum patterns which are then
digitized and transmitted at the speed of light across the network. On the receiving end, another Fast
Fourier Transform algorithm unpacks the frequency domain spectrum into time-space frequency
spectrums in low voltage circuits, which then drive the remote speaker allowing the remote human to
hear the recreated audio time-space spectral energy.
Psyche and the Calculus of Reasoning

Norbert Wiener, who pioneered and coined the term cybernetics in his book of the same
name published in 1946. He uses the mathematics of Fourier to analyze and to model the
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activity of brain waves in both the time domain (td) and the frequency domain (fd). The Fourier
transform and inverse Fourier transform are:
Fourier integral
Fourier integral transform
transform of a
of a continuous
continuous time function
frequency function into
into the frequency
the time domain.
domain.
The preceding two Fourier transform expressions indicate that any arbitrary function
(signal) in the time-space domain, f(t), can be transformed into and expressed by an infinite
series of frequency spectra functions dF(F) in the imaginary frequency, domain, and
conversely, that any arbitrary function in the frequency domain, f(F), can be transformed into
and expressed by an infinite series of time spectra functions dt(t).
Using the Fourier integral to analyze brain waves, Wiener describes how he has
discovered that frequency centers within the brain tend to auto correlate, i.e. attract one another,
resonate and self tune in the frequency domain, and concludes his book with an amazing
conjecture:
We thus see that a non-linear interaction causing the attraction of frequency can
generate a self-organizing system, as it does in the case of the brain waves we
have discussedThis possibility of self-organization is by no means limited to
the very low frequency of these two phenomena. Consider self-organizing
systems at the frequency level, say, of infrared light or radar spectra.41
41 Ibid., 202.
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51
Weiner goes on to discuss these implications for biology, and in particular the problems of
communication at the molecular and primitive cellular levels during which specific substances
produce cancer by reproducing themselves to specific specifications to mimic pre-existing
normal local cells. Molecules do not simply pass notes to one another, so how do they
communicate? Weiner conjectures:
The usual explanation given is that one molecule of these substances acts as a
template according to which the constituents smaller molecules lay themselves
down and unite into a similar macromolecule. However an entirely possible way
of describing such forces is that the active bearer of the specificity of a molecule
may lie in the frequency pattern of its molecular radiation, an important part of
which may lie in infra-red electromagnetic frequency or even lower. It is quite
possible that this phenomenon may be regarded as a sort of attractive interaction
of frequency.42
At the end of his paper, in a chapter titled Brain Waves and Self-Organizing Systems,
Wiener suggests further possible studies to throw light on the validity of my hypothesis
concerning brain waves.
He describes the widespread observations of seemingly simultaneous behavior of groups
of living beings such as crickets or frogs that can only be attributable to simultaneously
synchronization of a neuronal network through the frequency domain:
It has often been supposed that the fireflies in a tree flash in unison.
I have heard it stated that in the case of some of the fireflies of Southeastern Asia
this phenomenon is so marked that it can scarcely be put down to illusion.
Could not the same supposed phenomenon of the pulling together of frequencies
take place? However this process occurs, it is a dynamic process and involves
forces or their equivalent.43
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 200.
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The Fourier Transform, the Psyche and the Human

Brain
Knowledge of human neuroanatomy and electrophysiology have grown considerably, and
postmodern research has broadened the range of information available for consideration in
searching for connections between consciousness and the human physical body. In this section
we will explore several areas of contemporary knowledge that may shed additional light on any
adequate model of consciousness.
Electrophysiology and the Psyche

Recent discoveries in human electrophysiology appear to validate the conjecture that
Patajali's purus a, Heile's Primary Consciousness, and Fourier's frequency spectrum may be
mapping the same domain. Joseph Chilton Pearce (2002) describes the electromagnetic toroidal
field (Figure 3) generated by the human heart:
All living forms produce an electrical field because in some sense everything has
an electromagnetic element or basis, but a heart cells electrical output is
exceptional. electromagnetic energy arcs out from and curves back to the
heart to form a torus that extends as far as twelve to fifteen feet from the
body. The dipole of this heart torus extends through the length of our body,
more or less, from the pelvic floor to the top of the skull.44
44 Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence, (Vermont: Park Street Press, 2002), 57.
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Figure 1 Computer projection of electromagnetic heart torus field 45
If there is a correlation between the psyche and electrophysiology, then the individual
human psyche should, following the range of the electromagnetic toroidal energy field extending
out from the human heart, also extend in some sense twelve to fifteen feet from the body.
If our Primary consciousness or purus a does have an energy component in the
electromagnetic spectrum, then it must be affected, to some degree, by the electromagnetic
environment of the earth. Many animals possess a magnetic sense and appear to be able to
track the magnetic field of the earth which is generated by the flow of molten material in the
earths core and the corresponding flow of ions in the atmosphere.
Magnetoreception is an accepted phenomenon among a wide range of animals: birds,
fruit flies, honeybees, turtles, lobsters, sharks, stingrays, whales and even bacteria.46 Even
animals not normally known for their migration habits have been discovered to possess such a
sense:
45 Ibid., 58.
46 Magnetoception, Wikipedia, last modified December 12, 2010,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoception
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Recent publications from a German research group (Begall et al, 2008), made
the discovery that cattle (and other herd animals, such as red and roe deer) tend
to situate themselves on a magnetic North-South axis, as if involuntarily
directed by the earths magnetic field. These surprising results were discovered
when satellite images provided by Google Earth were used to analyze herding
patterns and behavior. However, the built-in magnetic compass gets out of
alignment the closer the cattle get to high voltage power lines, and the cattle
then align with the power lines instead.
Contemporary research in electrophysiology indicates that our human bodies may be
more involved in sensing electromagnetic fields than has previously been acknowledged.
Research at Cal Tech has discovered traces of magnetite in the human brain and heart, in about
the same density as that found in migrating animals, and has proven that onset of rapid eye
movement in sleeping humans is shortened in the E-W orientation of sleepers compared to the NS position.47
If the consciousness has a spectral vibrating energy frequency component, then is it not
likely there have evolved in the human biosystem physiological modulators of this frequency
component? Microwave cavities are to the invisible frequency energy spectrum what lenses are
to visible light energy. During my senior year we had to design resonant waveguide cavity horn
antennas (Figure 3) for amplification and modulation of microwave energy fields.
47 Ruhenstroth-Bauer, Influence of the Earth's Magnetic Field on Resting and Activated EEG
Mapping in Normal Subjects. International Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 73, no. 3-4 (June
1993): 331-49, 195.
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Figure 2 - Horn antenna

The horn antenna at Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ that Penzias and Wilson used to
discover the 3 K cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965. The simplest
aperture antenna is such a waveguide horn. Radiation is guided by a tapered
waveguide horn.
http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/RadioTelescopes.html
In another of my senior classes, the electrophysiology of the nervous system, I noticed

the striking similarities between the waveguide horn antennas in the advanced communication
lab and the images of the ventricular cavities within the human cranial cavity (Figure 4.). I
mentioned this to my professor and was assured that the ventricular system only dealt with
thermal equilibrium of the brain and secondarily to absorb shock trauma to the head.
Physiology of the Brain: The Ventricular Horns

The structures of the ventricular system are embryologically derived from the center of
the neural tube. In the developing vertebrate, this hollow tube is the first distinguishing
prefiguration of the spinal cord and central nervous system.48 In the mature human the ventricular
cavities are filled with cerebrospinal fluid, an extremely clear, protein free liquid created within
the brain by special cells on the inner walls of the ventricular caverns. The horns or caverns of
the two ventricles are separated only by a small opening between them, and the ventricular
system is contiguous down the spinal column within the central neural tube of the spinal cord.
48 G.J. Romanes, Cunninghams Textbook of Anatomy, 10th Edition, (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), 51.
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Figure 3 - Lateral view of the ventricular cavities within the human brain 49
The currently accepted explanation of the role of the ventricular cavities and the clear
cerebrospinal fluid within the cavities is as follows: that though the system has some
thermodynamic stabilizing properties its function is primarily a hydraulic one that the body uses
to cushion the brain during trauma, and that it simply protects the brain tissue from injury when
jolted or hit.50 It should be noted that prior to the 20th century the accepted physiological
description of the functioning of nerve fibers within the nervous system was that nerves were a
type of plumbing pipe vessel and that the nervous system and brain operated in fact as a
hydraulic system similar moving fluid according to Bernoullis law in a similar way as the
cardiovscular system. A better explanation for the nervous system awaited the understanding of
electrophysiology in the 20th century, as does yet, perhaps, a better explanation of the ventricular
cavities and their clear cerebrospinal fluid.
49 Netter, A Compilation of Paintings of the Normal and Pathologic Anatomy of the Nervous
System, 46.
50 Ibid., 21.
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Figure 4 - Ventricular cavity two views.
An excellent rotating image of the human ventricular cavities can be found at the
following hyperlink: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lateral_ventricle.gif
It is not unreasonable to imagine that modern physiologists are as mistaken about the role
and function of the ventricular cavity horns and the clear cerebrospinal fluid within as they were
over the function and role of the nervous system in previous centuries.
If the psyche does indeed have an electromagnetic frequency energy component, then the
horn shaped ventricular cavities within the cranial cavity indicate the possibility that nature
might very well have already designed and implemented its own energy frequency signal
communication system.
Is it not then likely that this communication system is being used unconsciously (or
consciously) by humans in various processes of the psyche? Could this cave be where internal
vision is projected during dreaming states?
If the psyche or parts of it does hold court as some sort of emf plasma within the
ventricular cavities, what about the individual neurons and nerve fibers which are exclusively
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focused upon by neurophysiologists? An MIT physicist concludes that it is likely that the
neurons have assumed a more automatic, instinctual, computer-like role in human
electrophysiological function. Danah Zohar says:
In the model of consciousness I am suggesting, the brain has two interacting
systems the coherent Bose-Einstein condensate associated with consciousness
and the computer-like system of individual neurones.51
Traditional Contemplative Observations: Fixing Spirit in its Original

Cavity
Contemplative experiences throughout many cultures corroborate the existence of a
potential gathering and localization of psychic energy within the central region of the cranium.
However few descriptions are as relevant to our discussion of the possibilities of finding aspects
of psyche within the ventricular cavities as is exhibited in this following passage from a text on
Taoist yoga:
Question:Will you please give me the exact position of the original cavity of
spirit?
Answer:
It is (in the centre of the brain behind) the spot between the
eyes. Lao Tsu called it the gateway to heaven and earth;
hence he urged people to concentrate on the centre in order to
realise the oneness (of all things). In this center is a pearl of the
size of a grain of rice, which is the centre between heaven and
earth in the human body (i.e. the microcosm); it is the cavity of
prenatal vitality. He who knows this cavity can prepare
the elixer of immortality.
Therefore, during the training both eyes should turn inward to
the centre (between and behind them) in order to hold on to this
One which should be held in the original cavity of spirit (tsu
chiao) with neither strain nor relaxation; this is called fixing
spirit in its original cavity .52
51 Dane Zohar, The Quantum Self, (London: Flamingo, 1991), 70.
52 Lu Kuan Yu, Taoist Yoga: Alchemy & Immortality. Boston: Weiser Books, 1973, 4-5.
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Figure 5 - Encephalogram from front, revealing horns of ventricular cavity.
Summary and Implications

Domains and Ranges of Human Consciousness
In the map we have drawn, Patajali's purusa is a significant energy configuration, Heile's
"Primary" as contrasted with "Symbolic" consciousness, and expresses itself in the toroidal
electromagnetic energy field enveloping our bodies. It is possible to detect a radiant flux of this
Primary consciousness glowing within the ventricular cavities of the brain in the very center of
the cranium, perceivable with the inner eye or "third eye" as described both in China and India:
The pineal gland is a pine cone shaped endocrine gland that sits between the two
hemispheres of the brain - a location which corresponds to what in Taoist practice
is known as the "Crystal Palace." Lao Tzu called this little gland "the gateway to
heaven and earth." In Hindu yoga, this same place is called the "Cave of
Brahman," and corresponds to the Aja Chakra, or "third eye."53
53 Elizabeth Reninger, "The Amazing Pineal Gland" dated March 27, 2008. Retrieved from
About.com site, web page http://taoism.about.com/b/2008/03/27/the-amazing-pineal-gland.htm,
November 19, 2011 @ 11:41 am PST.
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Of this "Cave of Brahman," Swami Hariharananda Giri (1907-2002) a Bengali guru and teacher
of Patajali's Yoga in the lineage of Paramahamsa Yogananda wrote:
The Cave of Brahman is an etheric chamber where Brahman, the creative
essence of the universal spirit, manifests itself and radiates pranic life to the
twenty four gross body elements via the medulla, cerebellum and the spinal chord.
The pituitary and pineal glands, at opposite ends of the cave, are the positive and
negative poles of Self-knowledge.54
Such also could be the place of access to the akashic record described by Alice Bailey in
her commentaries on the Yoga Sutra:
The akashic record is like an immense photographic film, registering all the
desires and earth experiences of our planet.
Those who perceive it will see pictured thereon:
The life experiences of every human being since time began,
1. The reactions to experience of the entire animal kingdom,
2. The aggregation of the thought-forms of a karmic nature (based on desire) of
every human unit throughout time. ...
3. The planetary "Dweller on the Threshold" with all that appertains to that term and
all the aggregations of forms which are to be found in its environment.
The trained seer has learnt to dissociate that which pertains to his own aura and
the aura of the planet (which is in actuality the akashic record).55
Using mathematical tools from Fourier and Mandelbrot, we have been able to visualize
the shapes and dynamics of these domains of consciousness as a manifestation of energy
simultaneously swirling between two states, coexisting both in the temporal, spatial time domain
(td) and in the non-temporal, non-spatial frequency domain(fd).
A consciousness that extends not only throughout the time domain but has a component
within the frequency domain goes far to explain the siddhis or "powers" described in the Yoga
54 Paramahamsa Hariharananda, Kriya Yoga: The Scientific Process of Soul Culture and the
Essence of All Religion, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006), 108.
55 Alice Baily. Light of the Soul: A Paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (New York:
Lucis Publishing Co., 1988), 275.
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Sutra, or the synchronistic phenomena observed by Jung and others, and provide a solid basis for
Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance,56 which has as its central hypothesis that
information can be transmitted instantaneously (or nearly so) among biological entities, whether
pigeons, humans, or bacteria.
In the frequency domain all frequency spectral patterns coexist simultaneously (no
temporal separation) and immediately connect aperspectivally (no spatial separation). While
there is no spatial axis found in this frequency domain, there is also no time axis. Thus many
previously unexplained phenomena including morphic resonance, telepathy, dj vu and others
may be understood as resonance processes within the frequency domain dynamically collapsing
into the timespace domain.
Being two aspects or transformations of psychic energy, the entire realm of the frequency
domain would be omnipresent within the timespace domain.
The Two Domains: Conscious Personality and Purua as the Self

A comparison of the concept of purusa as Primary consciousness with the Jungian
concept of the Self is also revealing. In Man and His Symbols, M.-L. von Franz, one of Carl
Jungs most famous students, in her essay The Process of Individuation, describes the Self as
follows:
The Self can be defined as an inner guiding factor that is different from the
conscious personality and that can be grasped only through the investigation of
ones own dreams. These show it to be the regulating center that brings about a
constant extension and maturing of the personality. But this larger, more nearly
total aspect of the psyche appears first as merely an inborn possibility. It may
emerge very slightly, or it may develop relatively completely during ones
56 Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, (London:

Blond & Briggs, 1981).
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lifetime. How far it develops depends on whether or not the ego is willing to
listen to the messages of the Self.57
Dr. von Franz here speaks of communication between the conscious personality and
the Self, stating categorically that the conscious personality can connect with the Self only
through the investigation of ones own dreams. [emphasis added]. It is my belief that Dr. von
Franz was incorrect in stating that the conscious personality can only connect with the Self
through dreams. Contemplative practices lead to sufficient quiescence of the normal awakened
state so as to allow the perception of the Self resonating with the self to arise within various
cavities throughout the body when they are made objects of sustained contemplative
concentration. It is my belief that this resonance experienced by contemplatives and variously
termed Nirvana, God, the Divine, the Absolute is that same purusa described in the
Yoga Sutra and in the Smkhya philosophy.
Note that she also describes the Self as this larger, more nearly total aspect of the
psyche, and as that which sends messages of the Self to the conscious personality through
dreams. If we equate this Self with the Symbolic self, then the Yoga Sutra is the instruction book
for establishing more lucid and intense perception of the Self than occurs during the state of
dreaming. This more lucid contact is called in Smkhya philosophy, the direct experience of
purusa by purusa,
the state of samadhi.
Yoga as Reunion with the Self

If we speculate that the Self is indeed the largest Self possible then it would include the
entire cosmic universe of timespace (td) (prakrti)
as well as the non-temporal, non-spatial
eternal frequency domain (fd) (purusa),
the Absolute. We can only assume that the Self is in
57 Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, (New York: Random House, 1964), 163.
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constant communication with itself and all its subselves, or alternately that Purus a is in constant
communication with itself and all of the purusas
in the cosmos (here we are accepting the theory
of multiple purusas,
subsets of the big Purusa).
While a human being is awake, involved in
timespace waking consciousness (conscious personality in the normal waking mode) there are
billions of neurons firing and processing immediate and long term memory, associations,
comparisons, logical operations, projections, perceptions. While a human being is sleeping, the
quiescence of the enormous electrical noise allows the cosmic frequency dimension of the
Primary Self to resonate with the Symbolic self in the ventricular cavities and toroidal body field,
and dreams are generated during this period of communication of self with Self.
Thus the Yoga Sutra can be seen as a manual of instruction meant to assist the human
individual personality to free itself from having been hijacked by the hyperactivity of the cortical
structures of prakrti,
the brain, with its multiple mechanical subprograms. Once freed by a
relative quiescence, no longer hidden from itself, purusa becomes aware of itself and begins to
resonate with an awareness which bridges the networks of timespace (td) brain and the nontemporal, non-spatial domain (fd) of radiant emf. From this arises the states (samadhis) which
are the catalyst and nourishment for newly emergent senses and powers (siddhis), speeding the
yogi toward the attainment of the oneness of kaivalya.
Darshan as Purua Radiance in the Physical World

Finally, our model of Primary human consciousness as the emf energy field extending
outward from the human body can be seen as providing a physical basis for validating the
traditional South Asian belief in darshan, whereby proximity to the living body of a highly
developed contemplative yogi can result in a resonance of energy that can be experienced. In
support of this conjecture and in closing, I would like to quote the following first-hand
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64
description of a such an experience of darshan in 1948, brought about by entry into the
proximity of the living presence of Sri Aurobindo, as recounted in the dissertation of Rhoda Le
Cocq, a doctoral student of Dr. Chaudhuri's at CIAS58:
As I stepped into a radius of about four feet, there was the sensation of moving into
some kind of a force field. Intuitively, I knew it was the force of Love, but not what
ordinary humans usually mean by the term. These two were geared straight up; they
were not paying attention to me as ordinary parents might have done; yet, this
unattachment seemed just the thing that healed. Suddenly, I loved them both, as spiritual
parents.
Then, all thought ceased, I was perfectly aware of where I was; it was not hypnotism
as one Stanford friend later suggested. It was simply that during those few minutes, my
mind became utterly still. It seemed that I stood there a very long, an uncounted time, for
there was no time. Only many years later did I describe this experience as my having
experienced the Timeless in Time. When there at the darshan, there was not the least
doubt in my mind that I had met two people who had experienced what they claimed.
They were Gnostic Beings. They had realized this new consciousness which Sri
Aurobindo called the Supramental.59
58 CIAS, The California Institute of Asian Studies, incorporated in 1974, was renamed in 1980
to the California Institute of Integral Studies.
59 Rhoda Le Cocq, The Radical Thinkers: Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo, (Pondicherry: Sri
Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1969), 108.
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65
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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science:

"Science is the Yoga of the West."

PARA 7255 01 Yoga Sutras of Patajali

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

6 Heile., Slide 10.

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

Experience of purusa consciousness is the gateway to Kaivalya, described in the final

8 Haridas Chaudhuri, The Philosophy of Integralism, (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir,

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

Chaudhuri's integral approach foreshadows the contemporary emphasis in "data-mining," a

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

Patajali's Yoga Stra: A Map of Human Consciousness.................20

Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science............................................43

The Fourier Transform, the Psyche and the Human Brain...............51

Summary and Implications..........................................................58

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

Charts, Tables, and Figures

Chart 1 - Yoga Sutra Book I...........................................................................................................24

Table 1 - Alternate translations of nirodhah in Yoga Stra I.2......................................................26

Figure 1 Computer projection of electromagnetic heart torus field...........................................52

Figure 5 - Encephalogram from front, revealing horns of ventricular cavity................................58

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

world of my schoolmates as we continued on our way.

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

As a result of my experiences at Little Sur Creek, I began practicing silent meditation

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

13 Psychonaut: (from the Greek (psych "soul/spirit/mind")

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Patajali's Yoga Stra: A Map of Human

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Patajali's Yoga and Modern Science

Sdhana-Pda, the chapter on the "path" or "practice" of Yoga made up of 55 stras;

17 Author's note: "Transcendent" as used in this paper is to be contrasted with "ordinary