Want “Perfect Flow”?

March 22, 2008 – 6:00 am

This essay was written by my friend, Sufi and Sanskrit scholar, Wakil Mushtaq Ali Al Ansari. It explains the historical and practical implications of flow in my Circular Strength Training® System. It has a lot of meat to it, so read it in chunks, or skip ahead to the last section for the climax.

Understanding Samādhi

(and the problem of translations)

Preamble

Before delving into the body of this essay, which will examine the reason I translate certain words from Sanskrit to English in the manner I do, I would like you to consider something about translations in general..

Much of what I am going to be writing about in my essay on Yoga, The Sutras of Patanjali, and what I consider his original concepts is translated from Sanskrit. While Sanskrit is related to English, both languages being members of the Indo-Aryan and Indo-European families, Sanskrit is the oldest attested Indo-European language, with examples of Vedic Sanskrit dating to about 1500 BCE. There has been considerable drift between the two language over the centuries.

The Yoga Sutras were most likely written sometime between 200 BCE and 100 CE. The culture of that time will have a significant effect on the meaning of the ideas presented.

Because of this, confusion can ensue if we are not careful.

I have studied the Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras for about forty years and started working on translating the Sutras about ten years ago. I have finished a translation, then gone back and scrapped it because of having discovered something that changed my understanding in some significant way several times. I often have to do a lot more study to understand the context in which a word or phrase was used than to understand the “base meaning”.

As an example, in English the words “marvelous”, “fantastic”, and “amazing” have very different meanings in context today than they did a hundred years ago. If this is not taken into consideration, the meaning of a sentence can become quite skewed.

To give another example, most people here are familiar with the aphorism of Jesus (as) translated as “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”.

Today, when we read this it most often invokes an image of a large, gangly-legged beast fully laden with packs trying to squeeze its head through a Nicholson #12 sewing needle. But is this what a fisherman 2000 ago in Galilee would have thought of? The answer is no, most likely not.

As most of us know, if we give it any thought, Kleenex is a brand name for a paper tissue used for wiping your nose, but the word has entered common usage as ANY tissue paper used for this purpose regardless of brand. It is so common an understanding that my spell checker didn’t even blink when I typed out the word here.

2000 years ago, sailors in the Middle-East used a lot of rope and cord. One kind of heavy cord was made out of, you guessed it, camel hair. It became common to refer to this kind of cord as “camel” (”Hey! Ben Yeshua, cut me five cubits of ‘camel’”)

Furthermore, a fisherman in the Galilee area 2000 years ago, when you say to him “needle”, is not going to think of a thin, delicate, sewing needle of today but of the huge, wide-eyed things that they used to mend nets and repair sails.

So the metaphor is going to have a very different feel to its original, intended audience than it will for a reader today. So much so that the meaning could be totally different for them than it would be for an uninformed reader of today.

Please bear this in mind when we talk about ideas like “prana, samadhi, samapati, tantra, yoga and such-like. While we have one cultural understanding of these terms today, the original meanings of the words will often be found to be quite a bit different.

For example, we have the word Tantra ( तन्त्र ) which I consider one of the most abused words in the Sanskrit language, at least here in the West.

Today you can find people who say “I practice tantra”, but if you ask them “which tantra do you practice?” you will get a confused look in most cases.

In the West “tantra” has come to mean, for the most part in the last twenty years, “sexual yoga”, but this not quite accurate to the meaning of the word or to how it has been understood in the East for some centuries.

There is no one “tantra”. The word means first, the warp strings of a loom, and goes on to suggest the principal or essential parts of something. The accurate meaning of Tantra is a compilation of knowledge, rituals, teaching, worship of various deities etc. Within Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions. There are perhaps hundreds of different Tantras, with ninety two major tantras within Hinduism alone. Some are well known, such as Vajrayāna Tantra of Buddhism and some almost unknown in the West such as the Bhairava Tantras of Kashmiri Sivaism.

This is a very poignant example of how we redefine terms to support our wishes or preconceptions. If we meet someone who says “I practice tantra” we can be fairly sure that they are referring to a modern Western group of traditions about twenty or thirty years old that draw, to a greater or lesser extent, on some Hindu and/or Buddhist traditions and a great deal of modern “psycho-sexual material of dubious origin. If, on the other hand someone says something along the lines of  “I am a follower of the Shaiva Siddhanta tradition” we can be pretty sure that they are studying one of the traditional tantras as a path.

There is one other area that needs to be addressed. This is the tendency of people to attribute ceremonial, religious or magical meaning to what they don’t understand.

There are thousands of examples of this throughout human history, but allow me to give you just one. For many years, an artifact found at Cro-Magnon sites, consisting of a piece of antler cut off just above the first fork with a hole drilled through the wide area and decorated with carvings was called in the text books a “baton de commandment”.

It was supposed that this was an object of ceremonial significance, held by a chief or shaman to show his status.

Today we know that the object is in fact a shaft wrench, a tool for straightening dart and arrow shafts so that they will fly true. We know this because anthropologists stopped sitting in a classroom making guesses based all too often on personal preconception and spent time with people who still use this kind of tool for its intended purpose.

So it is not marvelous to imagine that even when we read the same words exactly as spoken several centuries ago, we may not come up with the meaning that the speaker intended.

Yoga means Integration

Today there is no single “yogic tradition”. We now have all the various fragmented practices that go under names like Hatha Yoga, Karma Yoga, Kundilini Yoga etc. During Patanjali’s time this was not the case, and I suspect that “prasara yoga” is an attempt to return to the original, integrated meaning of yoga. 

Patanjali starts the first chapter (the samadhi pada) of the Yoga Sutras with the Statement:

अथ योगानुशासनम्
atha yogānuśāsanam
Now (in a very auspicious manner) instruction of yoga

You will note that the text does not say “instruction in “rajah yoga” or any other style of yoga. The idea that what Patanjali taught was “rajah yoga” did not show up for about another five hundred years.

Another, more accurate way to render this line would be:

Here are the instructions for integration.

The basic word concept Yoga (योग) is that of “the act of yoking , joining , attaching , harnessing , putting to (of horses)”. You will notice that it is a verb, an action rather than an abstract or object noun, an act before it is a thing.

You can say that yoga means “union”, the trouble is though, when you do it tends to create a misconception. That misunderstanding being that the definitive writer on the subject, Patanjali, in his text the Yoga Sutras, meant “union of man and god” or some other theological event when he said yoga. I do not think that this is the case. My contention is that the Yoga Sutras was not a work of theology or metaphysics, but rather that it was a work of science, and as such has no need of empty mysticism.

My sense of the word yoga, after years of study is that what Patanjali meant, and what he discusses in detail within the Sutras is a process of transformation that moves a person from the segregated, fragmented state that most of humanity finds itself in, to a state of integrated being.

The next line of the Sutra states:

योगाचित्तवृइत्तिनिरोधः
 yogaḥ cittavṛitti nirodhaḥ
Integration is the process of stilling the twisting and turning of egoic thought processes.

Patanjali go on to explain in the third verse:

तदा द्रष्टुः स्वरूपेअवस्थानम्
 tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe avasthānam
Then “that within which perceives” is in its proper place as witness to the given.

Then the fourth line finishes the idea with:

वृत्तिसारूप्यमितरत्र
 vṛtti sārūpyam itaratra
Otherwise, “that within which perceives” is fixated on and identified with the contents of egoic thought processes

This is Patanjali’s understanding of yoga.

The hardest term to translate here is “cittavṛitti”. This has often been translated as “mind stuff”, mental modifications, thinking principle, or even “versatile psychic nature”.

The word “cittavṛitti” is a compound made up of two root words. The first is citta which means “aimed at , longed for” and “thinking , reflecting , imagining , thought, intention” and has connection to the idea of memory.

Citta is the part of “mind” that ruminates over the past, fantasizes about the future and associates present experience with past events, fears and desires.

The word “vṛitti” comes from the root vṛt ( वृत् ) which means “to turn, turn round, revolve, roll” as well as “to live on , subsist by“. I understand “cittavṛitti” to mean the internal “movie” that the mind plays daily, the “stories we tell ourselves over and over about ourselves and the world. This ongoing “story” does not just consist of words and images, but is intimately connected to the body.

We see from this that the Yoga Sutras define yoga as the process of withdrawing attention from the “cittavṛitti” and allow it to experience the “given” in the present moment without habitual reference to the contents of  the “cittavṛitti” story to allow the process of integration to begin.

The rest of the Samadhi Pada (the first chapter) goes into detail on philosophical underpinnings of how this is accomplished.

The Doing of Yoga

This brings us to the hart of the matter, why I translate the word “samādhi” the way I do.

To understand this we need to look at the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras, the Sadhana Pada.
The word sādhana ( साधन ) means “effective, efficient, productive” and “the act of mastering” This chapter strikes to the hart of what Patanjali understands as the practices needed for integration.

He does this in two ways.

In the first verse of the sadhana pada, Patanjali says:

तपः स्वाध्यायेश्वरप्रणिधानानि क्रिययोगः
tapaḥ svādhyāyeśvarapraṇidhānāni kriyayogaḥ
The performance of yoga consists of profoundly focused and disciplined practice of deep study of one’s own self at the levels of body, mind, emotion and deepest being, and directing attention on that within oneself that is truly  “able to do” (has true volition as opposed to mere stimulus/response).

The chapter goes on to explain the how of this first idea is implemented for several verses

Then we get to verse twenty-nine.

यमनियमासनप्राणायामप्रत्याहारधारणाध्यानसमाधयोअष्टाउअण्गानि
yama niyama āsana prāṇāyāma pratyāhāra dhāraṇā dhyāna samādhayo aṣṭāu aṇgāni
Ethical practice, observances and disciplines, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration of awareness, meditation, the practice of integration, make up the eight limbs of yoga.

Here is the meat of the matter, the meaning of the word samādhi.

But before we get to specifics there is one more misconception we need to clear up. The “eight limbs” are practices.

There is a prevalent thought that samādhi is a state that somehow happens if you do other things, this is not the case. There is also a misconception that the eight practices are somehow liner and hierarchical, this is also not the case.
 Patanjali chose the term aṣṭāṅga ( अष्टाङ्ग ) quite deliberately. The meaning of aṣṭāṅga is “consisting of eight parts or members” and  “eight limbs”. The image that the word invokes is that of the eight arms of a Hindu deity radiating from and connected through the chest, or the eight spokes of a wheel, connect at the hub. The meaning of the word is holistic rather than hierarchical.

Each of the eight practices are interconnected and designed to be developed together as a whole both externally and internally. To think of these practices as manifesting states leads to some major confusions.

Patanjali demonstrates this explicitly the holistic, nonlinear nature of the eight limbs in the fourth line of the third chapter of the Yoga Sutras:

त्रयमेकत्र संयमः
trayam ekatra saṁyamaḥ
These three [dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi] practiced together constitute perfect integration.

Patanjali does not say “one after the other”, he says “Ekatra” ( एकत्र ) “all together, in one”.

Samādhi, Perfect Flow

The eighth limb or practice of yoga according to the sutras is called samādhi ( समाधि ). This word is a compound made up of three roots, sam ( सम् ) “to join together, completeness”,  ā ( आ ) “towards, near”, and dha ( ध ) “holding, possessing, having”.

So samādhi can be defined as the practice of “putting together, joining or combining, union, a whole, bringing into harmony, intentness, attention” it is the process of bringing oneself to a fully integrated state.

Unfortunate confusion has been caused by various teachers, philosophers and pundits who have identified samādhi with all manner of different mystical states, “god consciousness”, “higher consciousness” “bliss states”etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

While these states are no doubt interesting, and perhaps instructive, they do not represent samādhi as Patanjali describes it in the Yoga Sutras.

To put Patanjali’s samādhi into modern terms, it is a practice which produces a state of integrated awareness where the subject is attentive to direct experience without presupposition or association.

Patanjali states in the third verse of the third chapter of the yoga sutras:

तदेवार्थमात्रनिर्भासं स्व्रूपशून्यमिव सामधिः
tadevārthamātranirbhāsaṁ svrūpaśūnyamiva sāmadhiḥ
Samādhi is the pure flow of attention that illuminates the object alone, as if the subject were devoid of intrinsic form.

Anyone who has gone deeply into “flow state” will recognize this description as something familiar.

The “doing” of samādhi Starts with creating a broad attention and external focus, as we see from the verse above. Letting go of “intending” (which is a quality of cittavṛitti)  is also a step in the practice of samādhi as well. The quality of awareness in, and attending to the present moment is also a step to samādhi.

This is the foundational basis for understanding that what Patanjali means by samādhi  and what Prasara Yoga means by “flow state” are functionally identical.

We can connect Patanjali’s definition of samādhi directly to the material contained in RMAX corpus, such as Scott Sonnon’s trademarked “Flow-State Performance Spiral”. The RMAX material that Coach Sonnon has developed over the last several years provides the first concise methodology for producing “flow state” at will as a modern, Western discipline.

In examining the “flow state” material one can see a nearly one to one relationship between Patanjali’s samādhi and Coach Sonnon’s “flow state”. Comparing the two, we see that the RMAX body of knowledge directly and experientially addresses all eight limbs of Patanjali’s Yoga. Yama and niyama are addressed by the Gateway material,  āsana, prāṇāyāma and pratyāhāra through Intu-Flow, Be Breathed, and most importantly, the methods of implmenting the breath mastery scale, dhāraṇā dhyāna and samādhi  are addressed by Prasara Yoga and FlowFighting.

The promise of Prasara Yoga is that when we embrace the natural, there is no need for the “supernatural”. When we embody physics, there is no need for “metaphysics” that when we work within reality as it is given we have no need for the “magical”.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are a work of science, not theology, and as such they offer techniques that are repeatable and produce objectively observable results when applied correctly. Likewise, Prasara Yoga approaches what has, for the last several hundred  years has been  the domain  of  metaphysics, in a systematic and scientific manner.

Prasara Yoga represents both a forward looking development in the tradition of yoga and at the same time hold true to the original exposition of the science of human integration. - written by Wakil Mushtaq Ali Al Ansari

Thank you, Mushtaq for this seminal contribution to revitalizing the Spirit of Patanjali!

Flow Thyself™,