tato mano-javitvam vikaraṇa-bhāvaḥ pradhāna-jayaś ca
tataḥ manaḥ-javitvam vikaraṇa-bhāvaḥ pradhāna-jayaḥ ca
“From that–flexibility of mind, orientation toward change, and illumination of interconnectedness.”

It is challenging to observe change. Is it because we work so hard to prevent it? We seek stability to support our life. But the nature of nature, the nature of life, is change, and each life, each person’s life, is supported by a vast interconnection of life forms and dynamic forces in and around us.

The theme of change weaves in and out of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras. In the second pāda, he locates the underlying cause of pain and suffering to be change itself: “Due to the pain of change,” he says  in sutra II.15,  “all, really, is pain.” The constituent parts of nature–sattva, rajas, tamas–do not stand still.  The path of yoga, likewise, is a path of change. The third pāda, this Book of Marvels, begins with Patañjali describing transformation (pariṇāma) of the mind (see III.9-16), a transformation that Rohit Mehta calls birth of the New Mind.

Today’s sūtra follows from focus on the act of perception in III.48. This focus, and the awakening of the senses that accompany it, brings a threefold change that are key attributes, it seems to me, of that New Mind: manaḥ-javitvam (flexibility of mind), vikaraṇa-bhāvaḥ (orientation toward change), and pradhāna-jayaḥ (illumination of interconnectedness).

Manas is mind and javitvam is quickness. Commentators variously interpret the phrase to mean that the body attains the quickness of mind (see Edwin Bryant’s commentary, p. 388) or that mind comes to perceive, in B.K.S. Iyengar’s words, “directly and quickly.” I interpret quickness of mind to imply increased readiness and adaptibility–in other words, flexibility. Are we able to take in new information, hear new stories, consider new perspectives?

Vikarana is traditionally considered, in this context, to mean “without the senses,” and commentators describe the attainment of a supernatural ability to perceive. My translation is, instead, ordinary. A common meaning of vikarana  is “change making” (from vikṛ, “to transform”). It is a grammatical term that refers to letters used between a Sanskrit root and verbal endings. It is so rich a word, especially combined with bhāvaḥ, “becoming” (bhū, “to be”), itself a word of transformation. Therefore, I understand vikaraṇa-bhāvaḥ to refer to a new way of being, a realization deep within ourselves, of change itself. We become oriented toward change.

The third result of the focus on perception and on the senses (III.48) is pradhāna-jayaḥ, illumination of interconnectedness. To see, to listen, to smell, to touch, to taste is to come to know, as Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring some sixty years ago, “this whole closely knit fabric of life” (pg. 67).  Pradhāna (from pra-, “before,” + dhā, “to put”), is the underlying source or structure of things. Jayaḥ, often used in the Yoga Sūtras, has a buoyant quality, could well be translated as victory (though regularly is rendered grimly as “mastery”). I translate it here as illumination, which implies neither power over nor competition with.

Today’s sūtra can be a help to us in the time we are in, which is one of massive, visible, incontrovertible change–environmental, political, social. Patañjali encourages us to ask,

Do we see the change around us?

What are the stories we tell that explain the change?

What are we learning (are we teachable)?

I am finding Rebecca Solnit’s recent book The Beginning Comes After the End to be an invaluable guide to the moment we are in. It is a reflection on change, change over the centuries, change in our lifetimes. Like me, Solnit is a baby boomer and she describes beautifully the powerful social and ideological shifts that have occurred since she was a girl. She is not sure we are holding awareness of that change:

I often have the sense that a lot of the people I read and listen to and talk with don’t see the patterns, don’t have a perspective that grasps the scale of change. For them, the present seems to be perpetual, unchanging, unyielding, offering confidence or despair that the future will be like the present, a conclusion that seems to be drawn from the lack of recognition that the present is a radical departure from the past. … I’m often struck by my peers who’ve lived through dizzying change and somehow adjusted without noticing it. (pg. 25)

Solnit delineates the patterns of change that she sees:  the “immense impact” of human rights campaigns–antiracist, feminist, immigrant, disability, LGBTQ; the rise of environmental awareness; decolonization as a shift in government but also a shift in cultural and political ideas; and, importantly, denormalization of authoritarianism. None of this change, she emphasizes, is perfect or complete.

Indeed, we are in the midst of a frightening backlash against change. It is racist, misogynistic, anti-immigrant, and is staggeringly destructive to the environment.

There is an old world dying, says Solnit, quoting philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and the new one is being born. What are the stories we are telling at this time? The old world suppressed many voices and stories. It buried many histories. For those of us who think of the world dying as “something looming only in the future,” Solnit suggests we can learn from “Indigenous people of the Americas and others who’ve survived genocide and colonialism [and who] know that they live after the death of worlds.” (pg. 13)

I was raised to see history as linear and to consider my culture, my society, to be exceptional, an apex of progress. It is easy to experience the falling apart of that story as the end of all things. And perhaps this is why I am comforted by Solnit’s title: The Beginning Comes After the End. The future is uncertain. It is hard to live amid upheaval not-knowing. Solnit seems to be saying: Look at what has already begun!

I was born in 1956 and was given a worldview that was mechanistic, individualistic, and hierarchical. This worldview is the same that is being gripped tightly today by those in power. Solnit calls it an ideology of isolation. It suits capitalism, because in it, “everything can be commodified, including living beings and systems, and commodities are disposable.” But you can’t really throw anything away, Rebecca Solnit (a lifelong environmental activist), reminds us. “There is no such place as away.”

The ideology of isolation bumps up against reality. This has been a summer of smoke as wildfires burn across Europe, Oregon and Washington here in the United States, and in northern Canada. Smoke does not evaporate or rise to outer space; it moves in the limited airspace of our atmosphere, across borders and regions. I live in Montana. My town has a red-alert on air quality as I write. The smoke is from wildfires in Washington.

We are not isolated, and many more of us are coming to see that. We are seeing it because science and environmentalists are teaching it (and we are living it). We are also seeing it, says Solnit, because of a rise in Indigenous influence, a reclaiming of cultural integrity. Solnit quotes Indigenous scholar Natalie Avalos:

Native peoples in the Americas understand the universe as alive and sentient. All phenomena in it are understood to be a distinct expression of life force, or spirit. Since all persons–human and other-than-human–such as plants, animals, rivers, winds, and mountains are expressions of spirit, they are understood to be interconnected and contingent. Relatives. … [T]he people act as stewards of the land, protecting and nurturing the life within it. This reciprocal relationship is mutually self-sustaining.  (pg. 115, from Avalos’s 2020 article in Political Theology, “Indigenous Stewardship and the Death Rattle of White Supremacy”)

It is before us to learn from the voices that had been silenced, and to keep the histories that were buried but are now being told alive. This takes a flexible mind and a heart and a spirit ready for change. As Rebecca Solnit writes:

What if this civilization was not a pinnacle or a conclusion of cultural evolution, as was asserted again and again for centuries, but a detour from a widely shared understanding? What if that old world was dying, and a new world was struggling to be born–or, rather, an upstart world had emerged in the sixteenth century or so in Europe was dying, and the new world struggling to be born was the rememberer and heiress of older worlds that better met human and ecological needs, in part by better describing the world? What if this is an end to the idea that those worlds ended? … What if our best hope reaches for the future by sinking its roots deep in the past? What futures can we build on these other versions of the past, these other voices with other stories to tell? What beginnings come after such an end? (The Beginning Comes After the End, pg. 121)

—–

“It often happens that one thinks over a problem in the evening and its solution comes to mind on waking … instantaneous thought is the first result presented here. … Perception independent of the sense organs means that the body and the sense organs no longer present obstacles to perception and action…. Mastery of origins, the last result, enables us, through knowledge of the primary cause of events, to manage them better.” –Bernard Bouanchaud, The Essence of Yoga, commentary on III.49

“The speed of sound is greater than available mechanisms of speed such as motor cars, steam engines, and airplanes. Speed of light and electricity is higher even than speed of sound. But the speed of mind is the highest of all known speeds.” — Ramamurti S. Mishra , M.D., The Textbook of Yoga Psychology, commentary on III.49

“The taste of honey is the same from whichever side of the comb it is drawn. Similarly the organs of action and senses of perception, body and mind are made as pure as the soul when they are transformed to the level of the soul. … Each cell reflects the light of the pure Self and each cell drinks the nectar of the soul.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.49

Questions:
• Do you see the change around you?
• What are the stories you tell that explain the change?
• What are you learning (are you teachable)?