You would think, with the myriad of product advertisements flashing across every media, devise, magazine, email, radio, and newspaper, that shopping and purchasing is the purpose of human life on this planet.
Is Pantanjali saying anything different?
18. Things seen have as their property manifestation, action, inertia. They form the basis of the elements and the sense-powers. They make for experience and for liberation.
Here is a whole philosophy of life. Things seen, the total of the phenomena, possess as their property, manifestation, action, inertia: the qualities of force and matter in combination. These, in their grosser form, make the material world; in their finer, more subjective form, they make the psychical world, the world of sense-impressions and mind-images. And through this totality of the phenomenal, the soul gains experience, and is prepared for liberation. In other words, the whole outer world exists for the purposes of the soul, and finds in this its true reason for being.
(-- from,THE YOGA SUTRAS OF PATANJALI,“The Book of the Spiritual Man” An Interpretation By Charles Johnston, Bengal Civil Service, Retired;, Indian Civil Service, Sanskrit Prizeman;, Dublin University, Sanskrit Prizeman, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2526/2526-h/2526-h.htm#:~:text=In%20other%20words%2C%20the%20whole,mark%2C%20that%20without%20distinctive%20mark.
Investing and trading.
Betting and gambling.
Get me more.
Find me loopholes.
19. The grades or layers of the Three Potencies are the defined, the undefined, that with distinctive mark, that without distinctive mark.
Or, as we might say, there are two strata of the physical, and two strata of the psychical realms. In each, there is the side of form, and the side of force. The form side of the physical is here called the defined. The force side of the physical is the undefined, that which has no boundaries. So in the psychical; there is the form side; that with distinctive marks, such as the characteristic features of mind-images; and there is the force side, without distinctive marks, such as the forces of desire or fear, which may flow now to this mind-image, now to that.
20. The Seer is pure vision. Though pure, he looks out through the vesture of the mind.
The Seer, as always, is the spiritual man whose deepest consciousness is pure vision, the pure life of the eternal. But the spiritual man, as yet unseeing in his proper person, looks out on the world through the eyes of the psychical man, by whom he is enfolded and enmeshed. The task is, to set this prisoner free, to clear the dust of ages from this buried temple.
(ibid, bk 2: 18, 19, 20, Pantanjali)
I remember studying Pantanjali at The New School For Social Research in Manhattan in the early 1970s. I included him in my syllabus on Comparative Religions in university courses. I’m not sure I had (have) the foggiest idea about that which he writes. That might be age -- once too young, now too old.
Let’s try this: we look out through a field of distracting obstacles attempting to see through into an open empty field called the clarity of things as they are.
That which is the so-called origin of the looking, that out of which the longing to see, actually, what is there, has, of and in itself, a “no-place source.”
This “no-place source” is also (extensively) a no-place destination.
The seer (if you will) is traveling from no-place to no-place. Between origin and destination is the field of buying and selling crowding our every thought, desire, and action. It is a debris field likely to destabilize and reroute any traveler venturing into the circling band surrounding all human action in the so-called world.
So many of us get lost in this travel (travail?)
What’s not to like luxuriating in gadgets and groceries, pharmacy aides and insurance guarantees offered us for our protection, pleasure, and privilege?
Of course, this is probably not what Pantanjali is talking about.
But as I look back, I realize how off-course I went trying and failing to navigate that space between no-space and no-space.
No-space and no-place intruded upon by space and place obscuring no-space and no-place.
But as my (so-called) life rides the subway train from Coney Island Brooklyn to 57th street Manhattan I am flummoxed as to the complexity of life and its goings-on station to station, ingress to egress, strap-hangers and rush-hour crowds, bumping and rattling my knapsack on the rocking transit cars passing through the boroughs tunnels, and announced stops.
Ah the "pure vision, the pure life of the eternal” -- even unto now, warming sun melting snow from porch roof, white snow ground, pure blue sky, clear enough mind, in chair, by window, riding the corpus-capsule through the day, one day at a time, decades and decades trailing rumination of someone’s life, my life, gone by, going by, covered by all -- all I have fallen to, all that has fallen on me.
"The task is, to set this prisoner free, to clear the dust of ages from this buried temple.” (op cit)
