Book Four: Freedom

How does yoga help in the concept of the entire universe?

IV.1 The attainments brought about by integration may also arise at birth, through the use of herbs, from intonations, or through austerity.

IV.2 Being delivered into a new form comes about when natural forces overflow

IV.3 The transformation into this form or that is not driven by the causes proximate to it, just oriented by them, the way a farmer diverts a stream for irrigation.

IV.4 Feeling like a self is the frame that orients consciousness toward individuation.

IV.5 A succession of consciousnesses, generating a vast array of distinctive perceptions, appear to consolidate into one individual consciousness.

IV.6 Once consciousness is fixed in meditative absorption, it no longer contributes to the store of latent impressions.

IV.7 The actions of a realized yogi transcend good and evil, whereas the actions of others may be good or evil or both.

IV.8 Each action comes to fruition by coloring latent impressions according to its quality - good, evil, or both.

IV.9 Because the depth memory and its latent impressions are of a piece, their dynamic of cause and effect flows uninterruptedly across the demarcations of birth, place, and time.

IV.10 They have always existed, because the will to exist is eternal.

IV.11 Since its cause, effect, basis, and object are inseparable, a latent impression disappears when they do.

IV.12 The past and future are immanent in an object, existing as different sectors in the same flow of experiential substances

IV.13 The characteristics of these sectors, whether manifest or subtle, are imparted by the fundamental qualities of nature.

IV.14 Their transformations tend to blur together, imbuing each new object with a quality of substantiality

IV.15 People perceive the same object differently, as each person’s perception follows a separate path from another’s.

IV.16 But the object is not dependent on either of those perceptions; if it were, what would happen to it when nobody was looking?

IV.17 An object is only known by a consciousness it has colored; otherwise, it is not known.

IV.18 Patterns of consciousness are always known by pure awareness, their ultimate, unchanging witness.

IV.19 Consciousness is seen not by its own light, but by awareness.

IV.20 Furthermore, consciousness and its object cannot be perceived at once.

IV.21 If consciousness were perceived by itself instead of awareness, the chain of such perceptions would regress infinitely, imploding memory.

IV.22 Once it is stilled, though, consciousness mirrors unchanging pure awareness, and can reflect itself being perceived.

IV.23 Then, consciousness can be colored by both pure awareness and the phenomenal world, thereby fulfilling all its purposes.

IV.24 Even when colored by countless latent traits, consciousness, like all compound phenomena, has another purpose - to serve awareness.

IV.25 As soon as one can distinguish between consciousness and awareness, the ongoing construction of the self ceases.

IV.26 Consciousness, now oriented to this distinction, can gravitate toward freedom - the fully integrated knowledge that pure awareness is independent from nature.

IV.27 Any gaps in discriminating awareness allow distracting thoughts to emerge from the store of latent impressions.

IV.28 These distractions can be subdued, as the causes of suffering were, by tracing them back to their origin, or through meditative absorption.

IV.29 One who regards even the most exalted states disinterestedly, discriminating continuously between pure awareness and the phenomenal world, enters the final stage of integration, in which nature is seen to be a cloud of irreducible experiential substances.

IV.30 This realization extinguishes both the causes of suffering and the cycle of cause and effect.

IV.31 Once all the layers and imperfections concealing truth have been washed away, insight is boundless, with little left to know.

IV.32 Then the seamless flow of reality, its transformations colored by the fundamental qualities, begins to break down, fulfilling the true mission of consciousness

IV.33 One can see that the flow is actually a series of discrete events, each corresponding to the merest instant of time, in which one form becomes another.

IV.34 Freedom is at hand when the fundamental qualities of nature, each of their transformations witnessed at the moment of its inception, are recognized as irrelevant to pure awareness; it stands alone, grounded in its very nature, the power of pure seeing. That is all.

For the full Sanskrit and English Translation

https://www.arlingtoncenter.org/Sanskrit-English.pdf