See your whole mind as a light, as a flame

Patanjali Yoga Sutra Knowledge Sheet 34

Contd. from knowledge sheet 33

Jyothishmati pragnya. See your whole mind as a light, as a flame. Your consciousness is a flame, your mind is a flame. You forget this. Because of this presence of the mind as a flame in you, your entire body is functioning. Otherwise, you will be like an unlit candle.

Life and light are synonymous

What is a flame? How does that flame work?

A flame lives on oxygen. What it does? A flame uses some matter from the substance earth and then it uses oxygen and lives.

What is life? Life is also the same. It uses oxygen and lives on some matter. Just like flames live on wax and the wick, and use oxygen. Your life, the mind uses the body and the food in the body as wax, and the air as oxygen, and exhibits activities in the body.

Like the flame exhibits, consciousness exhibits life. Life and light are very synonymous. They are very close. If you put a bottle above the candle, the candle will be put off in a few minutes. The same thing, if you are locked in a room without any windows, you will live only for those many hours, eight hours. The candle may burn for eight minutes. In the room, if you are locked, you will live for a few hours and then you will die also. Very similar, isn't it? Whatever you do to the candle, the same you do to the body also; the same reaction will come.

So you pour more wax into this flame and it will light up more. You put food to the body and then the body lives longer. If the wick has become charred and very burnt out, any amount of wax you put into it, it will still be put off. So the wick has its own limitation. Similarly, the body, after certain years of burning, any amount of food you put, it does not sustain the body. It (the body) does not hold on. The body functions just like a wick. Just like the oxygen, the flame comes up.

This body is holding on to the jyotishmati pragnya. Vishoka vā jyothishmati - either get rid of unhappiness, be happy, and at the same time, know that your mind is made up of light. It is not matter. Your mind is energy. You are energy. Jyotishmati.

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(This is part of a series of knowledge sheets based on Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's commentaries on Patanjali Yoga Sutras.)