The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Patanjali puts the whole of yoga into his second sentence. In Johnston's translation: "Union, spiritual consciousness, is gained through control of the versatile psychic nature."

That is the programme, start to finish. Not a list of postures, not a creed to sign. There is a goal, union, and there is one thing standing in the way: the part of you that will not hold still.

Johnston is blunt about it. Nothing but the "obdurate resistance" of that nature keeps us from the goal. Not bad luck, not a lack of talent, not the wrong teacher. Everything that follows across the four books, the ethics, the breath, the meditation, is a way of working on that one resistance.

We think of ourselves as living in our bodies. Johnston says that is not quite true. For a very long time, he writes, our life has really been lived somewhere else: inside what the mind makes of things.

Think of an ordinary evening. The body is on the sofa. You are elsewhere entirely, replaying what a colleague said, rehearsing tomorrow, wanting something, dreading something. That inner world of memories, hopes, fears and regrets is where most of a day is actually spent.

This is what the book calls the psychic nature. It is the mental and emotional man, built from the images of everything seen and heard, and then from all the desires, comparisons and ambitions those images breed.

The word "psychic" trips up almost every modern reader. Johnston, writing in 1912, does not mean séances, auras or reading minds. He means the psyche: the thinking, feeling, picturing mind you use all day long.

"Versatile" needs hearing properly too. It does not mean gifted. It means turning, shifting, taking a new shape every few seconds. A worry becomes a plan, the plan becomes a daydream, the daydream becomes irritation that the plan will never work.

So the second sutra is not asking you to develop unusual abilities, or to stop feeling things. It points at something far more ordinary: the restless, shape-changing activity that is already running as you read this sentence. And it asks you to take the reins.

In Johnston's translation, what is the "versatile psychic nature" that Sutra I.2 says must be controlled?

• The physical body with its appetites and its fatigue
• The divine consciousness that the soul is seeking
• The restless thinking, feeling and image-making mind✓Correct answer
• Hidden paranormal abilities that wake up during practice

For Johnston, "psychic" simply means the mental and emotional nature, the everyday mind. It is not the body, which he says is not where our life is really lived, and it is certainly not the divine consciousness, which is the goal rather than the obstacle.

Johnston refused to call these lines aphorisms. An aphorism, he explains, is a pithy saying that fits many situations and more or less proves itself on sight. A sutra is something else.

The word comes from the same root as "sew" and means a thread, not a proverb. Each sutra is a knot in a close-knit chain of argument, and lifted out of its place it becomes "almost meaningless". He compares the whole to Euclid: you cannot quote one proposition and skip the ones that prove it.

That matters for how you read the second sutra. Pulled out on its own, "control your mind" sounds like advice from a calendar. In its place, it is the first proposition of a system, and the rest of the text exists to show what that control is and how it is done.

Johnston chose the word "sutra" because each one is a self-contained saying whose truth is obvious wherever it is quoted.

False✓Correct answer

That is his description of an aphorism, the word he rejected. A sutra is a thread: each one depends on its place in the chain and means almost nothing when taken out of it.