Patanjali Yoga Sutras and their Interpretations

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras outline a path for obtaining divine oneness, self-realisation or, as Nicolai Bachman says, in his book The Path of the Yoga Sutras, a deep understanding of the core of who you are. Among yogis and spiritual seekers, this promise is very inviting. What is even more attractive is that the path is laid out in 195 short verses (or 196, depending on the school of thought). You could easily read the entire Yoga Sutras in 30 minutes or less. However, making sense of these pithy lines is a different, and much longer, story. Like yoga, studying the Sutras could span a lifetime. There are dozens of translations of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and they vary because the terse verses leave much room for interpretation. The tradition of Patañjali in the oral and textual tradition of the Yoga Sûtras is accepted by traditional Vedic schools as the authoritative source on Yoga, and it retains this status in Hinducircles into the present day. In contrast to its modern Western transplanted forms, Yoga essentially consists of meditative practices culminating in attaining a state of consciousness free from all modes of active or discursive thought, and of eventually attaining a state where consciousness is unaware of any object external to itself, that is, is only aware of its own nature as consciousness unmixed with any other object. The book delineates every aspects of Yoga. It not only provides the systematic history of succession of Yogic knowledge, starting from the beginning, but it also spreads light on the various aspects of Yoga.