The Yoga of Patanjali

36 Lessons on The Yoga of Patanjaliplace and receive many cuts and burns. After a certain age, wehave to put up with the wounds and the life-long deformitieswe have created to ourselves by the foul-game. Life is lived asa story of pain and pleasure with all the delays, disappointmentsand sorrows that are self-contrived through a crafty procedureof ignorance. Our ignorance makes us question, “Is there aGod? If there is a God, why should He give us the pain, poverty,sorrow and misery? “Such a life is what we call the plane ofignorance, the hall of misery, the laboratory of causes and effects,where we conduct experiments of trial and error. This is a lifeof many involvements and it is called ‘Samsara’ in Sanskrit,which means drifting by the force of circumstances. Thus theguide Patanjali makes us know of the five types of measures.The next item is to understand the right use of the measureby knowing our relationship with each of the five measures.When you go to the market there are some measures for cereals,some measures for milk, some weights for Vegetables, differentweights in the shop of a butcher. The measure of milk is differentfrom the measure for the cereal. Gradually we come to knowabout all the types of the measures in the market. So also wecome to know of the measures of man in Yoga. What we callsymbol is nothing but a measure. We know things by readingbooks through letters, telephones through numbers and the cityby the map, shape, topography and illumination. Unless thereis a symbol we cannot know anything, we cannot read anythingor we cannot telephone to anyone or go to an appointed placein the city. We should know that the use of a measure is inevitable.Here Patanjali explains that there are three types of approachesto our measures so that we may get the right impression tohave a right source of knowledge. They are : 1) The directmeasure, 2) the indirect measure and 3) the representativemeasure, or the measure which we call authority.