us, we will be taken to a surprising conclusion: there is no such thing as a meditator.
The meditator does not exist, because what meditates is already a part of that which
is meditated upon.
This feeling of the unity of the meditating subject with the object will be the
masterstroke in bringing about samyama. All attachments will automatically cease.
It is the universe itself meditating in the practice of samyama; it is neither you, nor I,
nor any individual. The individual becomes only an occasion—rather, a symbol—for
the manifestation of a universal power, which creates a universal situation; this is the
practice of samyama. If this is practised effectively, one can know the past, the
present and the future. This is what Patanjali concludes. We will not be oblivious of
the past or ignorant of the future. Pariṇāmatraya saṁyamāt atīta anāgatajñānam (III.16).
We will become omniscience itself. If this meditation can be practised daily, we will
be slowly taken up to a level of consciousness where we will begin to feel what is in
the past and what is in the future—and, of course, what is in the present.
The past and the future are cut off from our present experience because of our
weddedness to the body and a wrong feeling that the object is located in one place
only. This feeling the author wants to remove from our minds by this critical analysis
of the situation of the subject as well as the object. The mind will be lifted up into a
Universal awareness. There will be a flow of events continually, from the past to the
present, and the present to the future, so that there will be no past, no present and no
future. There will be a continuity of experience because experience, here, becomes a
total comprehensiveness of all the features of experience and is not limited only to
the present.
Previously we studied, in connection with an earlier sutra, that we are aware only of
the present and we are not aware of anything that is in the past or in the future
because of the force with which all the gunas emphasise themselves in a particular
manner, to the exclusion of the emphasis they laid in the past and the emphasis that
they are going to lay in the future. We have no control over these gunas and,
therefore, we are subject to the emphasis that they lay at any given moment of time
and we are aware only of that particular stress of the gunas. That stress is the
present. The past has gone and the future has not come. But if we are lifted from this
stress by the practice of samyama, this knot which has tied consciousness to a little
location or space-point, which is the present notion of ours as subject-object relation,
can be broken. Then we will enter into a vastness of feeling, a universality of
experience; we will become as vast as space itself. We can imagine how terrible it is,
what sort of samyama Patanjali actually had in his mind. We are really as vast as
space even now, but that does not become a content of our awareness at present
because of this hard-boiled ego, this asmita, which will not listen to any advice of
anybody. “What I say is right”—that is its conviction, which is what is actually broken
through in samyama. Hence, we are given a great, solacing message in the sutra:
pariṇāmatraya saṁyamāt atīta anāgatajñānam (III.16). Atita anagata means the past as
well as that which is yet to come. We will be aware of this.
In the beginning it will not be Cosmic-consciousness suddenly, or God-
consciousness. It will not come like that. It will be only an inclination, a hint, a
sensing, a feeling, a tendency to feel what is going to happen. There are many people
who can feel what is going to happen; they are not Cosmic-conscious, but they can
have a sensation of something going to happen. That is because of their psychic