- Pratyahara or abstraction is, as it were, the imitation by the senses of the
mind by withdrawing themselves from their objects.
Pratyahara is the next Anga or component part of Yoga after Pranayama. There
seems to exist a good deal of uncertainty in the mind of the average student with re-
gard to the nature of this Yogic practice. Patanjali has disposed of the subject in two
Sutras and the commentaries are not very illuminative. In order to understand what
Pratyahara really means let us recall how mental perception of objects in the outer
world takes place. We perceive an object when different kinds of vibrations which
emanate from it strike our sense-organs and the mind is then joined to the sense-organs
thus activated. As a matter of fact, from the physiological and psychological points of
view there are many stages intervening between the reception of the vibration by the
sense-organs and the perception by the mind but let us, for the sake of simplicity, con-
fine ourselves to the simple representation of the mechanism of sense-perception as
generally understood. This may be represented diagrammatically as follows:
Now, it is a matter of common experience that the corresponding vibrations may
be striking against any particular sense-organ but if the mind is not joined, as it were,
to that sense-organ the vibrations remain unperceived. The clock in our room keeps
ticking constantly but we rarely hear the ticking. Although the vibrations of sound are