How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali
How to Know God: Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali Learn through these aphorism how to control your mind and achieve inner peace and freedom. Although these methods were taught over 2000 years ago, they are as alive and effective today as they have ever been. This translation draws on the inspired commentary of both Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood.
Our most popular title, this book is widely used in yoga classes as an important introduction to Raja Yoga. It had it's brief moment of fame when George Harrison, in his last album, quoted from the book in his song "Brainwashed:"
The soul does not love, it is love itself
It does not exist, it is existence itself
It does not know, it is knowledge itself
How to Know God, page 130 (page 136 in the current edition).
You can view a lecture by Swami Prabhavananda titled The Eight Limbs of Yoga that is based on this book, and is a good companion to understanding the message.
For the complete set of Vedanta Spiritual Classics please click here.
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“It is in the fitness of things that one of the celebrated monks of the Ramakrishna Order in collaboration with the well-known writer Christopher Isherwood undertook the task of translating the Yoga-Sutras in English and also providing an illuminating commentary thereon, avoiding the technicalities of the system and putting it in a very lucid manner suited for the modern mind.... This makes the book eminently readable for the modern mind and thereby fulfils the great mission of interpreting the East to the West.... The book should be widely read by all spiritual seekers who want to know ‘what yoga is, what its aims are, how it can be practiced, what powers can be attained by it and finally what liberation of the soul consists in'. When yoga is being so much misunderstood today both in the East and the West and is also being misused for physical ends and worldly gains the value of this publication cannot be over-estimated.” Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture