“What is Yoga?” The key role of the Guṇas.

Most likely your first experience of yoga was taking a physical yoga class somewhere. And most likely you remember that it involved lots of stretches with strange names like “Downward Facing Dog.” If you have continued on with your yoga journey since then, you will probably have picked up a lot more about what yoga is and where it comes from - beyond the physical practices.

But do you know what yoga really is? What problems it is trying to solve? And how this is to be achieved? Well hopefully this article will give you a bit more insight.

To get to the heart of the above questions we have to go back in time around a couple of thousand years or so and ask ourselves, “how did the people that developed yoga view the world and our place in it?” It’s an important question, and possibly one you’ve never thought to ask. Don’t worry, you’re not alone if you haven’t.

Whilst it is not possible to travel back in time and have a nice conversation with a yogi and ask this question directly, we can look at the writings that have survived through the ages into modern times.  One of the most important texts we do have that gives us a comprehensive view on the question of what yoga is, is called The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. Now we can’t be certain who exactly Patañjali was. There is little known about him as an historical figure, and he doesn’t tell us anything about himself in his famous treatise on yoga.

But what he does give us is an incredibly articulate and erudite exposition on Yoga - its definition; what problem the practice of yoga aims to overcome; and he gives us clear methods on how to do this - all in just 195 short verses (about 1,200 words in total). Ironically for modern yogis, the practice of physical exercises are not part of his curriculum!

If you have come across the Sūtras before, ie, as part of a Yoga Teacher Training course; or through a mention in a yoga class of some of its content; it’s likely that what has been shared with you is the eight limbs of yoga - the part of the Sūtras that form the basis of one of the methods Patañjali outlines for practicing yoga.

But is knowing what methods to practice really the answer to knowing what yoga is? No, it is not. Any yoga practice is simply a tool to use in order to solve a problem; and the problem Patañjali’s yoga seeks to solve is to know the “Self” for what it truly is - something beyond this body, this mind, and all of what we experience as the universe. That’s quite a big thing, and it’s where the guṇas come in, because the guṇas are the forces that colour the experiential universe.

The guṇas are part of an elaborately considered framework of all existence that has the true Self (which Patañjali calls the Seer - ie, the witness of experience) as its highest principle. The Seer is Pure Consciousness. It is held to be eternal and without any boundaries or limits. Each person and living creature has this entity behind it. It is our true Self. The Seer is hard to imagine because it is beyond form, beyond what the senses and our mind can comprehend. So, the ancient yogis simply describe the Seer as having the qualities of being eternal, un-manifested, and without cause. In other words, our pure Self has always been there and always will be, and nothing was the cause of it. This is a very different view to Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions where God is the ultimate principle and each of us are His creations.

With the Seer as the ultimate principle what comes next? Again, it is helpful to use Christianity as a counterpoint because many of us in the West have had some exposure to its teachings and views of how the world came into existence. In the Christian view, God created the Earth and everything that exists upon it. He also created the Heavens - stars, galaxies, and so on.

But in the metaphysics of Yoga, the universe is not created this way, or by anyone. Just like each of us has a Seer, there is also something behind the material phenomena of the universe. This entity is called Prakṛti, or to use a simple term, Primordial Nature. Like the Seer it is eternal, un-manifest, and un-caused - ie, it has always existed and nobody created it. Being un-manifest, Primordial Nature also has no form, but it does contain within it three equally balanced forces - the guṇas. The guṇas are not substances. They are not literally what things are made of - ie, in the way atoms are the building blocks of things. But they do explain how the phenomena of the universe come to be.

The three guṇas are called sattva, rajas and tamas. Just above I called them “forces” but that is not quite accurate. Think of them instead as principles or qualities (though these terms, too, are inadequate - but we must start somewhere).

We can ascribe to sattva the qualities of sentience (awareness), discriminative knowledge, intellect, and so on. It is what allows things to be “seen” or “known."

We can ascribe to rajas the principle of activity. For something to come into being there must be movement or transformation, otherwise things remain in their latent state. Rajas is the energetic principle that agitates and creates change.

We can ascribe to tamas the principle of inertia - that which causes materiality; and that which obscures - ie, something that obscures makes things difficult to see clearly.

We can ascribe to these three guṇas any manner and quantity of other descriptors, only limited by our imaginations. For example, we could describe our emotions as belonging to one or other, or a combination of the three basic principles of: seeing clearly (sattva), exciting passion (rajas), or obscuring the truth of a situation (tamas). You get the idea.

These guṇas are principles and not real objects themselves; but they have the nature of being in competition with one another. In Primordial Nature they are in perfect tension, so nothing moves and nothing happens.

Until… at a point in the indefinable, distant past, the Seer turned its power of consciousness from internal self-awareness, outwards. Then things began to happen. Now an outside power was brought to bear on these three latent forces, affecting their perfectly balanced tension, which in turn kicked off the beginning of all manifest phenomena…

The guṇa closest to the nature of the Seer (Pure Consciousness) is sattva. Amongst its qualities is sentience - the quality of awareness. So when the power of consciousness pervades sattva it is like a light being turned on. Sattva is that light, or rather the lamp itself, because the real power behind any lamp is the invisible electricity flowing into the bulb. In other words the Seer is the real power, but because it is un-manifest it needs an Instrument of Seeing for experience to take place.

Sattva becomes this instrument of seeing by transforming into “awareness” through blending with rajas (the guṇa of activity / transformation). Once the lamp is turned on things really begin to take off. We might call this the yogic equivalent of the “Big Bang.”

From the moment the power of conscious pervades Primordial Nature the guṇas quickly begin to compete and blend, blend and compete, over and over again, creating new combinations and sub-combinations. We can think of this process in a similar way to how the three primary colours - red, yellow and blue, can be combined and re-combined to create infinite colour variations. 

From that very first moment of the Seer turning its gaze outwards the predominant state within Primordial Nature shifts from latency into action. Action leads to modification; and modification leads to ever more modification that results in everything we see around us. This process stops at the gross elements, the most physical objects of the universe. As an example, earth is earth, is earth. You can take the gross element of earth and add the gross elements of water and fire to make a pot or brick; but when you smash that pot up it will return to being earth again.

All of this modification into “things” is for the benefit of the Seer. Primordial Nature has no consciousness at all; so the show that Nature puts on is not for itself. It is purely for the experience of the Seer who is pure consciousness. If not for witnessing this show, the Seer would be residing in that pure self-consciousness, unaware of Primordial Nature at all.

What does all this mean and what does it have to do with the meaning of yoga?

To answer that question in a simple sense we return to Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras where the sage tells is in just a few words, “Yoga is the stilling of the modifications of the Mind.” (Sūtra 1.2)

… Already this blog article is around 1,500 words - far longer than the entire Yoga Sūtras themselves! So you can see from the quote above that a lot of meaning is packed into each of the short verses Patañjali gives - all of what we have discussed so far is contained in those few words. For in that one sentence the sage is telling us that Yoga is all about inverting the process of creation; returning to the point where the guṇas are dissolved back into equal tension in Primordial Nature - to the point where there are no more modifications occurring and the outward Mind has nothing to encounter…

… to a point where the Seer no longer has any reason to look outward. 

The show is over. There is nothing else for Him to experience. There is no point looking outward anymore because He has seen it all. So He returns forever to that eternal blissful state that is His true nature. 

Yoga is the method used to obtain this goal. For if we don’t start on the path the show goes on forever, and we are cursed to endure the repeated sufferings of temporal existence - to be born, to die, to be re-born again, to feel pain, loss, sorrow, and so on.

If you would like to understand more about Yoga; how the universe is envisaged in yoga philosophy; and how and what practices and methods need to be employed to release your own Seer back to eternal bliss, then check out our three day course on this subject - How To Know Bliss.

Thanks for reading.

Love and light

Jamie