ABSTRACT
Many people reject the aims of yoga philosophy as ‘inhuman’ and ‘selfish,’ because they imagine yoga as a cold, deliberate shunning of everybody and everything for the sake of working out one’s own salvation. For the human intellect is itself within Prakriti and therefore cannot comprehend its nature. A great seer may experience the nature of the Brahman-Prakriti relationship while he is in the state of perfect yoga, but he cannot communicate his knowledge to us in terms of logic and language because, from an absolute standpoint, Prakriti does not exist. The gunas are sometimes described as ‘energies,’ sometimes as ‘qualities’; but no single English word can define their whole nature and function. Yoga philosophy teaches us that it is the samskaras that drive us from birth to birth—just as strongly rooted addiction drives a man to take a drug, over and over again, even despite his conscious disinclination and the efforts of his moral will.
