From birth to the age of three, our bodies unlock the secrets of motor movement. From the age of two years to ten years, we have the formation of thinking patterns and personality; a worldview begins to form. By the time we reach high school, many of us have formed rigid opinions of the world around us, blinders that limit the scope of the universe. Several psychology texts assert that the best time to expose a child to a musical instrument for instruction is around the age of five or six, and that a person has much greater difficulty learning to play an instrument after the age of twelve or thirteen.Imagine the mind as being a sponge, and pure thought as the pool of water that it sits in. It can only hold so many ways of thinking, limiting the further intake of new thoughts. Yoga offers a method of wringing out that sponge so as to be free of old, stagnant thought patterns, thus allowing the intake of new thoughts (which must also be squeezed out). The retention of those thoughts is unfavorable. They mix with pure thoughts and taint them. This is what the Yoga Sutra defines as the turnings of thought. The goal of Yoga, as stated in the second aphorism, is the cessation of the turnings of thought (Miller 29). When the mind is objective, like a perpetually dry sponge, one is open to a mystical experience and can see a pure thought for what it is.Stephen Katz and Robert Forman have two conflicting views on the nature of mystical experience. Katz believes that it springs from our past experiences and learnings while Forman argues that it is transcendental of language and thought, and can strike regardless of whether you believe in it or not. If we examine this debate under the context of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, we see the inherent truth in Robert Forman’s notion that mystical experiences can include a “pure consciousness event” or an “objectless consciousness.”When we look at the practice o...
