Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Book II · 3 of 55 · tr. Charles Johnston
Sutra 3
These are the hindrances: the darkness of unwisdom, self-assertion, lust hate, attachment. Let us try to translate this into terms of the psychical and spiritual man. The darkness of unwisdom is, primarily, the self-absorption of the psychical man, his complete preoccupation with his own hopes and fears, plans and purposes, sensations and desires; so that he fails to see, or refuses to see, that there is a spiritual man; and so doggedly resists all efforts of the spiritual man to cast off his psychic tyrant and set himself free. This is the real darkness; and all those who deny the immortality of the soul, or deny the soul's existence, and so lay out their lives wholly for the psychical, mortal man and his ambitions, are under this power of darkness. Born of this darkness, this psychic self-absorption, is the dogged conviction that the psychic, personal man has separate, exclusive interests, which he can follow for himself alone; and this conviction, when put into practice in our life, leads to contest with other personalities, and so to hate. This hate, again, makes against the spiritual man, since it hinders the revelation of the high harmony between the spiritual man and his other selves, a harmony to be revealed only through the practice of love, that perfect love which casts out fear. In like manner, lust is the psychic man's craving for the stimulus of sensation, the din of which smothers the voice of the spiritual man, as, in Shakespeare's phrase, the cackling geese would drown the song of the nightingale. And this craving for stimulus is the fruit of weakness, coming from the failure to find strength in the primal life of the spiritual man. Attachment is but another name for psychic self-absorption; for we are absorbed, not in outward things, but rather in their images within our minds; our inner eyes are fixed on them; our inner desires brood over them; and so we blind ourselves to the presence of the prisoner, the enmeshed and fettered spiritual man.
§ Ask Guru about this passage →Themes
Evil As Privationtheology
Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness.
Hate and lust are described as fruits of weakness rather than positive entities, aligning with the view that evil lacks independent being.
All passages →Kingdom Withinanthropology
The claim that the divine realm is present inside the individual, accessible without external mediation.
The text emphasizes the presence of a 'spiritual man' within the individual who must be revealed through practice.
All passages →Self Knowledgesoteriology
The recognition of one's own true divine nature as the primary path to liberation; 'know thyself' as soteriology.
The passage centrally argues that failing to see the spiritual man due to self-absorption is the root of all hindrances.
All passages →Related passages · 8 parallels
neoplatonism|Select Works of Plotinus|Select Works, Section 85 (part 1)
“Section 10 10.
But if Matter is devoid of quality how can it be evil?
It is described as being devoid of quality in the sense only that it does not essentially possess any of the qualities which it admits and which enter into it as into a…”
Shared concept: Evil As Privation — Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness. (derived)
christian_mysticism|Pseudo-Dionysius: The Divine Names|Chapter 4, Section 1u
“For things of the same kind cannot 333 333 Exuberant vitality is per se a good thing and the more exuberant the better, though, like all good things, it is dangerous, and unless properly directed is disastrous.
be wholly contradictory to o…”
Shared concept: Evil As Privation — Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness. (derived)
neoplatonism|Select Works of Plotinus|Select Works, Section 80
“Section 5 5. But, it will be objected, if this seeing and frequenting of the darkness is due to the lack of good, the Soul's evil has its source in that very lack; the darkness will be merely a secondary cause- and at once the Principle of…”
Shared concept: Evil As Privation — Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness. (derived)
western_esoteric|The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall)|The Human Body in Symbolism-j
“When humanity has completed its physical evolution, the empty shell of materiality left behind will be used by other life waves as steppingstones to their own liberation.
The trend of man's evolutionary growth is ever toward his own essent…”
Shared concept: Self Knowledge — The recognition of one's own true divine nature as the primary path to liberation; 'know thyself' as soteriology. (derived)
christian_mysticism|The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme|Chapter 1 (part 4)
“Let them, therefore, again go out with their will from their wilful ignorance or malignity and enter again into the will of God." ( Menschwerdung , 3, 5.) All this goes to show that it is useless and vain to seek for divine wisdom, meaning…”
Shared concept: Self Knowledge — The recognition of one's own true divine nature as the primary path to liberation; 'know thyself' as soteriology. (derived)
christian_mysticism|The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme|Chapter 1 (part 6)
“The human selfhood will then follow in its perceptions the Spirit of God, tremblingly and in the joy of humility, and become able to see what is contained in time and in eternity.
Everything is near to a soul in that state, for the soul is…”
Shared concept: Kingdom Within — The claim that the divine realm is present inside the individual, accessible without external mediation. (derived)
neoplatonism|Iamblichus: On the Mysteries|Chapter VIII-ai
“with evil dæmons], which are hurled forth before the Gods, but on entering the interior parts of the temple, unmoved, and guarded by the mystic rites, they genuinely receive in their bosom divine illumination, and divested of their garments…”
Shared concept: Self Knowledge — The recognition of one's own true divine nature as the primary path to liberation; 'know thyself' as soteriology. (derived)
western_esoteric|The Book of Ceremonial Magic (A.E. Waite)|Page 5 (part 2)
“The anonymous Cloud of Unknowing belongs, I believe, to the early part of the fifteenth century, and it is to be classed among the most signal presentations of the conditions and mode of the Union which I have met with in Christian literatu…”
Shared concept: Self Knowledge — The recognition of one's own true divine nature as the primary path to liberation; 'know thyself' as soteriology. (derived)