Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Book II · 9 of 55 · tr. Charles Johnston

Sutra 9

Attachment is the desire toward life, even in the wise, carried forward by its own energy. The life here desired is the psychic life, the intensely vibrating life of the psychical self. This prevails even in those who have attained much wisdom, so long as it falls short of the wisdom of complete renunciation, complete obedience to each least behest of the spiritual man, and of the Master who guards and aids the spiritual man. The desire of sensation, the desire of psychic life, reproduces itself, carried on by its own energy and momentum; and hence comes the circle of death and rebirth, death and rebirth, instead of the liberation of the spiritual man.

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Themes

Detachment Gelassenheitpraxis

Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit/Gelassenheit — radical letting-go of will, image, and grasping that opens the soul to God; distinct from inner_silence (quietness) and from material renunciation, and adjacent to Sufi tark and Buddhist non-grasping as a practice rather than a metaphysical claim.

The text emphasizes complete renunciation and obedience as prerequisites for liberation.

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Return To Sourcesoteriology

The soul's journey back to its divine origin, reversing the fall into matter through stages of purification or illumination.

The passage contrasts the cycle of rebirth with 'the liberation of the spiritual man,' framing liberation as the soul's escape from the cycle back to its true spiritual nature.

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Soul Migrationcosmology

The transmigration of the soul across lives.

The passage explicitly describes 'death and rebirth' as the consequence of unrenounced desire.

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Tripartite Soulanthropology

Division of the human being into three principles: spirit (pneuma), soul (psyche), and body/matter (hyle or soma).

The passage distinguishes between the 'psychical self' (psyche), the 'spiritual man' (pneuma), and implicitly the body/matter through 'desire of sensation,' mapping a threefold structure of the human being.

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Vibrationcosmology

The Hermetic doctrine that nothing rests — matter, energy, mind, and spirit are a single continuum differing only in rate of vibration, from the grossest matter to the least material spirit. Distinct from cosmic_sympathy (affinity resonating BETWEEN separate things) in being a claim about what constitutes any one thing in the first place, and from magical_equilibrium (Lévi's operational balancing technique, which presupposes some vibration doctrine rather than stating this general principle).

The passage describes the psychic life as 'the intensely vibrating life of the psychical self,' directly invoking vibration as a constitutive property of a level of being.

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