Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Book III · 49 of 55 · tr. Charles Johnston

Sutra 49

When the spiritual man is perfectly disentangled from the psychic body, he attains to mastery over all things and to a knowledge of all. The spiritual man is enmeshed in the web of the emotions; desire, fear, ambition, passion; and impeded by the mental forms of separateness and materialism. When these meshes are sundered, these obstacles completely overcome, then the spiritual man stands forth in his own wide world, strong, mighty, wise. He uses divine powers, with a divine scope and energy, working together with divine Companions. To such a one it is said: 'Thou art now a disciple, able to stand, able to hear, able to see, able to speak, thou hast conquered desire and attained to self-knowledge, thou hast seen thy soul in its bloom and recognized it, and heard the voice of the silence.'

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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 passage describes overcoming obstacles through mastery and disentanglement from emotional meshes.

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Self Knowledgesoteriology

The recognition of one's own true divine nature as the primary path to liberation; 'know thyself' as soteriology.

The passage explicitly states that the liberated man has 'attained to self-knowledge'.

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