by Fran Tolhurst
A woman was heading off to a wedding. Her father stopped her and made her fill her mouth with water so she wouldn’t join in when the other women said of the bride, “She’s ugly, ‘Her nose is too long”, or “Her legs are too short.” At the wedding this woman said nothing, but she did notice some small flaw in the bride. When she got home, her father told her to spit out the water in her mouth. They found it had turned to blood – just from this bad thought.i
In chapter one of the Yogasutra, Patanjali defines five patterns of thought (vrttis) that we all experience:
The turnings of thought, whether corrupted or immune to the forces of corruption, are of five kinds. They are right perception, misperception, conceptualization, deep sleep and remembering (1.5-6). ii
These patterns are to do with how we see things or interpret what we see, how we talk about things or how we imagine them to be. They are also the patterns arising in our deepest sleep and what and how we recall things. It is these kinds of thoughts that we act on both consciously and unconsciously.
A friend once told me that the stories we tell ourselves – about ourselves and about others – we frame and fashion in a way that they need to be told so that we avoid cognitive dissonance. That is, we try to avoid sounding like we are acting in a way that is contradictory to how we would like to be acting. Of course it also keeps us from looking bad in front of others. What that means she said is that if we are sure we would never do ‘x, y and z’, but then we do ‘x, y and z’, we have to explain to ourselves why we did it, or why what we did wasn’t really the same as what we said we would never do. So that’s the difficulty with perception. Even photos and video foot-age need a commentary and can be reinterpreted to suit the commentator or audience. They cannot just speak for themselves or help us to understand something. We have the same problem with memory– what we remember and what we forget are inevitably affected by what we actually saw or thought we saw in the first place, and by what we wanted to see and re-member.
So getting things right is possible but seeing what is really there is complicated by any number of factors. The main things that cause the problem are those kleshas the Yogasutra refers to; namely, ignorance, egoism, passion, hatred and fear of death.
The other thing about the vrttis – these patterns of consciousness – is that they can be quite neutral in effect or quite profound. Take the example of memory. One time when I was in Mashad, a city in Iran, I was staying with my friend Khanom Ibrahimi and her children. It was early morning but Khanom had turned the television on to follow the Iranian state government broadcast of a service from the central mosque in Tehran. Khanom had the Qur’an out in front of her and was crying a lot as she tried to follow the readings. She was crying so much and with such sorrow, I was alarmed. I quietly asked her daughter why she was so sad. She told me that her mother’s Iman had died. I sym-pathised as I understood that you can be very close to your spiritual leader. I asked when he had died. Her daughter said, “More than one thousand years ago.” “One thou-sand years, yek hazar-e-sal?” I repeated, thinking I had misheard. “Yes, yes, yek hazar-e-sal.” she repeated.
This kind of remembering is a way of honouring those who have died most often in sacrifice for others and an acknowledgement of the suffering of another for the greater good. It is a practice common to so many people around the world. “Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself.” iii But some kinds of remembering embitter us and bitterness distorts how we see things, which in turn affects how we respond to what we see.
The vrttis are often compared to ripples on the water, or even the waves of the sea. They are in constant motion, ever changing and affected by changing circumstances. Bringing all the vrttis to a complete and permanent standstill is no more achievable than stilling the movements of the ocean. However, the teachings of the yogasutra set out a way for us to lessen the harmfulness of these patterns of thought on ourselves, and on others.
Fran lives in Darwin where she studies with Chris Lalor at Flametree Yoga Studio. Whenever time permits she has also been a regular attender of Alan’s yoga retreats.
i A Bedouin story illustrating our vulnerability to other’s words of envy retold by Lila Abu-Lughod 2008, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories, University of California Press, California.
ii Translation by Barbara Stoler-Miller 1998, Yoga Discipline of Freedom The Yoga Sutra attributed to Patanjali.
iii Sontag, 2003, Regarding the Pain of Others, Penguin Books, US, p103.