The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: "The Book of the Spiritual Man"

One of the greatest classics of spiritual discipline ever written, revealing a timeless path to mastery of the mind and inner freedom.

Although yoga is mentioned in the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, it was Patanjali who first gave this ancient tradition its clear and systematic form. In a series of 195 concise aphorisms, he set forth a practical discipline aimed at training the mind, refining awareness, and leading the seeker toward a deeper knowledge of the Self.

These brief and carefully ordered sutras outline a method of inner transformation that has guided generations of practitioners. They describe the gradual transition from the restless activity of ordinary mental life to a state of clarity and spiritual insight in which the deeper nature of consciousness becomes known.

Charles Johnston's classic interpretation presents these teachings as the path toward what he calls the "spiritual man," the awakening of the higher nature hidden within human experience. His introduction places the text within the universal tradition of mysticism and spiritual regeneration, showing how this ancient discipline continues to speak directly to the modern search for meaning and inner balance.

Presented here in a clear and accessible large-print edition, this work remains one of the most enduring and influential guides to meditation, self-knowledge, and spiritual development.

EXCERPT: "The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are in themselves exceedingly brief, less than ten pages of large type in the original. Yet they contain the essence of practical wisdom, set forth in admirable order and detail. The theme, if the present interpreter be right, is the great regeneration, the birth of the spiritual from the psychical man: the same theme which Paul so wisely and eloquently set forth in writing to his disciples in Corinth, the theme of all mystics in all lands.

We think of ourselves as living a purely physical life, in these material bodies of ours. In reality, we have gone far indeed from pure physical life; for ages, our life has been psychical, we have been centred and immersed in the psychic nature. Some of the schools of India say that the psychic nature is, as it were, a looking-glass, wherein are mirrored the things seen by the physical eyes, and heard by the physical ears. But this is a magic mirror; the images remain, and take a certain life of their own. Thus within the psychic realm of our life there grows up an imaged world wherein we dwell; a world of the images of things seen and heard, and therefore a world of memories; a world also of hopes and desires, of fears and regrets. Mental life grows up among these images, built on a measuring and comparing, on the massing of images together into general ideas; on the abstraction of new notions and images from these; till a new world is built up within, full of desires and hates, ambition, envy, longing, speculation, curiosity, self-will, self-interest."