Experience is the result of the inability to differentiate
between purush, pure consciousness, and sattva, pure intelligence,
although they are absolutely distinct.
Performing samyama on the self-interest
brings knowledge of the purush
separated from the knowledge of others.

From this follows intuitional hearing,
touching, seeing, tasting, and smelling.

These are powers when the mind is turned outward,
but obstacles in the way of samadhi.

One of the most important sutras of Patanjali – the very key… This last part of Patanjali’s yoga sutras is called “kaivalya pada.” Kaivalya means the summum bonum – the ultimate liberation, the total freedom of consciousness, which knows no limitation, which knows no impurity. The word kaivalya is very beautiful; it means innocent aloneness, it means pure aloneness.

The word aloneness has to be understood. It is not loneliness. Loneliness is negative: loneliness is when you are hankering for the other. Loneliness is the feeling of the absence of the other; aloneness is the realization of oneself. Loneliness is ugly; aloneness is tremendously beautiful. Aloneness is when you are so content that you don’t need the other, that the other has completely disappeared from your consciousness – the other makes no shadow on you, the other creates no dream in you, the other does not pull you out.

The other is continuously pulling you off the center. Sartre’s famous saying – Patanjali would have understood it well – is, “The other is hell.” The other may not be hell, but the hell is created by your desire for the other. The desire for the other is hell.

And to be desireless of the other is to attain to your pristine clarity of being. Then you are, and you are the whole, and there exists nobody except you. This Patanjali calls kaivalya.

And the way, the path, toward kaivalya is: first, the most essential step, vivek, discrimination; the second important step is vairagya, renunciation; and the third is the realization of kaivalya, aloneness.

Why are you hankering so much for the other? Why this desire, this constant madness for the other? Where have you taken a wrong step? Why are you not satisfied with yourself? Why don’t you feel fulfilled? Why do you think that somehow you lack something? From where does this misconception that you are incomplete arise? It arises out of the identity with the body; the body is the other. Once you have taken the first wrong step, then you will go on and on, and then there is no end to it.

By vivek Patanjali means: to discriminate yourself as separate from the body, to realize that you are in the body but you are not the body; to realize that you are in the mind but you are not the mind; to realize that you are always the pure witness – sakshin, drashta – the seer. You are never the seen, you are never the object; you are pure subjectivity.