Our illusions come in five varieties, some of which are painful, others painless.

The important thing to remember in all cases, though, is that they are, ultimately, illusions. Our imagining winning the lottery may make us happy in the short term, but in the long term we will likely be hurt when we do not win. Remembering a departed loved one may seem painful initially, but if they passed after a long illness, perhaps we will come to see that it was a blessing that they were released from suffering.

Ultimately, though, these states of pain and pleasure are transitory. They are not our true state of being. When we vest importance in them, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.

When we’re not resident in the Self, we reside in our fantasies.

This is really stating the antithesis of the prior sutra—if we’re not able to rein in our imagination, to distinguish it from reality, we cannot reside in our Self. It could literally be no other way—either we reside in truth, and can connect to our Self, or we reside in fantasy, and must necessarily be disconnected from our Self.

This idea, that yoga is the practice of seeing things as they are, of distinguishing between our desires and reality, can be interpreted in a way that suggests that our imagination—which is often an expression of our desires—are wrong. I take exception to that idea—the power of imagination has changed the world. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, and with that dream he worked to change the world—but I believe he always remembered that the dream was not the way the world was, and when he acted, he acted from a place of being grounded in truth. I believe this is where he was able to find compassion even for those who tormented him.

Simply put, to be effective in realizing our desires, we have to distinguish between what is, and what we want. Without this distinction, we cannot succeed, because you cannot navigate from the place you are at to the place you wish to be—you’re reading the map incorrectly. You’re trying to get from Belgium to New York City, but you’re actually starting out in Weehawken.

But never abandon your imagination. This is the engine of desire, of transformation.

“Then the Self abides in its own true nature”

Why still the fluctuations of the mind? How is this going to help us? The fluctuations of the mind warp and distort our view of the world. When we find a place of stillness and immediacy, we can see the world clearly. Even more importantly, we can see ourselves clearly.

It reminds me of an old joke:

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician were on a train heading north, and had just crossed the border into Scotland.

The engineer looked out of the window and said “Look! Scottish sheep are black!”

The physicist said, “No, no. Some Scottish sheep are black.”

The mathematician looked irritated. “There is at least one field, containing at least one sheep, of which at least one side is black.”

The yogi is like the mathematician in a way: rather than making the assumptions of the engineer, or even the physicist, letting the reality be obscured by assumptions, distractions and fantasy—memories and dreams and how we wish the world to be—we try to let go of all of that to observe things as they most truly are. This is at once mundane and profound.

The relationship of this to the asana practice seems to me straightforward—we put ourselves in a position where it is hard to become mired in the unreal, by working the body in a way that demands as much of our attention as we can muster. With no capacity to spare for anything but this present moment, we start to train ourselves to have that sort of focus, and eventually we can start to bring it off the mat.

“Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind”

Why inhabit the present moment? To begin to let go of our fantasies and see the world as it truly is.

For me, this isn’t the stopping of thought. Certainly some schools of yoga encourage this—an attempt to step away from the world entirely, to transcend and escape it. But few of us have the luxury or the calling to step out of the world. Instead, we have to find our practice alongside the everyday aspects of our life.

Rather, for us, it is the cultivation of a clear focus on the present moment, and what it demands of us, and the ability to step beyond what we fantasize and do what is truly within our capacity.