Reading Summary

After exploring the physical and energetic bodies, our journey through Light on Life moves further inward, towards mind and intelligence.

These two chapters belong together. In Chapter 4, Iyengar turns to manomaya kośa, the mental body: the realm of thoughts, emotions, sensory impressions and reactions. He describes the familiar restlessness of the mind and examines the five kleśas, the afflictions that underlie suffering: ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and fear of death.

The work here is not simply to make the mind quiet. Iyengar is interested in learning to see more clearly. Pratyāhāra, the turning inward of the senses, creates a space in which our thoughts, emotions and habitual reactions can be observed rather than automatically followed.

Chapter 5 takes us from the mental body into vijñānamaya kośa, the intellectual or wisdom body. Here Iyengar distinguishes the fluctuating activity of mind from buddhi, the faculty of discrimination and discernment. He connects individual intelligence with mahat, a larger or cosmic intelligence, and asks what happens when intelligence is no longer organized primarily around “I” and “mine.”

One of the things I find particularly interesting in reading these chapters together is that Iyengar does not treat “mind” as one single thing. Thinking, reacting, remembering, perceiving, discriminating and knowing are not necessarily the same processes.

So as we read, we can begin asking: What is the difference between having thoughts and having discernment? What allows us to see rather than simply react? And how does the practice of yoga change the quality of the intelligence with which we meet ourselves and the world?