Svapna-nidra-jnanalambanam va is another Sutra whose meaning is a little difficult to understand. We can concentrate on dream, or the effects of sleep, or anything that hangs upon them, says this Sutra in a very pithy manner; and the meaning of the Sutra will not be very clear merely by a grammatical translation. Literally speaking, we may take it as a sort of attempt at concentration on things which we saw in dream and which we liked most. A person might have become Emperor Akbar in dream. It is a very happy thing. At the time he dreamt, he must have felt very happy. That person can go on thinking, "I am Akbar! I am Akbar!" That thought might produce an elevation of spirit, and a certain concentration, because of the affection and love entertained for that particular status of emperor. Or, one might have had a vision, a superb and very absorbing vision. One might have seen his Guru in his dream. Or he might have seen his Deity, his Ishta Devata in dream. The happiness of the vision might continue to persist in the waking state: "Oh, how happy I am! I saw my Deity, Ishta Devata, yesterday in my dream". True, the dream is over, but one can collect one's mind back. One can try to re-live the dream experience, so to say. "Yesterday what I dreamt was very beautiful. It was Lord Krishna. He appeared to me in such and such a way. Oh, how beautiful, how grand, how absorbing!" One can go on recapitulating. The mind will be happy. In this way, the objects that one sees in dream, which are pleasant to concentrate upon, can be taken as aids in one's meditation in the waking state as well. But, the deeper, philosophical meaning of it all is that the whole world is a dream. The world should be thought of as a dream, and not as a real object. The world is as real as a dream, and as unreal as that. Is our dream world real or unreal? It is real as long as it is experienced, and it is unreal when it is not experienced. So is this world. It is comparable to the manifestations of the mind in dream. The space, time, causation and the particularities that one sees in the dream world, including oneself as the dream subject, are all the drama enacted by one's own mind as a trick. Sometimes, one is pursued by a tiger in dream. The person runs and climbs a tree for fear of the pursuing tiger. This tiger is manufactured by the mind of the dreamer; the running process also is an action of the mind. The dream person who runs for fear of the tiger is a production of the mind. The tree which he climbs is also made by the mind only. Even the distance of space between the tiger and the tree is a creation of the mind of the dreamer. The whole dream is a mental complex. But yet, to the dreamer, the dream looks so real that in his dream, he cries in fear of the terrific beast that pursues him. In fact he may fall down from the tree and break his leg in his dream. He may feel the consequent pain also. The dream is so vivid that even on waking up, he sees if his leg is all right. He looks at it again. It is all right, thank God. His leg is not really broken!

Similarly, in this world, time, space and objects are all productions of a single universal mind, and therefore, this world does not exist to that universal mind in the same way as the dream world does not exist for the dreamer. So, there is something superb and transcendent and beyond this world, on which we have to concentrate in order to wake up from this world-dream. We are still sleeping, compared to another waking which is cosmical or universal in its nature. Contemplation along these lines will help us a great deal in the Yoga Path.

The system of Patanjali is often called the Ashtanga Yoga. This is the usual name by which it is known. Ashtanga Yoga means the Yoga of eight limbs. Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi - these are the eight limbs or eight stages of Patanjali's system. These classifications are very carefully done by the great author. It is not just a whim and fancy of his mind. One can imagine ten or twelve or fifteen stages or twenty stages. But why only eight? Patanjali has considered carefully the process of the evolution of the universe, and also our involvement in the various evolutionary stages, and thus concluded that eight would be a proper number of the stages of descent as well as ascent.

This is a highly scientific technique discovered by sage Patanjali; it is scientific and logical. Because, it has a direct connection with our daily experiences in life. Every morning, when a person gets up from bed, there is one kind of waking from one kind of temporal dream in an individual capacity, but the person's waking experiences also are a kind of dream only. Our experiences constitute our bondage, and the freedom from bondage that we are after is nothing but freedom from certain experiences in the world. A good psychologist will know that we are involved in various stages in this world of experience. A person may be immersed in the waters of the Ganga, but when he descends into it, he descends touching the top layer of water first and the bottom layer last, though it may appear that he has sunk suddenly. If we have several petals of a rose flower kept one over the other, and if we pass a needle through them, the needle goes through them so quickly that it looks as if it does not take any time at all to pierce through. But, in truth, it does take some time. Surely, it does not go at once through all the petals. It goes through each of the petals one after another, though it looks as if it takes no time at all, due to the quickness of the action. Likewise, it may appear that we are drowned in Samsara wholly, and everything is chaos and a confusion, and we do not know where we are standing. This is a layman's perception of things, just as a sick man may say that he is sick, while not knowing what his sickness is. But a very good biologist or a medical specialist will know that the man's sickness has come upon him gradually by stages, from cause to effect. One does not fall sick suddenly. Sickness does not descend like a bolt from the blue. It is also a gradual manifestation. So, there is a difference between a specialised scientific approach to matters and a layman's crude approach. We are laypeople, crude men. We do not understand anything. We only cry that something is wrong, that everything is at sixes and sevens, that we are helpless. It is like the sick patient weeping: "I am sick, doctor. Help me. I don't know what has happened to me". An intelligent examination will prove that the patient has fallen ill slowly, gradually, stage by stage. Therefore, the treatment has to be of a similar character, a gradual purging of the toxic matters of the body, a systematic relieving of the patient's tension by medicines which the doctor knows how to administer, stage by stage, everyday, for a protracted period.

So is the practice of Yoga. Yoga is, as it were, a highly medical treatment to the sickness of the soul of man, effectively administered by the master-physician Patanjali. We are not drowned suddenly in Samsara in a chaotic manner, though it is no doubt true that we are drowned. We have come to this level of suffering slowly, gradually. There is a coming down from the universal to the particular individual form of ours, and a greater and further involvement of this particularised individuality of ours in social relationships, and attachments and aversions. The implications of this involvement are well known. We live in a society. We are family people. We have our father and mother. Each one of us is a husband or a wife, a son, a daughter or a sister. Each one is a boss or a subordinate, or a minister or a peon. The least of us is something in society. Now, these ideas that everyone has about himself or herself in the mind are not unimportant things. An individual should not say that he is a spiritual seeker only and that he has nothing to do with these ideas. The idea that he is a son or a father cannot leave a person so easily, though he may be aspiring for God. So, the spiritual seeker should not be too enthusiastic and certainly not foolhardy. He should exercise his intelligence. How can a person forget that he is a son to his father? How can he forget other relationships? And there are so many of them. Likes and dislikes are there.

Our external social relationships have to be considered first, because above all problems, the social problems are the most predominant. We have other problems, no doubt. Perhaps they are very deep. But the social problems are immediate pinpricks which we feel everyday and we have to get out of them. Everyday, we see people. Well, we see trees also. We see buildings too. But trees and buildings do not trouble us. The immediate, palpable pain that we feel is from human beings, not even from tigers and lions, snakes and scorpions. The latter also can trouble us, but we do not bother about scorpions and snakes everyday. We bother about human beings only. Our concern is with human beings primarily, though the world is not made up only of human beings. So, Patanjali takes his stand, first and foremost, in the circumstance in which the human being is placed, namely, the social circumstance. Our conduct, our attitude, our outlook, our duties and obligations - all these are included in the term "relationship with human beings". We should be able to move tactfully with people and adjust with them; otherwise, we will feel like fish out of water. The problem can arise in one of two ways. Either other people cannot adjust with us or we cannot adjust with the others. Anyhow, this would be a sorry state of affairs, a dread disease almost, requiring remedial action. The subject is a difficult one and is generally extensively discussed in the sociological sciences, in psychology and psycho-analysis, and even in political science. But, Patanjali has his own way of looking at things. For him, all these social problems boil down to a few categories.

Our reactions to things are our relationships. And our reactions evoke return reactions from people in a corresponding manner. The world is something like a complexity of the tit-for-tat attitude. Whatever we do to others, that will be done to us. We cannot escape this situation. Now, we have to be very carefully analytical about our social position first, before we take to Yoga. It is no use for anyone to say, "I have left everything, I have nobody, I am all for Yoga". One should not make such an abrupt statement like that. After all, it may not be true that a person has nobody to call his own. Somebody may be there - a friend, a relation. The Yoga student who says outwardly that he has nobody to worry about will be grieving inwardly about his old mother, or poor father, or thinking about his boss from whom he has run away due to some fear or misunderstanding. And then, everyone has other problems personally, connected with human society.

Patanjali tells us that human problems arising out of human relations can be called, in a way, the conduct which people manifest among themselves by way of self-adjustment. The whole of human society is a large area of co-operation. Society is nothing but a co-operative complex. Otherwise, we do not call it a society. If in a place there is no amicable, intelligible, coordinating relationships between one another, we do not call that a social complex. It can only be described as a chaotic congregation of individuals. Whenever we form a society or an organisation of any kind, even if it be a small family by itself, there is inward co-operation and co-ordination, based on a kind of understanding among the members of that society or organisation. The understanding arises on account of a common aim that motivates the individuals forming the organisation, called the family or the society. If we have no common aim among ourselves, there cannot be any kind of amicable relationship, and we cannot form a society. We cannot be members of a single family if such understanding is absent. When we work together as friends, there is always a common purpose to serve. If three people have a common purpose, then the three of them become friends. If a hundred or a thousand people, or ten thousand people, have a common purpose, they become friends; why, they become a party, a society of some sort. Now, the whole humanity can be regarded as a society of this nature. The Yoga student should consider the whole of humanity as one single organisation for the purpose of framing his attitude towards others. Patanjali takes his stand on human relationships in general, which include the smaller forms of this relationship such as family relationship and communal relationship. We need not separately mention them, because humanity includes everything.

What is our attitude towards another person? This we must try to understand within our mind everyday. When I see a person, what do I think about him? We may not be analysing our mind in this way everyday, because we are too busy with our daily routine of life. We run to the shop, or go to the office to type something, or we have to do this or that thing, and so we have no time to think in the above manner, namely, "What do I think about this man?" But, it is necessary to think that. Because, even our little typing, or writing an address in our office, has something to do with our opinion about another person. It cannot be said that the latter is irrelevant. The relevance of it may be known later on, when the time for it comes. So, everything hangs on this, namely, "What is my general outlook to things around me? What is the opinion that I hold about people around me?" This is a type of analysis that we can conduct within ourselves. Do we hate something? Do we have a prejudice against anything? If so, we must make a note of it. "I curse this; I hate this; I would like to be rid of this person." When feelings like these arise in the student of Yoga, he must make a note. And he must ask himself, "Why do such emotions arise?"