Texts / Śivasaṃhitā / Verse 3.68

Śivasaṃhitā 3.68

Tṛtīyaḥ paṭalaḥ — Sādhana

Sanskrit text

यं यं जानाति योगीन्द्रस्तं तमात्मेति भावयेत्।

Transliteration

yaṃ yaṃ jānāti yogīndrastaṃ tamātmeti bhāvayet|

Translation

Now we have described the management of the air in order to remove the troubles (which await the Yogi); through this knowledge of vayu-sadhana vanish all sufferings and enjoyments in the circle of this universe.

Commentary

The instruction tamātmeti bhāvayet — «let them contemplate it as ātman» — is non-dualism’s practice in its most concrete and direct form. Not a philosophical affirmation about the nature of reality but an active and continuous practice: each object of knowledge, each experience, each perception is deliberately treated as manifestation of Ātman, of the universal Self. The difference between what is perceived and the perceiver collapses in the very act of perception.

Yaṃ yaṃ jānāti (all that they know, literally «whatever they know, that very thing») uses the correlative construction yaṃ… taṃ to indicate a relationship without exceptions: no object of knowledge falls outside this practice. The yogīndra (the lord of yogins) in niṣpattāvasthā does not discriminate between the «spiritual» deserving to be contemplated as ātman and the «mundane» that does not.

Vāyusādhana (the discipline of air, prāṇāyāma as complete practice) produces as its final result the dissolution of all duḥkha and sukha — sufferings and pleasures — in the universe’s circle (maṇḍala). It is not that the yogin stops feeling, but that the structure of experience itself transforms: without a separate self to suffer or enjoy, suffering and pleasure lose their binding power.