The exhaustion of the vāsanās is the only means for stillness

Here, Vasiṣṭha distills the entirety of yoga’s spiritual technology into a single dictum: there is no other sādhana. The vāsanās are the latent tendencies, the karmic habits of the mind, the patterns that compulsively reiterate the illusion of a subject acting upon objects. They cannot be annihilated by sheer willpower—for willpower itself is vāsanā in action. They are exhausted through the gnosis of their illusory nature, through beholding time and again that they possess no inherent substance, that they are but momentary undulations upon the surface of consciousness. The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā (XVI.1) declares unequivocally: “vāsan