As clay is not lost when it becomes a pot, so the mind is not lost when liberation is reached

The metaphor of clay and pot, classic in Advaita Vedānta, acquires here a specifically yogic nuance. Vasiṣṭha does not use the analogy to prove brahman-ātman identity — already assumed — but to reassure the practitioner who fears that mental stillness might be a kind of death. The clay transforms into a pot but does not cease to be clay; the mind transforms into an instrument of discrimination but does not disappear. What ceases is confusion, not function. In practical yoga, this has immediate consequences: stillness does not require us to stop thinking, but to think without the anxiety of a compulsive owner. When the Haṭha Pradīpikā prescribes prāṇāyāma as a method to calm the mind (II.1-2), it does not seek to nullify prāṇa but to redirect it; stillness is reorientation, not extinction.