In his book How Yoga Works, Geshe Michael Roach uses a simple story to illustrate some of the core teachings of the Yoga Sutras.  The first and probably most important lesson from the Sutras is from the second verse:  Yoga citta vrtti nirodah.  Y.S. 1.2  -  Yoga is learning to stop how the mind turns things around.

To illustrate this lesson the teacher, Miss Friday, picks up a stylus, which has been cut from a piece of green bamboo, from the Captain’s desk.  Miss Friday asks the Captain, her student, what this thing is she handed him: 

He says it is a pen.  (The story takes place in the year 1101 A.D.)  She asks him if he is sure it is a pen, and is it a pen from its own side?  She asks him if everyone would think it is a pen.  He looks at her as if she is crazy and says of course it is a pen.  Miss Friday hands the pen to a cow that happens to be in the front yard.  The cow happily munches on the “pen”.    So, the question still is:  Is it a pen?  Is it a pen from its own side?  Would everyone agree to the fact that it is a pen?  The answer is that it could be a pen to you and it could be food to a cow.  We think we see things as they are, but in reality, we see things as we want them to be; or, how our past has colored our vision to see things.

We may see a person whom we find irritating.  So, we think that person is irritating.  But, that person has friends and family and people who love them and think they are charming and witty.  Is that person irritating?  Or, do we find something irritating about that person because they exhibit some behavior that we find irritating about ourselves?  Is the quality of being irritating coming from their side, or is it coming from our side?

In a yoga class we do a lot of poses.  Are all of the poses good poses?  Or, are some of them bad poses?  Do we like some poses and hate other poses?  The poses are all just poses.  They, themselves, are neutral.  They are neither good nor bad.  It is just what we assign them.  But, yet we like some poses and hate other poses.  Our judgments might be based on whether or not we can “do” the poses.  If we can learn to pause and look at something as simple as yoga poses and notice when our mind begins to turn things around, we can begin to get a glimpse of where we get stuck by our own limiting beliefs.  If we can get beyond those beliefs we can begin to get a glimpse of the freedom that yoga promises.

The Yoga Sutras ask us to practice seeing the emptiness of all things.  To see, in the words of William Shakespeare, that “… there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  To learn to see things as neutral and to watch as our mind judges and assigns value to things.

So what do you think?  Is it a pen? Or…