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The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - Book 3 - Union achieved and its Results
54. This intuitive knowledge, which is the great Deliverer, is omnipresent and omniscient and includes the past, the present and the future in the Eternal Now. The only part of this sutra which is not clear even to the superficial reader is the significance of the words Eternal Now, and these it is not possible to comprehend until soul-consciousness is developed. To say that time is a succession of states of consciousness and that the present is lost in the past instantaneously, and merged in the future as it is experienced, is of small avail to the average student. To say that there is a time when sight is lost in vision, when the sum total of life anticipations are realized in a moment of accomplishment and that this persists for ever, and to point to a state of consciousness in which there is no sequence of events and no succession of realizations is to speak in a language of mystery. Yet so it is and will be. When the aspirant has reached his goal he knows the true significance of his immortality and the true nature of his liberation. [367] Space and time become for him meaningless terms. The only true Reality is seen to be the great central life force, remaining unchanged and unmoved at the center of the changing evanescent temporal forms. "I am," says the human unit and regards himself as the self, and identifies himself with the changing form. Time and space are for him the true realities. "I am That," says the aspirant and seeks to know himself as he truly is, a living word, part of a cosmic phrase. For him space no longer exists; he knows himself as omnipresent. "I am That I am," says the freed soul, the liberated man, the Christ. Neither time nor space exist for him, and omniscience and omnipresence are his distinctive qualities. In his comment upon this sutra, Charles Johnston quotes from St. Columba and says: "Some there are, though very few, to whom divine grace has granted this: that they can clearly and most distinctly see, at one and the same moment, as though under one ray of the sun, even the entire circuit of the whole world with its surroundings of ocean and sky, the innermost part of their mind being marvellously enlarged." It might be helpful also if the brief comment of Dvivedi were quoted here as it is well put, and the state of consciousness arrived at concisely summed up: "In aphorism XXXIII. of this section we have already described the nature of taroka-jnana - the knowledge that saves from the bonds of the world. The discriminative knowledge described [368] here results in taraka, the knowledge which is the end and aim of yoga. It relates to all objects from the pradhana (spirit-matter A.B.) to the bhutas (elements, forms A. B.), as also to all conditions of these objects. Moreover it produces knowledge of all things simultaneously, and is quite independent of the ordinary rules of cognition. Hence it is the highest knowledge which can be desired by the yogin, and it is a sure index of Kaivalya (state of absolute oneness A. B.) to be described in the following aphorism as its result."
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