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The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - Book 4 - Illumination
6. Among the forms which consciousness assumes, only that which is the result of meditation is free from latent karma. Forms are the result of desire. Meditation of the right kind is a purely mental process and into it desire enters not. Forms are the result of an outward-going urge or tendency. Meditation is the result of an inward-turning tendency, of the capacity to abstract the consciousness from form and substance and to center it within itself. Form is an effect produced by the love or desire nature of the conscious one; meditation is a producer of effects and relates to the will or life aspect of the spiritual man. Desire produces effects, and the organs of sentient consciousness then come inevitably the law of cause and effect, of karma, which governs the relation of form-consciousness. The meditation process, when rightly understood and carried on, necessitates the withdrawal of the consciousness of the spiritual man from all forms in the three worlds, and his abstraction from all sense perception and tendencies. Thus he stands at the moment of pure meditation free from that aspect of karma which deals with the producing of effects. Temporarily, he is so abstracted that his thought, perfectly concentrated and having no relation to aught in the three worlds, produces no outward-going vibration, relates to no form, affects no substance. When this concentrated meditation becomes a habit and is the normal daily attitude of his life, then the man becomes free from the law [389] of karma. He becomes aware then of the effects still remaining to be worked off, and learns to avoid the creation of new ones, initiating no actions which will "create organs" in the three worlds. He dwells on the plane of mind, persists in meditation, creates by an act of will and not through the helplessness of desire, and is a "free soul," a master and a liberated man.
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