Recognition

Dhāraṇā 81 · The yogī's one difference

Awareness of object and subject is common to every embodied being; the yogī differs in one thing only — unbroken attentiveness to the relation itself.

This verse is the collection's great leveller. It grants at the outset that yogīs possess nothing others lack: the awareness linking subject to object — grāhya-grāhaka-saṃvitti — is sāmānyā sarva-dehinām, common to all embodied beings. Every creature that perceives already has the whole equipment.

What the difference is

Yogināṃ tu viśeṣo 'yam — but of yogīs this is the distinction — sambandhe sāvadhānatā: attentiveness to the relation. In every perception three things are given: the thing grasped, the one grasping, and the living link of awareness between them. All beings use the link; they look through it the way one looks through a window, seeing objects, occasionally noticing the subject, never noticing the seeing. The yogī's entire speciality is to attend to the window — to the relation itself, the actual conscious connection flashing between grasper and grasped in every moment of experience.

As practice: in any perception — this page, a sound, a face — let attention fall neither on the object nor back onto yourself, but on the knowing of it that is currently alive between the two. It is the most available thing in the world and the least attended; sāvadhānatā, wakeful care, is the whole technique. There is no further secret to graduate to.

Why the relation is the hiding place

Subject and object are both products: the relation is the factory. Before experience splits into 'me' and 'it', there is the one awareness that, polarising itself, appears as both — and the split is re-enacted in every single cognition. To catch the relation is therefore to catch consciousness in the act of creating the two poles, which is why so slight a shift of attention carries so total a consequence. The tradition's boldest claim hides in this verse's modesty: saṃsāra and recognition are the same event, differing only in whether anyone is paying attention.