PATANJALI YOGA

>>19511122
Well, you could just read the actual Yogasūtras that Patañjali wrote. If you're wanting to go with his "system", you'll actually do well to steer clear of nearly everything ever written on the subject of Yoga. Patañjali wrote the oldest extant work on Yoga of any kind (probably sometime in the last two centuries BC).

There is nothing or nearly nothing about specific breath cycles, "cakras", and such in his work; not much of that stuff in its modern-like flavors is more than 600 years old or so.

There are some modern schools of Yoga that attempt to get back to the basics of Patañjali. You can check them out and judge how well they do at that for yourself, I guess. Unless you can read Saṃskṛt, you'll probably need several different translations of the Yogasūtras to compare to really get much out of them. Most of the freely-available scholarly English translations are very old, liberal, and worthless. This one should make an alright point of departure; just try to find as many others as you can.

https://www.ashtangayoga.info/philosophy/yoga-sutra/

>>19512350
>https://www.ashtangayoga.info/philosophy/yoga-sutra/
Well thank you for this information anon, but do you know where I could find it in book form?? My macbook is busted and has a loud ass fan that sounds like a Windows 95, so I'd rather have this text in book form. Plus I prefer books over a computer anyway.

Also to anon & anyone else reading this; does anyone have a modern guide to Patanjali system?? I want to really figure out how to do this as i said n the op.

>>19513646
>do you know where I could find it in book form?
Are you really going to make me tell you to do an Amazon search?

But keep in mind that the "book" is about eight pages long when printed, in the absence of mountains of modern-day commentary, anyway. It is a sūtra collection, after all. That link I gave you would probably take you 20–60 minutes to read in its entirety depending on how often you pause to soak it all in.

>does anyone have a modern guide to Patanjali system?

They honestly ALL say the exact same shit, which is just an exposition of the "limbs" shown in the image you posted. The extent to which they go beyond that is the extent to which they're superfluous. If "Book 4"'s first section on yoga is brief, it's really only because there's not much to say. Yoga when properly approached is *technique*, and technique alone. Very little of the loftier concepts attending it will be properly intelligible to anyone without considerable technical experience behind them anyway, and is more likely to just generate misunderstandings than anything else.

A good book on yoga will read more like a technical manual than an inspiring work of philosophy (although the Yogasūtras are indeed that for anyone who's been practicing yoga long enough to find its content relatable). The relevant sections of "Book 4" were, if anything, much too long. This PDF: https://paranormal.se/article/Liber_MMM.pdf , for example, contains a manual for the precise same set of techniques (in the section labelled "Mind Control", pp. 4–8 by PDF numbering) that is more palatable to the modern mind, and without even calling it "Yoga" or having to resort to the use of the traditional Indian nomenclature (the whole book that's from is called "Liber Null & Psychonaut" if you want a paper copy).

>>19513646
>>19514002
>I want to really figure out how to do this as i said n the op.

If you have even a partial understanding of what is described in the image in your OP, you have considerably more than what you'd need to begin anytime. Yoga is something that must be *done*, not read about.

As far as modern adaptations go, you can pretty much skip over all the Yama/Niyama stuff if you don't find moral codes all that interesting, or abide by it, or even make up your own code to follow. I would advise against getting too wrapped up in the elaborate postures or breathing cycles prescribed by Haṭhayoga (the much later school of yoga, on which virtually all of the Westernized classes run out of dance studios and shit are based) during the āsana and prānāyāma practice. For all practical purposes, you can begin what are segregated into āsana, prāṇāyāma, and pratyāhāra right off the bat, and just adopt ay comfortable position you can retain for a while and breathe at whatever rhythm comes naturally to you. Most pieces of advice beyond will be futile until you actually encounter the inevitable hurdles they'd be referring to, but most problems you will encounter ultimately come from trying too hard and striving for some imagined outcome to your efforts, rather than just *doing* it without concern for any reason or significance underlying it or for any result obtained. If you practice a minimum of thirty minutes everyday for six months, you should have experienced enough interesting things to more than justify the effort you put in, and you will have a much better point of departure for understanding what others have to say about magic and yoga (and, more importantly, arriving at your own perspectives on this). You can read a bunch of other books on it if you like, but you're not really missing any crucial beginner info at this point, and people who read too much too soon tend to just become chatty dilettantes who never get around to actually doing much yoga.

>>19514042
OP, do you really want to turn into this pretentious twat? Do something useful-instead of reading mumbo jumbo Asian nonsense, take a claw hammer and beat worthless hipsters like this to a pulp. Lot more benificial for the universe.

>>19514275
Probably better than being a lazy piece of shit who calls anyone that has bothered to learn things he doesn't know about "pretentious" in order to assure himself that there's at least somehow moral highground in stupidity and ignorance.

>>19511122
Google "AJITH VADAKAYIL PATANJALI YOGA" Lots of nonsense in his blog but his commentary on patanjali's text is worth it. This is not a spam bdw google and see it yourself.