Book 4: Kaivalya Pada (On Absoluteness): Yoga Sutras Structure & Overview

Book 4: Kaivalya Pada (On Absoluteness)
  • 34 verses
  • Means of attaining psychic powers
  • Cause of individuality
  • The individual and the cosmic mind
  • Karma (predestined actions and thoughts)
  • Unity of all things
  • Theory of perception
  • The mind as an unconscious instrument
  • The path to kaivalya
  • Kaivalya

The Chapter on Absolute Liberation

When the soul is freed from the bondage of body, mind, power, and pride of success, it reaches the state known as kaivalya, or aloneness, where the body and mind are as it were in quarantine and the soul is free. This is the subject of Patanjali’s fourth chapter, the chapter on absolute liberation. – B.K.S. Iyengar

Whom We Become & How We Experience the World

Pada 4 describes whom we become and how we experience the world as a result of understanding, practicing, and weaving the experience of samadhi back into our living. Kaivalysa is what we experience when we live with the awareness of pure consciousness in every moment, which is essentially beyond the duality created by the mind. – Alan Finger & Wendy Newton

See Also

  • Book Four