# A Movie Can Save Your Life **1) We have said that the seeds in our mind paint our reality upon the blank screen of the world. But imagining that we are sitting in our favorite vacation spot is obviously not the same as actually sitting in that spot. How real is the imagination of the spot; could it ever become the spot?** Sitting in our favorite vacation spot is a ripening of seeds planted when we provided others just such a place in the past. The seeds are ripening into the physical reality of the place. The ability to imagine our favorite vacation spot is also a ripening of seeds, but only seeds ripening as an imagined vacation spot. As our understanding of seeds increases, we are able to make them ripen more and more quickly. In time we can undertake actions which cause us to actually be in a distant place or time instantly. **2) Give two Sanskrit words for “mental seed” explain their roots, and give some related English words.** One Sanskrit word for “mental seed” which we had in the last class is vasana vasna. This comes from a root √vas vs!, meaning to dwell. The idea is that the seed is planted deep within the mind and dwells  there. Some related English words are was, were, astute (from the Greek word astu or town, a permanent dwelling place—people from town being more sophisticated or skilled), and divan (from a Persian word for house.) The second Sanskrit word for mental seed is sanskara s<Skar, which is made from the two parts sam and kara. Sam sm! means together, and is seen in the English words committee and compile. Kara comes from the root √kir k«, meaning to do, or to make, as do the English words cereal (a grown food); crescent (the moon growing); and create. Together the two words mean together-grown; and the meaning is traditionally explained as when the causes come together, then their result is grown. This then became a word for a cause or seed which produces something else. **3) In the west, we equate things having a cause with things having a beginning. Explain how Master Patanjali would consider this, in view of his statement that people can learn to “see forever, back to no beginning, and ahead with nothing left.”** If everything has a cause, then there are no “first” causes, since they too would have to have a cause.  This means quite naturally that there is no beginning to things, and no end to things. If further things are coming in some way from our own minds, then our minds have no beginning either, nor end. And in some way then too we could come to perceive all the things that have ever been, or will be. **4) Master Patanjali says that “the storehouse of causes and effects is maintained by certain factors; it disappears then, when they do.” What are these factors?** The storehouse of seeds in our own mind, like all other things, is a projection of our own mind. The power of the seeds in the storehouse is maintained simply by the “factor” of our own lack of understanding about seeds. Ultimately we destroy the entire storehouse by perfecting our understanding of where things are really coming from. **5) Explain how a grouchy boss at work relates to a movie.** A boss or supervisor who yells at us at work is not grouchy from their own side. They are only a certain collection of colors (redness) and noises. Our mind organizes these colors and noises into an unpleasant experience. This experience is not coming from its own side, because another person in the same room (someone, for example, who is envious of us) might see the same experience as pleasant (they might enjoy that we are getting in trouble). Our mind is imposing a picture of a yelling boss upon these indicators because of a seed ripening in our mind, from having yelled at someone else in the past. The experience of the boss yelling at us is actually some 65 discrete seeds ripening into pictures every minute. The total effect is like a movie: the illusion of our life passing by us. **6) How does this concept of a movie relate to what Master Patanjali calls “breaking through the idea that past and future are times that could exist in and of themselves”?** The flow of time itself, like our grouchy boss, is something which is being created by the ripening of seeds in our mind, one by one, at a high rate of speed. People with a great understanding of this process see time itself as a projection of seeds within their own mind, and thus gain the power to treat future time—for example—as present time, thus “seeing into” the future. **7) Master Patanjali says that all the different forms that things take are but one; and that therefore their basis is suchness. Explain, and talk also about the Sanskrit word for “suchness,” along with related English words.** Obviously the different forms that things take are not one. A potato is not the same as an atom bomb. These two things are the same though in being projections of my mind upon the blank screen of the world. This blank screen is the basis that allows all things to happen, and is called “emptiness” or “suchness.” The Sanskrit word for “suchness” here is tattva tÅv. This is made of two parts, tat and tva. Tat means that, and is the basis of words like that, the, and this. The ending tva means -ness, and is found in the English ending –tion, as in motion or action. **8) Master Patanjali has said throughout the Yoga Sutra that we are making some basic, fundamental mistake all the time when we look at things. We never have a really correct perception, and this is what causes all of the pain in the world, as we react to events in a completely mistaken way. The question then becomes: If we are always seeing everything wrong, how can we ever see  that we are seeing everything wrong? How can we catch ourselves doing it? How can we see truth with an instrument which is itself defective? Give two wrong answers to this question.** The first wrong answer is that we can never see truth with this mistaken state of mind. We are forever doomed to be in ignorance. The second wrong answer is that we can see truth, if we work by way of our self-awareness: a little, independent corner of our mind that listens to it, and watches it, even though the mind itself never sees anything correctly. **9) Explain, using an illustration, how we actually do first catch ourselves making the Great Mistake, even as we make the Great Mistake.** Remember that the Great Mistake consists not of misunderstanding what things are, but how they are. I can look at a pen, and think it is a pen, and be perfectly correct. What I’m doing wrong, all the time, is misunderstanding where it comes from: I believe that it is coming from its side, when in truth it is coming from my side. Things work, they just don’t work the way we thought they do. A simple illustration is that of a safety movie that’s played on an airplane before it takes off. The woman who speaks in the movie looks like a real woman, but she’s not. She’s just a motion picture of a real woman. The fact that she doesn’t exist in the way she seems doesn’t though cancel how she functions: a motion-picture woman can explain to me how to buckle my seatbelt, and if I do, it can really save my life. The state of mind that we use to explore how our own mind is not what it seems to be may not be itself what it seems to be, but it can still function to reason things out, and understand how I am thinking of things the wrong way.  **10) Master Patanjali says that two different states of mind “take separate routes to experience one basis.” What are these two states of mind, and what is “the basis” here?** The “basis” here is the basis of suchness already mentioned in the fourth chapter. That is, the world is like a blank screen, which provides a basis for the projections forced by seeds upon our mind. There must be a movie screen on which to project the movie. The two separate routes we may take to see this blank screen, this emptiness, are the different types of correct perception mentioned by the Master in the very first chapter of the text. At first we reason out how things cannot be coming from their own side. Once we have done this enough times, we perceive it directly, in a deep state of meditation.