When Infinity of Knowledge Is Revealed YS IV - 31

Yoga Sutra - IV- 31- TADA SARVAVARANA MALAPETASYA JNANASYANANTYA JNEYAM ALPAM - Then all the coverings and impurities of knowledge are totally removed. Because of the infinity of this knowledge, what remains to be known is almost nothing.

Swami Satchidananda asks in this short commentary What is impurity? He answers It is like the sensitive coating on photographic film. The "I" and "mine" coat our mental film and then want to "catch' everything they see. If not for the sensitive film, you may see many things, but they wouldn't affect you, because nothing would get recorded. A jivanmukta's mind is like an uncoated, crystal-clear mica sheet. It runs through the camera and pictures are shot, but nothing gets recorded. There's nothing to process, nothing to develop and nothing to fix. That means there are no "fixations."

"How to Know God - The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali" translated and commented on by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood says the following for this sutra:

To man in his ordinary sense-consciousness, the universe seems full of secrets. There seems so infinitely much to be discovered and known. Every object is an invitation to study. He is overcome by his own sense of ignorance. But, to the illumined yogi, the universe does not seem all that mysterious. It is said that , if you know clay, you know the nature of everything that is made of clay. So, if you know the nature of Atman, you know the nature of everything in the universe. Then, all the painstaking researches of science seem like efforts of a child to empty the ocean with a spoon.

See related posts:

• Absolute True Consciousness YS I - 48, 49
• Wisdom - Seven Stages - YS II - 27 (Part II)
  Wisdom - Seven Stages - YS II - 27 (Part I)
• Discriminative Knowledge YS III - 55