Vikalpa - Filtering through flight of fancy. We are often caught in thinking circularly about our plans to solve various problems. These are rarely tried out or do not see the light of the day. Thus, considerable mental energy is wasted in finding solutions to problems which may not even exist or exists in our imagination. This is like feeling afraid of what the future holds. Until the future manifests itself, we have no way of knowing what the future holds. Yet, we spend considerable energy in making future plans and worrying about their success, without doing anything practical to fructify them.

Nidra - Sleep is also a state that acts as an obstruction to our Yogic state. Here, Patanjali does not mean just active sleep, but conditions of sleep, such as laziness, sleepy moods, dullness, inattentiveness, delusion and hallucination. This could be substance induced, a natural state, tiredness and exhaustion. We all have experiences of how this state affects our attentiveness and concentration.

Smriti - Memory of past events, our relationships with our family and others, our growing up experiences, past conditioning and some past life memories or archetypes in the collective consciousness act as hindrances to our achieving the Yogic state. Memories act to cause rigidity, as our references to past events act to harden our views on various phenomena and behavior.

With this short essay on what are the actual mental energy processes that hinder us to connect with our source and achieve our highest potential Patanjali goes on to define and describe each of these patterns in detail. In the next article I will try to describe the five hindrances which may be obstacles or may be neutral in our efforts to achieve our goals.