Raja Yoga

This is the complete English text of Swami Vivekananda's "Raja Yoga" of 1896 – the book that carried Yoga to the West. It contains both parts of the work: the New York lectures and Vivekananda's full translation of and commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms, together with the appendix of Yoga passages from the Upanishads and Sankhya literature.



The lectures unfold the royal path step by step. The introductory chapter claims Yoga as a science of inner experience: "Each soul is potentially divine", and religion begins where personal verification begins. "The First Steps" describes posture, food and the daily frame of practice. The two central chapters, "Prana" and "The Psychic Prana", contain Vivekananda's famous interpretation of breathing: Pranayama is not about breath as such, but about gaining command of the universal energy of which breathing is the most tangible handle in the human body – from there the text moves through the nerve currents Ida, Pingala and Sushumna and the awakening of the Kundalini.



"The Control of Psychic Prana", "Pratyahara and Dharana", and "Dhyana and Samadhi" then trace the inner ascent: restraining the mind, withdrawing the senses, holding the mind to one point, and passing through meditation into the superconscious state. "Raja-Yoga in Brief" condenses the whole discipline into a few memorable pages.



The second half gives Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms complete: Concentration – its spiritual uses; Concentration – its practice; the chapter on Powers; and Independence (Kaivalya). Every sutra appears in translation followed by Vivekananda's commentary, which turns the terse aphorisms into living instruction.



Vivekananda's English – direct, vivid, spoken rather than written – remains one of the great pleasures of the book. For readers who want the source exactly as the world first received it, this is the text, complete and unabridged.