What Omniscience Is, and What It Is Not

2026-09-14

Raja Yoga Sutras, Lecture 15 — Samadhi Pada, Sutras 25 to 28

Someone offers to take you to Niagara Falls. He will describe every part of it to you in full detail, on one condition: you keep your eyes closed the entire time. Afterward, you tell him he is all-seeing.

Swami Jyotirmayananda uses that small absurdity to clear away almost everything people assume about omniscience. This lecture takes up four sutras of Patanjali’s Samadhi Pada, numbers 25 through 28, and the first two of them describe God, while the last two describe what you actually do about it. The through-line is that knowing, in Patanjali’s sense, is never something performed on your behalf.

The lecture begins somewhere unexpected. Before the sutras, Swamiji tells the story of Bhima’s remark in the Mahabharata. Duryodhana, humiliated in the Pandavas’ hall of illusions, had stumbled against transparent glass and fallen into a pool. Watching from the balcony, Bhima called him the son of a blind man. It was factually correct. Dhritarashtra was blind, and Duryodhana was his son. Nothing in the sentence was false, and the sentence helped start a war. Truth, Swamiji points out, is not made harmless by being accurate, and the test he offers is uncomfortably practical: look inward before you speak, and if the ego is smiling, something other than truth is being served.

From there the lecture turns to sutra 25, and to the word that occupies most of the hour: sarvajna, all-knowing. Swamiji spends considerable time on what it does not mean, because the popular version is so firmly established. He then gives three illustrations of what it does mean, moves to God as the teacher who precedes all teachers, and closes on Om and on japa. By the end, the arc has gone from a definition of God to a practice you can begin tonight.

Passages

The Truth That Is Not Enough

The invocation to Patanjali that opens every class names three gifts and three purifications: yoga for the mind, ayurveda for the body, grammar for speech. Swamiji reads the third as more than a scholarly footnote. Behind the discipline of grammar sits a question about conduct, because conduct expresses itself most through speech.

What follows is a distinction that the Mahabharata story is built to carry. Na bruyat satyam apriyam — do not speak a truth that is unpleasant. Note what it does not say. It is not an instruction against lying; it assumes the statement is true and rules it out anyway.

Swamiji’s gloss is that speed is the problem. Think within the mind before speaking. Ask whether it will hurt someone, and then ask the harder question: whether hurting someone is the actual intention, wearing truth as its cover. The diagnostic he gives is unusually concrete:

“If the ego is smiling, you must know there is some trick involved.”

And if you cannot find the language to say a true thing pleasantly, his advice is simply to keep quiet. Otherwise, as he puts it, people highlight their own ego in the name of speaking the truth.

Omniscience Is Not a Performance

Sutra 25 reads tatra niratishayam sarvajnabijam — in God, the seed of omniscience grows to a boundless degree. The seed language matters. Omniscience is not a category that God alone occupies and everyone else lacks. It is a capacity present in degrees, which in God reaches its limit.

Before developing that, Swamiji dismantles the version most people carry. In India, he notes, people approach sages and declare them all-knowing, but the cultured ones understand this does not mean the sage can tell you what you ate or what vehicle you arrived in. That kind of knowing, he says flatly, has no purpose.

He is equally direct about psychics. Their ability to say things you do not know is real enough in its way, but it is extremely limited and of very little use. And he warns against the test people are always tempted to run — writing something down, sealing it, and asking the teacher to name it. That is not a spiritual examination. It is a parlor game with religious vocabulary.

Then comes the Niagara Falls illustration, and it does the real work. If someone sees on your behalf while your eyes stay shut, you have gained nothing at all. All-knowing, Swamiji says, means someone holding a light — and the distinction he draws from there is the hinge of the whole lecture:

“who can give you the ability to look into your inner details with your own, the light of your reason.”

The light is handed over. It enables you to see. It does not go on seeing for you.

Three Pictures of Knowing Without Effort

Having said what omniscience is not, Swamiji gives three images of what it is, and each removes a little more of the machinery we assume knowledge requires.

The first is the sun. Everything alive depends on its rays. From an ordinary point of view, the sun would have to know where every seed is hidden, identify each one, and route the right energy to each — the mango seed must be found and supplied so it can produce mangoes. Imagine, he says, if the sun had to go through all that. Then he turns it around. Come to the stage of the sun, and the sun knows nothing at all:

“It’s all knowing. It’s just pure knowledge. Mass of light.”

It is all-knowing precisely because it does no calculating whatsoever.

The second image is love. Every mother knows her child, in degrees. Wherever there is deeper love, the mind gains insight into the other without anything being said. People at a higher level of evolution have profound insight into those below them, and great teachers look at their students and very quickly understand where the difficulty lies. This is the everyday form of the thing, and it is not a performance. It is what closeness does.

The third is the mountaintop. A man at the foot of a mountain watches the road wind upward. For him a car is first a future event, then a present one, then a past one. For the man at the summit, all three movements are present at once. Nothing is being predicted. The vantage is simply higher, and the sequence that governs the man below does not govern the man above.

Swamiji then extends this to everyone:

“Everyone has capacity of some degree of omniscience because you are a ray of God.”

The only variable is how much of it you have discovered. It is also why the writings of sages outlast their centuries: Tulasidasa wrote in the sixteenth century, and the Ramayana still reaches people who share nothing of his world, because a subtle omniscience was operating in him.

The practical consequence arrives quietly. When you turn toward God, two things must be clear. You do not have all the understanding, and a situation that is painful to you is painful only from where you stand. He compares it to a child taken for surgery. From inside the experience it is cruel, and the mother who permits it is not being cruel at all. Hence the shape prayer should take: say what you want, then end by saying, let it be your will.

The Teacher Who Precedes All Teachers

Sutra 26, purvesham api guruh kalenanavacchedat, names God the preceptor of all the ancient sages and saints, unaffected by the passage of time. Every inspired figure across every tradition was guided, and the guidance had a single origin.

Swamiji then unpacks the Sanskrit word Patanjali uses. It means one who illumines the cave of the heart. Heart here has nothing to do with the physical organ. It is the whole feeling process, and specifically its deepest layer, where obscurity sits.

That obscurity is not neutral. Out of it arise subtle desires, the vasanas, lodged in the subconscious, and they run more of your life than you would like to think. Your tastes, your temperament, your inclinations — Swamiji says plainly that all of them rest on those subtle desires. Enlightenment, in this framing, is not the acquisition of anything. It is permitting light into the layer that has been dark.

The image he uses is a cloud over the sun. Nothing needs to be built. A hole is bored through the cloud, and the sun is already there. Boring that hole is what a teacher does.

This sets up a definition of real teaching that quietly raises the bar. Anyone who teaches is called a teacher by convention, but the word is fulfilled only when the guidance is not merely verbal or intellectual — when it enters the heart, changes the whole personality, and brings a person to experience I am that. And whoever gives such guidance does so as an instrument. The inspiration comes from God, so the real teacher is God alone.

Why You Are Touched and God Is Not

Swamiji pauses to gather three lectures into one frame. Sutra 24 gave God as alipta, untouched by afflictions. Sutra 25 gave sarvajnata, all-knowing. Sutra 26 adds the absolute teacher, and kalena anavacchedat — unaffected by time — yields indestructible and eternal. On each of the three, the individual soul is the exact opposite.

You are touched. Do something good and pride appears. Do something wrong and denial appears, though, as he says, we still bring out the smell of onions. Either way you are modified by what you do, and God is not.

Your knowledge begins extremely small. It can grow, and on the spiritual path intellect does turn into intuitional vision, but it starts from almost nothing.

And everything about you is conditioned by time. Time interrupts every project you undertake. God is simply not conditioned that way.

He gives the river as the summary. Every river must reach the ocean eventually, and until it does, its knowledge is only of its own banks — some trees, some birds, some tweets. Every soul is like that. The destination is not in doubt; the limitation is real in the meantime.

The Name Formed Between Two Points

Sutra 27 is three words: tasya vachakah pranavah. His name is Om.

Swamiji first concedes the obvious objection. God has no name. But sadhana requires something you can actually do, so the sages drew Om out of their own intuitive experience.

The reasoning is unexpectedly physical. Mind depends on words; every thought has a language behind it, and you cannot easily separate the two. All spoken language is produced between exactly two terminals, the throat and the lips. There is no third place a sound can come from. When you say Om, the A begins at the throat and the M closes at the lips, so the sound spans the entire range within which human speech is possible. Everything sayable lies between those two points.

He notes that other traditions arrived at the same structure — amen, and alpha and omega — and adds a bodily observation: chanting Om has a harmonizing effect on the spinal column, a sonar massage for the spine.

The word pranava itself means ever-new, and Swamiji reads that as a description of what japa does over time. Sutra 28, tajjapas tadartha bhavanam, gives the practice its condition. Repeat the name for the sake of developing devotion, with the attitude that all of this is for Him.

Done that way, the repetition stops feeling like a duty. He compares it to eating sweets: you finish one and feel you have not quite enjoyed it, so you reach for the next to find what you missed. The same movement, turned toward the divine name, produces increasing potency rather than boredom. And the ego, which he calls stiff and rheumatic, loosens. A mango tree bows lower as its fruit ripens. The Sanskrit word for that bowing is namrata, which is why namah travels with the mantras, and why two people meeting say namaste.

From Form, to No Form, to the Fourth

The closing stretch lays out the levels of worship as a single ascent.

It begins with saguna sakara: God with attributes and with form — Shiva, Rama, Jesus, Buddha. Swamiji insists this should create no conflict about which form. Whatever image was given to you is symbolic, and since the entire universe is permeated by God, the table is God, the chair is God, the fingers are God. Any of it can serve.

As concentration deepens, the form becomes unnecessary and you reach saguna nirakara. The attributes remain — peace, joy, love, compassion, which is why the tradition evolved thousand-name litanies, so the mind never concludes there are only a few things to think about. But God is now blossoming in flowers, shining through the sun, flying with the birds.

Higher still is nirguna nirakara, and the illustration is the best in the lecture. A child travelling to meet his mother carries a hundred ideas about her — how she will look, how she will stand, how she will greet him. He arrives, and all of it falls away:

“The mother’s eyes shine for the child, that’s what matters.”

Attributes were scaffolding.

Finally Om is opened up. It contains four points: A, U, M, and the halant, the silencing mark that stops the sound. A is the physical plane and the waking state. U is the subtle plane and dream. M is the causal plane and deep sleep. The halant transcends all three — turiya, the fourth.

The reasoning he attaches is disarmingly plain. If you say you are the body, consider that your body is inseparable from universal matter, down to the Milky Way. In what way can matter be separated from matter? If you are honest, you would have to say you are universal matter. The same applies to mind: the mind is a wave in the ocean of cosmic mind, and if you claim the wave, you cannot decline the ocean. In the causal plane you cannot separate yourself from God who created all of it. Beyond all three is Brahman, and there the mind stops.

“River has entered the ocean, there is nothing more to tell.”

Terms

sarvajna — all-knowing. In Patanjali’s sense, knowledge that is boundless and effortless, not a faculty for detecting particulars.
pranava — a name for Om, meaning ever-new; the quality by which repetition freshens rather than dulls.
japa — repetition of a divine name, the practice sutra 28 prescribes.
bhavana — the feeling or attitude carried inside a practice, which sutra 28 makes the deciding factor.
vasana — a subtle desire lodged in the unconscious, quietly shaping tastes, temperament and inclination.
alipta — untouched, untainted; the attribute of God given in sutra 24 and contrasted here with the soul.
jiva — the individual soul in its limited condition, described as the mirror image of God’s three attributes.
saguna sakara — God conceived with attributes and with form; the first level of worship.
saguna nirakara — God conceived with attributes but without form; the second level.
nirguna nirakara — God beyond both form and attributes; the third level, illustrated by the child before the mother.
halant — the mark in Sanskrit that silences a final vowel; in Om, the fourth element, pointing to what transcends the three states.
turiya — the fourth, the transcendental state beyond waking, dream and deep sleep.
namrata — humility; the bowing of the ego, illustrated by the branch that lowers as its fruit ripens.
na bruyat satyam apriyam — do not speak a truth that wounds; the instruction behind the opening story.

For Reflection

When you last spoke a hard truth, was the ego smiling as you said it?
Which name do you repeat, and has the repeating begun to feel sweet, or does it still feel like an obligation?
If knowing is a light handed to you rather than sight borrowed from someone else, what have you been asking others to see on your behalf?

Raja Yoga Sutras, Samadhi Pada, sutras 25 to 28. Lecture 15 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation, Miami.

The complete archive of Swamiji’s lectures is free to all at yogaresearchfoundation.org.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.