VI: 4

Chapter 6, Verse 4

"When they become unattached
To sense-objects and to actions,
Having relinquished
The incentive of desire,
Then they are enthroned in Yoga."

Sri Eknath Easwaran:

It is a paradox filled with magic and mystery that when we surrender everything to the higher Power, we receive everything in return. When we depend entirely on the higher Power, we become independent, another paradoxical truth. In meditation when the mind tries to slip out to the movie theater or ice cream parlor, and we bring it back, we are gently turning our eyes to the Source within.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi:

In meditation when the mind retires from the field of sensory perception, it becomes disconnected from the outside world. It is turned inwards away from the field of the objects of the senses and away from the sphere of action. As the mind advances inwardly, so it retreats from the field of material experience. It continues through increasingly subtle fields of thinking, until it eventually transcends even the subtlest state of thought-produced memory, reaching that state of pure consciousness which is free of content. In this state there is the complete absence of clinging to sense-objects and to action.

Sri Aurobindo:

This is the spirit in which the liberated one does works, without desire and attachment, without the egoistic, personal will and the mental seeking which are the parents of desire. The lower self has been humbled, and a state of steady calm ensues in which the higher Self is front and center, concentrated in its own Being, Samahita, not only in the trance of the inward-drawn consciousness but uninterruptedly in the waking state of the mind as well.