"The coming sutras of Patanjali are concerned with these two most significant concepts, but before we enter the sutras it has to be firmly grasped that this, the pattern of human personality, is not totally intellectual.

"If it was only intellect then there would be no need for abhyasa – constant, repetitive effort. You can understand anything immediately if it is rational, through the mind, but just that understanding won't do. You can understand easily that anger is bad, poisonous, but this understanding is not enough for the anger to leave you, to disappear. In spite of your understanding the anger will continue, because the anger exists in many layers of your unconscious mind – not only in the mind, but in your body also.

"The body cannot understand just by verbal communication. Only your head can understand, but the body remains unaffected. And unless understanding reaches to the very roots of the body you cannot be transformed. You will remain the same. Your ideas may go on changing but your personality will persist. And then a new conflict will arise and you will be in more turmoil than ever, because now you can see what is wrong and still you persist in doing it, you go on doing it. A self-guilt and condemnation is created. You start hating yourself, you start thinking yourself a sinner. And the more you understand, the more condemnation grows, because you see how it is difficult, almost impossible, to change yourself.

"Yoga does not believe in intellectual understanding. It believes in bodily understanding, in a total understanding in which your wholeness is involved. Not only do you change in your head, but the deep sources of your being also change.

"How can they change? Constant repetition of a particular practice becomes non-voluntary. If you do a particular practice constantly, just repeating it continuously, by and by it drops from the conscious, reaches to the unconscious and becomes part of it. Once it becomes part of the unconscious it starts functioning from that deep source.

"Anything can become unconscious if you go on repeating it continuously. For example, your name has been repeated so constantly from your childhood that now it is not part of the conscious, it has become part of the unconscious."