Are You a Good Witch or a Bad Witch?

Sutra 1.5 says vrttayah pancatayah klishtaklishtah which mean something like, “There are five kinds of fluctuations of the mind, which can be either painful or not painful.” Klishta comes from the same root as klesha for you wordy geeks out there. Now, I find it pretty fascinating that Patanjali has narrowed down all of our mental activity into five types, but since all of the next sutras are about those and he hasn’t named them yet, there’s not much to say about that here besides “really?”

So what we’re left with is the klishtaklishtah part. Any of these movements of the mind can be problematic or not problematic. This seems important. All of our mental activities fit into five categories and none of these categories is inherently good or bad. I will only speak for myself when I say that the first thing my mind wants to do with a list of five categories is figure out which ones are good and which ones are bad. But once again, I am out of luck. Things are more complex than that. So, for instance, jumping ahead, the first type of vrtti is pramana, which can be thought of as valid or correct knowledge, We might think this is the “right” mind movement, but we also all know it can be painful (like seeing the truth about ourselves or other people). And the second type is misperception, which is often the best we can do and therefore isn’t exactly problematic in those situations. Each type of mind movement has a part to play at certain times.

So this sutra makes me think about how everything, everyone has the potential for both good and bad, to contribute and to detract, to connect and to disconnect, to inspire and to discourage, to grow and to stagnate. I know this isn’t exactly what Patanjali was talking about, but that is what is occurring to me today. What just popped into my head for the title of this post is the line from The Wizard of Oz—"Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" If you haven't seen or read Wicked, it has the best answer to that question, which is both (or neither). It's complicated.

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