It is enough to step onto a tram, metro, or bus to encounter one of the most characteristic images of our time. Most people sit or stand with their heads lowered, their gaze fixed on a flickering screen the size of their palm. The same scene can be seen in restaurants, waiting rooms, on the street, and often even when friends or family members are sitting across from one another. Physically, they occupy the same space, yet their attention is somewhere else entirely.
What is more, they are not simply looking at the same digital world. A different reality is unfolding on every screen. Different news, different faces, different conflicts, different desires, and different fears appear. One person sees political scandals, another perfect bodies, a third footage of war, and a fourth spiritual teachings. Physically, they are travelling on the same tram, yet mentally they are moving through separate, personalized corridors of reality.
These realities are not chosen entirely by the people themselves. In the background, recommendation systems, predictive models, and continuously learning algorithms are at work. They observe what a person clicks on, what they watch to the end, where they linger, what they share, and what kinds of content provoke a reaction. From this digital footprint, they build an increasingly detailed model of the person’s behavior and use it to select the next piece of content most likely to keep them in front of the screen for a few more seconds.
The primary purpose of the system is not necessarily to show us what is true, important, or useful. In the so-called attention economy, human attention itself is the most valuable resource. The longer someone remains on a platform, the more data they provide, the more advertisements they see, and the more accurate the model built around them becomes. A self-reinforcing feedback loop emerges: through their clicks, users train the algorithm, while the algorithm gradually shapes what they perceive as interesting, important, desirable, or threatening.
This raises a question: if we are not the ones deciding where our attention is directed, to what extent can we call the reality we inhabit our own?
Patañjali’s Two-Thousand-Year-Old Diagnosis
At first glance, it may seem that this situation can only be adequately addressed through the language of modern psychology, neuroscience, or information technology. Yet the first chapter of Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras offers a remarkably precise description of the fundamental problem of the human mind. According to the first three defining aphorisms of the Yoga Sutras:
I. 2. Yoga is the control of the thought-waves of the mind
I. 3. Then man abides in his real nature
I. 4. At other times, when he is not in the state of yoga, man remains identified with the thought-waves in the mind
Here, “control” does not necessarily mean forcibly suppressing thoughts or emptying the mind. Taken together, the three sutras describe a state in which a person no longer automatically identifies with every thought-wave that arises in the mind. Thoughts may appear and disappear without completely carrying us away with them.
According to Patañjali, then, a person does not merely have thoughts, feelings, and impressions, but usually identifies with them as well. A thought does not simply arise within us; for a moment, we become it. An image, a memory, a fear, or a desire can completely fill our field of consciousness, while we lose sight of what the sutra calls our true nature.
From this perspective, the social media feed can be seen as a kind of industrial-scale vritti generator. The Sanskrit term vritti refers to the movements or modifications of the mind—or, following the translation used in the book, its thought-waves. Never before have so many images, stories, opinions, and emotional stimuli been available for us to identify with. Before one thought-wave has had a chance to settle, the next one has already arrived. With a single movement of the finger, another face, another outrage, another image of desire, or another fear fills the mind.
The phone itself does not create this pattern of behavior. The device merely amplifies and automates an ancient human tendency: for attention to turn again and again toward the strongest, newest, or most emotionally intense stimulus. The difference is that today, global technological systems optimize these stimuli, personally tailored to each individual and delivered virtually without interruption.
The algorithm learns what makes us click. Yoga shows us what it is within us that wants to click.
The Hijacking of Attention
Research on attention often distinguishes between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional processes. In goal-directed situations, a person’s current intentions and tasks influence what they focus on. At other times, a salient or unexpected external stimulus—such as a sound, vibration, or flashing notification—causes attention to shift. These two modes do not operate in complete isolation from one another: they interact continuously, and both previous experience and established habits influence them.
Many elements of digital interfaces can repeatedly engage this stimulus-driven attention, or simply make it easier to continue consuming content. Notifications use sounds, vibrations, or prominent visual signals to draw attention to a new event. Infinite scrolling removes the natural stopping points created by the end of a page, while autoplay starts the next piece of content without requiring a separate decision. Meanwhile, personalized recommendation systems continuously offer new content that is expected to be interesting to the user.
The brain’s reward and learning mechanisms are also involved in this process, with the neurotransmitter dopamine playing an important role. Novelty, anticipation of reward, social feedback, and established habits can together influence how strongly a person feels compelled to check their phone again and how difficult it is to stop scrolling.
These elements do not take away a person’s ability to make decisions, nor do they affect everyone in the same way. Yet the interface often supports continuation more readily than conscious stopping. When this process is repeated regularly, checking the phone can easily become an automatic habit over time.
Ashtanga as an Embodied System of Attention
The practice of Ashtanga requires a radically different mode of functioning. Rather than giving the mind more information, it reorganizes the way attention operates.
The practitioner connects the breath, the position of the body, and the direction of the gaze into a single continuous process. The sound of the breath remains continuously audible. Internal information about the position of the body becomes increasingly precise. The gaze does not search the surrounding space for new stimuli but remains directed toward a designated point. The rhythm of vinyasa connects one movement to the next, so that the practice becomes not a sequence of separate poses, but an uninterrupted process of attention.
In the language of modern science, all of this can also be described as training interoception, proprioception, sensory integration, and attentional regulation. Interoception is the perception of the body’s internal state, including the breath, heartbeat, tension, temperature, and other internal sensations. Proprioception is the sense of where the body and its parts are positioned in space.
The digital environment tends to pull attention outward, toward images and abstract information. Ashtanga, by contrast, leads the mind back to embodied experience. During practice, we are not looking at a representation of the world curated by others; we are directly experiencing our breath, our body, our resistance, and our reactions.
On the mat, then, the practitioner is not escaping from reality. Quite the opposite: they are returning to what is actually happening, here and now.
Pratyāhāra: Taking Back Access Permissions
The fifth limb of Patañjali’s eight-limbed system of yoga is pratyāhāra, commonly translated as withdrawal of the senses. This does not necessarily mean completely shutting out the external world or switching off the senses. Rather, it means that the senses no longer automatically follow every external object from moment to moment.
In the language of modern technology, pratyāhāra can be compared to reconfiguring access permissions. The practitioner does not shut down the entire system or sever every connection with the outside world. They simply take back the right to decide whether any external stimulus should automatically be granted priority in the mind.
This is the difference between digital isolation and conscious use of technology. The goal is not to give up the phone, stop reading the news, or abandon social media. The question is whether we are able to decide for ourselves when and for what purpose we engage with these systems.
Pratyāhāra is not insensitivity, but freedom from automatic reaction.
Inner Algorithms
When the external noise begins to quiet down, peace and harmony are not necessarily the first things to appear. Often, this is precisely when the inner patterns previously concealed by the constant stream of stimulation become visible.
On the mat, the practitioner may encounter impatience, the drive to perform, the tendency to compare, fear, and the urge to escape discomfort. We can observe how we react when something does not happen immediately, when the body signals a limit, or when someone beside us appears to be progressing more easily.
These reactions are not flaws in the practice. They are among its most important material.
The philosophy of yoga describes these deeply ingrained patterns partly as samskaras: impressions and tendencies formed through previous experiences and repeated reactions. In contemporary language, we might even call them inner algorithms: when certain inputs appear, they repeatedly generate similar emotional and behavioral responses.
In this sense, asana practice is a high-resolution laboratory of self-awareness. It does not merely strengthen the body and make it more flexible; it also reveals the system through which we perceive ourselves and the world.
Community as a Shared Reality
The practice of Ashtanga is an individual path, but it is not necessarily a solitary one. In a Mysore room, everyone follows their own breath, practices their own sequence, and works with their own difficulties. And yet a shared rhythm and a distinctive field of attention emerge.
In this space, it is not profiles, usernames, and digitally curated identities that meet, but flesh-and-blood human beings. We do not experience one another through follower counts, likes, or shares. We are present to one another through our breath, our perseverance, our vulnerability, and our attention.
Psychology might describe this, among other things, as social co-regulation or interpersonal synchronization. The human nervous system does not operate in isolation: it is influenced by the breathing, movement, calmness, tension, and attentional states of others. A community that practices together regularly is therefore not merely a group of people, but also a collectively sustained environment of attention.
Self-awareness in this shared space is not an end in itself either. The more clearly practitioners recognize their own automatic reactions, the less likely they are to project them onto others, and the more clearly they can perceive the people around them. Attention turned inward therefore does not isolate us; rather, it creates the possibility of a more honest and direct connection.
Over time, practitioners may begin to recognize that their own fears, desires, insecurities, and struggles are not exclusively individual experiences. The same fundamental human patterns appear in others as well. The sense of separateness begins to soften, and a shared reality can emerge—one created not by algorithms, but through direct, embodied presence.
Technology Is Not the Enemy
None of this means that technology is the enemy. Phones, the internet, and artificial intelligence are extraordinary tools. The problem begins when we are no longer simply using them, but these tools begin, almost imperceptibly, to organize our attention, our time, our desires, and through them, our experience of reality.
Reading about yoga, watching videos, and listening to teachings are not in themselves yoga. All of this can easily become part of the same pattern of content consumption from which we are trying to find a way out. The essential question, then, is whether we notice what is happening to our attention in the process.
Ashtanga Yoga does not offer a theoretical answer to this. Day after day, the practitioner experiences what it means to stay with one thing: to follow a breath all the way through, to remain in an asana, to bring wandering attention back. Along the way, we inevitably encounter our impatience, our restlessness, and the stories we carry about ourselves. Here, self-awareness is not a separate practice, but a consequence that slowly emerges.
And when the practitioner eventually steps out of the shala, nothing outside has changed. The trams still run, messages continue to arrive, and the same algorithms keep working on the phone. But perhaps we notice a little sooner that moment when the hand reaches almost automatically for the device. In that very brief moment, there is still a choice: do we really want to unlock the screen?
It is not a dramatic change. Most of the time, no one else will even notice it. But perhaps this is precisely where what brings us back to the mat again and again begins: not merely to look at what is placed in front of us, but to become present in our own lives once more.
Source The sutra translations are from Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali.