The practice done in a former birth is the former practice; by that very practice, which is strong, he is carried along toward perfection. For even though that one fallen from yoga is, as it were, helpless: if some action stronger than the disposition born of the practice of yoga, marked as unrighteousness and the like, has not been done, then he is carried by the disposition arising from the practice of yoga. If a stronger unrighteousness has been done, then even the disposition born of yoga is overpowered by it; but once that is spent, the disposition born of yoga begins its work of itself, and even after lying dormant a long time it does not perish. Therefore even one who merely seeks to know yoga, who wishes to learn the nature of yoga, even one who, having set out on the path of yoga and renounced, has then slipped from yoga, even he, by that force, goes past 'śabda-brahman', past the fruit of performing the actions enjoined in the Veda; he crosses beyond it. How much more one who, having known yoga and being established in it, would carry on the practice. And why is being a yogin the greater good?

By that earlier practice, by the practice of old that bore on the discipline, that man fallen from the discipline, even helpless, is carried on the discipline itself; for the greatness of the discipline is well known. This is the meaning. Even one who has not engaged in the discipline, who only wished to know it, but whose mind has wandered from it, gaining again that very wish to know, and carrying out the discipline of action and the rest, passes beyond the sound-Brahman. The sound-Brahman is matter, which is fit for the verbal designations 'god', 'man', 'earth', 'mid-region', 'heaven', and the rest; freed of connection with matter, he attains the self, unfit for the verbal designations 'god', 'man', and the rest, whose single strand is knowledge and bliss. This is the meaning. Since the greatness of the discipline is such, therefore.

This is a brief sub-gloss. For a fuller reading of this verse, see Madhusūdana, Śaṅkara, or Rāmānuja above.

Even one who merely desires to know yoga: he in whom there is the strong wish 'I must come to know yoga', he too passes beyond the Brahman-that-is-sound; the sense is that he reaches the supreme Brahman.