Yoga Philosophy

How can comparative philosophy help us to cope with and ideally overcome terror? How can it help us envision a world without terror and the steps toward making such a world a reality? My approach in this paper is to situate the question of terror in the larger context of the question of violence more generally (of which terror is of course a sub-variety) and ultimately in the even larger context of suffering (of which violence is a sub-variety).

If you want to know where something is going, it is good to know where it came from. “To be ignorant of what happened before one was born,” said Cicero pointedly in his Orator, “is to remain ever a child.” History provides context and meaning, and Yoga is no exception to this rule. If you are fond of history, you’ll enjoy what follows. Many of the facts and ideas presented here have not yet found their way into the textbooks or even into most Yoga books. We put you in touch with the leading edge of knowledge in this area. If you are not a history buff, well, perhaps we can tempt you to suspend your preferences for a few minutes and read on anyway.

In modern times, yoganidrā is generally understood to be a specific type of guided meditation performed in a supine position. This common interpretation is largely due to the success of the Satyananda Yoga Nidra technique that has been trademarked and taught by the Bihar School of Yoga. In Swāmī Satyānanda Saraswati’s book Yoga Nidra, first published 1976, he claims to have constructed this seven part guided meditation technique from ‘important but little known practices’ (2009 edition: p. 3), which he found in various Tantras.

Roughly until the middle of the first millennium CE, an important general dis- tinction opposed Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophical thought in the South Asian subcontinent: Buddhist philosophers were of the opinion that our com- mon sense world is not ultimately real, Brahmanical philosophers were convinced that it is. During a number of centuries, all Buddhist philosophers denied the reality of the world of our everyday experience, and all Brahmanical philosophers accepted it.

Yājñavalkya is one of the most memorable characters in Vedic literature, known not only for his wit, insolence and intimidation – he nearly purloined one thousand cows from a group of renowned brahmins just before shattering the head of one of them –, but also for the profundity and newness of his thought.

To the uninitiated, yoga can easily seem like just another exercise fad.

The yogic theory of saṃskāras, or subliminal impressions of past painful or pleasurable experiences, is one of India’s most fascinating contributions to our understanding of human psychology. Briefly, when we experience aversion to a painful experience, or attachment to a pleasurable one, then an impression of that experience is laid down in our psyche, which is said to be a ‘seed’ of experience which will sprout again.

Although Pandit Rajmani Tigunait’s, “The Secret of the Yoga Sutra”, and David Gordon White’s “The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography”, could…