Traditions

Whence this creation has arisen
– perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – 
the One who looks down on it, 
in the highest heaven, only He knows 
or perhaps even He does not know.

Reflections on the Hindu connections of George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars Universe.

Pure consciousness is ever effulgent and never changing.

The paradox of the Zen kōan resists in a significantly different way what Emmanuel Levinas identifies as the totalizing “way of the same.” Zen Buddhism provides a critical insight into faciality that goes beyond Levinas’s fundamentally anthropocentric view and undercuts his refusal of “paganism,” thereby providing the ground for a deeper realization of the ethical relationship between humans and animals. The question at hand is whether there exists a fundamental experience of the “original face” of the animal, which is possible only by way of a direct face-to-face encounter.

The category of Agni related items includes everything of a hot, fiery, dry, or parching type,
while Soma-related items are moist, nourishing, soothing, and cooling. Items so classified range from medicinal herbs to mountain ranges to the seasons of the year.

Many students of yoga, especially those undergoing yoga teacher training, are introduced to the Yoga Sutras. It is commonly believed that this text, composed by Patanjali between 200 BCE and 200 AD, represent the culmination of the ancient yoga tradition’s spiritual quest. These so-called Classical Yoga teachings, most scholars believe, are the confluence of a long and complex development that emerged from yoga’s archaic beginnings in the Vedas about 3000 years earlier.

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.