By David Gordon White
Since the Nineteen Sixties, yoga has develop into a billion-dollar within the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. yet our glossy belief of yoga derives a lot from nineteenth-century eu spirituality, and the real tale of yoga’s origins in South Asia is much richer, stranger, and extra wonderful than so much folks realize.
To discover this background, David Gordon White makes a speciality of yoga’s practitioners. Combing via millennia of South Asia’s tremendous and various literature, he discovers that yogis tend to be portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their risky supernatural abilities—which can contain elevating the lifeless, ownership, and levitation—to gather energy, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White exhibits, even these yogis who aren’t downright villainous endure little resemblance to Western assumptions approximately them. At turns rollicking and complicated, Sinister Yogis tears down a dead ringer for yogis as indifferent, contemplative lecturers, ultimately putting them of their right context.
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Extra info for Sinister Yogis
E. , the human sacrificer’s] correct eye are, in reality, none except loss of life. his ft are solidly planted on a man’s middle. while he withdraws them, and whilst he leaves there, the fellow dies. 36 even though the language of this passage is ambiguous, it sincerely shows that human existence is continued by means of a luminous bond, extending from the sunlight on excessive down throughout the human eye and into the guts. whilst that lifeline (or mild line) is damaged, a man’s eyes cross dim, and he dies. within the final bankruptcy, we observed an upanishadic improvement of this idea within the hyperlink made, in ChU eight. 6, among the channels of the guts and the rays of the sunlight. This analyzing is seconded through a passage from the BṛU, a textual content thought of to be an “appendix” to the ŚB, at the creation of demise. whilst the self turns into debilitated and has likely fallen right into a stupor, the breaths converge on it. Taking again with it these luminous components (tejomātrāḥ), it advances down towards (anvavakrāmati) the guts. whilst the individual of the attention turns clear of this self, it ceases to understand kinds [i. e. , one’s eye grows dim] . . . The uppermost zone of that self’s [space of the] center starts off to glow, and the self emerges (niṣkrāmati) with that glow, both during the eye, the top, or different components of the physique. because it advances upward (utkrāmanta), the very important breath follows its upward enhance (anūtkrāmati); because the breath advances upward, all the senses [or breaths] persist with its upward strengthen. 37 one other BṛU passage relates the individual of the attention on to the sunlight disk. on the divine point, the essence of the immortal brahman is the individual within the circle (of the sun), whereas on the human point it's the “person who's within the correct eye” who embodies that immortal absolute. At dying, while the individual of the perfect eye leaves the physique, he rejoins his homologue within the sunlight, with the conduit for his or her union being the rays (raśmi) of the solar, which merge or morph into the human breaths. What fact is, the sunlight is. 38 the individual (puruṣa) who's in its orb and the individual that is within the correct eye are supported on each other. That one rests in this one via its rays, and this one rests on that one via its breaths. while one is set to go away, one sees that circle natural [without rays]. The rays don't come to him back. 39 The ChU and the Jaiminīya Upaniṣad Brāhmaṇa (JUB), Upaniṣads of the Sāma Veda that have been most probably coeval with the BṛU, are fairly wealthy in homologies of this kind. chapters within the JUB draw direct parallels among the sunlight, the attention, mortality, and immortality at the degrees of either physique and universe. First, at the common point, the variety of the sun’s circulate is split into components: the mortal, constituted of the sea that surrounds the earth, and the immortal, that which lies past that sea. during an afternoon, the solar strikes from immortality (as it rises from past the horizon of sea and sky) to immortality (as it units past the horizon), “advancing towards (ākramate) immortality at the again of the wind. ” Its threefold shape, which loss of life can't succeed in, is made from “the white, the black, and the puruṣa.