Mircea Eliade YOGA IMMORTALITY AND ... - Brihaspati.net

first glance, it is well defined: free man from his human condition, gain absolute freedom,
make the unconditioned. The method includes multiple techniques (physiological,
mental, mystical), but all have one common trait: their antiprofano character, or rather,
anti-human. The pro-fane lives in society, get married, start a family, the loneliness and
Yoga prescribes absolute castidac. The profane is "possessed" by their own uniqueness
life, the yogi refuses to "let live" stance precludes her, the immobility of the asana, the
continuous movement, prana-yama opposed to agitated respiration, arrhythmic, diverse,
and suefia to get the total retention of the respiration, the chaotic flow of life
psychomental, responding with "fixing the mind on one point," the first step towards the
final retraction of the world of phenomena, you will get the pratyahara. All yogic
techniques invite the same gesture: do the exact opposite of what human nature compels
us to do. The isolation and the samyama casti-ing, there is no solution of continuity. The
orientation is always the same inclination to react against the "normal", "pro-fana" in
short, "human".
This total opposition to life is not new, either in India or in other countries, the archaic
and universal polarity between the sacred and the profane is easily recognizable.
Historically, the sacred was always something "completely different" to the profane. And
judged by this criterion, the Yoga of Patanjali, like the other Yoga, retains a religious
value. The man who rejects his own condition and reacts against it knowingly, trying to
abolish it, is a hom-bre thirsty for the unconditioned, of freedom, "can" sum-do, one of
the many modalities of the sacred. This "reversal of all human values" that the yogi
seeks, this otherwise recovered by a long tradicibn Indian, because in the Vedic
perspective, the world of the gods is exactly counter to our river (the right hand of god
corresponds to the iz-left hand of man, a broken object in this world remains intact in the
other world, etc.).. The yogi, by the refusal to oppose the secular life, imitating a
transcendent model: Isvara. And even if God takes the role in the fight for the release is
pretty mediocre, this imitation of a transcendent mode retains its religious value.
Note that it is in stages, the yogi becomes disinterested in life. Start by removing less
essential habits of life: comfort, leisure, futile loss of time, the dispersion of their mental
powers, and so on. It then attempts to unify the most important functions of life:
respiration, consciousness. Disciplining the respiraci6n, make rhythm, reduce to a single
type-that of deep-suefio equivalent to the unification of all varieties tract. The continuous
ekagrata in life psychomental piano, with the same purpose: frjar the stream of
consciousness, psychic effect a continuum without a crack, "unify" the thought. Even the
most elementary of the techniques yogis, healthy, suggests a similar purpose, because if
we ever get to be aware of the "totality" of our body, experienced as "uni-ty", could only
be testing one of these positions hierati-cas. The extreme simplification of life, calm,
serenity, body stance, the rate of respiration, the concentration in one spot, and so on., All
these exercises the same object, the abolition of the multiplicity and fragmentation,
reintegrate it-grate, unifying, totalizing.
When he retired from secular life, the yogi is another, deeper, more true-because he has
pace, the life of the Cosmos. Indeed, we can speak of early yogis as an effort to
"cosmization" of man. Transforming the chaos of life biomental profane, in a Cosmos,
here's ambition to guess at all psychophysiological techniques, from asana to ekagrata.
We have shown in other work