What Is The Meaning Of Freedom In Yoga?

TABLE OF CONTENTS
DISCOVERY OF INDIA
THE EXOTIC UNKNOWN
THE MEANING OF BEING
THE PATH OF YOGA

DISCOVERY OF INDIA

There is no more fascinating tale than that of Western awareness' discovery and understanding of India.

Not only do I refer to its geographical, linguistic, and literary discoveries, as well as expeditions and excavations—in short, everything that forms the foundation for Western Indianism—but I also refer to the diverse cultural adventures sparked by the increasing revelation of Indian languages, myths, and philosophies.

Raymond Schwab's excellent book La Renaissance Orientale describes some of these cultural experiences.

However, the exploration of India is still ongoing, and there is no reason to believe that it will be completed soon.

For the most part, analyzing a foreign culture shows what the seeker was looking for or what the seeker was already willing to learn.

The discovery of India will not be completed until the day when the West's creative powers have run dry irreversibly.

When it comes to spiritual values, the contribution of philology, as important as it is, does not exhaust the object's richness.

Attempting to comprehend Buddhism would have been futile if the texts had not been properly edited and the different Buddhistic philologies had not been established.

The truth is that having access to such great instruments as critical editions, polyglot dictionaries, historical monographs, and so on did not ensure understanding of that huge and complex spiritual phenomena.

THE EXOTIC UNKNOWN

When one approaches exotic spirituality, one is primarily understanding what one is predestined to learn by one's own vocation, cultural orientation, and the historical period to which one belongs.

This axiom may be applied to any situation. The image of "inferior societies" that our nineteenth century created was largely derived from the positivistic, antireligiose, and ametaphysical attitude held by a number of worthy explorers and ethnologists with whom he shares, his unconscious—and above all by history, by his historical moment and his own personal history.

Western philosophy is still dominated by this final finding of Western thought: that man is fundamentally a temporal and historical creature, that he is, and can only be, what history has created him.

Certain philosophical trends even conclude that the only worthy and valid task proposed to man is to accept this temporality and historicity honestly and fully, because any other option would be equivalent to an escape into the abstract and nonauthentic, and would come at the cost of the sterility and death that inexorably follow any betrayal of history.

It is not our responsibility to debate these claims. However, we may see that the difficulties that now occupy the Western mind prepare it for a greater comprehension of Indian spirituality, indeed, they encourage it to use India's millennial experience in its own philosophical endeavor.

THE MEANING OF BEING.

The goal of the most modern Western philosophy is the human condition, and above all, the temporality of the human person.

All additional "conditionings" are made possible by this temporality, which, in the end, renders man a "conditioned being," an infinite and ephemeral sequence of "conditions."

Now, the fundamental issue of Indian philosophy is the "conditioning" of man (and its counterpart, "deconditioning," which is often overlooked in the West).

Since the Upanisads, India has been concerned with just one major issue: the constitution of the human condition. ( As a result, it has been claimed, and rightly so, that all Indian philosophy has been and continues to be "existentialist.")

As a result, the West would benefit from learning,

( 1) what India thinks about the multiple "conditionings" of the human being,
( 2) how it has approached the problem of man's temporality and historicity, and
(3) what solution it has found for the anxiety and despair that invariably accompany consciousness of temporality, the matrix of all "conditionings."

India has devoted itself to studying the different conditionings of the human person with a thoroughness not seen elsewhere.

We accelerate the Bhagavad Gita because, in some ways, the problem revealed itself in these words for Christianity.

How shall we resolve the paradoxical situation created by the twofold facts that man, on the one hand, finds himself in time, given over to history, and that, on the other hand, he knows that he will be "damned" if he allows himself to be exhausted by temporality and historicity, and that, as a result, he must find a road in this world that issues upon a transhistorical and atemporal plan at all costs?

The Bhagavad Gita's suggested remedies will be addressed later.

THE PATH OF YOGA

What we want to highlight right now is that all of these solutions represent different Yoga applications.

For the fact is that the answers offered by Indian thought to the third question that concerns Western philosophy (that is, what solution India proposes for the anxiety produced by our discovery of our temporality and historicity, the means by which one can remain in the world without letting oneself be exhausted by time and history), all more or less directly imply some.

As a result, it is clear what knowledge with this issue may imply to Western researchers and philosophers.

To reiterate, it is not a simple question of adopting one of India's suggested answers.

A spiritual worth is not gained because a new car model is fashionable.

It is not, above all, a question of intellectual syncretism, "Indianization," or the abhorrent "spiritual" hybridism pioneered by the Theosophical Society and perpetuated, in exacerbated forms, by numerous pseudomorphs of our day.

The issue is more severe; we must grasp and comprehend a concept that has had a central position in the history of global spirituality. And it's critical that we understand it now.

For, on the one hand, we are now forced—Westerners and non-Westerners alike—to conceive in terms of global history and to create universal spiritual ideals, since any cultural provincialism has been surpassed by the path of history.

On the other hand, the issue of man's place in the world today dominates Europe's intellectual consciousness—and, to reiterate, this problem lies at the heart of Indian philosophy.

Perhaps this intellectual conversation will not continue without some disappointments, especially at initially.

A lot of Western researchers and philosophers may consider the Indian assessments to be too simplistic, and the suggested remedies to be ineffective.

Any technical language based on a spiritual tradition is inevitably a jargon, and Western philosophers may regard the jargon of Indian philosophy to be out of date, lacking in clarity, and unusable.

However, all of the dangers that the conversation faces are insignificant.

Under and despite the philosophic jargon, the profound discoveries of Indian thinking will eventually be acknowledged.

It's impossible, for example, to ignore one of India's greatest discoveries: consciousness as witness, consciousness freed from its psychophysiological structures and temporal conditioning, consciousness of the "liberated" man, that is, of him who has succeeded in emancipating himself from temporal-ity and thus knows true, inexpressible freedom.

The pursuit of this ultimate freedom, of complete spontaneity, is the aim of all Indians, and it may be attained primarily via Yoga, one of the many forms that India has to offer.

This is why we felt it would be useful to write a relatively comprehensive explanation of Yoga philosophy and practices, to chronicle the history of its many manifestations, and to explain its place in Indian spirituality as a whole.