Yoga: Immortality and Freedom by Mircea Eliade

"withdrawal". The Yogi turns itself takes possession of himself, surrounded himself with "defenses", more and more powerful to defend against an invasion from outside, in a word, it becomes invulnerable.

It is understood that such a concentration, tested in to-two levels (asana, pranayama, ekagrata) is accompanied by increased attention with regard to organic life itself. The layman feels his body as diametrically opposed to the yogi's body sensation while it lasts the year. The body stability, decreasing the respiratory rate, the cam-po weakens the awareness to coincide with a point, as well as the echo that thanks to this, the yogi has the lowest click-ture of the inner life All this makes it comparable to the yogi with a plant, apparently. Moreover, such approval does not imply-ing any determination derogatory, although it corresponds to reality. The plant form is not for the Indian consciousness, an impoverishment, but the opposite: an enrichment of life. In Puranic mythology, as well as in iconography, the lotus rhizome and are the symbols of cosmic events. The creation is symbolized by a lotus floating on primordial waters. The always mean excess vegetation, fertility, hatching of all germs. Regarding Indian painting (for example, the frescoes of Ajanta) the beatitude of the characters is expressed through gestures soft, undulating vines like skis: one has the impression that the veins of these mystical figures running instead of blood, plant sap.

A priori, therefore, this approval of the yogi in a state of concentration in a plant is not completely false. The Indian, thinking of the closed circuit continuous-circuits organic life to devoid of acrimony and explosive moments, he feels a nostalgia that takes real event category. We do not believe, however, that the abolition of the human condition through the stillness, the tax rate of respiration, the concentration in one point, they aim to take this extreme step back which means the integration in the vegetable form.

Everything persi-gue, in the Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali and primarily what was persi-ment in the other species of Yoga, clearly tarnish such a hypothesis. The symmetries found in vegetable posture, breathing and concentration yogis seem per-fectly explained by the archaic symbolism of the "renaissance". Morphological-mind, could approve the asana and pranayama to the "embryonic breaths" used by Taoism, 7 to the position "embryo" that so many people impose their dead before burial (in the hope of a speedy return to life), and finally to certain ceremonies of initiation and regeneration carried out in closed spaces, symbol of the matrix. We can not stress more about these ceremonies here: say only that they assume the entire projec-tions of practicing magic in auroral time in a tempus illud mystical. Incipit vita nova (and any regeneration is a "new na-ment") that is not possible if the time has not been abolished, and the "story" also, if the current time does not match the mystical moment of beginning, ie the creation of the worlds, the cosmography. In this sense, the body position and breathing embryonic yogi, although pursued (at least in the Yoga-Sutra, and other forms of Yoga) one ob-jective can be regarded as ontological conditions, em-bryonic, vegetative .

Moreover, the asana and ekagrata imitate a divine archetype: the yogi position, in itself, has religious value. It is true that the yogi does not mimic the "gestures" and the "passions" of divinity, j and with reason! Because the God of the Yoga-Sutra, Isvara, is a pure spirit that not only has created the world, but also intervenes in history, neither directly nor indirectly. What the yogi imitates, then, is the absence of actions, at least that the proper mode of pure spirit. The defeat the human condition, the "liberation" 7 The purpose of this breathing is, according to Taoist sources, to imitate the respiration