Any more or less educated person has heard about yoga. But if
you ask what is yoga, you will have a wide range of various and often
contradictory definitions: from «Indian gymnastics» to «religious philo-
sophic teaching», from «fakir art» to «system of spiritual perfection»,
from «relic of ancient civilizations» to a «gift of extraterrestrial intel-
ligence». More «competent» interlocutor will also recall about Buddhist
yoga (the less competent can confuse Buddhism with yoga), Taoist yoga
and many others. Speaking about yoga we also think about Tantra,
which an uneducated interlocutor can call «the yoga of sex».
So what is yoga? Is it a purely Indian phenomena or does it go
through different world traditions, as many people think? How ancient
is this teaching? Is it a canonic learning transmitted from generation to
generation or is it a dynamic developing system? Or maybe it is just a
reconstructed tradition like the «classical» Indian dance Bharatnatyam,
invented only in XIX century or the animal kung fu fighting, contrived
by the Institute of Physical Culture in Beijing? Can we really define
«Chinese», «Russian» or «modern» yoga? After all is yoga a religion?
If not, why is it so often confused with it? Let’s try to give preliminary
answers to these questions.
In every culture and religion there traditionally was a specific sys-
tem, mainly practical, used by the limited number of disciples. Such
systems are called esoteric (from the Greek «inward»). For example, Su-
fism was such a system within Islam, Hesychasm within Orthodoxy,
Neydan within Taosism, Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola in
Catholisism etc. Esoteric systems are hidden deep inside of religions
and fundamentally differ from them. First of all by the fact that… they
are not religions. Actually what makes them special and «secret» is that
unlike religion esoteric systems they are highly practical. They have the
same goal as religions: to make personality consciously change, but
unlike religions these systems offer a defined set of methods to make
such changes. Those changes are based on the changed state of mind.
But unlike religionists, followers of esoteric systems strive for long-last-
ing changes of personality.
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. SAFRONOV. Yoga: Physiology, Psychosomatics, Bioenergetics
If you compare objects and values of religions and their esoteric
systems, you’ll see some clear distinctions, although they are not much
proclaimed.
The reader might already see what I’m getting at. Yoga is an es-
oteric system within Indian tradition. Only Indian? Is there any rap-
port between different esoteric systems? Are they all independent or
did they evolve one from another? Or maybe they all evolved from one
more ancient unknown system? Or is this more ancient system yoga
itself? After all it is the most ancient of all esoteric systems. Indeed
comparing practices of different esoteric systems you’ll find many obvi-
ous analogies. For example, if you read one of the Hesychasm classics
Gregory Palamas, who suggests to inhale the «red air» by one nostril
and to exhale the «blue air» with another, if you are somewhat familiar
with yoga you would exclaim: «Hey, it’s Anuloma Viloma! They hap-
pened to know about Ida and Pingala». It might seem an obvious adop-
tion, but is it? Is it because of the same object of influence — man and
his psyche? Did different esoteric systems come to the same techniques,
because they were the most effective?
Tracing back the history of yoga we meet with some difficulties.
Although we can find terms «yoga» and «yogin» in the Mahabharata
so that they obviously date before the Vedic period, the activity they
meant often differs a lot from what we call yoga now. Furthermore
even then there have already been discords in definition of yoga.
Everyone agreed upon two thinks: a) yoga is a system of methods and
b) yoga is a secret (esoteric) system. Analyzing ancient scripts you
will also find evidence that yoga had a common object, which was
to change ontological status of the practitioner in the world. Over-
looking other esoteric systems we’ll easily see that they had the same
goals. Taoists grow the spiritual germ, Hesychasts strive for an «angel
rank in this life», Buddhists seek for Enlightenment etc. Is it an adop-
tion? Or is it once more the same object?
We can try to track down how yoga was forming. We’ll find Ary-
an and Dravidian background, find parallels with Shaman practices,
Matriarchal cults, primitive magic and so on. We can track the origin of
yoga back to the prehistoric civilizations, although it goes beyond the
scope of this book. It is exiting and edifying. But probably the reader
has already got my attitude to this subject. We can never find precise
answers to all our questions, and it doesn’t really matter. Above all I
hope we»ve already understood: the idea of the Way, the spiritual
evolution is archetypical. This way or another it always comes to any
tradition whether it is prehistoric culture, religious system or material-
istic soviet culture. The unity of yoga is not in details and historic refer-
ences. Yoga is common in its spirit. That is why despite all persecu-
tions it still exists and survived most of its «persecutors».
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