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Introduction: Challenges of an Oxymoronic Genre The interior is not easily revealed and understood; Who really knows what is in there? Compared with the lucidity of the congealed, objective, and wellbound external, the inner—though close and familiar—is dubious and dark. Normal vision and ordinary experiences may not be enough as data and grounds for healthy conceptualization of innerness and selfhood. Freud’s fascinating conjectures about the human interior originated in fertile circumstances of abysmal anxiety, dreaming, hypnosis, symptoms of pathology, and other unusual phenomena such as hysteria. Commonplace, seemingly simple and well-adjusted perceptions of reality may be too narrow, insufficient expressions of human nature and reality. The more remote and surprising reaches of the interior—and the “spiritual potential of man”—may yet be digested. More extreme “symptoms” and “aberrant” behavior have yet to be explored and understood. Patañjali’s Yogas¥tra is one of the more viable, systematic conceptualizations of such symptoms and behavior, and an impressive articulation of the human end— disintegration. Even people less receptive to Patañjali’s allegedly healing— transformative—intentions may be interested in the system of PåtañjalaYoga , for in its courageous explication and openness to distant areas of human experience and modes of being it is admittedly singular. Yoga is an instructive example of the rich modes of otherness apparently available in ancient India. However, the emaciated, frightfully disciplined, as if free and happy (alleviated of sorrow) figure of the yogin portrayed in the Yogas¥tra threatens us in his singularly critical attitude towards normal life. Yoga insists on its harsh diagnosis of the human condition; victim of innate predispositions and ignorance, humans are conditioned and afflicted by the accumulated impact of past lives and behaviors, by the vicissitudes of life from moment to moment, by the antagonistic powers of nature.1 Moreover, the remedy is as harsh as the diagnosis. Yoga requires that the person disintegrate; it seeks separation of subject and object, and consequent dissolution. It is the absolute, unfathomable end, the end of ends. While death is at most an 1 2 Silence Unheard incomplete completion, the end according to yoga is a complete completion, infinitely deeper and more final than death. The color, taste, sound, and flavor of this end of ends can hardly be imagined. It is a most indigestible, inaccessible kernel of otherness embedded in the universe of yoga pointed at by the Yogas¥tra. Commentators on and scholars of Påtañjala-Yoga do not share in the yogin’s universe and experience, and cannot touch—among other things—the depth of diagnosis and prognosis of “life” expressed in the Yogas¥tra. While Patañjali himself heard about it, was closely familiar with and deeply moved by the spectacle of the yogin immersed in meditation, he may not have substantially shared it. However, in his thought he conceived the images of disintegration and separation underlying and pervading Så£khya metaphysics , and combined them with the vision of the silent yogin, visibly dissociated from the world, as if fallen apart, disintegrated. Though terribly impervious and dark, the silent yogin stimulates and moves the philosopher committed to dualism. The yogin’s deepest silence had its enduring verbalized echo in the imageries of disintegration correlated with the unabridgeable gap between the light of consciousness and objective reality. Patañjali has thus found his spiritual hero, the embodiment of his Så£khya theory of liberation. Indeed, the most compelling of the voices vibrating in the Yogas¥tra is a Så£khya interpretation of the yogin’s silence. The yogin unties the knots of existence, dismantling combinations, resisting “integrations,” breaking entities apart, living in the spirit of analysis and separation (the spirit of Så£khya) until he decombines his very own being into the densest possible silence. Patañjali’s statement in YS 3.35 seems the epitome of the integration of Så£khya metaphysics with yogic immersion in meditation. Meditation (sa¢yama) on the infinite difference between the sattva component of the mind and the seer (purusha) brings about the knowledge of the pure subject. We may thus visualize Patañjali’s visualization of the yogin absorbed in meditation. What does the latter meditate on? The ultimate principle of Så£khya metaphysics, the dualism of purusha and prakriti. The dead-to-world yogin is an extension of Patañjali himself, a philosopher in action (however beyond discursive verbalization). Thus, Patañjali imagines the silent yogin as he disentangles the three...

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