"Words from the Soul excerpt"
by Stuart Sovatksy, Ph.D.
Maturation of the Ensouled Body p.147


RECOVERING THE DIONYSIAN-ENDOGENOUS YOGA
...Both indigenously over the ages, and in their translation and importation into the West, the "innately arising" (sahaja), panentheistic, dionysian origins of yoga and meditation have been shaped and overshaped into apollonian, pedagogical constructs, cosmeticized or leveled for mass appeal, sterilized for upper-class gentilities, or otherwise tamed and overtamed to avoid real or imagined dangers...
The mysterious flow of lineage stiffened into the rigidities of caste, also in contrast to the dionysian rejection of caste prejudice and the "crazy wisdoms" that ridicule it. The reverentially ecstatic "Dance of Siva, Lord of Yogis," became stylized in public rituals, "classical" music and dance, and in the yogic asanas themselves, or withered in the severe asceticisms of the fakir. By the second century A.D., Patanjali's dualistic, "classical" Yoga-Sutras had formalized an overseparation between Nature (prakriti) and Ultimate Subjectivity (purusha), thus "rejecting the idea that the world is an aspect of the Divine" (Feuerstein 1989, p. 412).
Thus the shamanic or dionysian yoga and its bond with mystical phenomenology maintained in the living moment ... arose and then fell into evermore secularized, scriptural fundamentalisms.
The sequence of dionysian yoga's "fall" from dionysian-soteriological time and in-the- moment narrative utterances into the apollonian mundane time and its "formalized narratives and "histories of events" is as follows:
1. the spirit-in-time revealed as a superlative, private bodily experience (ecstasy or enstasy),
2. emerged publicly as presemantic ecstatic- catalytic utterances and dancing-swaying movements, [spontaneous kriyas, charisms, speaking in tongues, trance states], then
3. languaged orally as sheer descriptions of the experience, then
4. memorized and scriptured into an orthodox text or externalized liturgical commemoration (yoga and meditation as teachings; the movements classicalized as ritual forms),
5. its lessons fableized for charm (the ancient myths), then
6. in search of a genteel purity, its sparkling and sensual phenomenology put into disembodied descriptions of "heaven realms" or sheer "higher states of consciousnesses," and
7. as texts and practices exported into the West, formulized for mass pedagogical ease (the contemporary yoga books and aerobics-like classes, stress-reduction courses, and other holistic applications or new-age appropriations),
8. made abstract or "symbolic" of something else, or "primitivized" by scholars for learned discourse (the transpersonalist's synthesizing schemas), and, at all junctures,
9. suppressed or championed by religio- political forces; eroded by sectarian rivalries and scandals; desiccated as the legalistic, purely academic word, or scorned as mere superstition.
Via further translations into the modern pragmatic-scientific vernacular, instead of an inner awe of wonder and delight, we now speak of "spiritual practices," "visualization techniques," yogic "states of consciousness" and quasi-Newtonian "spiritual energies." Instead of a well-mapped but dynamic, esoteric phenomenology of marvelous fluttering, whorling, meditative experiences of cerebral- hormonal flowing juices or externalized teachings; the (soma) and brilliant sunlight (savitri, a Vedic term for kundalini illuminating the mind and for which Elizarenkova counts more than fifteen verbs denoting its brilliance in the Rig Veda) we have the dry brahmanic (Indian or Western) abstractions or translations depicting only exoteric " spritual libations, transrational evolutionary schemas,tantric visualization practices, and theonyms for sun worship. The Burning Bush, whether Western or Eastern, as aptly describing the overwhelming, experienced glow of kundalini in the cerebrum, is lost in its own metaphor. But sometimes not, as Allama Prabhu, the tenth-century dionysian bhakti yogi sang:

Looking for your light [of hope],
I went out [into meditation]:
it was like a sudden dawn [of eternal ttt]
of a million million suns,
a ganglion of lightnings [the cerebral puberty]
for my wonder [soteriological awe]

O Lord of Caves [hearted flesh bodies],
if you are light,
there can be no metaphor [narrative equivalent].
(Ramanujan, 1973 p. 168)