"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)