Word: yogis
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Urals. Restaurants, of course, are similarly ordered; according to bright, ubiquitous Leonard Lyons, best of the New York chroniclers, the rear room upstairs at the 21 Club is "absolute Siberia," while the best table at El Morocco is just inside the door on the right (the Duchess of Argyll, Yogi Berra...
...famed 1945 essay, The Yogi and the Commissar, Author Arthur Koestler contrasted their ways of coping with the world-the commissar trying to change his environment, the yogi trying to change himself. Having qualified as an expert on the commissar's way of doing things (he resigned from the Communist Party in 1938), Hungarian-born Author Koestler, 55, journeyed to India and Japan last year to investigate the yogi's. He came back with a cargo of provocative conclusions that are causing controversy in Britain around his new book, The Lotus and the Robot, to be published...
Prodigious Detour. Koestler dwells lovingly on some of the more incongruous (to Westerners) aspects of Yoga, including the "painful [Hindu] obsession with the bowel functions, which permeates religious observances and social custom." Like many a Westerner before him, he was impressed with such yogi feats as reversing peristalsis to take in fluids through the anus and urethra, but was depressed by the far-out theories that went with them-such as that the sperm (bindu) is stored in the head and should be prevented from leaving the body at all costs. The result, says Koestler, is that a large number...
Samadhi, the trancelike bliss that is the yogi's goal, is for Koestler the closest thing possible to death, and the practice of Yoga is "a systematic conditioning of the body to conniving in its own destruction, at the command of the will, by a series of graduated stages." Koestler erroneously thinks that the "Christian ascetic mortifies his body to hasten its return to dust."* This, he holds, at least has the merit of directness over the yogi's "prodigious detour. He must build up his body into a superefficient, super-sentient instrument of self-annihilation...
...Thus the hubris of rationalism is matched by the hubris of irrationality, and the messianic arrogance of the Christian crusader is matched by the Yogi's arrogant attitude of detachment towards human suffering. Mankind is facing its most deadly predicament since it climbed down from the trees; but one is reluctantly brought to the conclusion that neither Yoga, Zen, nor any other Asian form of mysticism has any significant advice to offer...